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The Best Teachers in the World Book Event Clip 2

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    (ESTV - The Best teachers in the World Clip 2)
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    [Jeff Selingo] Alright, let's go back to Tennessee for a second.
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    You talk a little bit of - obviously, you focus a lot on Vanderbilt there in Tennessee -
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    and you talk a little bit about how Vanderbilt and Teach For America
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    are essentially the only two intitutions or providers in Tennessee producing high quality teachers.
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    What should happen to all those other providers in Tennessee? Should we shut them down?
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    Hem, how do we raise them up to be as good as Vanderbild and Teach for America?
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    And then a related question: Teach for America - here you talked earlier about how the -
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    how the lead institutions in this country have essentially abdicated their role in training teachers,
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    but yet Teach for America is this incredibly high-profile program
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    that students at some of the best institutions in our country clamour to get into every year, right?
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    Why are they not clamouring to get into teachers' traditional programs? [indistinct mumbling]
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    [John Chubb] There are a lot of questions there.
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    First, I don't think a regulatory approach to training institutions is the right way to - I mean
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    the states have the power (?) now to close down programs that they, you know, if they want to.
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    But they've never had the political will to do that
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    and you can count on them (?) not having a political will
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    I think a better approach is to use transparency, to use information.
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    So, you know, if their performance - if the performance of training programs at education schools
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    were better known, I think that would create incentives for them to improve,
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    you know, rather than close down somebody who is actually trying to improve.
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    I also - so I think there needs be a lot more information.
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    I think that there should be a more open market in training.
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    So, yeah, there is an alternative certification now in a lot of places,
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    but that's more often than not an alternative route, but through an Ed school.
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    think that there should be other kinds of training institutions that are allowed into the market
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    and if we can now (?) get information about their performance,
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    then I think that the competition for students, the competition ....
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    But the Teach For America example, I think, is a great one.
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    It shows that there is interest on the part - intense interest -
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    on the part of high-aptitude young people to go into teaching, right?
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    But Teach For America has become ever more selective, right?
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    It is - I think that is actually harder to get into Teach For America
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    [Selingo] than it is .... Harvard
    [Chubb] than into Harvard, right?
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    So there is something wrong with that too, because we're looking for bright people to become teachers -
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    [Selingo] - We're also looking for bright people to ..... and then move on to other places
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    [Chubb] Exactly. So the - exactly - so the problem I have with Teach for America is that
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    it's not accompanied by an adequate training and support program.
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    So, if you are able to attract these many people into teaching,
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    if you provided better support for them, and if the profession were to change,
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    were to be better compensated, were to recognize merit, all the things that, you know, professions do,
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    then you could hold more people - more of these people in place,
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    and also, if it were a better compensated profession, if it were a better ...... profession,
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    that higher caliber high school graduates were interested in,
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    more of the top universities would be interested in preparing them.
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    [Selingo] Yeah, but [indistinct]
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    how about the jobs themselves: you talk in some ways
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    that part of teaching is drudgery, right, it's like hourly (?) work in some cases, right?
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    And so, is part of improving the actual experience, as well, so that students want to enter into?
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    [Chubb] Yeah - I worked with, you know, hundreds of schools, thousands and thousands of teachers.
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    And you know, it's unbelievably noble work, there's no work that is more important,
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    but it's much harder than it has to be.
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    And - and every industry on the planet is looking for ways
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    to make people more productive and more successful.
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    And that's what technology is all about.
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    And if they can do that, then there will be fewer teachers, like, so what? You know.
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    This is now an important program.
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    This is an effort to provide great education to our kids, right?
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    So, whatever that looks like is what we ..... should be trying to do.
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    And yes, when a profession becomes more attractive, it does - it becomes more intellectual work.
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    I mean, that is one of the arguments that I make in the book,
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    that good teaching is intellectually demanding work.
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    It's not repetitive, right? It requires lots and lots of decisions, it requires intellect,
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    it requires content knowledge.
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    And we could get there if we would take some of the load off the backs of teachers
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    that could be taken off by technology.
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    (This has been a production of EducationSector Independant Analysis. Innovative Ideas
    www.educationsector.org)
Title:
The Best Teachers in the World Book Event Clip 2
Description:

In Education Sector's November 1 event, John Chubb discusses his book The Best Teachers in the World: Why We Don't Have Them and How We Could.
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Video Language:
English
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