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More A's, More Pay
theodp writes "Little slashdotters may find teacher a tad more upset when they screw up on a test. The Dept. of Education just launched the first federal program that uses bonuses to motivate teachers who raise test scores in at-risk communities, awarding $42M this month to 16 school systems. Any fears that teachers might cook the books to score a typical $5,000 payoff? Not to worry, says Chicago's school chief, there are statistical analyses in place that spot testing irregularities, presumably better at catching Cheaters than those used in the past."
This is unbelievable and one of the reasons I've always "lobbied" against public education where teachers are also graders. It is my firm belief that you don't grade your own work. If you're a programmer, do you get to grade your programming?
In any public job, allowing the employee to grade their output is going to end up with the grades falling into the average level as much as possible. If a public employee has too many failing students, they'll get fired. If they have too many students doing above average, they don't have a reason to ask for more money. With mostly average students (say, grade C or so), you can always say you can do better with more money. Since most teachers don't have a student for more than a few years, this can go on ad infinitum.
I'm against publicly funded education entirely, but I would be 100% satisfied with TRUE free market grading systems. The ACT and SAT are not realistic scoring systems -- even though the ACT says they are a private organization. We need REAL grading companies who settle the knowledge of students. Why should a 12 year old always be in the 6th grade? Shouldn't various students of various abilities be judged to their level by what the market needs? Shouldn't education be partially based on what will be required of the student if they were to enter the industry at a certain knowledge level?
To me, this feels like more teachers' union cronyism and preferential treatment to keep private industry out of the education system. What we need is more competition and less paternalism in this very-important market. Let us see what would happen when real competition creeps into the system -- not more regulation.
I for one, am a huge proponent of this type of approach. In almost any corporation in America, there are bonuses that are offered when someone performs well. Teachers (and many other Union jobs) don't have such performance bonuses in place. Why not? Sure, you have to worry a little about cheating, but I have to (maybe naively) believe that teachers will not be slipping students answers to achievement tests while school administrators are monitoring test taking progress. Plus, the statistical analyses referred to in the article should catch teachers that are this egregious.
We expect our teachers to put more and more hours in (most work tons of nights and weekend hours) for "the love of the children", and without any incremental pay. Shouldn't we reward them for their good work? Instead, we treat all teachers the same, and then provide tenure after 5 years (or so, depending on the school/state) that protects even the poor performing teachers. This is detrimental to our children, our future, and to our teachers.
The only problem I see with the program is that it only addresses at-risk schools. While school teachers in more affluent areas often get paid more (in my area, the difference is ~$15,000 between the wealthy and inner city school teachers), saying they shouldn't be compensated for good performance is like saying our "at risk" students matter more than everyone else. Rolling out the bonus program to all school districts could be a huge win for our education system.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Great. just what i wanted, my grades and my work to mean even less. Thank you god for people who cheapen the entire system and ruin my credibility as a student.
You mad
Chicago schools are nowhere near equal to one another. Some are fine. Others are worse than what you would imagine conditions are in third world countries.
My friend taught science and math in a Chicago school in a poor neighborhood.
In all the years he taught there; they NEVER had books, they NEVER had lab supplies, they SELDOM had working AV equipment, they NEVER had a computer.
Not that this effected the average grades, because any grade he assigned that was below a C was magically changed to a C by the principal.
How the fsck can you teach school without books?
I submit to you that basing his pay on the number of A's is corrupt in the extreme. (Though, thankfully, he is retired now.)
Dog is my co-pilot.
...of the story where the clueless manager gave out $50 for each bug a programmer fixed.
"Not to worry, says Chicago's school chief, there are statistical analyses in place that spot testing irregularities" Jaime Escalante to the rescue!
In a scholastic world where quantitative performance metrics are the norm, I'm surprised that this hasn't started sooner. I do wonder about the effect it will have on students who are already being driven hard to succeed by their parents - it always used to be my (few, decent) teachers who gave me the love of the subject, rather than the impetuous to perform. I weep for the day when Mr. Carbunkle says "I'm sorry Jimmy, I'd love to teach you calculus because I know you're interested in it, and it's really neat, but if you don't regurgitate all these trig tables 100% correctly, I can't afford that new kidney."
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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In theory this is a great idea, give bonuses to teachers that are doing their jobs well. However, in practice....I fear that we will only see exams getting easier and the children being taught less and less. We will see classes being taught to the children at the bottom of the bell curve rather than the middle...and instead of screwing up the gifted children's education....everyone will suffer. Isn't it bad enough that we are teaching classes to prepare the children for standardized tests, and then don't cover a lot of information that isn't on those tests just for the sake of raising test scores?
What hurts me most is the fact that these kids excel at written English and write much better essays yet they have to learn the language in addition to their vernaculars. American kids, who [mostly] speak English from childhood have horrible English, so solve the discipline question then we can go from there.
To any teacher who upgrades this to First Post!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Maybe the submitter wouldn't have put an apostrophe in "As" if his teacher had an incentive to teach him some grammar?
This is one of the worst "solutions" to solve our nation's education crisis that I've ever heard suggested, and to see it actually going into effect is more horrifying than the mere suggestion. When you create systems like this, with punishment or incentives hanging over the average person, that average person is going to find the simplest away around the system to get their carrot or avoid their spanking. This will not solve any problems, and may cause MORE problems if the material becomes watered down in an attempt to make tests easier and thus grades better. Perhaps that is the true purpose of this legislation: the further stupidification of our once-great nation.
Legislators need to begin asking these questions when they propose, vote, and pass new laws:
1) What is the SIMPLEST way to defeat the intent of the law?
2) Is this vulnerability worth the risk, or does the law's intent require it be solved before the bill is passed?
3) Does this law solve the problem I intend it to, and could it create any new problems that should be addressed before the bill is passed?
I could argue that there needs to be new legislation that educates legislatures on problem solving techniques. First IDENTIFY the problem, then discover relevant information to the problem, and finally devise SOLUTIONS. The problem in America is that the level of education aimed at those in standard (non-Advanced Placement) courses is specifically lowered to the level of the slowest person in the class. The ideal solution to solve this problem is to reward and penalize the STUDENTS. Grow some balls and hold students back if they do not put effort into learning the material, rather than slowing the entire school down to their lazy-fucking pace. At the same time, it's important you provide resources to support their extracurricular learning: tutors, additional reading and work material, extra class hours at the end of the day, incentives for a high GPA (it doesn't have to be money, one idea: I wonder how many people would work a little harder if it meant they get the last day of school off?)... This is not an easy problem to resolve, but for fucks sake it's not rocket science either. Find the people who want to learn, give them the opportunity... Find the people who don't, and bring them into the fold or kick them out of the system.
Excuse my randomly capitalized words, but I'm trying to convey passionate speech through a neutral text medium.
A quote from the article: "Similar ideas are used in the private sector all the time. 'In any other profession, when you do well, you get rewarded.'" UGH. OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM IS NOT A STOCK-HELD CORPORATION, THIS MINDSET IS WHAT HAS CAUSED THESE PROBLEMS TO BEGIN WITH. Corporations are expected to make results: profit, products, whatever. Education is supposed to raise the level of intelligence of a country, and socialize people so they are capable of surviving in our complex and modern world. The idea is to create as many intelligent students as possible, so society advances. Stop fucking the rest of us so your numbers look better, and start worrying about the future!
DRM = Digitally Restricted Media. This is a viral sig, pass it on.
The chapter in Freakonomics about cheating teachers deals with this. If you have any interest in learning about how they detect such behavior, give the book a read.
Score-related bonuses guarantee that teachers will "teach to the test."
This is a good thing if the test is a good one - meaning, if the test evaluates authentic skills in an authentic application.
The unfortunate reality: standardized tests are rarely (if ever) authentic assessments of student learning.
<sarcasm>
Yes, I'm sure their system will catch this stuff, too. How? Magic, maybe.
</sarcasm>
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Probably not a smart idea. Even at first glance, either 1) tests will not be standardized and all this will do will distort what constitutes an "A" or 2) tests will be standardized and this will create widespread "Teaching to the Test."
In scenario 1, this is bad because it creates an obvious incentive to grade very kindly. People can try to test for that influence to prevent it all they want, but if they create a market out of good grades, the market is going to react.
Scenario 2 doesn't fair much better, as anyone who has seen first hand the results of teachers teaching to, for example, the AP tests. Test scores will improve, knowledge will actually tend to decrease as original and creative thinking is discouraged in favor of simply being told the types of answers testers are looking for, rather than having to learn how to get there yourself. It's sort of the opposite of the Socratic teaching method.
If someone wanted to raise salaries to increase the size of the pool of teacher candidates, fine. But if a bonus is what's really changing someone's attitude, I think we all know greed isn't conducive to working with people well (and yes kids are people). Despite the flaws in our school system, I'm pretty sure I feel better knowing my kids teachers are there to educate because that's what they enjoy, and not there to try to get a certain set of letters or numbers associated with them so they get a bunch of cash, regardless of the actual amount of knowledge attained.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
The power to tax is the power to destroy. When the federal government taxes people and gives it back to the states with strings attatched, it is destroying state sovereignty.
This only breads corruption. It is going to encourage educational institutions to cook the books, as the author says, in order to get money. The solution would be to give money with no strings attatched, in hopes that districts would be able to improve education (not just test scores) that way.
Block grants or vouchers would be the key. If a school has lower class sizes, perhaps under 20, this allows teachers more one on one time with students. Also, increasing the school day is another thing they should consider. There isn't enough time in math class, for example, to properly teach mathematics. This is a problem in colleges too, but that is another topic altogether.
Levitt's Freakonomics does a nice piece on these same Chicago public schools studies. Here is a discussion of Levitt's ideas
What you suggest is a good idea with unfortuantely extremely difficult implementation given the requirement that schooling be universally free, available and of comparable quality. What happens when corporations decide not to run a school in your area because it wouldn't be profitable?
It seems like the government does a poor job, and to some extent it does, but if the government stepped out, or even some distance away, the school system would turn into the health care system pretty fast. Some couldn't get it, there would be widespread gouging, and the crap with bad standardized testing would only get worse when it was corporate bottom line involved.
The real solution is to provide vouchers to encourage kids to go to private schools, while still keeping the public schools around. Ideally, as more can afford private schools, their availability will increase, and as the state will have more money to teach fewer students (for some reason it is not common knowledge that vouchers save a great deal of money, but read up on them if you don't believe me), quality there will improve as well.
This is not a free market problem because of its requirements, but the free market can be used very effectively through a voucher program. So vote for it when it comes up on your county ballot!
Relax I just want some peanuts.
I give this idea a B. I guess someone won't be getting a raise!
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Honest question: how do you statistically tell the difference between the anomaly of a teacher cooking the grades, and the anomaly of a teacher raising crappy grades through effort and diligence?
.evom ton seod gis eht
It would be interesting to see what would happen if you gave that money to the students instead. $150 for a C, $200 for a B and $250 for an A? You can pay the teachers a million bucks, but if students aren't motivated or able it will not help. I am not sure I buy the assumption here that the teachers can be motivated to do a lot better with money. The teachers have to teach and the students have to learn, and I would be inclined to think that students not being motivated (or able due to circumstances aside from the teacher) to do the work to learn is a bigger contributor to poor test scores than inability or lack of motivation from the teachers.
parents take the responsibility? what if parents give monetary or other rewards to kids when they get an A on a test? take them to a movie; buy them a toy; give them little more freedom to watch TV; let them stay at cousins'; let them do things that they enjoy. a teacher can only do so much without student's interest. you can lead the horse to water but can't make him drink it. create the thirst and the horse will drink automagically.
This is a really bad idea. It will only encourage teaching for the test. I think the whole school culture has to be changed. You should be teaching to learn, not for tests. You need to make school enjoyable, not a torture system where you are forced to peform or else your teacher goes hungry? This idea total ignores the fact that your whether you get an A or not in a 8th grade science test will most likely not affect the rest of your life. If teachers are putting pressure on kids to perform, it will make school less enjoyable.
Also, this whole system is flawed into thinking that every class has an equal potential for results. Sadly it isn't. The whole thing will be like a lottery, seeing which teachers get the smart kids rather than the less smart ones.
It takes more than money to fix the system.
kill all the fucking niggers
In NYC the Public Schools are broken. Teachers have to buy their own supplies. Mayor Bloomberg's (like the company, not the mayor) corporate management style has resulted in elementary school students being taught nothing except taking tests. I'm a private music teacher and I try to sneak some math in, especially for the younger kids. When I ask them about what they're learning in math or science they used to discuss it with me for a while (giving us both a break from scales and theory) - for the past year they just shrug and say 'studying to take the test.' The overpaid Bloomberg cronies at the Board of Ed actually spy on the teachers to make sure they aren't deviating from the 'lesson plan'.
Between the pharmaceutical companies and the bureaucrats kids today are being used as test subjects. I'm considering home schooling.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Your "degree" in elementary, or your "degree" in high school?
This has nothing to do with post-secondary education, which is still the only place you get a degree.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The only real solution to our American education system is to figure the average amount nationwide that all schools have for their budget.
Double that number and then increase all corporate american taxes to get an amount of money equal that doubled number. (Corporations benefit from well educated workers, so should be willing to pay to get them)
Then distribute this amount of money evenly to all schools nationwide based upon the number of students that were enlisted in the previous year. Beyond that the federal government should have no say other than that money should be spent by the school district it was allocated to ONLY. Let the states manage their educational systems. Increase this number and the tax amount by the previous year's inflation numbers published by the federal reserve and you have a well funded local educational system.
This has the dual effect of increasing nearly all school's budgets (and rich parents can still donate money in rich areas if they want an elite school) and at the same time reducing the dependence on local property values for school income (and theoretically reduce local taxes) This is Democratization of American Education.
And to the critics that say doubling the amount spent on average in American public schools - public education is the ONE thing that this nation can throw money "away" on or "spend money frivilously on".
John B
New Math 2.0 will be introduced so that 2 + 2 = 5 will earn a student a perfect grade every time. Remember that it's not about the student knowing what he or she needs to know, it's all about being number one in the stats!
The teachers should get a bonus according to the amount that they have improved the student's level of education over the year that they spent with the teacher. You look at their grades for the year before they were with the teacher, and the grades for the year after, and the teacher gets a bonus according to the improvement. That way the teacher is making an investment in their own future by improving the student's education.
This elimates some of the cheating problem.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
...or does this sound a little like the communism vs. capitalism debate?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
They've got it backwards. Instead of rewarding teachers for good grades, they should tax the parent(s) for poor grades. A teacher can only do so much, and they can't do a damned thing without the parent(s) taking an interest. Behind the majority of kids doing poorly in school is a parent that doesn't give a damn.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
How about... giving more money to all teachers and attracting better talent? It is obvious and uncontroversial that offering more money gets you more skilled people. However, for some reason, when it comes to education people ignore this fact. If you want to provide incentives to get better teaching, raise salaries! Offering a prize for performance is just an underhanded way of trying to save money on your incentives -you are giving all the teachers a lottery ticket instead of cash. Worse than that, it clearly encourages cheating.
I love the way we are taking education these days. I am currently in college and I notice that the institution is not at all what I expected. No one goes because they want to learn more about their field and want to be educated about it, they go because it is a certification they can put on their resume, which will determine if they get hired or not, or determine if they make $35K a year or $75K a year. I don't even know who I am angry at, the managers of the corporations that use college degrees instead of work experience to determine a candidate's worth, or the universities that take in tuition and try to pump out degrees with little idea at whether the student is actually "educated" or if they just learned "how to replicate the process" for the test and then forgot the information the next day. .I guess standardized testing is just the best solution at the moment.
This applies here too. Essentially they are assessing worth by attaching a numerical value to "intelligence" or "education". Most of the time if you just went to these schools and sat down in the classes you would get a better idea than assigning some standardized test. Then again, the costs associated with that would be astronomical and end up taking away from what the schools have. .
I don't care what you mod me (if at all) this was just a stupid rant, I just wonder if its me or if others out there agree.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
One obvious way to game this system is to push out the low-performing students, thus raising the averages. Then, just as in the "Texas miracle", you cook the books and falsify the dropout rate.
The problem with that system is that education is not an exact science, teachers would realistically have no control over a student's grades. A student could do exceptionally well in middle school math, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll do well in statistics. A grammar student wouldn't necessarily do well in literature. Chemistry, biology, physics, geology, astronomy (etc) are uncomparable yet they all fall under the catagory of "science."
>They also hated to be individual, or singled out.
It wasn't Ghana, but I read one teacher's account of teaching students from a culture with a similar feature.
She split the class into small groups which would then pick a spokesperson to deliver their report or answer questions. The kids would freeze up if they felt alone but thrived as part of a team.
Interestingly, the same topic was covered in the book Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explore the Hidden Side of Everything. One of the authors, Steven Levitt, developed some of the tools to find cheating teachers. One of the examples I from the book was to look for strings of correct answers that were statistically significant (where the teacher would have erased quite a few of a students answers, right or wrong, and put in all right answers).
"Dewey, you fool: Your decimal system has played right into my hands!"
is not *necessarily* bad.
The big problem the US has with education is that people haven't agreed on a problem statement.
If there's a standardized curriculum (which most industrialized countries have); if there's a core set of knowledge and skills that everyone thinks are indispensable for a citizen; if there's a standardized test that accurately measures those -- then the test is simply a necessary feedback mechanism and "teaching to the test" simply means concentrating on the basics.
Every one of those "if"s has whole books arguing the contrary, of course.
to breed better students than spend all your time fussing over this educational strategey or that. There is only so much school can do. School is for learning things, i.e., aquiring knowledge; it does not make one smarter. Re bogaboga's post, why should we follow the third world's example? They are, after all, The Third World. I don't believe in aspiring to be poor. Also, the " products of those schools [who] come over here and excel" are likely well above average in their country of origin.
I thought the headline meant that if you get more A's, you will be paid more in the future.
I thought I was fucked!
http://sixpop.com/images/images/83267365.gif
This is more-or-less lifted straight from the book "Freakonomics," by Steven D. Levitt that came out last year; so what is new?..
-Here is Levitt's homepage; here is his blog..
..Here is *cough*
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
juss testin' out sum shit. yo yall gotz ein problem mit das?
ket gutchar tung? nah, eye meen ta say dis
If you insist on teaching the smart and the dumb in the same class, then measure at regular intervals and award improvements, not just the high scores. If you only pay for the A's, you will end up paying only the smartest students, the dumb ones may try forever and fail everytime. Now there is a good demotivator for the majority of the class.
If you pay for the improvement of the student (how much of his learning capacity he has used the last trimester), you are actually rewarding learning. The downside is that you will need to test more than just a few days to accurately measure knowledge and capacity, so some computer aided program that gathers the data while you are learning might be in order. (for which is somehow no money available)
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
trolls're sexy's all getout, ja!~
Is this really, from a national point of view, a worthwhile use of the education system?
I'd think that it would be good if the students knew their subject matter, which, as a side effect, might also increase the test scores. But if you pay the teachers after the test scores of their students, they will teach how to score high in tests, not how to understand the subject matter.
For the individual student it may be a competitive advantage to optimize solely after high test scores. But only if the other students don't do the same. It is one of the annoying cases where individual optimization does not lead to improved system performance.
Education is important, people know this and will pay anything they can muster to get the best education for their children. Companies know this. If you leave education to the forces of the free market, prices of education will just rise ad infinitum, as their is not a point that parents will say 'this education thing is too expensive, little Joe doesn't need any'. The companies will just bleed em dry.
... there's isn't a point where people say 'curing this cancer is too expensive, forget it'. So what are you left with? The most expensive system in the world with the least actual care and the highest number of uninsured citizens for any first world country.
Same basically as the American healthcare system
I think you really need to rethink your 'let the free market sort it out' kind of philosophy.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
The problem with this system is that it's going to be abused, mostly by the administrators. I've seen it happen in my husband's school. If the head of the department and/or principal don't like you, they give you all the craptacular students on purpose. This is their way of getting rid of you because your tests scores will suffer. They play favorites more than I've ever seen any other job do in my life. How about we also take care of the problem that a little over 3/4 of teachers leave the profession within five years because they are sick of all the bullshit. They're sick of working 7.5 hours at work and bringing home another 4 hours work each night as well as spending their weekends grading papers for less money than other people who have master's degrees. Sure, they get the summers off but after working 60-70 hours per week, don't you want some time off? They also quit because they actually thought they'd get a chance to actually teach instead of being pigeon-holed into rote behavior, turning out clones instead of thinking people. They also hate having to deal with parents who constantly say their kid is Einstein and get pissed off when their kid fails. Not my kid. He wouldn't do that. And, last but not least, they hate that they put in honest grades but the school requires a certain percentage passing and failing so grades magically get changed. If you think the magical grade changes won't happen for the favorite teachers by administrators, you're sorely mistaken. This program isn't going to solve the problem. It's going to make things worse. While I agree that the American education system is very broken, this isn't the way to fix it. You need to start by disciplining students again and telling parents to f-off when they whine about their kid 24/7. You also need to stop with the hand holding and giving a quarter of the students magic "undefined" learning disabilities. How about you cut the damned sugar out of your kid's diet so he can actually sit in class and pay attention. How about you actually make your kid do their homework and study. How about disciplining your child at home and teaching him that disrespectful and disruptive behavior in school is counterproductive to everyone. While you're at it, try taking responsibility for your own child and stop making the school their surrogate parent. Lastly, force your school to remove inclusion. It does not work. Inclusion prevents slower kids from getting the help that they need and keeps the smarter students bored out of their minds. Return to the days when we were all seperated by our abilities, instead of this PC nonsense. I'm sorry but, maybe your kid isn't smart enough to go to college. Deal with it. Maybe he doesn't want to go to college. There's nothing wrong with tech/trade schools. The world needs carpenters, plumbers, automechanics, etc. They are very good careers but, in today's system, everyone is steered away from these jobs. The kids that want to do these things, end up dropping out and stumbling upon them later on.
I'll give you an example of how this approach can fail badly if the wrong performance metrics are used - the example is from health care but it still applies. In my state (not in the USA) we have a system where hospitals get a bonus dependent on the number and type of complex procedures performed. A hospital administrator had a perfect employee for this - a doctor with good US qualifications who performed large numbers of quite complex procedures that every other doctor in the place would refer to someone in the capital. He didn't even waste time washing his hands between operations or counting the instruments - it was right on to the next one. The throughput was amazing - these people were not in hospital for very long. The surgeon was considered the best employee in the hospital by the administrators - meanwhile the nurses and the other doctors were actually hiding patients from him. This fantastic employee by all the administrators metrics was killing people for years, hence them not being in hospital for long - he was not competant to do any of those complex and risky procedures that made the hospital a lot of money whether people lived or died - and extradition proceedings are underway to bring him back to face a lot of charges.
An untempered money driven approach in a situation where the objective is supposed to be other than selling something has real consequences. With this sort of approach the teacher with the little angels that just need someone to babysit them gets paid more than the teacher that makes real progress with the difficult kids and turns them into useful members of society. Currently in my country the teachers with some of the worst results get paid the best money for good reasons - they are teaching in third world conditions where the first major challenge is to make sure the kids get to school, the second is to make sure that they are getting food, the third is to give them a reason not to sniff gasoline until their brains melt and the fourth is to give them a good education.
in the UK, we have "league tables" of A-level and GCSE results (the exams you take before attending university, and two years previously respectively, for those not familiar with them). these are published nationally every year.
this has lead to a race of "dumbing down" of examinations. while the exams are not set by the schools, there are several examination boards for each subject, and the schools can pick and choose which ones to set. the schools want higher results, obviously, so they gravitate towards the easier curriculums and examinations. the exam boards try to create the easiest courses they can while still operating within their guidelines (i'm not sure how their regulation works), as the more popular they are, the more money they earn. it's worth noting if you get an A-level in Geography, for instance, it is just that, not an A-level in Geography from xxxx exam board.
continue this for 15 years, and you end up with vast numbers of students passing. consult http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2193169.stm for some statistics. this only covers until 2002, it's continued to rise - 96.2% of entrants passed in 2005. the problem is in effect at the top of the scale too, somewhere around 20% of entrants achieve the top grade, an A or A*. universities are ending up being unable to discern top candidates, and complain about A-grade students lacking skills they used to arrive with in the past. they are considering bringing in their own examinations to grade students' aptitude, a move that would completely undermine A-levels.
qualifications are meant to sort the top candidates from everyone else, they are elitist by nature. they are not meant to be all-inclusive "gold star for everyone who takes part" affairs where all but the dumbest 4% are awarded a qualification. aiming for higher pass rates shifts the standard down for everybody, and, perhaps most importantly, challenges the best candidates less, leaving them behind their counterparts in other countries who get pushed harder.
Rewards for quality teaching aren't bad in themselves, but rather than being tied to absolute grades it needs to be dependent on "added value". The work taken to get an F student to an E is equivalent, and of equal value, as getting a B student to an A. A permanently A-grade student requires little effort on the teachers part.
But as you say (elsewhere in your post) all this is meaningless unless the examinations are external and independently verified to be of equal value. Choosing an "easy" curriculum doesn't (really) help your students.
Catch 22 -
It really is time to move past assigned grade letters to scores (it's value is so variable over time it's meaningless almost as soon as it's awarded). Your parents grade A isn't worth the same as yours.
Is there any logical reason not to assign absolute scores based on observed, proven knowlege? One mark for each curriculum element demonstrated. I got 800 this year. You got 600? We both got an "A" but I learnt more than you.
you have never even looked into the subject of school funding. Let alone looked at why some schools do better than others. I have as many others here have.
Guess what, it isn't money that makes a school better. If so you could not have systems that spend 10k doing worse than those spending 6k per student by your logic.
The only good point you had was getting the feds out of education. Everything they touch turns into a mess. You must also get the unions out of education. The various teacher unions must not have the control they do over schools. Don't think they do? Your only fooling yourself. Most changes that occur are because of the unions. The DoE in your county and state? Most likely union members or so indebted to them that their decisions are basically bought.
Oh, lets dispell one more myth. CORPORATIONS PAY NO TAXES.
Its an indirect tax on you and me. Tell me, just where does the money that GM, IBM, or Amazon, gets to pay their taxes comes from? Huh? Please? Do they have a magical machine that prints out money just for taxes? Oh, but I forget its so much easier to assign the "burden" to someone else, especially "eveel" corporations. Moron. "We the people" pay ALL the damn taxes. "We the people" are constantly shafted by politicians because of idiots like you who bought into the idea that "corporations are eveel and not paying their fair share"
Shit, don't ask for a better education system when you don't use the education you were provided.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
even in the 3rd world to see how much discipline there is in schools over there. No wonder the products of those schools come over here and excel, leaving American kids behind!
If they are legal migrants, they have been subject to requirements on education.
If they are illegal migrants, they have been subject to a Darwinian process to get into the country.
For the ill effects of too much discipline, see teenage suicides in Japan.
A lot of these comments are about teachers cheating. Isn't this an argument _for_ national standardized tests? You get all the kids in the gym in groups and all the tests leave the room with the principal in a sealed container. Clear responsibility.
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I'm a little tired of hearing "teaching to the test" because so many school systems have expanded to somethng like 40 "core areas" spreading the kid's attention a mile wide and an inch deep. American culture may be an oxymoron and it can be politically correct and tempting to throw a ton of stuff at kids while you've got them locked in, but there is also a lot to be said for a solid core foundation of reading, writing, and arithmetic preparing a kid to be a good citizen.
And if you want to send your kid to a charter school, assume you are sending him to a _worse_ school:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/education/17cha
Personally, I would like to see _more_ federal intervention concentrated on public education (like the rest of the world has). Then local boards could spend less time wondering whether evolution should be banned and books with witches should be burned.
This is incredibly amusing to me. As someone who works in industry and teaches as a hobby (yes, bizarre, but true -- some people play sports, some people have collections, I teach), many of the efforts I have seen around this area are well-intentioned nonsense.
Rewards will drive behavior - but often not the desired behavior. This is just as true in industry as it is in the classroom. Compensation programs must be well designed in order to ensure they're driving desirable behaviors. Those of us in industry all know of the person who is able to *beat the system* - why would teaching be immune from such behaviors?
As a side note - in my opinion, tests - especially standardized tests - are only useful as a least common indicator of learning. Tests facilitate neither problem solving nor exploration.
Another problem is that the politicians (who, in a representative government are really *us*) create these nifty 'one-size fits all' bandages complete with pithy slogans because they (we) don't really see the problem.
Teaching is no longer the desirable (respectable) profession it once was. The respect is no longer there. The support from the parents is no longer there. Many people who once entered this profession have found that there are many easier - and more profitable - and less painful ways to make a living than by teaching.
One of the great challenges we have is to make learning interesting... It doesn't have to be *fun* but it should be worth of capturing our attention...
(As a side note - I am constantly finding gaps in my knowledge where I need to brush up on my education - and this is after 10 years and 3 degrees from one of the top engineering schools in the country.)
Right off the bat we are limited in how many medical doctors can be created inside the US, creating a severe artificial scarcity model, which comes about from the government granting near governmental control powers to the AMA. In fact, I would say the AMA is pretty analogous to the old AT&T "ma bell" quasi governmentally approved monopoly. Same deal with lawyers for the most part, too, with the BAR association. Then look at the revolving door with the FDA then to private pharmcos. Tell me there aren't any "decisions" influenced there long term. Now look at the cost of healthcare since medicare took off. I am old enough to remember when healthcare was pretty affordable, I mean insanely affordable compared to today, but ever since the government got involved with payments and rearranging the money in the healthcare indstry and creating a huge middle man skimming industry and paperwork bloat industry, the prices have risen faster even than inflation and the numbers of non and under insured peopl keep rising, because there is no way for the market to correct there other than increased prices. There is no incentive for cheaper prices or more widespread coverage for people. And it is going to get worse as medical tourism increases and more dollars get exported, instead of spent and respent internally, because that is the only place where the market appears to be working with medical care unfortunately.
As to public education, that is for sure one area where we could easily just completely drop the federal department of education-there is no proof whatsoever that it has been much more than a very expensive jobs program for the government and a way to push pretty weird social engineering programs with the financial carrot and the stick. The US got by just fine in education (and probably better over-all), during the years before that cabinet level position and agency were created. Like prohibition, it was well intentioned but should be recognized as a failure and just ended. Call it "cut and run"" if you want to, but good money and effort after bad is never a wise course.
I support standardized tests in theory, but in practice they are less than desirable. For one, the standards seem to change every year. My wife is a Drama and Arts and Humanities teacher at the high school level. She is stuck with textbooks from last year that are already out of date based on the testing standards for this year. I think if public schools are going to be forced into taking standardized tests that influence funding, then the texts should be provided to those schools by the test makers. Furthermore, the standards for these tests are remarkably ambiguous. As an undergraduate, I had a summer job catagorizing problems to fit into the standards for the high school math tests here. It was a huge mess.
At my first job as a software engineer, management cooked up something very similar. The software had a habit of having software bugs in it that seemed to show up right at release or during a customer demo. Management offered a "bounty" on software bugs and would pay bonuses based on defects found and fixed before a release or customer demo. It was amazing... Suddenly people were "finding" all sorts of bugs, and getting paid. This went on for several months until a couple of the software engineers were busted working with each other to create bugs that the other could find.
I say give the money to the students. Show the hard-up kids that education is worth it and that they don't have to sling drugs or whatever to get decent money.
Borat
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
I wonder if this is a good deal financially--
Assuming that raising student grades is a function of the hours a teacher invests in honing lesson plans and providing extra assistance and tutoring, how does it compare to alternative ways the teacher has to supplement their income? Does it yield more per hour than, say, getting a night job at the supermarket, or earning a law degree and leaving teaching altogether?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Kids (parents) who do not want to get educated should not be educated. Period.
One thing is availability of education for everybody. I am for that. I am for free education for everybody. But those who cannot match up to the standards by their upbringing should not be dragged up the level of the education system. It is waste of money and degradation of the general level of education.
People who have problems should be helped OUTSIDE of general system of education, so it won't be done at the expence of education quality for others.
Is it that difficult to understand?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
...frequently, as a primary school teacher in a former coal mining village with a low level of parental education, a moderate amount of borderline inbreeding and a high proportion of itinerant gypsy pupils whose parents would treat the school as free childcare for the 6 months that they stayed in the area:
"The day that how well these little toerags do determines how much I get paid, is the day I get out of teaching"
Check out the description of the Chicago School Board's use of statistics to identify cheating teachers. Not only did they successfully identify cheats, they also identified cheats that didn't even know the right answer to cheat with. Quite an eye opener.
Do other states of tests that are written by the state? In NY we have regents tests. Why not just use those as the tests that determine whether a teacher gets the bonus or not?
nothing
I can't speak for metropolitan areas, but in the smaller cities and rural areas the teachers make out like bandits compared to others in the community. This is starting to come to light now that schools are forced to make their budgets accessible to anybody in the public.
I live in a town where the average pay is $29k per year and there are many teachers making $50k and above. Someone might says that perhaps they have put in a lot of years to get that high, but how many other small-town industries allow you to move up in pay like that?
It's not just teachers, it's government workers in general. I think the era of, "The government doesn't offer great pay, but has great benefits", is over and we are now in the era of, "The government pays great and offers great benefits too!".
Secretaries to county officials making $40-50k, county officials making near six figures, etc.
I can't be the only person who notices this, as the last several attempts of raising millage rates and property taxes have been voted down by a large margin.
This was tried already in a few states here in Brazil, and failed badly. What we ended up what a bunch of kids that could never get into college, or even get some decent technical education.
That is a VERY bad idea.
morcego
And how to take and pass tests, rather than the subjects, the children are taught the factoids (data separate from context) in order to pass the tests and help the teachers keep their jobs.
Things were bad before, with teachers who didn't know their subjects, or even the language, but No Child Left Behind doesn't seem to be a particularly ideal solution.
Two things you might consider:
Perhaps it would be ideal to teach students thinging and learning skills, so that they can adapt to ever changing market forces (and have some idea how to judge if the latest military adventure being pushed by the MIC is really a Good Idea(TM).
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
I'm surprised Slashdotters haven't figured out how to beat the system.
If you're a principal, it's very easy to cheat and get bonuses without improving reading at all.
Simply expel the poor-scoring students.
That's what happened in Texas when George W. Bush was governor, and instituted this free-market bonus idea.
Sure, you could re-program the system to track that. Call me in 10 years when you've done it.
The New York Times had a few front-page stories about this. Needless to say, most of the students who were expelled were black.
Bush took some of the very people who were responsible for this and appointed them to high positions in his administation.
Really, do you expect someone who had so much contempt for his own education as GWB to understand education?
A high percentage of "at risk" students are also "special needs" students requiring Special Ed. Teaching for standardized tests does not help these children, and does not demonstrate proficiency for their teachers.
My husband's been teaching Special Ed for twenty years. The burnout rate for Special Ed teachers is that most of them quit within their first 6 months of teaching. He has a dual masters in Twice Exceptional, meaning kids who have learning and/or behavioral disabilities but are also gifted. Few of his students are gifted. He can teach all subjects, K-12.
He worked in one middle school in an economically depressed rural area, where fully 1/4 of the students were Special Ed! He had no books, no learning materials, and was only allowed to make 10 photocopies a month.
He worked in one school where the administrators mandated standardized tests every two weeks. He spent all his time grooming his students for the tests. He had NO time to actually provide them services which would improve their learning skills. Test day would come and he would have to read them the questions. His students would be in tears, crying "Why do they want to make us feel stupid?"
He's now teaches severely emotionally disturbed behavior-disordered students with learning disabilities, grades 1-8, in a self-contained classroom. How do you make a mentally retarded child, or a child with a combination of Tourette's Syndrome, Autism, ADHD and Dyslexia (this is one of his students this year) take a standardized test? They can take them, but they don't do well. Their scores reflect badly on the school, bringing the entire school's score down. Yep. They are factored in as if they were regular education students. Then the government punishes the school.
These kids will NEVER do well on standardized tests. They CAN, however, greatly improve if they are provided the services they need. Special Ed teachers will NEVER be able to demonstrate proficiency if they are judged by their students' performance on standardized tests. Yet, they deal every day with challenges that regular teachers, much less federal bureaucrats, couldn't take for fifteen minutes! How many of you will go to work today and have to put a large, violent boy in a safety hold on the ground for a full hour, just to keep him from injuring himself? My husband deserves a bonus every day!
The Federal dept of Ed provides 10% of his district's funding, but requires 80% of the district's paperwork. He has seen so many of these stupid programs come and go, and they ALL fail at the classroom level because they are mandated and micromanaged by bureaucrats a thousand miles away who have NEVER worked in a classroom!
We always compare our low test scores to other countries. Those countries don't teach their special needs children. They don't have those children bringing down their aggregate scores, so it's a false comparison.
Drop the damn standardized tests and give these children relevant services that can actually help them in life. Judge them by their personal best, and reward their teachers for their hard work and dedication.
Health care is not, and never will be a gree market for 2 very important reasons:
1) Most people are not qualified to comparison shop. To truly coparison shop between drugs, treatments and hospitals you need lots of information and some knowledge of statistics. Most people just can't do this type of analysis. Therefore you need to rely on the opinions of health care providers and licensing boards. It is not like shopping for clothes and comparing Wal-Mart to Target.
2) Even if you are qualified to do this, in emergency or other high priority medicine there is often no time to do detailed reviews. If you are bleeding and in pain you are not going to comparison shop. All you would want to do is stop hurting.
Free market forces simply do not work in health care, except perhaps for elective procedures such as plastic surgery.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
There is none.
Here in Oregon the teachers are paid according to time in the saddle. That is it.
At 30 years in, on the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) you can retire at 108% of base pay. Yes, more than you were making on the job.
Your retirement fund makes 8% minimum, regardless of the real performance in the stock market or wherever else they have it invested. Plus, the money was put in FOR you, you can get there in 30 years without any additional investment of your own funds.
Before retirement, you have enjoyed the best bennies money can buy.
On top of this the unions cry like babies that there is not enough money in education.
I would prefer to shove pitchforks up the asses of all these people.
It you want to be in IT, do it for a small high school and get a good hobby.
This simply raises the number of people attracted to the teaching profession. There is no shortage of people willing to be teachers. There is a shortage of effective teachers. Raising the wage of any class of worker only assures you will have more people (of all abilities and skill sets) willing to do that job. Providing incentives to attract and retain effective teachers is far more difficult.
Education is important, people know this and will pay anything they can muster to get the best education for their children. Companies know this. If you leave education to the forces of the free market, prices of education will just rise ad infinitum, as their is not a point that parents will say 'this education thing is too expensive, little Joe doesn't need any'.
This isn't borne out by experience. Private education is generally less expensive than public education. And even more essential products like food don't work the way you say (unless their markets are highly regulated/manipulated, like milk or sugar, but even those remain relatively affordable). But the more you subsidize education, the more expensive it gets.
Same basically as the American healthcare system ... there's isn't a point where people say 'curing this cancer is too expensive, forget it'. So what are you left with? The most expensive system in the world with the least actual care and the highest number of uninsured citizens for any first world country.
Why don't you contact a health insurance company and ask them how "unregulated" they are ... again, you're picking one of the most highly regulated (i.e. government-run) sectors, and working against your own argument.
Now, translate this back to the education problem. You have a bunch of teachers who are willing to work for $X. If you decide that lack of pay is part of the problem, the solution isn't to give the current batch of teachers $X+$Y in pay. The solution is to fire the current batch of teachers, and hire new ones who weren't willing to work for $X but are willing to work for $X+$Y. Unfortunately the teachers' unions want to hear nothing of the sort. In other words, it's not enough to throw more money at the system, you have to be willing to create major changes within the system with that money.
The idea of selective pay bonuses for measurable achievement is just a variation on this principle which avoids the huge negative of the "fire everyone" step. You're trying to find the teachers who are working for $X but are probably worth $X+$Y, and selectively increase their pay. So in a way, this idea is increasing the education budget.
You could live in Texas where the TAAS test is all important, and not a single other grade truly counts toward your graduation...
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
That way the less priveleged kids are even more incented to do well because the money means more to them. But if you really want to give bonuses to the teachers, perhaps each grade should be peer-reviewed to help avoid cheating. Then have a 3rd party do random audits.
Much of the time dicipline has nothing to with misbehavior, but rather with establishing dominance or plain old power tripping. Any person who went to public or private school can probably recall a dozen cases off the top of their heads of being yelled at or given detention for something that wasn't against the rules, wasn't wrong, or wasn't their fault. Add paddling to the mix will just make it worse.
Thank goodness I have thus far managed to avoid breeding. If I ever have kids I'm not going to be able to let them attend public school because I will want them to be able to fulfill at least a significant part of their potential and I don't really want them pressed into a system which was designed to produce factory workers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does anyone here have the slightest doubt that there will be teachers wrongly accused of "cooking the books"? Very weird-looking statistical anomalies will happen, given a large enough sample size.
I don't envy these teachers.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Really? The U.S. has one of the worst public education systems in the world, but the college system is a competitive one in terms of choice, and we have a fairly exceptional one (short of the cost of college, which comes directly out of government funding which made the costs go way up).
It's only exceptional at keeping citizens out. If you're from some despotic country, welcome to the country club. If you're a citizen, fork up a ton if you're "undesirable". Otherwise go work in some industry that will end up offshored someday. The concept is something that economists of your kind will never understand, as the math may be right, but the application of it wrong.
However, there is a decent solution - universal admissions for citizens to any place of higher education. If you cant build "prestige classes", get known for being the college with tons of immigrants of one specific race, or play funding games that go against citizens, they'd have more incentive to concentrate on quality of education. Yes, that means that your average citizen will be able to go to MIT, Stanford, or any Ivy regardless of educational background with no ability to refuse. Other universities would have to catch up, and in capacities to serve our citizens first, immigrants second.
Because you can pick your college, you can pick what you want/need/can afford.
Seen, shot down, picked up by the bird dog and cooked for dinner. The practical choice is driven by ability to pay, which would be well served to be removed from the equation altogether - then the others can be dealt with on terms of true choice of the person's interest. Otherwise it is not want/need at all, but mostly "can afford" and partially "will not refuse citizens". Picking your college is only for the top 10% in the current way of things - that never was true choice.
The situation is going to get to a point where it will end up that education will have to be universal admissions for citizens, mostly paid with redirected subsidies and shifting the burden to known job stealing countries. While that wouldn't be a problem for most countries, it would send a clear message that we want to build our own, not disregard them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Seeing as grain is 1) subsidized in many wealthier countries, and 2) much of it - over 50%, possibly up to 70% - is controlled by Cargill Foods, and 3) the quality is regulated for good reasons (i.e. so it doesn't kill us through mold, pesticides, etc), I don't think it'd be consitered a "free market". But it was worth a try.
You mean now the federal govt is going to PAY for grade inflation? Nutz I say, nutz.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I think that we would be FAR better off offering performance based incentives to the parents of the children and not the teachers. For the most part teachers I've seen try to do a reasonable job at teaching and many of the times when they don't succeed it is as a result of families not living up to thier end of the deal. It is my very deep personal belief that education is the responsibility of the family and the school is just one tool that can be used to accomplish this task. I also believe you can only get out of school what you as a family put into it. If you just go and hang out you won't do nearly as well as if you go and actively participate in the entire experience. If every family had some sort of incentive (that they noticed I guess since education was an incentive in and of itself in my family) to hold thier children up to high standards I think it would go a long way toward fixing the problem rather than shoving it entirely off onto the state who can't control enough of a childs life to have the great effect on it that we all expect.
Believe me I'm not saying that schools don't need improvements, I'm more saying that those changes should be driven by the families of all the students rather than be driven by the state if we want those changes to have a high effectiveness. Its been shown that schools that do the best are not the ones with the most money but the ones with the best family participation.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
This will help The Rest Of The World in their plans to destroy American Culture.
Seriously though, this will (if allowed to run for long enough) lead to a surge in mediocrity that can only benefit countries where teaching is based on the idea that students learn stuff, rather than the idea that teachers document stuff. "Client based education" was the first step. This is a huge step further.
..are not replaceable cogs in some big machine. The abilities and achievements of last years students have nothing to do with this years students abilities and achievments.
We test children in sevaral grades, 4th & 8th being very common years for high-stakes testing. Why do we compare scores year to year, instead of comparing scores for the same children from test to test?
Does anybody actually check to see if children who fail the 4th grade test and gets remediation are doing well in the 8th grade, or if they have fallen behind again?
Funny how I always seemed to be "randomly" chosen for special assessment tests for my school. It seemed that the majority of the "randomly" chosen were people who scored in the top 1% on the standardized test.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The purpose of using taxes to fund education is to help those that cannot get everything they need in education from their families and to make the nation a better place. You don't need monetary rewards of success to people that are doing well to the exclusion applying money to difficult problems - if nothing else that can be a case of taking money away from people to give it back and a waste of everyones time.
Schools in most countries have some sort of parent and teacher association that does this.
First off, from a Constitutional point of view, the Fed has NO BUSINESS in education!!!
But secondly, the free market can do a MUCH better job with education than the government can.
Libertas in infinitum
So the idea is that teachers are offered money to get their classes to score well, but if their classes score unusually well (ie. statistically out of step with the non-incentivised baseline) they're detected as cheaters and deincentivised?
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com
By definition, most people are average. Hence, you should see C grades as the norm and middling test scores as the norm. It's just parents who always think their kids are at X levels higher than they really are. If the teacher... if the school... if... if... if... When the reality is that they are average, their kids are average and all their fantasies are just an overblown sense of entitlement.