Show me numbers

Good to see my hometown making the news for relatively positive reasons.  A few quick points: 

First, I admit that I haven't kept up on Rochester news since moving (both to college, and with my parents) 5 years ago, but I don't know how "many" people think East High is the most troubled in Rochester.  It has its fair share of problems, to be sure, but it also has one of the few IB programs in the county (suburban or urban) and as a larger school, has a fair amount to offer in terms of co-curricular activities.  Its mascot is also the Orientals, so by that measure, it's probably the most troubled.  

Second, the article seems to be more interested in writing creative nonfiction.  Sure, it traffics in innuendo about the tough halls of East High-- "ambulance attendants were rolling out a young man on a gurney and wearing a neck brace."  Insinuendo, we called in it college: no actual reporting on what happened to the young man--Heaven forbid a good image get ruined by a phys. ed. accident--just a tantalizing hint at the problems at East.  Insinuation + innuendo.   Same with the 5 person calculus class.  "Not normally enough to justify a class."  Well, why aren't there more people in calculus at East? The author lets our minds wander.   No supervision at home.  Too many kids taken out on gurneys.  Wait, I thought small classes were a good thing?  It's an interesting gambit (particularly by playing against popular conceptions of class size), but I'd prefer to see some numbers about the apparent disconnect between Rochester schools' success and their teachers' salaries.  

Quarterback problems

Malcolm Gladwell tackled (no pun intended) teacher recruiting and the similarities with NFL quarterbacking a few weeks back.  Here's the nut graf:

This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.

That's not quite true.  In his effort to reduce public school teaching into an easily (too?) digestible concept, Gladwell races by the obvious: the NFL, for all of its struggles finding the next John Elway, limits its search to college quarterbacks.  And that's worked out pretty well for pro football.  This isn't to say that schools/TFA like programs shouldn't find great teachers from the ranks of the non-education majors, but maybe Division 1 of future teachers isn't Georgetown, but schools of education.  TFA would disagree, but it certainly complicates the metaphor, no?

On a related note: is it really easy, by comparison, to determine who's going to be a top baseball player?  Probably not; with the exception of a left-hander who throws 90 mph, there aren't many hard and fast prospects with a future. Moreover, from the challenge of adjusting to wood bats in the pros from aluminum in school to facing players with 10-15 years more experience, there's an adjustment similarly challenging for baseball.  There's a Wood Bat Problem, if you will.  To figure out who's ready for The Show, baseball has not only extensive scouting, but also an extensive farm system of paid baseball where it determines who the best future players are.  Some guys can't hit the ball out of the infield in rookie ball with a wood bat, while other guys just can't hit a major league curveball, leading to a successful AAA career, like Jeff Manto.  

Education is arguably (okay, fine, inarguably) more important and more deserving of our investment than high-caliber baseball players, so why can't we make a similar investment in an educational farm system/apprenticeship system? Lawyers don't walk out of law school and argue cases in front of the Supreme Court; doctors don't hang up their cap and gown and scrub in for neurosurgery; electricians don't finish their classes and head up the wiring for a new skyscraper.  So why do we make teachers head into a live classroom with (at best) a few semesters of in-class time?  The farm system metaphor isn't perfect (raise your hand if you want to go to the AA school district instead of the National League),  but there's gotta be a way to give passionate new teachers more reps, either through observation or through team-teaching, before being thrown out on their own.  

Gladwell, of all people, should understand that practice makes perfect; he's making millions right now telling people that 10,000 hours of practice makes an expert.