Spend any time at all writing education commentary and you’ll inevitably find yourself coming back to certain ideas and themes. Here’s one that I can’t stop probing and poking at like a sore tooth: Why do we insist on making teaching too hard for ordinary people to do well? It seems obvious that we’ll never make a serious dent in raising outcomes for kids at scale until or unless we make the job doable by mere mortals—because that’s who fills our classrooms. So go nuts: Beat the bushes for 3.7 million saints and superheroes. Raise standards. Invest billions in professional development (with nearly nothing to show for it). Or just give teachers better tools, focus their efforts, and ask them to be really good at fewer things.
The latest data point to illustrate this idea—that maybe we should make teaching an achievable job for average people—comes from C. Kirabo Jackson and Alexey Makarin, a pair of researchers at Northwestern University. Their intriguing new study suggests that teacher efficacy can be enhanced—affordably, easily, and at scale—by giving teachers “off-the-shelf’ lessons designed to develop students’ deep understanding of math concepts.
The pair randomly assigned teachers in three Virginia school districts to one of three groups. The first was given free access to online lessons “designed to develop understanding.” (the Mathalicious curriculum, an “inquiry-based math curriculum for grades six through twelve grounded in real-world topics”). To promote adoption of these lessons, a second group of teachers was assigned to the “full treatment” condition, which included free access to the lessons, email reminders to use them, and an online social media group focused on implementing them. A third group of teachers went about business as usual. If the best teachers are those who can simultaneously impart knowledge and develop students’ understanding, Jackson and Makarin wanted to see if teachers “who may only excel at imparting knowledge” might be more effective overall if given lessons to teach that were aimed at deep understanding of math concepts.
The unsurprising upshot is that it worked. “Full treatment teachers increased average student test scores by about 0.08 standard deviations relative to those in the control group. Benefits were much larger for weaker teachers, suggesting that weaker teachers compensated for skill deficiencies by substituting the lessons for their own efforts,” the pair note. In other words, access to good lessons simplified the complex job of teaching and allowed for greater specialization—fewer moving parts, more focused effort, better results.
It is easy to look at the modest effect size of the intervention, a mere 0.08 standard deviations, and ask (cue Peggy Lee), “Is that all there is?” But as Jackson and Makarin note, while the results seem modest, “this is a similarly sized effect as that of moving from an average teacher to one at the eightieth percentile of quality, or reducing class size by 15 percent.” And much, much cheaper. The estimated cost of the intervention was about $431 per teacher, and each teacher has about ninety students on average. “Back-of-the envelope calculations suggest that the test score effect of about 0.08? would generate about $360,000 in present value of student future earnings.” In sum, this “modest” return on a vanishingly small investment offers “an internal rate of return far greater than that of well-known educational interventions such as the Perry Pre-School Program, Head Start, class size reduction, or increases in per-pupil school spending.”
Not surprisingly—and most persuasively—the effects of giving teachers good lessons were “much larger for weaker teachers, suggesting that weaker teachers compensated for skill deficiencies by substituting the lessons for their own efforts.” Give a weak teacher good lessons to teach—allow them to focus on lesson delivery, not lesson design—and they get better results. Who’d have thunk?
Are these results replicable? Does it work across subject disciplines? Would better curricula show even larger effects? There is more work to be done, but the principle is now firmly established: Curriculum effects are real, significant and cheap.
Now tell me again: Why curriculum isn’t at the top of our priority list of reform levers when it offers much bigger bang for far fewer bucks? And why we aren’t using it to make teachers’ lives easier and their jobs more doable?
SOURCE: C. Kirabo Jackson and Alexey Makarin, “Simplifying Teaching: A Field Experiment with Online “Off-the-Shelf” Lessons,” National Bureau of Economic Research (July 2016).
