Quarterbacks and Teachers

09/01/2010

Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking… This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement.
Jane Goodall, Primatologist

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, has equated the difficulty in selecting a successful quarterback in professional football with selecting a good teacher (whether it be a preschool or a high school teacher). In What the Dog Saw (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2009) he gave multiple examples to demonstrate how NFL teams find it almost impossible to judge how a college quarterback will do as a pro. Many Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks have been total failures in the NFL and many barely-noticed college quarterbacks have become superstars. He concludes that there are certain jobs, such as quarterback, "where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they will do once they are hired." He continues... "A number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching."

Gladwell goes on to describe how the key to the success in teaching is the quality of the teacher — "the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast... If you rank the countries of the world in terms of academic performance of their school children, the United States is just below average ... the United States could close this gap simply by replacing the bottom 6 percent to 10 percent of public school teachers with teachers of average quality.... But there's a hitch: No one knows what a person with potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has the quarterback problem."

Gladwell concludes this essay with that radical suggestion that to find successful teachers at any level we can't exclude people based on test scores or certificates, but we need to keep "the gate as wide open as possible" and then hold on to the ones who demonstrate what it takes on the job. "... We shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about.... Teachers should be judged after they start their jobs, not before."

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