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only 26 percent of US high school students are proficient in math.

The accountability models increasingly in fashion find their roots in the discipline of economics rather than education, and they are exemplified in the value-added metrics now gathered by large urban school districts

Value-added modeling is one example of a larger approach to improving public schools that is aimed at enhancing what economists label “human capital”—factors such as teacher experience, subject knowledge, and pedagogical skills.

enhancing teacher human capital should not be the sole or even primary focus of school reform

if students are to show measurable and sustained improvement, schools must also foster what sociologists label “social capital”—the patterns of interactions among teachers.4

In addition to targeting teacher human capital, many believe that a key to improving public schools lies in bringing in people outside the school, or even the school district, to solve problems

A natural extension of the belief in the power of outsiders is the notion that teacher tenure is the enemy of effective public education.

In many reform efforts, the principal is cast as the “instructional leader” who is responsible for developing and managing pedagogical practice.

These three beliefs—in the power of teacher human capital, the value of outsiders, and the centrality of the principal in instructional practice—form the implicit or explicit core of many reform efforts today

Unfortunately, all three beliefs are rooted more in conventional wisdom and political sloganeering than in strong empirical research.

our findings strongly suggest that in trying to improve public schools we are overselling the role of human capital and innovation from the top, while greatly undervaluing the benefits of social capital and stability at the bottom.

results provide much support for the centrality of social capital—the relationships among teachers—for improving public schools.

teacher tenure can have significant positive effects on student achievement.

In the context of schools, human capital is a teacher’s cumulative abilities, knowledge, and skills developed through formal education and on-the-job experience.

several studies conducted largely by economists have shown little relationship between a teacher’s accumulation of formal education and actual student learning

Social capital, by comparison, is not a characteristic of the individual teacher but instead resides in the relationships among teachers.

A social capital perspective would answer the same question by looking not just at what a teacher knows, but also where she gets that knowledge

When a teacher needs information or advice about how to do her job more effectively, she goes to other teachers.

when the relationships among teachers in a school are characterized by high trust and frequent interaction—that is, when social capital is strong—student achievement scores improve.

Teachers were almost twice as likely to turn to their peers as to the experts designated by the school district, and four times more likely to seek advice from one another than from the principal.

We found that the students of high-ability teachers outperformed those of low-ability teachers, as proponents of human capital approaches to school improvement would predict.

Students whose teachers were more able (high human capital) and also had stronger ties with their peers (strong social capital) showed the highest gains in math achievement.

Conversely, students of teachers with lower teaching ability (low human capital) and weaker ties with their peers (weak social capital) showed the lowest achievement gains

even low-ability teachers can perform as well as teachers of average ability if they have strong social capital

According to Ms. Rhee, “cooperation, collaboration, and consensus building are way overrated.”7

When teacher turnover resulted in high losses of either human or social capital, student achievement declined. But when turnover resulted in high losses of both human and social capital, students were particularly disadvantaged.

ideology of school reform

But it is this latter class of activities—which can be conceived of as building external social capital—that made the difference both for teachers and for students.

When principals spent more time building external social capital, the quality of instruction in the school was higher and students’ scores on standardized tests in both reading and math were higher.

The more effective principals were those who defined their roles as facilitators of teacher success rather than instructional leaders.

the current focus on building teacher human capital—and the paper credentials often associated with it—will not yield the qualified teaching staff so desperately needed in urban districts.

olicymakers must also invest in measures that enhance collaboration and information sharing among teachers.

there is not enough emphasis on the value of teacher stability

We found direct, positive relationships between student achievement gains in mathematics and teacher tenure at grade level and teacher social capital.

principals who spent more of their time on collaborating with people and organizations outside the school delivered gains to teachers and students alike.

Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.

Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction

Doctors understand expertise in the same way.

We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.

Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.

Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection.

“My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.”

The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me.

Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires.

So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes

For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.

Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores.

alifornia researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools,

Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time.

But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent.

Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

One thing that seems clear, though, is that not all coaches are effective

Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching.

Novice teachers often struggle with the basic behavioral issues.

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components

It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.

She told me that she had begun to burn out. “I felt really isolated, too,” she said.

The coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is,” she said.

Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice

I’d had no outside ears and eyes.

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down.

Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches

The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.

But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology.

What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology.

We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure

But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow.

“Most surgery is done in your head,”

we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance

Memory is the representation of the things that we ‘know’ as a culture

The worker was the original goal of the public education system.

The worker needs to remember things without understanding them.

Learning for a worker is about compliance.

Our education system currently does a very good job of creating workers.

The soldier

They are the defenders of memory.

They are the ones who establish what things we currently know that the worker should remember, and then establish the system by which we will measure that knowing.

They decide which parts of the past will be valued

soldiers really can decide what they want to have valued.

Soldiers defend the status quo

The nomad is trying to do what I call ‘learning’.

Learning for the nomad is the point where the steps in a process go away.

It is what Wynton Marsalis calls ‘being the thing itself’

In order to create an educational system that allows for nomads we can’t measure for a prescribed outcome.

Rhizomatic learning

It is designed for a world where there aren’t ‘things people should know’ but rather ‘new connections to be made’.

If we want a society of innovators, of creatives, we can’t think of success as an act of compliance