Como identificar buenos profesores

 <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell>
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell



New Yorker


Annals of Education


Most Likely to Succeed


How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?


by Malcolm
<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Malcolm%20Gladwel
l%22>  Gladwell December 15, 2008


Effective teachers have a gift for noticing--what one researcher calls
"withitness."

On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri
Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka
sat in his hotel, in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka
has worked for three National Football League teams. Before that, he was a
football coach, and before that he played linebacker--although, he says,
"that was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago." Every year, he
evaluates somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred players around
the country, helping professional teams decide whom to choose in the college
draft, which means that over the last thirty years he has probably seen as
many football games as anyone else in America. In his DVD player was his
homework for the evening's big game--an edited video of the Tigers' previous
contest, against the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.

Shonka methodically made his way through the video, stopping and re-winding
whenever he saw something that caught his eye. He liked Jeremy Maclin and
Chase Coffman, two of the Mizzou receivers. He loved William Moore, the
team's bruising strong safety. But, most of all, he was interested in the
Tigers' quarterback and star, a stocky, strong-armed senior named Chase
Daniel.

"I like to see that the quarterback can hit a receiver in stride, so he
doesn't have to slow for the ball," Shonka began. He had a stack of
evaluation forms next to him and, as he watched the game, he was charting
and grading every throw that Daniel made. "Then judgment. Hey, if it's not
there, throw it away and play another day. Will he stand in there and take a
hit, with a guy breathing down his face? Will he be able to step right in
there, throw, and still take that hit? Does the guy throw better when he's
in the pocket, or does he throw equally well when he's on the move? You want
a great competitor. Durability. Can they hold up, their strength, toughness?
Can they make big plays? Can they lead a team down the field and score late
in the game? Can they see the field? When your team's way ahead, that's
fine. But when you're getting your ass kicked I want to see what you're
going to do."

He pointed to his screen. Daniel had thrown a dart, and, just as he did, a
defensive player had hit him squarely. "See how he popped up?" Shonka said.
"He stood right there and threw the ball in the face of that rush. This kid
has got a lot of courage." Daniel was six feet tall and weighed two hundred
and twenty-five pounds: thick through the chest and trunk. He carried
himself with a self-assurance that bordered on cockiness. He threw quickly
and in rhythm. He nimbly evaded defenders. He made short throws with touch
and longer throws with accuracy. By the game's end, he had completed an
astonishing seventy-eight per cent of his passes, and handed Nebraska its
worst home defeat in fifty-three years. "He can zip it," Shonka said. "He
can really gun, when he has to." Shonka had seen all the promising college
quarterbacks, charted and graded their throws, and to his mind Daniel was
special: "He might be one of the best college quarterbacks in the country."

But then Shonka began to talk about when he was on the staff of the
Philadelphia Eagles, in 1999. Five quarterbacks were taken in the first
round of the college draft that year, and each looked as promising as Chase
Daniel did now. But only one of them, Donovan McNabb, ended up fulfilling
that promise. Of the rest, one descended into mediocrity after a decent
start. Two were complete busts, and the last was so awful that after failing
out of the N.F.L. he ended up failing out of the Canadian Football League as
well.

The year before, the same thing happened with Ryan Leaf, who was the Chase
Daniel of 1998. The San Diego Chargers made him the second player taken over
all in the draft, and gave him an eleven-million-dollar signing bonus. Leaf
turned out to be terrible. In 2002, it was Joey Harrington's turn.
Harrington was a golden boy out of the University of Oregon, and the third
player taken in the draft. Shonka still can't get over what happened to him.

"I tell you, I saw Joey live," he said. "This guy threw lasers, he could
throw under tight spots, he had the arm strength, he had the size, he had
the intelligence." Shonka got as misty as a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound
ex-linebacker in a black tracksuit can get. "He's a concert pianist, you
know? I really--I mean, I really--liked Joey." And yet Harrington's career
consisted of a failed stint with the Detroit Lions and a slide into
obscurity. Shonka looked back at the screen, where the young man he felt
might be the best quarterback in the country was marching his team up and
down the field. "How will that ability translate to the National Football
League?" He shook his head slowly. "Shoot."

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.

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is
"value added" analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much
the academic performance of students in a given teacher's classroom changes
between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs.
Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the
fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in
September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown's class
scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith's students have fallen
to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students' rankings,
value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more
effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It's only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible
for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a
teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized
test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years,
their effect on their students' test scores starts to become predictable:
with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are
and who the very poor teachers are. What's more--and this is the finding that
has galvanized the educational world--the difference between good teachers
and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a
very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in
one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn
a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's
worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects:
your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent
teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are
also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average
class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched
from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And
remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas
halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and
hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a
rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If
you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of
their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard
deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada
and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by
replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers
with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like
school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers
have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people
with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows
what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The
school system has a quarterback problem.

Kickoff time for Missouri's game against Oklahoma State was seven o'clock.
It was a perfect evening for football: cloudless skies and a light fall
breeze. For hours, fans had been tailgating in the parking lots around the
stadium. Cars lined the roads leading to the university, many with fuzzy
yellow-and-black Tiger tails hanging from their trunks. It was one of
Mizzou's biggest games in years. The Tigers were undefeated, and had a
chance to become the No. 1 college football team in the country. Shonka made
his way through the milling crowds and took a seat in the press box. Below
him, the players on the field looked like pieces on a chessboard.

The Tigers held the ball first. Chase Daniel stood a good seven yards behind
his offensive line. He had five receivers, two to his left and three to his
right, spaced from one side of the field to the other. His linemen were
widely spaced as well. In play after play, Daniel caught the snap from his
center, planted his feet, and threw the ball in quick seven- and eight-yard
diagonal passes to one of his five receivers.

The style of offense that the Tigers run is called the "spread," and most of
the top quarterbacks in college football--the players who will be drafted
into the pros--are spread quarterbacks. By spacing out the offensive linemen
and wide receivers, the system makes it easy for the quarterback to figure
out the intentions of the opposing defense before the ball is snapped: he
can look up and down the line, "read" the defense, and decide where to throw
the ball before anyone has moved a muscle. Daniel had been playing in the
spread since high school; he was its master. "Look how quickly he gets the
ball out," Shonka said. "You can hardly go a thousand and one, a thousand
and two, and it's out of his hand. He knows right where he's going. When
everyone is spread out like that, the defense can't disguise its coverage.
Chase knows right away what they are going to do. The system simplifies the
quarterback's decisions."

But for Shonka this didn't help matters. It had always been hard to predict
how a college quarterback would fare in the pros. The professional game was,
simply, faster and more complicated. With the advent of the spread, though,
the correspondence between the two levels of play had broken down almost
entirely. N.F.L. teams don't run the spread. They can't. The defenders in
the pros are so much faster than their college counterparts that they would
shoot through those big gaps in the offensive line and flatten the
quarterback. In the N.F.L., the offensive line is bunched closely together.
Daniel wouldn't have five receivers. Most of the time, he'd have just three
or four. He wouldn't have the luxury of standing seven yards behind the
center, planting his feet, and knowing instantly where to throw. He'd have
to crouch right behind the center, take the snap directly, and run backward
before planting his feet to throw. The onrushing defenders wouldn't be seven
yards away. They would be all around him, from the start. The defense would
no longer have to show its hand, because the field would not be so spread
out. It could now disguise its intentions. Daniel wouldn't be able to read
the defense before the snap was taken. He'd have to read it in the seconds
after the play began.

"In the spread, you see a lot of guys wide open," Shonka said. "But when a
guy like Chase goes to the N.F.L. he's never going to see his receivers that
open--only in some rare case, like someone slips or there's a bust in the
coverage. When that ball's leaving your hands in the pros, if you don't use
your eyes to move the defender a little bit, they'll break on the ball and
intercept it. The athletic ability that they're playing against in the
league is unbelievable."

As Shonka talked, Daniel was moving his team down the field. But he was
almost always throwing those quick, diagonal passes. In the N.F.L., he would
have to do much more than that--he would have to throw long, vertical passes
over the top of the defense. Could he make that kind of throw? Shonka didn't
know. There was also the matter of his height. Six feet was fine in a spread
system, where the big gaps in the offensive line gave Daniel plenty of
opportunity to throw the ball and see downfield. But in the N.F.L. there
wouldn't be gaps, and the linemen rushing at him would be six-five, not
six-one.

"I wonder," Shonka went on. "Can he see? Can he be productive in a new kind
of offense? How will he handle that? I'd like to see him set up quickly from
center. I'd like to see his ability to read coverages that are not in the
spread. I'd like to see him in the pocket. I'd like to see him move his
feet. I'd like to see him do a deep dig, or deep comeback. You know, like a
throw twenty to twenty-five yards down the field."

It was clear that Shonka didn't feel the same hesitancy in evaluating the
other Mizzou stars--the safety Moore, the receivers Maclin and Coffman. The
game that they would play in the pros would also be different from the game
they were playing in college, but the difference was merely one of degree.
They had succeeded at Missouri because they were strong and fast and
skilled, and these traits translate in kind to professional football.

A college quarterback joining the N.F.L., by contrast, has to learn to play
an entirely new game. Shonka began to talk about Tim Couch, the quarterback
taken first in that legendary draft of 1999. Couch set every record
imaginable in his years at the University of Kentucky. "They used to put
five garbage cans on the field," Shonka recalled, shaking his head, "and
Couch would stand there and throw and just drop the ball into every one."
But Couch was a flop in the pros. It wasn't that professional quarterbacks
didn't need to be accurate. It was that the kind of accuracy required to do
the job well could be measured only in a real N.F.L. game.

Similarly, all quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an
I.Q. test--the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that
the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game
that high intelligence should be a good predictor of success. But when the
economists David Berri and Rob Simmons analyzed the scores--which are
routinely leaked to the press--they found that Wonderlic scores are all but
useless as predictors. Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the
1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall
of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the
same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest
quarterbacks ever to play the game.

We're used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for
better predictors. We now realize that being a good doctor requires the
ability to communicate, listen, and empathize--and so there is increasing
pressure on medical schools to pay attention to interpersonal skills as well
as to test scores. We can have better physicians if we're just smarter about
how we choose medical-school students. But no one is saying that Dan Shonka
is somehow missing some key ingredient in his analysis; that if he were only
more perceptive he could predict Chase Daniel's career trajectory. The
problem with picking quarterbacks is that Chase Daniel's performance can't
be predicted. The job he's being groomed for is so particular and
specialized that there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won'
t. In fact, Berri and Simmons found no connection between where a
quarterback was taken in the draft--that is, how highly he was rated on the
basis of his college performance--and how well he played in the pros.

The entire time that Chase Daniel was on the field against Oklahoma State,
his backup, Chase Patton, stood on the sidelines, watching. Patton didn't
play a single down. In his four years at Missouri, up to that point, he had
thrown a total of twenty-six passes. And yet there were people in Shonka's
world who thought that Patton would end up as a better professional
quarterback than Daniel. The week of the Oklahoma State game, the national
sports magazine ESPN even put the two players on its cover, with the title
"CHASE DANIEL MIGHT WIN THE HEISMAN"--referring to the trophy given to
college football's best player. "HIS BACKUP COULD WIN THE SUPER BOWL." Why
did everyone like Patton so much? It wasn't clear. Maybe he looked good in
practice. Maybe it was because this season in the N.F.L. a quarterback who
had also never started in a single college game is playing superbly for the
New England Patriots. It sounds absurd to put an athlete on the cover of a
magazine for no particular reason. But perhaps that's just the quarterback
problem taken to an extreme. If college performance doesn't tell us
anything, why shouldn't we value someone who hasn't had the chance to play
as highly as someone who plays as well as anyone in the land?

Picture a young preschool teacher, sitting on a classroom floor surrounded
by seven children. She is holding an alphabet book, and working through the
letters with the children, one by one: " 'A' is for apple. . . . 'C' is for
cow." The session was taped, and the videotape is being watched by a group
of experts, who are charting and grading each of the teacher's moves.

After thirty seconds, the leader of the group--Bob Pianta, the dean of the
University of Virginia's Curry School of Education--stops the tape. He points
to two little girls on the right side of the circle. They are unusually
active, leaning into the circle and reaching out to touch the book.

"What I'm struck by is how lively the affect is in this room," Pianta said.
"One of the things the teacher is doing is creating a holding space for
that. And what distinguishes her from other teachers is that she flexibly
allows the kids to move and point to the book. She's not rigidly forcing the
kids to sit back."

Pianta's team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies
relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is "regard for student
perspective"; that is, a teacher's knack for allowing students some
flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and
rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became
plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn't become a
free-for-all.

"A lesser teacher would have responded to the kids' leaning over as
misbehavior," Pianta went on. " 'We can't do this right now. You need to be
sitting still.' She would have turned this off."

Bridget Hamre, one of Pianta's colleagues, chimed in: "These are three- and
four-year-olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it's not like
the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They're leaning forward
and wriggling. That's their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn't
interpret that as bad behavior. You can see how hard it is to teach new
teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the
student's perspective, they think you have to give up control of the
classroom."

The lesson continued. Pianta pointed out how the teacher managed to
personalize the material. " 'C' is for cow" turned into a short discussion
of which of the kids had ever visited a farm. "Almost every time a child
says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher
sensitivity," Hamre said.

The teacher then asked the children if anyone's name began with that letter.
"Calvin," a boy named Calvin says. The teacher nods, and says, "Calvin
starts with 'C.' " A little girl in the middle says, "Me!" The teacher turns
to her. "Your name's Venisha. Letter 'V.' Venisha."

It was a key moment. Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia
group, feedback--a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific
statement by a student--seems to be most closely linked to academic success.
Not only did the teacher catch the "Me!" amid the wiggling and tumult; she
addressed it directly.

"Mind you, that's not great feedback," Hamre said. "High-quality feedback is
where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding." The
perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause
and pull out Venisha's name card, point to the letter "V," show her how
different it is from "C," and make the class sound out both letters. But the
teacher didn't do that--either because it didn't occur to her or because she
was distracted by the wiggling of the girls to her right.

"On the other hand, she could have completely ignored the girl, which
happens a lot," Hamre went on. "The other thing that happens a lot is the
teacher will just say, 'You're wrong.' Yes-no feedback is probably the
predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the
kid in terms of learning."

Pianta showed another tape, of a nearly identical situation: a circle of
pre-schoolers around a teacher. The lesson was about how we can tell when
someone is happy or sad. The teacher began by acting out a short
conversation between two hand puppets, Henrietta and Twiggle: Twiggle is sad
until Henrietta shares some watermelon with him.

"The idea that the teacher is trying to get across is that you can tell by
looking at somebody's face how they're feeling, whether they're feeling sad
or happy," Hamre said. "What kids of this age tend to say is you can tell
how they're feeling because of something that happened to them. They lost
their puppy and that's why they're sad. They don't really get this idea. So
she's been challenged, and she's struggling."

The teacher begins, "Remember when we did something and we drew our face?"
She touches her face, pointing out her eyes and mouth. "When somebody is
happy, their face tells us that they're happy. And their eyes tell us." The
children look on blankly. The teacher plunges on: "Watch, watch." She smiles
broadly. "This is happy! How can you tell that I'm happy? Look at my face.
Tell me what changes about my face when I'm happy. No, no, look at my face.
. . . No. . . ."

A little girl next to her says, "Eyes," providing the teacher with an
opportunity to use one of her students to draw the lesson out. But the
teacher doesn't hear her. Again, she asks, "What's changed about my face?"
She smiles and she frowns, as if she can reach the children by sheer force
of repetition. Pianta stopped the tape. One problem, he pointed out, was
that Henrietta made Twiggle happy by sharing watermelon with him, which
doesn't illustrate what the lesson is about.

"You know, a better way to handle this would be to anchor something around
the kids," Pianta said. "She should ask, 'What makes you feel happy?' The
kids could answer. Then she could say, 'Show me your face when you have that
feeling? O.K., what does So-and-So's face look like? Now tell me what makes
you sad. Show me your face when you're sad. Oh, look, her face changed!'
You've basically made the point. And then you could have the kids practice,
or something. But this is going to go nowhere."

"What's changed about my face?" the teacher repeated, for what seemed like
the hundredth time. One boy leaned forward into the circle, trying to engage
himself in the lesson, in the way that little children do. His eyes were on
the teacher. "Sit up!" she snapped at him.

As Pianta played one tape after another, the patterns started to become
clear. Here was a teacher who read out sentences, in a spelling test, and
every sentence came from her own life--"I went to a wedding last week"--which
meant she was missing an opportunity to say something that engaged her
students. Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint
presentation, only to realize that she hadn't turned it on. As she waited
for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.

Then there was the superstar--a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and
a green polo shirt. "So let's see," he began, standing up at the blackboard.
"Special right triangles. We're going to do practice with this, just
throwing out ideas." He drew two triangles. "Label the length of the side,
if you can. If you can't, we'll all do it." He was talking and moving
quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this
was trigonometry. It wasn't easy material. But his energy seemed to infect
the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can't,
we'll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who'd
evidently missed a few classes. "See what you can remember, Ben," the
teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: "I'm going
to give you a way to get to it." He made a quick suggestion: "How about
that?" Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next
to Ben, and glanced at her work. "That's all right!" He went to a third
student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson--the length of
time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer--he had already laid
out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was
back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

"In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he's at the board,
broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he's doing and who
doesn't know," Pianta said. "But he's giving individualized feedback. He's
off the charts on feedback." Pianta and his team watched in awe.

Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards
for teachers--that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for
entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you've watched
Pianta's tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are,
this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. The preschool teacher
with the alphabet book was sensitive to her students' needs and knew how to
let the two girls on the right wiggle and squirm without disrupting the rest
of the students; the trigonometry teacher knew how to complete a circuit of
his classroom in two and a half minutes and make everyone feel as if he or
she were getting his personal attention. But these aren't cognitive skills.

A group of researchers--Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard's school of
education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a
policy analyst at the Center for American Progress--have investigated whether
it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a
master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost
every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in
the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications--as much as
they appear related to teaching prowess--turn out to be about as useful in
predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of
garbage cans.

Another educational researcher, Jacob Kounin, once did an analysis of
"desist" events, in which a teacher has to stop some kind of misbehavior. In
one instance, "Mary leans toward the table to her right and whispers to
Jane. Both she and Jane giggle. The teacher says, 'Mary and Jane, stop
that!' " That's a desist event. But how a teacher desists--her tone of voice,
her attitudes, her choice of words--appears to make no difference at all in
maintaining an orderly classroom. How can that be? Kounin went back over the
videotape and noticed that forty-five seconds before Mary whispered to Jane,
Lucy and John had started whispering. Then Robert had noticed and joined in,
making Jane giggle, whereupon Jane said something to John. Then Mary
whispered to Jane. It was a contagious chain of misbehavior, and what really
was significant was not how a teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the
chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin
called that ability "withitness," which he defined as "a teacher's
communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by
verbally announcing: 'I know what's going on') that she knows what the
children are doing, or has the proverbial 'eyes in the back of her head.' "
It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.
But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in
front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts
and tries to impose order?

Perhaps no profession has taken the implications of the quarterback problem
more seriously than the financial-advice field, and the experience of
financial advisers is a useful guide to what could happen in teaching as
well. There are no formal qualifications for entering the field except a
college degree. Financial-services firms don't look for only the best
students, or require graduate degrees or specify a list of prerequisites. No
one knows beforehand what makes a high-performing financial adviser
different from a low-performing one, so the field throws the door wide open.

"A question I ask is, 'Give me a typical day,' " Ed Deutschlander, the
co-president of North Star Resource Group, in Minneapolis, says. "If that
person says, 'I get up at five-thirty, hit the gym, go to the library, go to
class, go to my job, do homework until eleven,' that person has a chance."
Deutschlander, in other words, begins by looking for the same general traits
that every corporate recruiter looks for.

Deutschlander says that last year his firm interviewed about a thousand
people, and found forty-nine it liked, a ratio of twenty interviewees to one
candidate. Those candidates were put through a four-month "training camp,"
in which they tried to act like real financial advisers. "They should be
able to obtain in that four-month period a minimum of ten official clients,"
Deutschlander said. "If someone can obtain ten clients, and is able to
maintain a minimum of ten meetings a week, that means that person has
gathered over a hundred introductions in that four-month period. Then we
know that person is at least fast enough to play this game."

Of the forty-nine people invited to the training camp, twenty-three made the
cut and were hired as apprentice advisers. Then the real sorting began.
"Even with the top performers, it really takes three to four years to see
whether someone can make it," Deutschlander says. "You're just scratching
the surface at the beginning. Four years from now, I expect to hang on to at
least thirty to forty per cent of that twenty-three."

People like Deutschlander are referred to as gatekeepers, a title that
suggests that those at the door of a profession are expected to
discriminate--to select who gets through the gate and who doesn't. But
Deutschlander sees his role as keeping the gate as wide open as possible: to
find ten new financial advisers, he's willing to interview a thousand
people. The equivalent of that approach, in the N.F.L., would be for a team
to give up trying to figure out who the "best" college quarterback is, and,
instead, try out three or four "good" candidates.

In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we
shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is
no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care
about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree--
and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not
before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed
Deutschlander's training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows
candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated
that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the
profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good
teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now.
Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid,
and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers
on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But
if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half'
s material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot--both because
we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for
what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive
the winnowing a healthy reward.

Is this solution to teaching's quarterback problem politically possible?
Taxpayers might well balk at the costs of trying out four teachers to find
one good one. Teachers' unions have been resistant to even the slightest
move away from the current tenure arrangement. But all the reformers want is
for the teaching profession to copy what firms like North Star have been
doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten
advisers. He spends large amounts of money to figure out who has the
particular mixture of abilities to do the job. "Between hard and soft
costs," he says, "most firms sink between a hundred thousand dollars and two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars on someone in their first three or four
years," and in most cases, of course, that investment comes to naught. But,
if you were willing to make that kind of investment and show that kind of
patience, you wound up with a truly high-performing financial adviser. "We
have a hundred and twenty-five full-time advisers," Deutschlander says.
"Last year, we had seventy-one of them qualify for the Million Dollar Round
Table"--the industry's association of its most successful practitioners. "We'
re seventy-one out of a hundred and twenty-five in that élite group." What
does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the
selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its
children?

Midway through the fourth quarter of the Oklahoma State-Missouri game, the
Tigers were in trouble. For the first time all year, they were behind late
in the game. They needed to score, or they'd lose any chance of a national
championship. Daniel took the snap from his center, and planted his feet to
pass. His receivers were covered. He began to run. The Oklahoma State
defenders closed in on him. He was under pressure, something that rarely
happened to him in the spread. Desperate, he heaved the ball downfield,
right into the arms of a Cowboy defender.

Shonka jumped up. "That's not like him!" he cried out. "He doesn't throw
stuff up like that."

Next to Shonka, a scout for the Kansas City Chiefs looked crestfallen.
"Chase never throws something up for grabs!"

It was tempting to see Daniel's mistake as definitive. The spread had broken
down. He was finally under pressure. This was what it would be like to be an
N.F.L. quarterback, wasn't it? But there is nothing like being an N.F.L.
quarterback except being an N.F.L. quarterback. A prediction, in a field
where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice. Maybe that
interception means that Daniel won't be a good professional quarterback, or
maybe he made a mistake that he'll learn from. "In a great big piece of
pie," Shonka said, "that was just a little slice." ♦