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Teachers and Quarterbacks
My latest New Yorker piece, "Most Likely to Succeed" is now up.
A couple of additional thoughts.
In some of the responses to the piece, I've seen some resistance to the idea that choosing NFL quarterbacks and choosing public school teachers represent the same category of problem. There are only a small number of NFL quarterbacks, and we are selecting candidates from a tiny pool of highly elite athletes. By contrast, we need a vast number of public school teachers and we're recruiting from an enormous non-elite pool to fill that need. So, the response has gone, it's apples and oranges.
Precisely! But of course non-symetrical comparisons are far more interesting and thought-provoking than symetrical comparisons. If I wrote a piece about how finding good point guards in the NBA was a lot like finding good quarterbacks in the NFL, the comparison would be exact. And as a result, it would be relatively useless. What new light does the addition of a second, identical example shed on the first?
Link to the New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell
1 comment:
But Gladwell ignores all of the evidence Michael Lewis aggregated. In Moneyball and in The Blind Side, Lewis shows that sports franchises make history and make money by moving away from reliance on star players to reliance on strategies that have been historically overlooked. In baseball, various metrics showed where to eke out more value and wins for your dollar; in football, west coast offense was about changing the playbook, directly instructing the qb on what to do and exactly WHEN to do it--so quickly that your opponents didn't have time to stop you.
so in the former case, the baseball analogy shows you should mine the data to find the variable everyone else is ignoring that can increase your performance for the best value per buck, and in the latter case, the football analogy says you don't need fantastic qbs, you just need to script them so tightly that everyone else will THINK they are fantastic natural qbs.
by analogy, then you should mine the data and you should script your teachers.
DI and PT. the way to create teachers everyone thinks are natural elites because people refuse to believe they could be cultivated.
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