Ray Fisman How To Build A Better Teacher Summary

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Ray Fisman writes a monthly column for Slate magazine. He is the Slate Family Professor in Behavioral Economics at Boston University. In his article “How to Build a Better Teacher”, which is published in the Slate magazine on the 25th of July 2012, Ray Fisman discusses different methods for improving American education. This article is written for the general audience. Its purpose is to analyze the opportunity of building a better teacher, rather than firing low-performing teachers and hiring new ones in a few school except some big cities in America. Reformers introduced dismissing of low-performing teachers as the main opportunity to improve the American educational system in latest years. Though, firing of teachers was not financially effective – find new recruits and give to them additional training costs much more than making low-performance teachers better. For solving education problem in America, Fisman recommends other approaches and provides some creative …show more content…

The author shows different findings of latest studies in several scientific spheres such as economics, and social psychology. The author tries to show that the vision - “good teachers are born, not made” is incompletely dismissed by the results of programs such as the Teacher Evaluation System (Cincinnati’s approach), the Knowledge is Power Program (Gates Foundation), and Harlem Children’s Zone. He suggests duplicating outcomes of these researches across the whole country to show an improved education system, and also focuses on different problems connected to scaling these methodologies across the country: the size of trials, and cost complications. Though, Fisman still inference that these experimentations perform just the type of research, which are based on logical understandings that can help to get improved teachers “in front of America’s

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