Steve Kinney

Check out this video of Malcom Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, at the 2008 New Yorker Conference. In his talk, Gladwell talks about what he calls “the mismatch problem,” which he defines as:

[...] when the criteria we use to prepare to assess someone’s ability to do a job is radically out of step with the actual demands of the job itself.

Gladwell begins with examples from the world of sports to illustrate the mismatch problem before moving into the world of education. According to Gladwell, the single biggest contributing factor in student achievement is teacher quality. This probably isn’t particularly surprising and actually quite relieving to people like you and me.

Studies show that a 28% reduction in class size (from about 22 to 16 students) will yield you a 5-percentile-point increase in student achievement. Mind you, that increase comes at a cost; the Department of Education would have to hire 38% more teachers and find an equal number of classrooms to place them in. They’d also have to get the number down to 22 to begin with.

5-percentile-points is nothing to scoff at, but what if I told you that I could get you a 10-percentile-point increase in student achieve and I could do it without the added cost–actually, it might even be cheaper? The trick, as I alluded to earlier is to find quality teachers.

Determining teacher quality and teacher effectiveness is easy on paper–I’ll get to the hair-splitting later. You take a look at student growth over the course of the year and average it out among all of the students in the class. The mean of the distribution will give you a reasonably accurate picture of the teacher’s effectiveness. You can get an even clearer picture if you take student’s academic histories into account.

Studies have shown that there is a 10-point spread between the top and bottom quartile of teachers using this methodology. Students of teachers in the bottom 25% actually regress 5-percentile-points over the course of the year.

Determining teacher effectiveness is the easy part. The bigger question is how do we recruit and retain quality teachers? That is where the mismatch problem lies.

According to No Child Left Behind, the dominating paradigm (for better or worse), you need to have credentials. You need to have a college degree; you need to have a certain number of credits in educational theory and practice and a certain number of credits in the area that you teach. You need to be certified by the state. You need to pass (in New York) a triad of standardized tests. According to No Child Left Behind, you can be just any regular guy off the street. You have to be qualified–unless, you’re a in an alternative certification program, then you just need a pulse.

So what’s the difference between certified teachers with master’s degrees in their specialty, backgrounds in educational theory, and a few sheets of paper saying they passed a myriad of standardized tests and a random sampling of people without these credentials? Nothing.

After two years of experience in the classroom, there is no difference in quality between the two groups. You’re just as likely to have a “highly-qualified” teacher in the lowest quartile and an “unqualified” pedagogue in the top 25% as you are to have the inverse.

What we have is a mismatch problem. Having a laundry list of requirements to get into the classroom actually hurts us because it limits the number of applicants. Since we have no idea what will make a good teacher during the hiring the process (remember, it has nothing to do with their certification or education), we would want the largest and most diverse pool possible in order to increase the likelihood of attracting quality teachers.

There is one caveat. I mentioned that teacher quality was determined based on student achievement. What do we use to measure student achievement? Oh yea, high-stakes standardized tests.

If this topic interests you, I encourage you to check out Gladwell’s upcoming book entitled Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t, which will be out in November.

If you think about it, the idea of social networking is incredible. An individual labels a page with tags they consider to be relevant. Whether these tags have anything to do with the page in question is completely subjective. However, if a thousand people all tag a page using their own individual judgment, the result is an incredibly accurate description of the site.

James Surowiecki writes about this same phenomenon in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki spins the tale of Francis Galton, a British scientist from the turn of the last century. Galton was a bit of a naysayer. He was also a bit full of himself. He believed that the crowd was inherently foolish. To prove this, he designed a test.

He strolled down to the local fair grounds and set up shop next to a “Guess the Weight” booth featuring a rather large pig. Galton diligently recorded the guesses. Some contestants overestimated the pig’s weight my a ridiculous amount; others did the same in the opposite direction. Galton noticed some of the guessers had a wealth of experience with pigs and were able to consider a number of factors that led them to very informed guesses. At the end of the day, he found something absolutely startling: the average of all of the guesses was better than the closest individual guess.

This scenario has been repeated a million times over. A large number of people, working with their own private knowledge, are able to make incredibly astute predictions that would elude even the most seasoned panel of experts. In The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki elaborates on this phenomenon. He even tells the tale of how the stock market was able to predict what went wrong in the Columbia shuttle crash before any of the experts were able to.

 I can’t help but think of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Ingenuity Gap, as I write this article. Homer-Dixon is an environmentalist who believes that we are creating global problems that are going to take an increasing amount of ingenuity to solve.One of the only ways we’re going to be able to keep up is shift the paradigm in which we solve problems. Rather than relying on experts to solve the world’s problem, which are growing in both number and intensity, we need to find a way to tap into the crowd for ingenuity.

Bringing this kind of thinking into our classrooms is an excellent way to accelerate the process.