Teachers should help the weakest

(Second of three parts)

Last week, I reminisced about one of the best teachers I knew:  the late Doreen Fernandez, Ateneo de Manila University English and communication arts professor, Inquirer food reviewer and columnist, and Metrobank Outstanding Teacher.

Doreen’s suggestion? “The best teachers should teach the worst students.”

Though I was not initially convinced, I decided to take her advice.

In the first 10 years of my teaching career, I handled calculus-level or higher classes for science majors. In the subsequent 10 years, I focused more on algebra classes for nonscience majors.

The latter task is not as intellectually demanding but it is much more challenging—psychologically, emotionally, physically.

Instead of taking a break for a few minutes while the entire class works quietly on word problems, I stride across the room, drenched in sweat, presenting detailed solutions, line by line, on the board, to students who grit their teeth through still another mathematics subject.

Instead of giving students nonroutine problems, I am often limited to giving standard exercises because many students (and parents and tutors) complain if problems are not similar to those in the textbook.

Since I have high expectations of all my students, in every examination, I give one challenging problem that only students who fully understand the topic can ace.  Having said that, I used to give two or three challenging problems in the 1980s and 1990s.

Teachers matter

Let’s go back to Doreen’s contention. Should the best teachers really teach the worst students? Aren’t student grades more affected by socioeconomic class (wealthier students supposedly have access to better education)? Or by parental involvement (my own research shows that parents who are involved in learning positively affect student performance)?

What exactly are the effects, if any, of teachers on student performance?

A lot, as it turns out. (Thank you, Ruben Gomez, Ateneo math major, summa cum laude in 1965, for alerting me to the following findings.)

In September 2013, economists Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University published the results of their study on the effect of teachers on students’ future career.

“Good teachers… are worth their weight in gold,” reports The Economist (Oct. 12) in the article, “Knowledge for earnings’ sake.”

The researchers studied 20 years of data from a large, urban American school district that covered 2.5 million students from Grades 3 to 8.

In two papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists set controls on other factors that could bias the results. They found that, contrary to popular opinion, “characteristics of pupils’ parents, such as family income, do not generally predict how teachers perform.”

Teacher quality does matter.  “When the average quality of teachers in fourth grade falls from one year to the next, for example, the performance of the fourth graders also drops as expected,” reports The Economist.

Minimize achievement gap

Good teachers matter, especially to the weakest students.

In most schools, the best teachers are assigned to teach the honors classes. This may stem from common sense, since how can poor teachers, who themselves can barely master the fundamentals of the subjects they are supposed to teach, handle the tougher subjects?

But the researchers question this practice, at least for Grades 4 to 8, where subjects are not supposed to be extremely technical or specialized. The researchers also question the practice of tracking.

“Better pupils are assigned to slightly better teachers on average,” reports The Economist.  “The common practice of ‘tracking’ pupils (filtering good ones into more advanced courses) could be to blame [for this practice].”

The best teachers should indeed teach the weakest students.

“Whatever the cause, getting more effective teachers to instruct better-performing pupils naturally exacerbates the gap in achievement,” reports The Economist.  “Making the best teachers work with the worst pupils could go a long way toward minimizing the yawning differences in attainment within a school system.”

The best teachers influence students so much that even their future lives depend on it.  “Students assigned to high VA (value-added) teachers in primary school are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES (socioeconomic status) neighborhoods and have higher savings rates,” the researchers say in their paper.  “They are also less likely to have children as teenagers.”

VA refers to how much improvement good teachers have on student national achievement test grades.

In fact, students’ future incomes even depend on their teachers, to quite a large extent.

(To be concluded next week)

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