teacher effectiveness and K-12 tenure

I've commented twice at Uncertain Principles on this fine report.

But let me add a second level to the model. It should be robustly applicable to K-12 (the Brookings Institute and Gladwell focus) and post-secondary education alike, if I am right.

What effect, if any, do Department Chairmen make? Or Chairpersons to be politically correct, and because I hope that the university that employs my wife will realize that she, as a very good Physics Professor with many publications and a PhD in Physics might be a better chairman that the virtually unpublished idiot whose students hate him and who has a nonsensical Ed.D.

In sports, there are ways to quantify value added by a coach or manager.

For example, baseball mathematician Bill James discovered a formula (or paramerized set of formulae) to predict how many games a team should win, based on how many runs it scored and how many runs it gives up. It's known as the "Pythagorean law of baseball."

A team's expected winning percentage is equal to:

(runs scored)^2 / [(runs scored)^2 + (runs allowed)^2]

If a team wins MORE than this estimate, it may be inferred that the manager and/or coach has efficiently allocated resources so that, when a team wins, it wins by only a few runs, rather than, for instance, pitchers blowing out their arm, or base runners breaking an ankle sliding into a bag, or outfielders getting a concussion by slamming their head into the fence when chasing a fly ball that wouldn't affect who won or lost.

Or, perhaps, that the management has instilled an intangible "team spirit" that improves communications, or makes one player's good results lead to other players getting hot streaks as well.

Conversely, if a team does worse that Bill James' formula suggests, then management is making a set of good players work together badly.

I suggest that a good department chairman can make the mean faculty member in the department have better professional performance, or the mean student do better on standardized tests. A bad chairman (or a bad Dean who appoints bad chairman, to add a third level) can make the whole system underperform expectation.

And a President of the United States who runs a bad law into the ground -- i.e. No Child Left Behind -- which punishes schools already suffering, and offers no financial award to schools making heroic efforts -- can lower performance for the entire nation.

Every President claims to be "the education President" and most are just whistling Dixie. The current emphasis on making highly qualified teachers (dislaimer: I include myself) spend on the order of $10^4 and 2 years effort in Colleges of Education to get certified to teach in secondary schools what they are already qualified to teach in colleges or universities, is grotesquely bad allocation of resources. School districts should be bidding big bucks to recruit good teachers, and then giving out tasty bonuses to retain them.

President Professor Obama (whose wife worked in a school district) and Vice President Professor Biden (whose wife worked in a school district) have a chance to turn the Bush catastrophe into a national opportunity for educational repair. The choice of the head of the Chicago school system (#3 by size of US systems) who is pragmatic, a reformer, and in good communication with teacher's unions, makes me optimistic.