Pictured: an actual headline…
Without going into too much detail here, there is a difference between teacher quality and teaching quality, but for this exercise of thought, this doesn’t make a massive difference.
I find it strange that whilst everything within education is marketed, branded and sold - every school has its own social media accounts it seems. Teachers, or teaching almost never is.
Rather oddly, there doesn’t seem to be any link between the marketing of public and indeed private schools and teacher excellence or teacher quality. Whilst private schools might actively seek out opportunities to have their teachers recognised within the broader media landscape (though this is mostly limited to online platforms) as mainstream media shows limited interest in these smaller award programs.
But there is not a school I know of that will have a billboard promoting their excellent teachers, individual or as a group, though you could maybe at a stretch suggest that high scores by students in their exams are linked to this somehow. Though if we’re honest, I think the presence of students faces on billboards outside of schools is mostly a signal that rich and well off students are going to those schools, rather than suggesting that teachers have transformatively changed those students outcomes. Which, as I type it out, shows a rather good grasp on reality by the broader public, rather at odds with the movement towards private schools during the high school years of schooling, as noted by the HILDA study.
For context: The HILDA survey tells the story of the same group of Australians over the course of their lives. Starting in 2001, the survey now tracks more than 17,500 people in 9,500 households. In years 2012, 2016 and 2020, it collected information regarding each child in the household attending school.
“The latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Annual Statistical Report has found an increasing number of students going to public schools over non-government (Catholic and other private) schools for the primary years.
But once students get to high school, the trend is significantly reversed.”
This is interesting for the manner in which the trend expected anecdotally by most, is definitely true, at least according to within this studies data. But, the stone that remains unturned is selling teachers individual, collective excellence or quality. Whilst we know that assessing teacher quality is complex, tricky and most of all costly (Wiliam, 2016), the general public would be assumed not to know this intuitively. Though, as the HILDA study suggests, perhaps we ought to give more credit to parents as a body, who do seem to know things about what education level seems most ‘prestigious or important’ to them. So, a school could never really be able to promote or display the excellence of their teachers, or the teaching that they do. But it does seem odd that no one even really tries to do it anyway?
To force a simple analogy, it’s rather like a University basketball program promoting their excellent facilities but not the coaches or support staff who would be developing the athletes. This seems rather like what happens in education:
1. the team mates are promoted ‘we have four other five star recruits’ - in education this means: ‘you’ll be surrounded by well-off / clever peers
2. The facilities are promoted ‘state-of-the-art’ - in education this means: ‘we have a rifle range and Olympic pool’
3. The scores are promoted ‘we’ve made it to the last four national finals’ - in education this means: ‘our NAPLAN and ATAR scores are execpetional
But NEVER:
4. We have the best coaches ‘Dean Smith is famed for his coaching and recruiting’ - in education this never happens.
When speaking on Nepotism, Hasan Piker noted that sports was one of the few areas where you could not use fame and connections to succeed, because the data was so clear-cut. Whilst education is much less clear, it does seem rather odd that no one has thought to try and sell their schools, or basketball programs, in this manner.
References
Baroutsis, A. (2018). Mapping the field of education research and media. In Education Research and the Media (pp. 1-24). Routledge.
Baroutsis, A., & Lingard, B. (2018). Headlines and hashtags herald new ‘damaging effects’: Media and Australia’s declining PISA performance. In Education Research and the Media (pp. 27-46). Routledge.
Le Feuvre, L., Hogan, A., Thompson, G., & Mockler, N. (2021). Marketing Australian public schools: the double bind of the public school principal. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 1-14.
Wiliam, D. (2016). Leadership for Professional Learning West Palm Beach, FL: Learning Sciences International.
Running word count: 75,498
Here’s a thought. Nice buildings don’t change with staff turnover. It’s hard to offer a product that is unstable and always changing.