Why Teaching Doesn't Improve

Glenn Latham

For more than a hundred years much complaint has been made of the unmethodological way in which schools are conducted, but it is only within the last thirty that any serious attempt has been made to find a remedy for this state of things. And with what results? Schools remain exactly as they were.

That’s from The Great Didactic, a book written by John Comenius and published in 1632, but it could just as easily have come from today’s newspaper.

The most effective instructional practices available are seldom to be found in schools, and when they do appear they are soon dropped. For some time I have been trying to understand why this occurs. No doubt there are many pieces to the puzzle, but I believe five things are particularly important:

• There are few incentives to teach effectively. How well a person teaches has little to do with how well he or she fares in a school system. Teachers whose students progress at double the “normal” rate typically receive no bonus, no merit raise, no sabbatical, no benefit of any kind that is not available to those teachers whose students progress at half the normal rate. In fact, superior performance is more likely to result in the teacher being assigned larger classes, more difficult students, or additional administrative work.

• Teaching effectively is more work. Research shows, for example, that students learn more when teachers are on their feet, asking questions, providing feedback, and moving about the class providing assistance. At the end of five hours of this, most people are exhausted. It’s much easier for the teacher to give the students an assignment and sit at a desk marking papers.

• The movers and shakers move on. Change comes into a system because of the work of change agents. Once those change agents move on, so do the changes they brought about. With nothing to anchor the changes to the educational system, they drift away.

• When the funding goes, so does the change. Virtually all efforts to introduce change into the system carry with them time limits on funding. This is reasonable enough. The tragedy occurs when funding is cut off even when the program proves to be effective. Indeed, successful programs seem to be just as likely to be scrapped at the end of a trial period as ineffective programs.

• No accountability leads to no longevity. Boards of education, the people who ultimately govern the system, hold no one accountable for the academic quality of the schools. I did a systematic review of the minutes of several randomly selected board meetings and never once found a single reference to a concern for instructional excellence. The board was concerned about salary negotiations, budgets, legal challenges and the like, not unimportant things such as, How much are the children learning?

Why doesn’t teaching improve? Why don’t teachers adopt the most effective instructional practices? Because we don’t have an educational system that makes student achievement its first priority. Until we have such a system, all the talk about educational reform will be just that, talk.

Glenn I. Latham, Ph.D., a former school teacher and administrator, was Professor Emeritus of Education at Utah State University.

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