Study: Billions of dollars in annual teacher training is largely a waste
研究：每年数十亿美元的教师培训支出基本都浪费了
A new study of 10,000 teachers found that professional development — the teacher workshops and training that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year — is largely a waste.
一项涉及10,000名教师的新研究发现，每年花费纳税人数十亿美元的教师小组讨论和培训职业发展项目是一笔巨大的浪费。
The study released Tuesday by TNTP, a nonprofit organization, found no evidence that any particular approach or amount of professional development consistently helps teachers improve in the classroom.
非营利组织TNTP周二发布的研究发现，没有证据表明特定的方法或一定时间的职业发展培训能稳步提高教师在课堂上的表现。
“We are bombarding teachers with a lot of help, but the truth is, it’s not helping all that much,” said Dan Weisberg, TNTP’s chief executive. “We are not approaching this in a very smart way. We’re basically throwing a lot of things against the wall and not even looking to see whether it works.”
“我们用大量的培训对教师进行轰炸，可事实是，这并没有多大作用”，TNTP首席执行官Dan Weisberg说，“我们没能用一种很聪明的办法来解决当前的问题。我们只是盲目地尝试各种方法，甚至没去在意这是否有效。”
Researchers examined three large school districts as well as one network of charter schools. They looked at professional development programs at all the schools and teacher performance data over several years, and they surveyed 10,000 teachers and interviewed more than 100 administrators. They identified teachers who improved their job performance and tried to figure out what experiences they had that differed from teachers who were stagnant. To determine if a teacher had improved, researchers analyzed multiple measures — evaluation ratings, classroom observation and student test scores.
研究者对三个大的学区以及一个特许学校系统做了研究。他们分析了所有学校职业发展项目以及教师表现的多年数据，对10,000名教师进行了问卷调查，采访了超过100位管理者。他们找出了那些在工作表现上取得进步的教师，并试图找出他们的经历与那些在职业道路上停滞不前的教师有什么不同。研究者采用了多种衡量指标来判定一名教师是否取得进步，包括评估得分、课堂观察和学生的考试成绩。
And they didn’t find many answers.
他们并没有找到太多答案。
“When it comes to teaching, real improvement is a lot harder to achieve — and we know much less about how to make it happen — than most of us would like to admit,” Weisberg said.
Weisberg表示：“对教学来说，取得真正改进的难度比我们多数人愿意承认的要大得多，而且我们对如何才能取得改进知之甚少。”
The school districts that participated in the study spent an average of $18,000 per teacher annually on professional development. Based on that figure, TNTP estimates that the 50 largest school districts spend an estimated $8 billion on teacher development annually. That is far larger than previous estimates.
参与这项研究的学区在教师职业发展上的平均投入为每名教师每年18,000美元。以此为基础，TNTP估计50个最大的学区每年在教师发展培训上的花费为80亿美元。这远远超过之前的估计。
And teachers spend a good deal of time in training, the study found. The 10,000 teachers surveyed were in training an average of 19 school days a year, or almost 10 percent of a typical school year, according to TNTP.
研究还发现教师们在培训上花费了大量的时间。据TNTP，在10,000名受调查的教师中，平均培训时间为每年19个教学日，或者说，几乎是一个正常学年的10%。
“The bottom line is, they’re spending a lot of money on this and it’s such an appealing idea — take your existing teachers and just make them better and everybody is better off,” said Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “But this report finds that, on average, it doesn’t do much.”
“关键是，他们在这上面花了大量的金钱，而且它是如此具有吸引力的一个想法——让你现有的教师变得更好，同时所有人都会有所获益”，斯坦福大学胡佛研究所的经济学家Eric Hanushek说，“但这份报告显示，平均而言，它并没起多大作用。”
The findings echo two recent federally funded studies, which concluded that current approaches to teacher training have no significant effect on performance.
这些结果呼应了最近联邦政府资助的两项研究，研究结果也显示，目前的培训方法对教师的表现没有明显作用。
“At the federal level, we spend $2.5 billion a year on professional development,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at a teachers town hall meeting in 2012. “As I go out [and] talk to great teachers around the country, when I ask them how much is that money improving their job or development, they either laugh or they cry. They are not feeling it.”
教育部长Arne Duncan在2012年的一个市政教师会议上说：“在联邦政府层面，我们每年花费250亿美元在职业发展项目上,当我下基层与全国的优秀教师们谈话的时候，我问他们这些钱让他们的职业技能提升了多少或者他们自身得到了多大的发展时，他们不是一笑了之就是泪花盈盈。他们根本感觉不到这些钱。”
School districts have failed to adequately scrutinize the quality of their training programs, Hanushek said.
Hanushek表示，学区不能恰当地审视他们的培训项目的质量。
“School districts just have to take it more seriously,” he said. “They have to manage the use of professional development, evaluate its usefulness and dump the bad stuff. Which is a common problem in schools. They add something, and if it’s not working, they add something on top of that. They’re good at adding, not as good at taking away.”
他说：“各个学区只是需要更认真地对待培训项目。他们需要管理好对职业发展项目的使用，评估其用处，去掉没用的。所有学校都有一个通病。他们喜欢垒积木，如果没有效果，那就再往上加一块新的。他们善于做加法，却不善于做减法。”
In the TNTP study, about one-third of teachers — 3 out of 10 — improved over a two-to-three-year period after participating in training while 20 percent got worse, as measured by teacher evaluations.
在TNTP的研究中，教师评估显示，大约有三分之一的教师（十分之三）在参加培训后的2-3年内有所提升，然而与此同时，有20%的教师表现变差了。
The study also found that school districts are not helping teachers understand their weaknesses. Fewer than half of the teachers surveyed agreed that they had weaknesses in the classroom while more than 60 percent of teachers who earned low performance ratings gave themselves high grades.
研究还发现，各学区没有帮助教师们认识到自己的缺点。调查中，只有少于一半的教师承认他们在教学中存在弱点。在获得差评的教师中，超过60%给出了较高的自我评定。
“There is no doubt that there are initiatives that are probably producing positive impacts,” Weisberg said. “But it’s not helpful if you don’t know what they are. It is really important for school systems to begin to set goals and measure impacts against those goals. If we do that, we’re going to be so much smarter than we are now.”
“毫无疑问，能够产生积极作用的举措是存在的”，Weisberg说，“但如果你不知道到底是哪些举措，那就没什么用。对学校系统来说，至关重要的是，要开始设定目标并根据这些目标衡量所产生的影响。如果我们实行这些举措，那么我们将会变得比现在聪明得多。”
翻译：陈小乖（@lion_kittyyyyy)
校对：慕白（@李凤阳他说）
编辑：辉格@whigzhou