Why it's not worth paying peanuts

In his posting All of the Above - how to cheat Multiple Choice Questions, Donald Clark provides the following quote from a talk given by Professor Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, gave at the ALT conference in 2007:

“The variability at teacher level is about four times the variability at school level. If you get one of the best teachers, you will learn in six months what an average teacher will take a year to teach you. If you get one of the worst teachers, that same learning will take you two years. There’s a four-fold difference in the speed of learning created by the most and the least effective teachers. And it’s not class size, it’s not between class grouping, it’s not within class grouping – it’s the quality of the teacher.”

I'm sure he's right, although my contention would be that, if you have a really bad teacher, you'll never learn however long the experience lasts, because you just give up.

And of course bad teaching can occur online as well as in the classroom, except that bad e-learning materials are going to be even less effective than what you'd experience in a classroom. At least online you can simply shut the window down and get on with something else, without any embarrassment to the teacher.

The four-fold difference between the best and the worst teachers that Wiliam cites doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I learned long ago that it pays to choose your specialist help with care. The best graphic designers are at least four times better and quicker than the second best. The best programmers create almost error-free code in no time at all, whereas the worst will never get rid of the bugs. That's why it's always worth paying above the average - in the end you get what you pay for.