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Union Boycotts LA Times Over Teacher Evaluation Disclosure
Atypical Geek writes "According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: 'Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.' According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was 'an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.'"
There are definitely problems in the U.S. educational system. This article was pretty cool, and they do state that their metrics aren't perfect, but lead to some valuable insight. I'd like to see further studies on this.
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I ride the fence on this one. Having had some incompetent mere babysitter math teachers in high school and then also seeing competent teachers who worked their butts off to help lazy bum kids who didn't want to make anything of themselves, it's hard to quantify. Part of me wants something that can justify their value and employment but there would need to be something in place that shows them doing their part (or not) when it comes to helping the kids.
I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged? Maybe this will motivate them to actually try harder to be better teachers instead of just griping about a paycheck. There are worse jobs out there with even worse pay, i say start firing teachers that rank the worst.
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.
...
Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall.
Palm trees and 8
These unions need to stop whining and get on with something productive. I can tell whether a teacher has tenure after a brief conversation. It's so obvious in their attitude, it's like once they get tenure and know they can't be fired (unless they screw up really bad) it's like someone flipped the 'give a damn' switch to off.
As for the rankings, it's not conclusive but there surely is some correlation. I'd like to know simply because I subsidize these schools and pay the teacher's salaries (which are rather high in most cases). I deserve to know what the money forcibly taken from me to pay for things I do not use or condone is doing.
Seems like poor science to me. There is a bias in the data as schools in less affluent parts of town with less funding generally have less involved parents and less teaching resources. Teachers are stretched thinner and given fewer resources and in, the end, probably seem less effective. On the other side of the token, in more affluent areas parents are involved in their child's educational experience, tutor and work with their kids after school, provide some levels of financial support to the school and generally demand smaller class sizes and "special treatment" for their future President of the World. Seems like an unfair comparison to me.
Perhaps it would make sense to compare teachers on a school by school level since the resources and affluence would be fairly consistent, but not the entire district.
There are hardly any fields of endeavor where the people asking to provide a service are exempt from scrutiny. Teaching is a honorable and needed service, but the teacher's union does not want their members to be subject to the same feedback every other profession endures. They are not such a special class of human beings that the consumers of their service should be shutout from performance evaluation statistics. Would you want to hire the services of a crappy plummer, mechanic, investment counselor, or doctor? Why does the consumer not have access to the data to make an informed decision on whether to accept the services for which they will have to pay for? This is just not fair.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Test the teachers on the material they are teaching. Completely objective metric. If they know the material and yet their students do not and their peer (same grade, same school) classes are succeeding with the same criteria, then the teacher doesn't know how to teach. Either re-train them or let them go.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Usually no, except that the teachers' unions do such an amazing job at preventing any sort of information getting out, and at preventing the establishment of any merit-based pay system, that there is no way to incentivize better teaching. This is a last resort to get the ball rolling. Better teachers should get paid more, period, and we should know who they are. Once they start teaching at the correct level, then you can argue it doesn't matter which teacher you have since they are all adequate, and therefore shouldn't publish the data anymore. Clearly in this school that's not the case.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
It would be nice to hope that this was the first step in recognising that (indirectly) real people pay for and therefore employ teachers. These real people would like to think the primary role of teachers is to impart knowledge, skills and abilities to the children in their charge. If this article leads parents to question schools about why they are employing sub-standard teachers, then it can only be a good thing, that should be extended everywhere.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Of course the teachers' union is infuriated. They've taken a stand against any policy having anything to do with performance - tying it or factoring it in to tenure or salary for example, and fight tooth and nail against anything resembling competition - even between public schools - that would highlight differences in teaching effectiveness. That they're openly furious that the public is being informed about the performance of the schools they pay for and the teachers they employ and whom they entrust with their children shows how out-of-touch they are with reality. The union hack is right that it "will do nothing to improve student learning" - as long as a few years of teaching guarantees a job for life from which a person can't be fired, no matter how crappy a job s/he does.
publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch
It could be worse. My last name could be Felch.
Murphry's Law strikes again. I didn't re-read the article, though I've read each in the series. However, it seems to me that all that's missing is an em-dash, a unicode character that would not appear after posting due to the idiotically handicapped Slashcode system.
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This is exactly why you will never get nationwide electronic medical records in the United States. No profession can withstand the publication of the statistical distribution of outcomes by practitioner.
Are employed by the government and surrounded by their money-hungry corrupt unions.
Since they are employed by the government they are indirectly paid for by the local taxes, which means they are "property" of the public and when you own something, you have the right to access it's information.
At any normal job, you are evaluated on performance regularly and this should be no different for the teachers.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Their are mentally challenged individuals who have such absurd notions that schools should be run like businesses and that teachers should be paid by performance.
The fact is that that is bullshit. We have absolute proof that the price of the home in which students live is the greatest determinant of success in schools. Schools that draw from rich areas have great students whereas schools that draw from poor areas tend to have very poorly performing students.
Unions are an important engine for decent treatment and pay of workers, and we're overall much better off with them than without. Still, they occasionally make mistakes, and this is one of them. Unions tend to push for a seniority-based payscale - seniority is not a bad foundation for pay, but there should be a performance-based metric as well (many unions support this too) in order to ensure that wayward workers don't bring the profession or union into disrepute or cause poor product. Concern over alienation from labour goes both ways.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,2695044.story
Palm trees and 8
We all know where the schools get their revenue from. So it is a good thing this info gets out. The more information the taxpayers have about the performance of the schools, the more pressure the schools will be under to explain themselves if they are underperforming. Of course this is only one facet of the impact on schools.
Since when is a teacher solely responsible for students grades. Can teachers kick unruly students out of class if they choose? Can teachers turn the TV or video games off until children have done their homework? Is there a report card for parents? Can any of you say that you've always tried your best in school? When you didn't, did you blame your teacher?
Judging teachers solely by students grades is unfair.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
My God! How can you advocate unbiased, quantifiable measures of teacher performance! Teachers have magical powers that can't be measured by numbers! Teachers aren't like people in other jobs who can be fired based on their performance! And tests are a horrible way to measure learning! Teachers never use tests themselves! Tests are never used to assign advanced/remedial classes, nor to enter college, and certainly not to get Advanced Placement credits! And, certainly, by God, hide this measure from the parents! You might make them think that something can be done to improve their child's education!!!
They absolutely should be outraged. In what world should anybody's job be judged by their performance? Especially a job funded by taxpayers. <\sarcasm>
Test scores are a bad measure of teacher effectiveness because teachers cheat on the tests. In one elementary school of which I am aware, there is one (award-winning) teacher. Students in her class always do significantly better on their tests than they did in the grade prior or than they do in the next grade. Even special ed students get great test scores in this person's class. A couple of years someone tried to blow the whistle ago and was fired, in spite of or because of the fact that they were an eyewitness and had documented evidence of the cheating. Of course, the kids are learning something from this teacher. They are learning it's OK to cheat because their teacher teaches them to cheat. As long as teachers are rewarded with money and job security for producing good test scores rather than good students, some of them will cheat and test scores will not be a consistently accurate measure of anything whatsoever. The system, at least here, is badly broken and there is no sign it's going to be fixed anytime soon.
This comparison is particularly useful because it tracks students over time so that the effect of a teacher can be separated from other preexisting conditions (like poverty). This graphic from the LA times really says it all. The image shows how on teacher greatly improves the standing of students in his class, while the other does the exact opposite. This ranking has merit.
I'm not a teacher, but I'm pretty sure that teachers are "so vehemently opposed to testing children and assessing how much they know" because standardized testing doesn't work. It motivates the teachers to teach to the test, and rewards the students for memorizing the contents of the test. There's no incentive for the students to actually learn anything in this system.
Also, t
Isn't the whole point of unions to extort money and benefits from their employers? I mean, of course they're outraged: now people can see them for what they are. It reduces the leverage to extort additional money/benefits.
Being able to do something and being able to teach somebody else to do it are two different things. "Testing a teacher on what they teach" is testing the first, what we want is the second.
For example, I am very good at math (I slept through CalcIII and still got an A). Would I be able to teach it well? No - especially to some kid who didn't want to learn, as I have little patience with such things. So while I would ace the tests, I would suck at teaching.
Moreover, you have to factor in the students. I had an excellent physics and chemistry teacher in high school, but part of that was the fact that his classes, being electives, ONLY had honors students in them. Had he been force to teach "duh joks" I doubt he would have done as well. There are teachers who can teach "duh joks" but couldn't teach honors students.
However, a big part of measuring teacher performance SHOULD be evaluating the whole picture:
a) Can the teacher maintain order in the classroom (and part of THAT is empowering the teacher to do so - as in "OK smartass, get down to the principal's office. Won't go? SECURITY, remove this asshole.")
b) Does the teacher know how to teach what they are teaching?
c) Can the teacher engage students who aren't "getting it"?
Part of that is going to be moving the teachers around: if class A suddenly drops and class B suddenly rises when you swap teachers, then you can suspect the teacher.
Part of that has to be investigating further when you see problems: don't just go on the test, but when you think some teacher isn't doing a good job, start observing what is going on in the classroom.
And part of it WILL be removing bad teachers, and the union WILL oppose that. I had my share of really bad teachers - to the extent that I only learned because I ignored them and read the book. Any decent system would detect and remove those coaches^W"teachers", and believe me, they are usually the most active in the union, for some strange reason.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I hold people that choose to teacher in high regard. Several studies have shown the variable with the highest correlation to student performance is the quality of the teacher.
In most other industries, if you do not perform, you get fired. Why should teaching be different? I bet the really good teachers feel the same way.
In most school districts the only good paying jobs are in management. I have known several good teachers that went back to school so they could stop teaching and double their salary as a principal, or curriculum director, etc. We need to rebalance the pay, raising teachers salaries, and cutting in administration roles.
This sounds like an unbiased system, and assuming there are no substantial confounding variables, it is. However, having had many protracted discussions with friends of mine who are teachers, I've found out that in many districts the principals identify the best teachers in the school themselves and assign the worst students to them. The "sampling" of sorts is most likely very unrandom and biased.
I'm certain this isn't captured in these test scores or being adjusted for. This would be difficult if not impossible to tease out but might be by looking for the expected patterns, i.e. a student's poor performance is less than it was with a previous teacher. Unfortunately, there are relatively objective ways to identify these problem students and add variables in a regression to adjust for them but it doesn't appear they were applied as predictors (e.g. IQ, parents taxable income, birthday, single parent household, distance to school, ADHD or not, height, weight, play a sport, play an instrument. etc.)
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/10/all-right-harris-drop-the-degree-or-well-kill-this-kids-career/
Our teachers do crazier things than that.
What does that mean, "pay talent what talent deserves"?
I have a real talent for jerking off, it took years to master, I should get paid for that wonderful talent. So who is interested in paying?
--
Your argument is absurd. In real world we don't pay people simply because they have talent. People get paid because someone is making money.
A talented basketball player makes money for the investors.
A talented software developer makes money for a company.
A talented thief controls High Frequency Trade transaction house.
Another talented thief controls money flow from many people to a small subset.
A talented plastic surgeon gets paid for his work and discretion.
etc.
--
The REAL talent in this case is the UNION, it gets a LOT of people paid for doing very very little, sure some do more, but most do very little, that's what a union does, that's what it is all about. Used to be that a union was really built by people dying on floors of factories, that's not what today's unions are about, especially GOVERNMENT unions!
If your mother is so talented yet she feels that she is financially unappreciated, she has a choice of working in a private school, isn't that so? In fact if her talents are in high DEMAND then she can tutor people for much MORE money than she'd be making in a school, and eventually with that money that she could save, she could open her own private school, why not?
It's not that I am questioning talent of your mother, I have no idea, but the entire point is that you can have the best talents but nobody cares, and nor SHOULD they! Can she apply her talents so that people would want to give her more money, that's the question.
You can't handle the truth.
More than any other job, teaching depends on a multitude of parties "doing the right thing" in order to be successful. Teachers are definitely one of those, but the best teacher in the world can't overcome parents who aren't involved with their children, a home environment and surroundings that don't value education, children themselves who may have been taught that teachers are "bad" and the public education system is "bad" so they want none of it and school administrations which are more interested in CYA than supporting their teachers. One, maybe two, of these can break down or be sub-par and a child still might get an education. But in many systems, you've got massive cascading breakdowns in all of them. Trying to then point out the faults in just one of them is then little more than blame shifting and finger pointing. Further, because of their intertwined nature, how can you fix one of them without fixing all of them? Any improvement in one area will slowly be ground down by the interference coming from the others. Are there bad teachers? You bet there are. Maybe more than anyone would like to admit because having the desire to work with kids and education doesn't mean having the ability to navigate the current learning environment. But unless this evaluation takes into account the whole picture (kids, parents, administration, teachers and environment), it's just another bandwagon "Let's blame teachers!" torches-and-pitchforks battlecry. Even worse, its just bad journalism. It also means the teachers who the evaluation call "good" are about to get all sorts of hell unleashed on them as parents read these things and then fight, sometimes quite viciously, to have Little Billy put into the top teacher's classroom or, upon seeing Little Sally is in a "bad" teacher's classroom, well, what's the point?
You do get what you pay for, and the teacher's union (NEA) are the single largest campaign contributors in the United States. They pay for politicians, and they get them. That is not the sole problem, but its intertwined with the rest of it. Schools have trouble telling good teachers from bad ones, and there aren't enough good ones to go around anyway, so they pay them all the same as if it were unskilled labor, and pay the administrators more in the hopes that overcompensated administrators can manage away incompetence in those actually doing the teaching. These incompetent teachers and overcompensated administrators like the NEA because it is job security. The really good teachers either go along knowing that most schools can't tell they are worth extra, don't care about the money anyway, and don't really have the ability to make a change. They are gifted teachers after all, not gifted politicians. I don't know if there is a way to tell a very good newly graduated teacher from a very poor one in the time allotted for an interview, or if there is any hint on a resume. The ability to terminate the employment of a teacher as soon as they show themselves to be sub par without worrying about lawsuits would be a less efficient, but more feasible solution to mind reading employment candidates. Paying more won't create a greater number of good teachers either, because they are almost never money motivated people. Using poor or untested teachers as little more than TAs and proctors while the better compensated, proven teachers instruct large numbers of students via live or recorded media would provide more students with access to good teachers, and a testing ground for new teachers to earn their credentials in a less pivotal role in the child's life.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
My mother was a book-keeper for a school district and as a result was able to get the same benefits as the teachers. She has absolutely no problems with money in her retirement, now and she isn't exactly a frugal person to put it lightly.
In my financial planning class, we were shown stats that showed that teachers are the tops when it comes to people who retire as millionaires.
If you start teaching at the age of 22 right out of college and stick with it for 30 years (retire at 52), you'll be set for life - nice comfortable life. The first couple of years suck in terms of apy, though. But after you get over that hump, you're making a nice living. Looking back now, I kind of wish I did that.
Either your mother is in a very shitty school district, or you're not telling us the whole story.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
They need to agree to eliminating tenure and quit fighting the firing of incompetent teachers (LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million in the last 10 years "trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance). I spent 4 years in a California high school and other then the best math and science teacher ever the entire experience was a waste of time. We had a drunk, a women who chewed, a commie who promoted drug use, a wannabe jock coach who could not teach his way out of a paper bag, an English teacher who was extra friendly to the jocks (ya I was jealous), a spanish teach with no classroom skills at all and on and on. They struck twice while I was attending and we really didn't notice the difference between them and the subs!
We home school and yes I'm posting Anonymously, I've been told by several "teachers" that home schooling should be a criminal act!!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective?
Yes, of course they do, if they actually give a damn about their child potentially getting a quality education. I'll be damned if I know a teacher is shit and my child goes to "learn" under his or her watch. All other people should feel the same, provided they actually care about their kids.
I just ask my kids. They and their peers know exactly who the good teachers and bad teachers are. The question is, how do you use that information? In the politically perverse education system it creates unhelpful drama to ask that bad teachers be replaced or that your child be moved to a class with a better teacher.
Test the teachers but don't publish the scores in a newspaper. If you are publishing the teachers' scores then publish your kids scores too.
For the children this has to stop.
Teachers, like most government workers and academia as well, want to be free to do as they wish under the protection of tenure, unions, and like-minded administrators. I've always advocated for less spending in education. First, we're not getting a return on investment. Second, the number of administrators per student is crazy. And third, the curriculum is bloated. We're so busy teaching them the cultural changes we wish for them to adopt that they come out knowing very little about math, language, or science. There's been a lot of investigative work done on how there's been a concerted effort to dumb-down our kids. It's time to get them back to the basics. Several years ago I recall a rural West Virginian high school student blew the national curve. I bet they don't focus too much on cultural curriculum at that school.
From the comments section of the LA Times site linked in the OP:
Gerald Grow
Deriving teacher rankings from student test scores involves use of a complicated statistical methodology that has many critics. This controversial statistical method is the hidden link in discussions of teacher quality, and that methodology itself needs to be the subject of an investigative series. There is no straightforward way to use student test scores to measure a teacher's effectiveness. Far too many other factors intervene.
The original and probably most widely used value-added methodology is proprietary -- meaning you have to pay to use it, and its methods are secret. This methodology has been widely sold to decision-makers as if it were not controversial.
Which methodology did the LATimes use? Have they discussed it with statisticians who have doubts about whether so many multiple regressions can produce a meaningful result?
I worry that the effort to tie teacher performance to student test scores will result in huge sums being diverted from the classroom and spent on more standardized tests, given to more students, in more grades, and to the cost of analyzing these and improving those scores.
Please follow up with experts who can analyze whether this approach to eduction reform can ever become cost-effective, or whether it will always divert more funds away from schools than the value of the results it produces.
Schools arrived at this externally imposed method of evaluation because they failed to initiate ways to prove that they produce results that are worth what they cost. Too bad. A great opportunity was missed there for bottom-up improvement.
... it comes down to the fact that the parents are the teachers' employers. Does an employer have a right to see job performance data on an employee?
"The Joke's on you! We don't have any readership anyway, so your boycott does nothing!"
When I went to school, WAY back when, ALL the instructors had bachelors degrees in the subject
they were teaching as a minimum. Today, assholes graduate with "teaching degrees" where by they are allowed to read to students 'from the book' and cannot ask in depth answers that may require actual knowledge in the subject they are 'teaching'.
All we get today are knee-jerk assholes with NO knowledge in their supposed field of
expertise!
IT IS NO WONDER THESE ASSWIPES GET LOW SCORES, THEY HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE of the subjects they PRETEND to teach. NIGGERS!!!! And their union keeps these useless fucks employed. I say kill them ALL.
Fuck Karma, if you understood karma, you would STFU. NIGGERS!!!
State test scores are depressing. I had 142 kids take the CST. 5 of the scores were undetermined so I guess they don't count. Of the 137, 42 received scores of Advanced or Proficient. Tons of scores went down over last year. About 20 went up. I don't understand. I almost want to survey the kids the first week to ask them to rate their effort on those exams, as most kids don't even try very hard on them.
30% are Advanced or Proficient ...My BB and FBB both raised up about 23% each.
35% are Basic
The rest aren't worth doing the math for right now
If I were ranked by my test scores I'd be screwed...
Unless they want to judge teachers by taking into account their students' grades throughout middle and high school, suspensions, how long they were at each previous school, etc. ; only then can we really see our effectiveness.
It's obvious to me that a child in a stable home, in the burbs, who goes to the same school, has educated and involved parents as far as school goes, etc, these students are at a higher advantage compared to my kids who are low income, inner city, transient, immigrant, English As A Second Language Learners, etc.
Just saying that my kids didn't pass without putting the kid's socio-economic background is just a witch hunt. The numbers at this point become inflamatory
The whole lot of them should be fired.
over the years, I've seen way too many educators willing to tell students what would be on tests and help the students with "learning" just what's needed to pass the tests. I've also seen large percentages of college students interested only with what is on the test instead of being interested in understanding the concepts and material to rely on a general understanding to pass the exams.
I wonder if they've looked at this with the understanding that students who are taught the test will get better grades, they are not likely to be any better off than a teacher who strives to teach more general concepts or theory and is just a tough teacher.
If they cover this aspect in the reporting great, if not then they should reconsider publishing names until they know more the situation.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
First, in regards to the campaign contributions: based on that list you cited, it looks like one should be more concerned about tribal gaming than the NEA. While NEA was #1, the various tribal gaming donors were #2, #3, #4, #8, and #9. Combined, they squash teacher interest.
Now think about this for a moment, because I think this is incredibly important. What do you consider more important to our society, gambling or public education? What should we be fighting to preserve more? A little news for you: Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of our country, fought tooth-and-nail to establish a public educational system in this country, as he understood that it was one of the most important methods of preserving our form of government. "I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393. And that's just one quote. You can read another whole fist-full here.
Considering how vital education is to our country, I think a national educators union deserves to spend whatever it needs to preserve the interests of public education, which sadly has been under attack from various businesses, philanthropists, and other institutions over the last few decades. Which leads me to my second point...
You do get what you pay for, and the teacher's union (NEA) are the single largest campaign contributors in the United States.
Then explain to me why No Child Left Behind is so vehemently opposed by teachers at large? It received widespread, bipartisan support when it was passed and renewed in Congress, so why were teachers and the unions so against it? If we were truly getting what we paid for, then I think you would see legislation that was more supportive of unions, rather than trying to undermine them and work against them. (And while NCLB was bad, it doesn't hold a candle to what Duncan and Obama are trying to push through the pipes with the latest "Race to the Top." And remember, the NEA backed Obama during the election, so why such opposition?)
Rather, I believe the NEA is spending that much money to do the best that it can to fight such radical undermining of public education.
I'm a teacher. And I will admit, there are problems with public education. Some of those are coming from outside, and some from within. Long has the unions ignored the problems with permitting poor teachers to stay on the payroll and do nothing to help them improve in their teaching skills, it has created a subgroup of individuals with no motivation to improve. But creating a punitive system that stands to bring down an entire school due to poor performance of a student population at large on invalid assessment methods is no way to fix the system. Replacing elected school board officials with unilateral tyrants who are not accountable to the public is no way to fix a the system. Teachers know better than anyone what makes a student learn, and we're so overwhelmed by all these biased and/or misguided individuals, politicians, and businesses who all fighting to take charge of a system that they have no idea how to operate, it's like letting a three-year-old into
He was wrong. For instance, if we want to know how well a football coach is doing, we often measure something about the team he's coaching. It's the same when measuring many managerial and executive positions. Teaching seems to me to be another area where that makes perfect sense.
Coaches are often measured by team success but many variables contribute to that success. Also a coach may be involved in more variables than those involving the techniques and tactics of the sport, for example things from a players personal life. Teachers do not have such latitude.
...) a factor? Is the subject taught at different times of the day in the two classrooms? It was college but for me 7:30am calculus was a lot harder than 2:00pm calculus. Are the students comparable in the two classrooms? When I was in elementary school I recall that for math and reading our regular classrooms got reshuffled and some kids had to swap rooms for these particular lessons. The school was regrouping us according to their estimation of who would be on the college prep track and who would be on the vocational track.
I expect that the professor is arguing something like it is insufficient to say that the outcome is x, we must also know to what degree teacher quality is a factor - it is likely not 100%. Even with the example of two classrooms at the same school there *may* be other factors, I recall some classrooms being more comfortable when I was a kid. To what degree is comfort (glare from sunlight, outside noise, heating, air conditioning,
Come now. We can't have publicly employed teachers having their performance data released can we? Taxpayers and parents certainly have no right to know what their money is going to. Shut up comrade! The Union, as supported by The Party knows what is best for you. What kind of treasonous questioning is this? I demand that the LA Times be shut down, and turned over to the teacher's union as compensation.
(though at NYC colleges, not LA K-12), release the metrics. I'd have nothing to hide, and I'd suspect any teacher that doesn't want such things made public. As far as I'm concerned, prospective students have a right to know how other students have fared in my classes, what other students thought of my teaching, and how both have changed over time. If that makes a lot of people want to avoid my classes, maybe--just maybe--I'm in the wrong field of work.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Just remember, it was management's idea to give those ridiculous retirement benefits, not the unions. The union requested a modest pay raise, and management thought they'd get away cheap by giving retirement bennies instead, thinking workers would only live to 68. In hindsight, the pay raise would have been much cheaper.
Except that they got pay raises and exorbitant benefits. And I'm going to need to see some kind of citation about the benefits being management's idea. Every time the UAW threatens to strike, benefits seem to be at the heart of their demands.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This isn't a very fair assessment since in elementary school there is typically a single teacher for each student. Unlike in High school, the teachers and administration have influence over how the students are allocated. Frequently the teachers who are the better disciplinarians get the problem kids who act up and, predictably, perform worse in their school work. These sort of statistics cast unfair aspersions onto teachers who may be very good at their jobs but are stuck with bad seeds.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
If I weren't a teacher myself, I would pay good money to see the results of all these raging non-teachers prescribing that we need easier and faster firing and all the problems of schools would go away. Are you a woman on the wrong side of 40? Bye. Are you a minority who looks like a terrorist? Bye. Are you the superintendent's $RELATIVE? You have a job for life. After all, who better to make decisions about teachers' jobs than mostly former physical educators (administrators, by and large.) No citation needed, just like in all the posts where people claim that some teachers work hard and most do very little. I believe that because I read it on slashdot.
BTW I wouldn't be worried so much for my own job in a scenario with easier firing. I'd be worried about my class sizes doubling and my incoming students being less prepared because their previous teacher was hired as a cost-cutting measure more than anything else. Where I work, the upper admins have got it into their head that they're the ones making the decisions that lead most directly to student success. The success is in the programs and initiatives, not the teachers. Try doing that without us. Success comes from administrators and from community support and whoever else you want to make feel good. Failure is the only thing you can peg to the teacher. I realize this is not the substance of the article, and my post is therefore not on topic as far as that goes. I think it is on the topic of the discussion that has ensued, however.
There are bad teachers, and unions protect them insofar as they protect all of us. If the school administration is unable or too lazy to demonstrate incompetence through an established process, that's on them.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
There are so many reasons why these scores could be the way they are, teacher performance being one of them.
Do you remember in High School how there were certain kids who were just assholes? They usually ended up in remedial classes of some sort? And that that remedial class was taught by a teacher who was probably a disciplinarian first, and teacher second? Should that teacher's scores by considered a valid representation of their job performance? He is probably the football/wrestling coach, and is literally baby sitting unruly, rude, disruptive teens, in the hopes that by keeping them out of other classrooms the other students might have a chance at not having a lesson disrupted.
Did you know many schools in LAUSD don't have air conditioning despite the temp getting into the hundreds in August/Sept and June? If a teacher has a southern facing classroom with all day sun exposure, well, how well do you think those students are going to be learning for 2-3 months of the year?
I think the union is acting ridiculous and in a very tone deaf manner on this. I don't think that is a reason to abolish the union though. You want tougher rules for teachers? Vote in a mayor and city council that will support tougher negotiating positions and risk a teacher's strike. Don't want to deal with a strike? Then you're a coward or lazy, and blaming them for wanting the best deal they can get is just another thing you're being lazy about.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
It matters not whether you work for a private company or are a public employee. Citizens cannot fire or hire either one. (The only exception is politicians - but that is a different topic.) If you buy a car from Ford, are you entitled to see the work performance of each worker who built that car? Why not? You gave your money to a corporation. This is the same as paying taxes for services provided by government. You claim its your tax money, why not claim the same when you buy a product or service from a corporation? To be fair, I will state that I am a public employee. I have had the local newspaper publish my earnings with my title and name and what department I work for. The purpose of this "investigative journalism" was to demean public employees during a time of difficult budget negotiations between political parties. This is nothing more than nasty politics period. Although the local newspaper lost over 65,000 subscribers shortly after that publication. So in the long run, doing something stupid like that has its consequences. And did publishing this information help the budget process? No. The budget still was not resolved in a timely manner. But the politicians had a shield to divert the public attention away from the real problem, which was that the politicians didn't know how to do their jobs properly. I may be prejudice, because I am a public employee. But I suspect that someone is trying to divert the publics attention away from where the real problems are. Public employees are not in their positions to get rich, they do not get paid the same as private employees. Most are only trying to improve the lives of the citizens in their community, or the community as a whole. Most public employees are not like the greedy politicians or corporate officers. Yet most of the time, the public employees are the ones who usually get shit on because of stupid people doing or saying stupid things.
Not even close. The biggest problem in the US educational system is shitty parenting.
The biggest single problem in education is that everyone involved do not agree on the definition of the term "Education".
Since they don't agree on what it is, they can't agree what a "good" one or "bad" one is. They also can't agree on the roles of the people involved.
We've all known real reasons as employees to keep some confidentiality in the review process.
- How many of us would invite a high-visibility public debate of our personal, individual performance reviews?
- How many of us would STAY if high-visibility public debates of our personal, individual performance reviews were added to the job description?
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" is a favorite book recommendations in the computer industry, but it applies to so many industries. (Finally available as an eBook from http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/PW-ebook.html ) Their long-researched conclusion required review confidentiality to keep the data-gathering process functioning. Without it, the whole process would break down and become meaningless.
This is just Unions being Unions. The list of Union priorities goes something like this:
1) Compensation for Union Management ..)
2) Benefits for Union Management
3) Ensuring the long term survival of the Union
99) Compensation for Union Members
Unions hate it when workers are pitted against each other via performance metrics because it leads to a lack of solidarity. The biggest threat to the NEA would be for the good teachers to splinter off and negotiate their own contracts (and the subsequent loss of dues).
The problem with the way teachers are ranked is that it causes the unintended consequence of teaching to the test. Everything is a waste of time for them.
The solution to this is to rank teaches based on the how the students succeed when the teacher has no direct input. Rank teachers based on how students do in the following grade. A 1st grade teach gets ranks by the grades in 2nd grade and so on. 12th grade teachers get ranked based on if the person does well over the next four years in college, work, or the military. There's always the posibility of collusion but it becomes more difficult.
I guess I had some fuzzy notion that good teachers would be teaching no matter what. I was missing the notion that a good teacher isn't necessarily first and foremost a teacher. For instance if a good researcher who also happens to be a good teacher can't get money to work on his favorite field, he might instead be lured into teaching rather than researching in another if the pay was adequate. Thanks for the correction. I am still convinced tele-educating with a great teacher could be better than sitting in a smaller class with an average one, depending on the subject matter.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Being a teacher is the easy life. Just about every other job in the universe is a worse job with worse pay. Your day ends at 4pm, you get 3-4 months off a year and your paid more than well enough to make a living, especially for the average teacher's time spent. They should just fire all of them every 5 years and only give the ones that haven't gone insane yet their jobs back after some very stringent tests. My mother got chewed out by the union once because she wanted the faculty of teachers she worked with to do the standardized grade 10 literacy test so they could better prepare the students to take them. The test was given, filled out, and graded; not for any sort of evaluation purposes, just for self education. When the union found out that any sort of test with a score, regardless of the purpose behind taking it, was given to the teachers she nearly got fired. The reason, in all likelihood that teachers' unions are so incensed about being evaluated is because 15% of their members aren't likely able to answer questions about material they're teaching, which is usually still a far cry from what the students actually have to learn. The education systems in the USA and all of North America, for that matter, are nothing more than a glorified babysitting service. Don't put your babysitters under any sort of scrutiny though, or they'll go on strike.
That makes a difference, you know.
South Carolina does not allow teachers to unionize. Over 90% of Georgia and North Carolina teachers are not members of unions. I don't recall those states being used as models of education. I believe they also fire fewer teachers as a percentage than does California.
Given that it is unreasonable to presume that all the problems of the American educational system rest with teachers, teachers should demand as part of the bargaining, inclusion of evaluations for principals, school boards, deans, university presidents and in particular politicians and parents. It doesn't make any sense to single out teachers to bear the burden of cuts to school budgets just to let politicians and business "leaders" off the hook for their glaring failure to provide leadership. Might not hurt to lay some of the blame on students as well. The person most responsible for your education is you.
Perhaps linking poor performance of politicians and parents to say reductions in salary for politicans, businessmen, parents, and school board administrators as a direct percentage of failing students in the electoral district, market areas, school in which their students are enrolled, or schools they administer respectively. That should make such inadequate performance unpopular enough for everyone to start shouldering their own responsibilities. Heaven knows we need to do something before we fall from 28th place internationally into the lower 66th percentile.
As it is now, teachers are by and large scapegoats for the larger failings of politicians and society as a whole. Its hard to conceive of just how bad our educational system will become with even more disincentive for the best and brightest to become teachers. Its time for teachers to demand that their critics put their money where their mouth is.
I believe it may be time to organize a "Buy-Cott" of this newspaper -- buy subscriptions just to encourage this type of journalism and accountability.
That being said, I haven't R'ed the FA yet...
Many teachers get put in tough settings because they are in fact good at their jobs and can handle it. However, they don't get the test scores of their peers. Should they be shamed?
The problem here isn't too much data -- it's not enough. What's the context to these aggregates? What do students and peers say about these teachers? Without this thick description, and partial data can really hurt. These metrics should be deeper. Skip the aggregate class score and instead look at later performance of students, relative to their class on day one. Etc etc etc. Children are not numbers, and reporting them as such leads to some wonky results. And when those are aimed at human beings, then the people pulling the trigger on the story have some responsibility to get it right.
In this situation, the reporters got leaked to, tipped off about a possible good story angle. then they followed it up.
With that said, just goes to show the failure of the modern urban "system", which is predominantly Democratic party/liberal in makeup across the nation (I have several beefs against the far right and neocons and the Republicans, so I hope people don't think I am prejudiced one way or the other, just calling it like it is in this particular situation).
All major urban areas in the US are experiencing problems in the public schools, so much so that they have to keep dropping competency levels to avoid the bulk of their school's children getting what would have been Ds,Es or Fs two generations ago. And no one can dispute the teachers unions are heavily far left and embraced a lot of social engineering ahead of academics a long time ago. that's just the facts. This is the result of the shift in priorities. And "no child left behind" just made it worse.
I have an anecdotal to help illustrate this. I used to date this woman who had a grade school kid. They move from the 'burbs to "intown", her kid now goes to a school where the primary focus is hip hop and basketball and making sure your hat is at the correct angle and your butt crack and underwear is showing as they shuffle around with untied oversized shoes doing the gorilla walk, or in the case of the girls, making sure they have the most elaborate hair extensions and braids and nail "artwork".
In her words "something isn't right here. My kid is just a C student, that's it, always has been. that's reality. All of a sudden since we moved he is getting As??" along those lines paraphrased.
In a nutshell, that has been what's happened in US major urban areas, with LA just change it around a little to reflect the heavy violent and stupid "machismo" cultural influences. Same deal though.
There is no emphasis on academics anymore, because the Democratic party and urban politicians and especially the teachers unions lost control of the schools two decades ago. They no longer control the schools, so they are faking it as best they can.
There are any number of legitimate reasons why so many teachers burn out in those school districts and just leave, but the main reason is the switch to liberal conditioning and social engineering and experimentation they pushed. It failed, they failed, now they have no answers, it is too late to fix that situation, two generations now of ill educated and violent children who are now adults, and will continue to get worse and worse. (Along with those major urban area failures in general, they are all falling apart. Look close, the big cities are akin to 60 year old hookers with layers of makeup on, trying to still look good. It doesn't work).
A simple fMRI scan can reveal the competencies and integrity of your kid's teacher.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
The GM shareholders got dick out of the deal, they lost big time.
disclaimer: not a holder of past GM stock, nor will I purchase any in the upcoming new IPO.
What tests measure is ability to succeed at taking tests. I am a good case in point. IQ about average (100+ a smidgen) but my test scores show me as being in the top ten percent. Am I a good student, mmmm, not really great but slightly above average. But I rock at taking tests. I have a built-in ability to quickly and accurately guess/discern correct answers in MGQ (multiple guess questions) and I can quickly finish a larger percentage of questions than other, more intelligent/schooled people. Why? I dunno. I just can.
As a teacher I often see the opposite: students that totally suck at test taking. they are as average as I am but fail miserably, no matter how hard they study (but then I work in tertiary ed so they have mostly given up by the time they get to me) Dp they have "other" problems? Yes, but forcing them to be judged by test scores is stupid. The next , more ridiculous level is judging their teachers based on their test scores. The teachers who (might have) scarred the poor bastards are in their past. The parents who might still be scarring them are not being judged. The system that is screwing up is being promoted as fair and just and "helping to improve test scores."
Pardon me for calling bullshit on this. I am teaching at an institution that focuses entirely on forcing students to take and pass tests in English (the students 3rd or 4th language and one that has been horribly mangled for them by incompetent non-skilled teachers since early years). The students are so brainwashed with this shit that they believe that the tests can tell their English ability. They can't. The teachers are restrained by the system that requires them to teach the test (not English) in English even though the students cannot understand enough English to follow the class. then the Ss have to pass a test that is crucial to their job application or to moving further in the ed system. Everyone is screwed.
The solution here is to set passing grades at 45% or lower (as a C-). Think about it, in a test that uses 4 MG answers for each question, random guessing should give something like 25%. So these kids don't have much of a bar to cross, and still there is a 10% failure rate.
So, what I am ranting about is that we need to teach the content, not the test. Stop giving tests that are considered "standards" and stop using test data to judge teachers. Return to a system where parents are welcome in the classroom and the school and the parents can not only act to support discipline with their presence but to understand the teacher and make an INFORMED judgment about their connection to the students. How hard would it be for businesses to give worker drones a day off every semester to visit their children's school and participate in helping the teacher, getting to know the teacher and the classroom and to understand what the classrooms and teachers and students actually need. Not the scripted one day fits all PT conference but a random day for parents to just visit and help the teacher or the school, to be around.
Yes I can hear the screams abut how it wouldn't work, but the reasons given are always to do with legal BS. We are crippling our children to feed lawyers?
Sorry, I'm too passionate about education, I apologize.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Whether you like teachers unions or not, I don't, they are right on this issue. Publishing this information on individuals is a gross violation of personal privacy. Information at this level of detail is none of the public's business and does nothing to promote good administration, which would be furthered simply with data on the percentage of teachers evaluated as underperforming and what the administration is doing about it. I hope the newspaper is successfully sued by some teacher.
The teachers union is correct too about the unreliability of evaluations based on student test results (if that is in fact the approach used here). There is not necessarily any reliable correlation between a students academic achievement and the individual teacher's competence in the classroom. Many students do well despite poor or mediocre teachers. Many students are behaviourly resistent to discipline and learning in the classroom.
I you want to find out who the good and bad teachers are, simply ask the students. You can't put anything over on them. Then go and ask the other teachers in the school. They know who the incompetents, burnouts and dead-wood are. Ask the parents although they are not very reliable on this. Finally, ask the administration, the least reliable of all, as they rarely enter the classroom to see how the class is being conducted and are more interested in whether the teachers compliance with rules and procedures than with classroom competence.
Parents, Districts, Unions, and local government are in general well meaning but share equally in the failure of our public and charter public school system. There are a lot of stats from all sides. Blame unions for seniority over ability and districts for lack of intelligence and public education policy decision making, parents for lack of interest or the narrow interests, non-parents for voting down bonds or property taxes... Everyone has a stat to yell about. But this focus on test scores is not complete. Are demographics really the same? Culture, language at home, income, district and teachers pro-actively getting parents involved, location - busing, after school programs, length of day, materials provided (teachers buy do much out of pocket in some districts). To be a great teacher goes well beyond the classroom.
Here is a definition I've built over the past few years with the help of teachers and parents. I'm open to suggestions for improvement.
Education is: any process a student uses to improve skills, knowledge and character within themselves, with the help of others.
"Student" - the person who is improving. It is important to note that only the student can cause the student to change.
"Skill" -It is important to remember that only the person who will posses the skill can build or improve that skill, and only by practice. Others can watch and tell a student how well they are doing, and how they might improve, and what to practice more. But the student must do the work of practicing.
"Knowledge" - is about data. Skill allows a student to use data to solve problems. Math is primarily problem-solving skill which is applied to data. It can be easy to confuse the two sometimes. Since Math is a skill, it too is improved by practice.
"Character" - includes confidence, opinion, manners, ability to delay gratification, ability or desire to work with others and much more.
"With the Help of Others" - this phrase refers to anyone else involved, directly or indirectly. This can include teachers, professors, coaches, authors, film-makers, mentors and many more. Virtually anyone who can share advise on building skill, share knowledge, and help build character through any means is included.
Any adult mind, however illiterate, can attend college in 2 or 3 years. This is proven around the world in adult literacy classes, which require 80 - 90 hours in a classroom to ready students to continue their education on their own. Motivated adult students routinely make themselves ready for college in 2 or 3 years with little additional assistance.
That evidence was from an era of books. Now we have the internet, YouTube EDU channel, Kahn's Academy, ... Look at the "hole in the wall" experiments done in India, the 'unschooling' movement here in the US, ...
Based on real evidence from educational research, not the 'fad a year' educational establishments, as a competitive advantage for our workers relative to the rest of the world and to reduce the social pathologies directly caused by our dysfunctional educational system, we should abolish public education.
The relative ignorance of the electorate relative to the elite who manipulate us in political and economic spheres continues to increase. Around the world, socio-econo-political systems are on the edge of collapse. Failed educational systems are one of the root causes.