Likely To Succeed?

Gladwell tackles the difficulty of selecting the right person for a job. A paragraph about teaching:

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.

Jonah Lehrer adds his own thoughts. Frank Wilson is unimpressed:

Teaching, like writing, requires a certain amount of talent. Mastering a subject does not mean necessarily that you will be any good at teaching it. Teaching is also, to some extent, a performance art. And you either have the knack of performing or you don't. Probably the only way to determine if someone is any good at teaching is the same way you find out if somebody can act: auditions, rehearsals, actual performances. Otherwise, as Gladwell finally gets around to telling us: "A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice."

So the point of this article would appear to be this: You can't predict how a college quarterback will perform in the pros or how aspiring teachers will perform in the classroom. But you'll know whether they can perform, once you see ... how they perform. I'll bet that's right.