Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools

Hugh Pickens writes "Most workplaces build a system to evaluate worker performance, provide feedback that yields information employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for results. However, Bill and Melinda Gates write that in the field of education, we really don't know very much at all about what makes someone an effective teacher. 'We have all known terrific teachers,' write the Gates. 'But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.' For the last several years, the Gates Foundation has been working with more than 3,000 teachers on a large research project called Measures of Effective Teaching to get a better sense of what makes teaching work (PDF) so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. 'Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve. When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of providing every student with an effective teacher, in every class, every year.'"

Comments

Roland Piquepaille, is that you?

[Frosty Piss]

This guy Hugh Pickens, he's Roland Piquepaille back from the grave, right?

Re:Roland Piquepaille, is that you?

[Maow]

Why complain?

His postings are, while plentiful, also informative and documented with links to sites other than his own (I don't visit them all to see if they're primary links).

I just wonder how he finds the time to post so often, but I've never minded the quality of his posts.

Guys like him make /. worth coming to frequently: he digs out content, digests it, puts it up for us to read and comment on.

Finally, Roland was a prolific poster, but the biggest complaint was that he linked to his own blog, which then linked to primary sources (if I remember correctly).

He did modify his behaviour though, so even he redeemed himself.

I just don't get the problem here.

Not again....

[ColdWetDog]

Once the MET research is completed, we hope that school districts will work with teachers and their unions to create fair and reliable evaluations that reward teachers who are effective and identify and help those who need to improve.

How many times have people tried this? How many different answers do we need anyway?

Re:Not again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor teachers...forced to teach to 'no child left behind' and then being graded based on their student performance on that test. Now they'll be graded on this too, and I bet the two systems don't play well with each other. Rock, meet hard place...

Re:Not again....

[sigipickl]

How many times have people tried this? How many different answers do we need anyway?

Many, and the teacher unions have shot it down every time. Good teachers can not be rewarded and bad teachers can not be punished. The only reward is for those who stay around the longest.

Re:Not again....

[LWATCDR]

Well that is the problem. How do you know if teachers are teaching. The old answer of "you just know" isn't good enough.
Looking back the teachers I had varied from very good, over worked, and some where just terrible.
My second grade teacher hated kids. She was very old and really disliked me because her son knew my father and got into a lot of trouble a decade before I was born. She was the only 2nd grade teacher so i was stuck. My third grade teacher was great and found out that I was reading way above level but was in a very low reading group. She moved me to the top reading group and I got all As. Fifth grade teacher hardly ever taught science because she didn't like it. She also refused to use the new Science books because she knew the old ones. So in fifth grade I had book with a Gemini capsule on it and it talked about how some day man would walk on the moon. The funny thing was that we lived only 50 miles from Cape Kennedy and all the kids grew up with the space program. I could go on pointing out really good teachers and really bad ones but i think you get the point. And just for the record I lived in a very well town and my elementary school was in a well to do area.
So how do judge teachers?
When you test the students they game the system by teaching the test.
It isn't a secret and not one gets upset over it which is odd. The FCAT was a test for teachers but it was turned into a test for the students.

Re:Not again....

[eln]

I think the problem here is that such a system seeks to evaluate teachers as if they were line workers, cogs in the machine. In reality, teachers operate more like managers. As anyone who has been involved in management or management education should be able to attest, getting a good read on exactly what makes good managers so good (and bad managers so bad) is a lot harder. The metrics are a lot fuzzier, and there tends to be a lot of different ways to get good (or bad) results. In many cases, two people doing things that look on the outside to be very similar can lead to wildly divergent results.

Go to any random business school and take a look at their various case studies on managers. It's usually quite difficult to find any common thread in any of them, other than "this guy's company was successful, therefore what he did is the right way to do it." Of course, in every one of those studies, the manager did things differently than the other managers. The upshot of it is that the best managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and are successful, while the worst managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and aren't successful

In short, why does Bill Gates think business can help evaluate teachers (leaders of students) when business isn't even very good at evaluating their own managers (leaders of corporations)?

Re:Not again....

[hedwards]

You make that sound like a bad thing. The reason why most universities provide tenure is so that the professors don't have to worry about being fired when a new dean comes in and decides that a teacher is being controversial.

Likewise with the K-12 system teachers are always under pressure from administrators and parents to do this or don't do that, and without job security in that form, it gets really tough for the educators to make any decisions about how to run their class as a single minor complaint can result in termination.

But, lastly, at this stage, we don't really know what makes a particular teacher good, there are a lot of ideas, but when it comes down to it, even with resources and time, there aren't any assessments that can fairly and accurately judge good teacher from bad in a reliable way.

As for rewarding good teachers, they certainly can, there just isn't usually money to do so because the tax payers aren't willing to pay more than they absolutely have to. They reward good teachers by paying a stipend for passing the national boards or by improving the work environment.

Re:Not again....

[cavreader]

The root of the problem is that teachers at 1-12 grade levels have always been terribly underpaid. If a society wants to produce educated people they should start at the very beginning of the educational process. The second crucial component is the students themselves. The students must accept responsibility for their choices. You can go through the best school systems in the world and still come out as an idiot.

Re:Not again....

[SecurityGuy]

You make that sound like a bad thing. The reason why most universities provide tenure is so that the professors don't have to worry about being fired when a new dean comes in and decides that a teacher is being controversial.

Why do professors or teachers get a special deal here? Do you think it's any different for the rest of us? When the powers that be shift, sometimes the powers that become clean house. The instances I've seen where that have happened have largely revolved around cronyism and racism.

Re:Not again....

[shilly]

Hum.

While the range of styles of successful managers is very wild, it's still true that most people will succeed best as managers if they stick within quite a narrow range of performance:
- giving and receiving actionable feedback
- setting clear directions for teams
- tracking performance carefully
etc

I think you're overplaying the variety point

Re:Not again....

[supercrisp]

I'm in the position of waiting until tenure to undertake some much-needed initiatives that are being resisted by very old faculty at my university. I was told quite plainly that I would lose my job if I pushed the issue. So, that's my perspective. Why should I get the protection of tenure when others don't? My first answer is hthat maybe others should receive similar protections once they've passed similar hurdles. My second answer is a little more complicated. I spent years of hard work getting my degree, and I spent a great deal of money doing it. And the pay is relatively low. Tenure provides some job security, and it also provides some incentive to seek this sort of work, despite the obstacles of the degree and low pay, because I value the independence and authority that tenure provides. I doubt these answers will satisfy those opposed to tenure. There are certainly some downsides, like living with year after year of deadwood. But my experience so far is that the majority of senior faculty continue to be quite productive.

Apples and Oranges

[elrous0]

It's not that we don't know HOW to evaluate teachers, it's that you have to cut through miles of bullshit from teachers unions, state employee unions, and assorted political allies to actually DO IT and USE IT for anything. If you think that unions are about to negotiate away things like teacher seniority, tenure, automatic raises, etc. then you're high. They protect their own, and they have the emotional political/public appeal of the underpaid noble teacher to use if they need to (even though teachers are actually usually very WELL paid).

There are also real world issues that no one wants to talk about that effect teacher performance at the best and worst schools. Poor schools tend to be in shitty neighborhoods where teachers don't want to work, for example. Improving a school in a shitty neighborhood isn't as simple as "We need to get good teachers." You're NOT going to get the good teachers because the good teachers would be fucking crazy to teach at Gangbanger High when they could make more money and put up with less threats of physical violence if they go to the suburbs and teach at Whitey McRichkid High. So you're stuck with the worst teachers, the one's who had no choice but to come there. School stays shitty, vicious cycle continues.

Breaking that cycle requires real money to recruit better teachers, and the shitty schools usually have the LEAST money. If you want to get rid of the bad teachers in a crappy school, what are you going to do, fire everyone? Where are you going to get replacements? Some crappy schools are having to recruit overseas in places like the Philippines just to find teachers as it is.

This is approaching the problem the wrong way. In an ideal world, it would be great to evaluate teachers and pay/promote/fire based on performance. But in the real world, it doesn't work that way.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[AnonGCB]

Wish I had mod points.

Remove government regulation public schools, make them have to compete, and we'd see the end of teachers unions that force high pay and automatic raises, tenure, etc.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[grasshoppa]

You touch on some good points, but fail to address the real issue with education today; Parents. Education starts, and never ends, at home. If parents aren't valuing education at home, then kids are learning that education is a waste of time.

An overwhelming majority of parents today view education as free day care. That's it. The best teacher in the world has a 50/50 chance of any kind of impact on a child when their parents don't care. That's why poor schools tend to have poor results; it's not the money specifically, but the fact that poor folks tend to be less than college education and, generally, hold a negative view point of higher education.

Just some things to think about.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[bbasgen]

I think your premise is incorrect: evaluating teachers is actually very difficult to do. I think that one way to sum up the challenge is that teacher's don't have a "boss" in the way of most other professions. Consider, for example, in higher ed where a faculty member may have something that amounts to a dotted line to an administrative dean. That dean may have 50 or more faculty under them, with no intervening layers of management. This is obviously untenable by design. One could go on and talk about the dynamics of student evals, department chairs, and student learning outcomes. For the sake of brevity, I'll just say that evaluating a profession that is as much an art as a science is rather difficult. I'm hopeful MET comes up with a good model.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Pumpkin Tuna]

A lot of what you say makes sense, but you need to rethink the first paragraph. What about all those states, primarily in the South, that have toothless unions or no unions at all?

I'm in education and I agree that we don't have a good evaluation system. I also agree that unions push too hard against real evaluation systems. But I won't go as far as saying that we know how to evaluate teachers. Gates, Arnie Duncan and their ilk would have us pretty much use test scores. That's not a realistic measure of teacher ability. We need real assessments that include input from multiple administrators, as well as highly rated teachers and even students. This, combined with test scores might give us a better picture of which teachers are good, which need help, and which need a new job.

But the real problem is that if we could snap our fingers and fire all the idiots tomorrow, we don't have anything better to replace them with. That's where your "recruit better teachers" idea is right on. We need to look at Finland, where most people who apply to ed schools can't don't cut it. They accept only the best, train them well, pay them well, and then let them do their thing without a lot of meddling. It works.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ColdWetDog]

Make them compete.

With WHAT? The problem is that poor schools already can't compete even with regulatory pressure to help them. They need MONEY. If they had money, they wouldn't have the problem they are having. The poorer neighborhoods are already at huge disadvantage to Elrous' "Whitey McRichkid" schools. If they have to 'compete' on a flat playing field, exactly what would they bring to the table?

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Ironchew]

They protect their own, and they have the emotional political/public appeal of the underpaid noble teacher to use if they need to (even though teachers are actually usually very WELL paid)

[citation needed]

This is approaching the problem the wrong way.

Since you're clearly enough of a visionary to say the Gates Foundation's research is a waste of time, what is your approach?

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates, Arnie Duncan and their ilk would have us pretty much use test scores. That's not a realistic measure of teacher ability

You obviously didn't RTFA, but whatevs. The Proposed Teacher Evaluation and Development Criteria chart on page 2 describes a more holistic system incorportating: rigorous classroom observations, school working conditions, student feedback, and pedagogical knowledge content. Hardly a simplistic test score approach.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[houghi]

Also there is the issue that in the real world you can expect a promotion once in a while. In Schools not so much. You are a teacher and one of them becomes a director of the school. That means the majority will not ever get a promotion.

How motivated would you be if the job you took at first would be the same job for the rest of your life? How motivated would you be after 25 years?

Making this about business, it will be worse for school who already have no money because of the neighborhood. Do we want toddlers to take student loans so they can get into the better schools?

Re:Apples and Oranges

[tbannist]

Actually, it is. Frankly most organisations do a terrible job of evaluating the performance of any complicated role. If a job can't be automated, most businesses are unable to reliably evaluate performance. How do we evaluate doctors? Engineers? Software developers?

This things are difficult to evaluate and when pressed, businesses usually come up with terrible measures of performance. Just look at the games that CEOs play with their bonus requirements. They're often able to hit all of their bonus requirements even while the company struggles along with below market average performance.

I have no confidence that Bill and Melinda will come up with anything other than another wacky scheme that implodes after the first couple of years when it can be shown that it promotes people who game the system and punishes those who don't. After all, Bill Gates put Steve Ballmer in charge of Microsoft. If that doesn't call his judgement on competency into question, I don't know what will.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Chris Mattern]

What about all those states, primarily in the South, that have toothless unions or no unions at all?

They may not have unions in private industry. They still have teachers' unions. And they aren't toothless.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Pumpkin Tuna]

Expound on that for me. for example, in NC, the "union" can't negotiate contracts, they can't require members to join, and pretty soon, they might not even be able to allow members to deduct dues directly from their paychecks. The only thing they do is lobby, and they don't do that very well any more. I don't even call that a union.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[khallow]

You touch on some good points, but fail to address the real issue with education today; Parents.

And if you do nothing about parents, then that observation is garbage. Similarly, the "real issue" with living is the dying part at the end. But nobody has the fix for that either. (Also, if you happen to disagree that dying is the "real issue", then maybe that same consideration applies to your assertion about parents.)

There are two things to remember here. Teachers are the ones typically held responsible by society for the education of their students, not the students nor the students' parents. Given that, it makes sense to hold teachers accountable for the outcome.

Second, a good teacher or a good school can encourage students and their parents to be more receptive and responsive with respect to education. A bad teacher or school would IMHO be far less likely to.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[stabiesoft]

Wish I had mod points. So true. I recall my mother helping me and my brothers with english. Really just the fact my parents were interested in our performance and did not instantly blame the teacher was probably a good deal of the reason I did well in school. I am so tired of people blaming the schools. And oh, more money for the schools is always the answer. The answer is for parents to start caring about the lives they brought into this world and make sure those lives can survive after they leave the nest.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[unimacs]

That's crap. If a principle wants a teacher to move on, there are a variety of ways to get that done. The principle needs to be savvy and needs to be willing to do it. I worked with such a principle and he definitely wasn't the only one.

The bigger issue is that kids are not "one size fits all". You can take a teacher that's performing well in one school and put them in another school with a different demographic and they may have a very difficult time duplicating their past success.

Not saying that there aren't bad teachers and good teachers. There are. But people are vastly over simplifying if they think the biggest problem with the educational system is tied to teacher performance. It is unrealistic to expect schools to deal with problems that are societal in nature and start well before a kid ever sees a classroom.

Can schools do more than they are? Yes, absolutely. Training teachers in methods that work for a given demographic is key. So is hiring the right kind of teacher for the right kind of kids.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[elrous0]

I live in a state where teachers get automatic 4% cost-of-living raises every year, where they get automatic *substantial* raises for various certifications, at certain intervals in their career, etc. and where they're virtually bulletproof once they get tenure (pretty much a job for life after just a few years of service). That would certainly motivate me, promotion or not.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[sigipickl]

Money is not the problem, accountability is.

Here in California, local property tax money is redistributed throughout the state. Often schools is poorer neighborhoods get more money per student than the schools in more affluent areas. Heck, in some districts teachers get paid more to teach in the under-achieving schools. Nothing has gotten better except the employment at schools.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[msobkow]

I agree that there is a real issue with getting rid of a bad teacher over the objections of a union about "seniority", but it can be done. Many of my relatives are or were teachers (most of them retired now), and every one of them had to deal wtih parents who were screaming to the board about how they're a "bad" teacher for failing or reprimanding their precious and flawless child. Some of those parents engaged in rather vicious smear campaigns against teachers they hated. So the union system is needed to protect teachers from arbitrary firing when those outraged parents are on a mission to destroy their careers.

What Bill is talking about, though, is the actual process of evaluating teachers and teaching techniques fairly. The effectiveness of different approaches in the field have never been properly evaluated before. Some districts "evaluate" a teachers performance by considering how their students do on standardized tests, but such simplistic approaches are white-wash to appease people who are demanding that the teachers be evaluated, not an actual evaluation of the teacher's skills as a teacher.

Worse, such simplistic approaches don't make any attempt to evaluate why one teacher's students do better on the tests than others. If teachers are to improve, they need that feedback so they know how to improve.

No matter what the results of the studies are, there will be teachers, unions, school boards, and parents who resist acting on that information. Bill and Melinda are to be commended for tackling the issue when they know full well that it's going to be a battle to get the results of those studies applied to practice.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ShavedOrangutan]

IN VA, the "union" is basically a group-buy for liability insurance and a magazine every few months. It does nothing else.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[asylumx]

It's not that we don't know HOW to evaluate teachers

Uh, yeah, it is. It is exactly that. There are so many variables and so few ways to measure. Is a student doing poorly because the teacher is bad? Is it because he is dyslexic and nobody has identified it? Is it because he's distracted by the fights going on in his home every night? Is it because he has to take care of his little brother while his single mother is at work, and he doesn't get enough sleep, or enough to eat? There are communities where these types of problems are the not the exceptions, they are the rule.

On the other side of measuring teachers, the only method we seem to have is to do standardized tests... and even if the rest of the issues I mentioned above are non factors, all these tests really do is judge a teacher's ability to get students to memorize answers. It's really hard to actually judge whether the student has learned the material from a pen-and-paper test. So you are bound to have teachers who are really engaged with their students but are not necessarily teaching the test material, and they get failing grades... and on the flip side you might get really bad, unengaged teachers who know how to get their kids to remember a few test answers to make them look good.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Exactly how is money going to help?

Its not going to help the way the fucking twits and geeks think its going to help.

First the kids need to be taught that the ghetto is not the "real world".

It boils down to the fact that the children need a safe environment where learning is actually encourage. Most of them don't have books at home, and aren't in an environment where education matters. The kids in the poor neighborhoods are starting school where their parents never read to them, and they weren't taught to read first.

These bad schools are fighting a losing war against the parents and the community.

Sure there are a few loud-mouths out there, but most of the parents don't give a rats ass about education, and even the ones who do don't know or have the resources to take advantage of things.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

As the son of two retired school teachers I spent a lot of time looking at my public school years from a different perspective. One perspective was as a student and the other perspective was observer listening to teachers to talk outside of work. My father elected to a position in the NEA, so I got to see that side of it as well.

Not surprisingly, teachers come in all shapes and size: a few are lazy; a bunch are burned out from years of pouring energy into their profession; some are passionate about their material and their mission; others will bore you to death. Just like normal people. I also learned that teaching takes an enormous amount of energy, patience and dedication. And I learned that teachers who go into the profession without passion leave teaching in a few years-- it is impossible to sustain the level of effort required of a teacher without the passion.

When I was in high school, the teacher's union went on strike. They picked the school buildings. There wasn't any violence, but it was pretty ugly. I stayed out of school until the strike was over. The teacher's union had two big issues. The first was class size. The second was a provision that allowed school administrators to retroactively change students' grades without notifying the teacher. Would the teachers have taken to the pick line for three weeks if there were not passionate about their work?

The drop-out rate (from the start of freshman year to graduation) at my school was close to 50%. None-the-less, I felt like I got a good education. The value of education was instilled in me from a very early age. My parents attitude toward learning contributed more to my success than anything else. A teacher can open a door, but the student has to walk through it. Focusing only on evaluating and culling teachers will not improve public education.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[saleenS281]

There are two things to remember here. Teachers are the ones typically held responsible by society for the education of their students, not the students nor the students' parents. Given that, it makes sense to hold teachers accountable for the outcome.

Teachers are only being held responsibly by individuals who wish to have society raise their children. No competent parent thinks teachers are the source of their childs education. They're absolutely there to HELP and GUIDE, but it is a parents responsibility to be involved in every aspect of their education.

Second, a good teacher or a good school can encourage students and their parents to be more receptive and responsive with respect to education. A bad teacher or school would IMHO be far less likely to.

That may very well be the most ridiculous statement I've seen on this site to date. A good teacher can encourage bad students and their bad parents to suddenly be involved? Mr. Jones is going to convince Jimmy's mom to stop smoking crack so she can read to her son every night? You're out of touch with reality.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[john.r.strohm]

If what you said was true, then the schools that spent lots of money would CONSISTENTLY get better results than the schools that didn't.

The problem is that they don't. New York City and Washington DC have the highest per-pupil expenditures in the United States, and they have the WORST schools in the United States.

Meanwhile, dirt-poor schools in the Rio Grande Valley routinely get better results than schools in New York and Washington DC.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[HeckRuler]

Everyone, please pay attention!
This is a republican/libertarian that wants to remove government regulation of public schools.
The stated purpose is to end the "high pay" and raises of teachers.

The high pay of teachers.

Think about that. He doesn't want better teachers. He doesn't want poor schools to do better. The entire goal he's going for, in the grand sum of two sentences, is to pay teachers even less than what they're paid now.
This is why we need unions. This is why teachers unions fight this sort of thing. This is a roadblock to progress.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Half-pint HAL]

The problem with "pedagogical knowledge content" is that education, perhaps more than any other profession is polluted with horrific pseudo-science fads and fashions. Good teachers ignore the b*ll*cks in teaching trends and keep doing a good job. This metric would harm good teachers and reward bad ones who're willing to follow the management checklist. Just like in businesses.

Now that's what education can learn from business: what gets measured gets managed, and nothing of value can be measured, so measuring rewards valueless attributes.

HAL.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[gumbi west]

What would they compete on? Parents have no idea what makes a school good (if they did, presumably Bill Gates could just ask them). When you compete you have to have a good metric for success that can be measured. There are lots of places where people do not have this metric and really crappy businesses thrive (snake oil anyone?)

If you think markets are efficient, then you have to say things like the people who buy the "anti-virus" that pops up when you get a virus are really good AV programs (after all, they cost as much as the real deal).

Re:Apples and Oranges

[lptport1]

Parents are also a handicap if they feel that their child put in the effort to make the grade, and that they deserve appropriate marks for the effort.

I'm of the opinion that schools need to maximize the number of C students, not A students. If you push the bell curve of scores toward the middle, then you are challenging the majority of the students, and not neglecting the people who should be at the high end of the curve. People need to stop thinking of them as an statements of worth, and start thinking of them as an evaluation of challenge. Winning all the time does not lead to success. Even video game designers know that.

(I would probably be somewhere in middle of that curve, honestly)

Re:Apples and Oranges

[gumbi west]

20 to 30 year olds with college degrees in 2010 make twice as much as 20 to 30 year olds with just a HS degree. They also enjoy 1/4 the unemployment rate. (from the current population survey, easy to DL and confirm yourself.)

However, based just on this data, this could be entirely "those who went to college" instead of "those who finished college."

Re:Apples and Oranges

[dtmos]

Poor schools tend to be in shitty neighborhoods where teachers don't want to work, for example.

That's one theory.

An alternative theory is that the teachers in both good and bad neighborhoods have equivalent abilities, but kids in neighborhoods with "threats of physical violence" have so many things other than learning on their minds while they're at school -- like surviving the walk home, or protecting their little sisters from street gangs, or trying to understand why Mom didn't come home last night and feed them dinner -- that there's nothing the teacher can do in his/her one hour per day with the kid to make a demonstrable difference during the remaining twenty-three. Under this theory, the neighborhood (specifically, a caring parent) has a larger influence on student learning than the teacher does.

This is testable: Teachers transferred from the good neighborhood to the bad neighborhood would, under your theory, show improved performance when compared to their peers while, under the alternative theory, their performance would remain unchanged. Interestingly, the experiment has been done. Care to know what the result was?

Re:Apples and Oranges

[HeckRuler]

Well, step back a moment. Why would you say that the ghetto is not the "real world" for them?
For some kids, the school IS in the ghetto. The ghetto sits across from them in class, teaches at the chalkboard, and awaits them after school. There are poor doomed bastards that get born into the ghetto and will live and die in the ghetto. So, I think I have to explain to you that the ghetto IS their world.

It's a world we want them to escape, but there's a statistical improbability that all of them are going to do so.

Also, once you point out that the root of the problem is the culture surrounding them, you natrally progress to wanting to fix that culture. Well, imposing culture onto people is social interventionism. It's the sort of thing that fascists did. Just saying.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[elsurexiste]

+1 "I don't have mod points, but I like your interesting post"

Re:Apples and Oranges

[werepants]

It's not that we don't know HOW to evaluate teachers, it's that you have to cut through miles of bullshit from teachers unions, state employee unions, and assorted political allies to actually DO IT and USE IT for anything.

Citation needed. A disturbingly large portion of educational research that I've come across seems to be nothing more than a collection of opinion articles in a self-referencing echo chamber. We need to use whatever tools we have, either from business or from hard science, to actually get some rigor into our understanding of education. When we've got lots of data, and good predictive models, then we can say we know how to evaluate people.

A good friend of mine recently started working in a district with merit pay, which she was initially excited about. However, the administration assembled a list of 28 criteria, including "Cultural Relevance" and similar gems, which a teacher must include in EVERY LESSON. Furthermore, the teacher is observed randomly (which isn't a problem in itself) without any chance to speak with the evaluator. So, the evaluator marked the teacher down for not accommodating special ed students, when in fact the teacher had discreetly provided individualized assignments for those students.

The problem is that I think this school's administration has essentially built a tool to keep any teachers from getting raises, ever. The people who are evaluating these lessons aren't themselves able to demonstrate a lesson that would fulfill each and every one of the criteria. If nobody can produce a perfect lesson, even the so-called experts in charge of evaluation, that seems like evidence that the criteria are totally inappropriate.

Defining criteria is a great move, and I applaud Bill for having the insight to see that this is one of the fundamental pieces required to start improving education. We can't rely on the uninformed opinions of bureaucrats to decide how our teachers should be evaluated, and we probably can't rely on teachers themselves either. We need people (scientists, business HR people, ???) who can objectively dissect the process and find good indicators for a teacher's worth.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Changa_MC]

Your first paragraph and your third paragraphs are completely contradictory. Is the problem that teachers unions protect bad teachers, or is the problem that teachers are so underpaid that if your fire a bad teacher, there will be literally no-one to take their place? Hint: you got it right the second time. I quit teaching because the pay, hours & facilities in IT are so much better. In IT.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[khallow]

Teachers are only being held responsibly by individuals who wish to have society raise their children. No competent parent thinks teachers are the source of their childs education. They're absolutely there to HELP and GUIDE, but it is a parents responsibility to be involved in every aspect of their education.

I didn't say that teachers were the source of education (though they are an obvious source of education). I say teachers were held responsible by society. That's a statement of fact.

Second, a good teacher or a good school can encourage students and their parents to be more receptive and responsive with respect to education. A bad teacher or school would IMHO be far less likely to.

That may very well be the most ridiculous statement I've seen on this site to date. A good teacher can encourage bad students and their bad parents to suddenly be involved? Mr. Jones is going to convince Jimmy's mom to stop smoking crack so she can read to her son every night? You're out of touch with reality.

Yes, you idiot. That is exactly what I'm saying (Aside from the "suddenly" part). There's this thing called "communication" that people do. Maybe Jimmy's mom will keep hitting the pipe, but maybe the fact that Jimmy's future hinges on whether or not she quits smoking crack (or whether she hands Jimmy off to a relative who can take care of him) will make the difference. Most decisions don't start from scratch and most people aren't firmly decided on being destructive parents.

As to the "suddenly be involved", most teachers see their students for nine or so months at a time. That's a bit of time in which to help a student become more effective or parent become more supportive.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[saleenS281]

I didn't say that teachers were the source of education (though they are an obvious source of education). I say teachers were held responsible by society. That's a statement of fact.

You may personally hold them responsible, but you don't speak for everyone. I dont' know a competent parent who holds teachers responsible for their child's education. That responsibility is held entirely by the parents. A teacher is simply there to assist them.

Yes, you idiot. That is exactly what I'm saying (Aside from the "suddenly" part). There's this thing called "communication" that people do. Maybe Jimmy's mom will keep hitting the pipe, but maybe the fact that Jimmy's future hinges on whether or not she quits smoking crack (or whether she hands Jimmy off to a relative who can take care of him) will make the difference. Most decisions don't start from scratch and most people aren't firmly decided on being destructive parents.
As to the "suddenly be involved", most teachers see their students for nine or so months at a time. That's a bit of time in which to help a student become more effective or parent become more supportive.

I can tell you've sat through a lot of parent-teacher conferences. You know, the ones that uncaring parents don't show up to. What exactly is this mode of communication from teacher to parent again? If you call them and they don't want to talk to you, it's called harassment. There is no repercussion for a parent who doesn't want to be involved in their child's education. You can't force them to be involved. A teacher also has no real ability to invoke discipline on a student who has not been taught any respect for authority. Which in turn means they have no way to communicate with a student who doesn't want to hear it. But you know, outside of that, your theory is fucking excellent!

Re:Apples and Oranges

[djchristensen]

Evaluating teachers is extremely hard to do.

As an example, I'm very happy with my 4th grade daughter's teacher this year, yet at least three kids have been pulled out of her class by their parents. I'm choosing not to believe that this is because she is black in an area that is excessively white (I'm white for sake of disclosure). Rather, I think it has much more to do with the personality of the teacher, which is very compatible my daughter's personality. My daughter hasn't been compatible with all of her teachers, and we had to move her to a different class in the past. She had a very bad experience with that particular teacher.

So is one of these teachers better or worse than the other? From the perspective of my daughter's education, emphatically yes. But ask a different parent and you might get exactly the opposite answer as to which teacher was better. In both cases, these two teachers could be either the worst or the best in the school depending on the mix of kids they get. And since we're talking about humans (both the teachers and the kids), personality is an important and very difficult to measure aspect of performance.

So while I think it would be wonderful if there was a better way to evaluate teachers, it might be an untenable proposition. Kind of like reforming the tax code in the US.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[martin-boundary]

Eh? If you're going to invoke real issues, then get it right. The real issue here is that Gates is trying to get his pet project noticed in the media. That's the reason TFA has shown up on slashdot, that's the reason you're commenting. If you're not addressing that point, then you're off on a tangent.

All that ranting about education and parents is irrelevant. There are always lots of issues on anything. The real issue here is Gates wants to make schools more like Microsoft.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ryanov]

No one said it was causation (though I suspect that they absolutely do have something to do with the success). What people are arguing is that "we can't have great schools with good teachers because of unions" is complete horseshit, and those countries ARE proof of that.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ryanov]

Poor folks also have much less time to deal with their kids' education as they're often times at work well more than full time trying to keep the lights on. Further, if the parents don't succeed at at least that much, that becomes another reason why poor kids do poorly.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ryanov]

The states with the least union intervention tend to also have the worst educational systems.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ryanov]

He spoke at the AFT convention about a year ago and that's not what he was saying then (he was talking much more about test scores). So, either he got religion or something doesn't add up here.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[UnknowingFool]

In an ideal world, the teacher would be totally responsible but we don't live in an ideal world. I have friends who are teachers who work in these bad districts with parents that don't care. A hard part in teaching some of these kids is that they come to school hungry and sometimes dirty. What can they do about that? Feed them out of their meager salaries? Clean them and wash their clothes? Some have parents that downright don't care. Some of them outright told them that their job as teachers is to watch their kids during the day and not get the parents involved with the education part at all.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[makubesu]

I agree, but let's be bolder. If parents are what kids need, then parents are what teachers should become. We need to tear down the barriers. Teachers should be allowed to make deeper connections with their students. The same teacher should spend time with a student for many years. Students should spend more time at school, with teachers being closely involved in nonacademic activities. They should be encouraged to meet with them outside of school. They should be allowed to discipline the children. They should be there when the student is working on his homework. The community needs to pick up the slack of bad parents. I know that the fundies will scream about indoctrination, and the paranoid about pedophilia, but we can't expect mere lecturers to inspire kids.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[UnknowingFool]

The superintendent of one of the largest and best school systems said that the one thing that he thinks is the most valuable is parental involvement as he told 60 Minutes.

“[W]here parents are involved, students do well. Where they're not, achievement suffers.

The school system is the Department of Defense system for children of military personnel. At first glance, it should be one of the poorest performing schools. Nearly half are minority. 64% of the children qualify for free or reduced lunch. The children move repeatedly as their parents are transferred.

However in benchmarks, the school system is one of the best in the nation. The scores on national tests are one of the highest with almost no discernible gap between minority and white students. 97% of students graduate with the majority attending higher education.

The system has major advantages over other schools. They spend more per child than the average. The vast majority of the teachers have Masters degrees or better but that might be a chicken and egg effect in that they can recruit better teachers because the school is better.

Because it is of military children, the superintendent has advantages other superintendents don't. Discipline is not a problem as it is in ingrained into their students from their parents. Parental involvement is much easier as the superintendent knows how to contact parents directly and if they are not responsive, he can contact their CO to hold the parents accountable.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Saxophonist]

I think that one way to sum up the challenge is that teacher's don't have a "boss" in the way of most other professions.

That statement is incorrect in regard to nearly all schools. The teachers' boss is nearly always the principal, who is (directly or by delegation to other administrators) responsible for evaluating the teachers, among all other boss-like duties.

And, actually, that's a huge part of the problem: PHBs are just as prevalent in schools as they are everywhere else. You point out that evaluating teachers is difficult, but when you add a complete moron doing the job, it becomes impossible. Very often, the problem with a school is at the top of the administrative structure.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[khallow]

You may personally hold them responsible, but you don't speak for everyone.

[...]

There is no repercussion for a parent who doesn't want to be involved in their child's education.

What I find particularly amusing about this is the cognitive dissonance. In your second quote, you are merely rephrasing my observation that society doesn't hold parents responsible for the education of their kids. No repercussion from society means no responsibility imposed by society.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[hedwards]

And precisely where is that money going to come from? They could get an awful lot of mileage from using that money to pay for meals, school supplies and tutoring for students in need. Or perhaps a librarian and librarian's assistant to go along with a good selection of books.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[saleenS281]

What I find particularly amusing is you suggesting we hold teachers responsible for shitty parenting. That's obviously the solution to the problem. Wait, wait, good teachers magically make shitty parents good parents! Your logic is only matched by your understanding of the education system.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[gumbi west]

Sorry last sentence should be: "However, based on this data alone you can't tell if it is the kind of people who go to college who earn that much more and are that much less likely to be unemployed or if it is college itself that is causing that difference." Some interesting studies based on college name value show that signals work for a few years but then true quality starts to mater more.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Fujisawa Sensei]

When they refer to the ghetto as being the "real world", they also mean that everything outside is bullshit, and not worth shit.

So its not even a matter of escaping, or wanting to escape; its a matter of reality vs bullshit. The see everybody outside as being stupid fucks who don't know shit.

And in a manner of speaking they're right, we are stupid fucks who don't know shit. And we can't change their lives from the ivory tower. But what we can do is provide them with a safe environment, where learning is actually encouraged and rewarded, and their peers can't sanction them into believing otherwise.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[gawbl]

Money is not the problem, accountability is.

Here in California, local property tax money is redistributed throughout the state. Often schools is poorer neighborhoods get more money per student than the schools in more affluent areas. Heck, in some districts teachers get paid more to teach in the under-achieving schools. Nothing has gotten better except the employment at schools.

No. While property taxes get handled by the state, most of that money stays local. Most of the state's income is from income taxes (that's why CA has such a divergent boom-and-bust budget). The difference is due to the variation in the price of real estate; here in the Silicon Valley, a house in East San Jose might cost $200K, while that same house in Palo Alto would be $1.5M. Yes, the school districts in poorer neighborhoods get some money from the state, and rich districts don't. That's because those rich districts are *much* richer than the other districts; a whole bunch of teachers in the not-so-rich districts were laid off last summer (including my kid's school). The state money doesn't come anywhere near to closing the district funding gap. gawbl

Re:Apples and Oranges

[khallow]

What I find particularly amusing is you suggesting we hold teachers responsible for shitty parenting. That's obviously the solution to the problem. Wait, wait, good teachers magically make shitty parents good parents! Your logic is only matched by your understanding of the education system.

Huh, doesn't look to me like I said that. Instead, it looks to me like an excuse for someone to not do their job (here I mean "teaching" not "parenting"). Various relatives and friends of mine have been on the other side of this blame game with problematic teachers blaming parents. It happened to my parents, my brother and his wife, and a friend with three kids of his own, including one with special needs.

When I hear someone blaming education failure on parents solely, then I hope they aren't teachers. Because it means they completely missed the boat. As I noted several in this thread, teachers are paid to educate students. Not the student, not the parent. So if the professional cannot handle the "issues" of education, then they should get a different job.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[ChrisMaple]

Engineers are not that difficult to evaluate. Within a few months, often within a few weeks, another engineer can tell if they're productive and if their work looks correct. Really bad engineers are pretty easy to identify.

Naturally, it's tough to find the difference between one who does nearly everything right and one who tends to design products with serious hidden flaws, but speed, willingness to do documentation, apparent thoroughness, and a host of other important properties aren't too difficult to see.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[SecurityGuy]

I don't know...I still dislike Windows and Microsoft, but I get the genuine impression Gates doesn't think he has a thing in the world to prove to anyone. He built a colossus of a company, became fantastically wealthy, and is now trying to do something that really matters.

Good for him.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[HeckRuler]

I'm guessing about the republican/libertarian, but who else would bitching about government regulation?
The next few points come from READING COMPREHENSION. He wrote down two sentences. The second kind of runs on, but it's readable.

As for what he doesn't want, those points are kind of inferred. He could have simply forgotten about them. Perhaps he would have mentioned them if he wasn't so rushed for time. We could give him the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, his first concern is to slash the pay of teachers. And that's my main point.

Hmmm? OH! no no no. You see, my post wasn't just plastered whilly nilly anywhere in the thread. I wasn't referring to Bill Gates. I was talking about AnonGCB.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[saleenS281]

Part of parenting is teaching!!!!! Do you not have kids??

A child can learn with their parents help regardless of how good or bad a teacher is. A teacher cannot teach regardless of how bad a child and his parents are. Period.

Between your attitude and the fact you've got "multiple relatives" that have issues with "problem teachers", it sounds like the problem is right there at home. You might as well say construction workers are paid to build roads, and then send them out to the jobsite with nothing but a hammer and start complaining when you don't have a road a month later. Your ignorance of teaching is quite evident, I'd suggest you just stop before you make yourself look even less informed.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[shilly]

This is starting to get into some interesting stuff. Why would kids say that "everything outside is bullshit, and not worth shit"? It looks an awful lot like a form of self-protection to me: if the outside world is pretty much inaccessible to you, then it is damaging to you to be reminded too often that it's also better. It ruins your mental health. So I'd say that in addition to a safe environment, we need to actually deal with the root cause issue of helping kids access a better world -- above-and-beyond providing them with educational opportunities.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[HeckRuler]

huh, go figure. You're right. They're not paid too bad. Well we're doing something right at least.
Still, the stated goal of reducing the pay of teachers is atrocious. It would effectively diminish the entire industry and things would get even worse.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[shilly]

Pedagogical knowledge content is defined in quite narrow terms that exclude what you're banging on about: an assessment of a teacher’s ability to recognize and diagnose students’ misunderstandings of the lessons

Re:Apples and Oranges

[khallow]

You simply don't get it. If teachers really were as useless as you claim, there would be no point to having schools.

For a lot of students, the school has the kids longer than their parents do. Even if the student hasn't learned good work/study habits at home, you can still teach them at school. A good teacher can motivate most of their students while a bad teacher can demotivate most of their students. Similarly, teachers can motivate or demotivate parents to a limited degree. You can't motivate or demotivate everyone, but there is a huge effect which you miss.

As I see it, this generic blaming of the students and their parents is just a pathetic excuse to rationalize bad teacher performance. IMHO, a lot of these student and parent "issues" would go away, if we got rid of those teachers who don't do their jobs.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[drsquare]

How would schools compete? Most of them are already at capacity, even if they attracted pupils from other schools there'd be no rooms to put them in, and no teachers to teach them. Meanwhile the failing schools would lose even more money, and wouldn't even be able to maintain the buildings.

So you get rid of the unions, decent pay, good job security, and that's supposed to attract good teachers? More than likely, the best ones will think 'fuck that' and go to private industry where they can make more money and not have idiots like you and the politicians you vote for fucking them about.

A totally stupid idea put forward by market ideologues, why not simply look at more successful education systems, like the one in Finland?

Re:Apples and Oranges

[drsquare]

Are you sure? The last stats I saw said that graduates make around a hundred grand extra over their careers.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[supercrisp]

Oh good lord. I wish the parent could make his post go away. No doubt this argument will soon justify more deanlets at universities. Which is most certainly not what we need. I'm going to advance some management-culture heresy: maybe the cure is worse than the disease. That is, maybe the slackers and droolers among the faculty do less harm, waste less potential, than do the various managers and management tools? I say this as someone who has to submit grades four different ways for each set of grades, is required to record attendance three different ways, and can't send out an e-mail to his colleagues about a lecture without approval from the PR & Marketing people (a process taking a minimum of two weeks). Please, please don't leave justifications for management just lying around unattended! Someone might use them!

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Fujisawa Sensei]

There's a lot that needs to happen.

But spending more money on whiz-bang gadgets, and administrators isn't going to do shit.

Instead of issuing edicts from education service centers with reliable air-conditioning, comfortable chairs, and roofs that never leak; the fuckers need to get involved and actually work with the teachers who are in the schools. But like all social issues there's no magic bullet.

Also, using tests as a performance monitor leads to shit like this: http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/100-atlanta-school-employees-552164.html

Re:Apples and Oranges

[shilly]

Your points may or may not be right, but they seem like a non-sequitur -- they don't follow from what I was talking about.

Specifically re tests: nothing in this world is free of negative consequences. Not using tests has some pretty bad consequences too.

Headline: Schools Respond to Gates Suggestions

[tacokill]

Dear Bill,
Thank you for your comments and concerns but we got this, thanks.
P.S. Please keep sending the money though
Sincerely Yours,
The Teachers Unions


Sad, but this has been the response for a looooong time now and as my good man Bob Dylan says.....the times they are a changin'

What makes a good teacher?

[Moheeheeko]

One without tenure...

Re:What makes a good teacher?

[hedwards]

Those teachers aren't good typically, they're timid and likely not to inspire much confidence in the students. A good teacher needs to have breathing room if a controversial subject comes up to teach about the controversy and hopefully inspire some interest in further research.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[schlesinm]

Parent-Teacher Conferences only let the parents talk to the teacher about how the child is doing in school. There is no way for the parent to know if issues in the classroom are from poor learning on the child's side or poor teaching on the teacher's side. I've dealt with both sides where I've had to complain to the teacher about how they were teaching my child and also make sure the child knows what's expected of them in the teacher's classroom. And it is hard to tell at times.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[grimmjeeper]

They're called Parent-Teacher Conferences.

That was effective back when parents were interested in making their kids knuckle down and accomplish something in school. But that's becoming less and less common. Instead, we have parents showing up to yell at the teacher for not giving their idiot slacker offspring better grades even though the urchin does none of the work required to earn the grades.

No, I think this effort by the Gates foundation is a noble one. We really do need to come up with a realistic way to evaluate our entire educational system (not just the effectiveness of teachers). We need a way we can identify the real faults in our educational system.

Realistically, I don't hold out much hope that the territorialism and politics that are pervasive in our educational system can be overcome. So I'm not sure how effective this drive will be at affecting change. But the goal itself is noble.

That's an easy one

[mvar]

Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools

1) patent
2) lawsuit
3) profit!

Re:That's an easy one

[c0lo]

Bill Gates On What Business Can Teach Schools

1) patent
2) lawsuit
3) profit!

You forgot

0) lobby

Errr... apologies... I heard they're calling it "evangelism".

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[0123456]

That was effective back when parents were interested in making their kids knuckle down and accomplish something in school. But that's becoming less and less common. Instead, we have parents showing up to yell at the teacher for not giving their idiot slacker offspring better grades even though the urchin does none of the work required to earn the grades.

Those parents probably got their grades for free, so why should Little Jimmy have to work for them?

We really do need to come up with a realistic way to evaluate our entire educational system (not just the effectiveness of teachers). We need a way we can identify the real faults in our educational system.

That's easy: get the government out of the way. Then parents will send their kids to good schools and bad schools will go bust.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[Jawnn]

Let's see..., percentage of all parents qualified to evaluate a teacher's effectiveness - (being generous) maybe 20%. Percentage of that set that has the interest and ability (time) to get involved to an effective degree, maybe 20% again? Yeah, I can see why the PTA has been such a huge success in setting effective performance metrics for teachers. Just like those standardized tests handed down by state bureaucrats...

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[hexghost]

That's easy: get the government out of the way. Then parents will send their kids to good schools and bad schools will go bust.

Right. Because poor people or people living in bad school districts ALWAYS have the option of doing that.

3,823,142 teachers in the US

[More Trouble]

Teaching 55,203,000 students, at 132,656 schools. There is no larger group of professionals in the US. So, if you want to improve education in the US, you can pretty much forget about "hiring the best, firing the rest." You need to build a teaching work force that meets your needs.

Re:3,823,142 teachers in the US

[Sir_Sri]

Other teachers and professors. Professors experiment, and get it wrong, a lot, you take the tidbits of things you learned to do right and you put those into a classroom.

And like every other job, you take people who've done it well, ask them how they did so well, if they know, you stand them in the front of a room of their peers and tell them about it.

The root problem the gates foundation has is that they aren't sure what constitutes a good teacher. That's probably in part because it's a moving target. A good teacher today, and a good teacher 20 years ago aren't the same thing, the classroom has changed as have childrens approaches to information and their access to alternate data. In an evolving market place it's hard to know how to do these things.

With teachers parents always had a fit on PD days, because they had to pay someone else to take care of their kids that day. Teachers had to show up and go to conferences or the like - that was where they're supposed to learn to be better teachers.

Re:3,823,142 teachers in the US

[dkleinsc]

It should be pointed out that building a teaching work force that's totally awesome means paying teachers rates that are totally awesome. And judging from battles I've seen over school funding, a lot of Americans don't really want to do that - they want top-notch teachers at bargain basement rates.

Re:3,823,142 teachers in the US

[HeckRuler]

Universities.

Re:3,823,142 teachers in the US

[supercrisp]

MAYBE. Or maybe we could train our teachers differently. There are some real problems there. That said, where are people getting salary numbers for teachers? In the southeast, $31,500-32,000 are pretty standard starting salaries. It wouldn't hurt to pay more. Let me advance another issue: maybe the problem is the dramatic change in our students' lives and not the teachers as much. When I was in college, many, many students between classes hauled out a copy of The Hobbit or some Stephen King or something like that. They went home to the dorm or the frat house, and their distractions were beer, the opposite sex, music, and maybe some weed. Now, students are constantly on their phones; they have internet access, they have cable—basically many, many more distractions. They're not reading with the same intensity or absorbedness. This applies at all levels of education, but in university, we have another major game-changer: increased access. We have many more students from poor backgrounds, from racial minorities, many of whom are first-generation scholars. That makes a big difference too.

Useless

[Ashenkase]

Job performance evaluations are useless. Most of the time the completion of performance evaluations are tied to Manger bonuses.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[khallow]

Those are student performance reviews. Further, there's no repercussion to a teacher from negative feedback during a parent-teacher meeting. Complaining to a principle or higher is far more likely to correct teacher problems.

Do gooders

[trolman]

Way too much time on their hands

In January 2011, the National Education Policy Center (a think tank funded by the National Education Association (NEA)) published a paper by Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California – Berkeley. In his paper, Mr. Rothstein stated that the MET project’s preliminary finding that teachers with high value-added on state tests also tend to help their students master cognitively challenging tasks is not supported by the data collected in the first year of the project. Are Mr. Rothstein’s criticisms accurate?

I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. - Dr Ray Stanz

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[khallow]

Right. Because poor people or people living in bad school districts ALWAYS have the option of doing that.

Even if true, how is that different from now?

Re:Headline: Schools Respond to Gates Suggestions

[dwarfsoft]

"we got this"? You must be one of the teachers that could use some improvement according to Mr. Gates suggestions.

Even the best teachers

[Anonymous Coward]

Are hamstrung by poorly planned curriculum and the current application of memorization and regurgitation that is the standardized testing system of today.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[grimmjeeper]

Those parents probably got their grades for free, so why should Little Jimmy have to work for them?

Hardly. Parents these days just want to be friends with their kids and make it easier for them than they had it. Either that or they want to make sure their kids have the grades to get scholarships or just admittance to some trendy prep school, etc. Or their motivation is banal enough to just want the stupid "my kid is an honor student" bumper sticker to put on their car to show off at the local overpriced coffee shack.

That's easy: get the government out of the way. Then parents will send their kids to good schools and bad schools will go bust.

That may be an enticing slogan for someone who doesn't think the issue all the way through. And it's unlikely someone who only spits out one sentence talking points like that will put forth the effort to investigate the real causes of the problem, no matter what kind of well documented research is posted. Suffice it to say that while the government doesn't get everything right when it comes to education, removing the government altogether will only cause more problems than it solves.

Elements of a good teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Gives a shit.
2) Knows their shit.
3) Low tolerance for shit.

Or, more to the point, the elements of a bad teacher:

1) Wants to expend the least amount of effort to collect a paycheck.
2) Has a head full of stupid ideas like: these kids probably aren't doing drugs or bullying each other. The stupid ones will always be stupid and the smart ones will always be smart no matter what I do. Cheerleaders wouldn't lie to me. I don't have to know my subject to teach it well, I can just read the book as I go. Disagreeing with me means the answer is incorrect, even if it is clearly an opinion-seeking question. The correct remedy to low grades is MORE HOMEWORK! Rote memorization of boring facts is a great way to get young minds interested in higher learning. etc.
3) Refuses to adequately punish the trouble-makers or under-performers, to the detriment of the rest of the class.

While we are at it, we should more intelligently align the curricula with age groups, as suggested by Piaget (e.g. young kids should study foreign languages rather than math, because the brain is far more capable of learning language when young, and will be able to pick up basic math very quickly when a bit older).

Oh, and the phrase "zero tolerance policy" usually means "zero thought put into proper enforcement or deciding what constitutes infringement" which means "zero respect for authority learned at an early age."

Ok I'm done.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

Punishing should only be for trouble-makers. Punishment is a deterrent against unwanted behaviour. Punishing under-performers generally makes them perform worse, because it associates punishment with the subject being taught. Just my opinion though, feel free to disagree, I don't have a large sample-size.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[Jack Fat]

3) Low tolerance for shit.

3) Refuses to adequately punish the trouble-makers or under-performers, to the detriment of the rest of the class.

I agree with both short lists of elements, but I think this pair (for good and bad teachers, respectively) needs to be expanded because there's more to it than the Iron vs Lenient Fists that it implies.

Which is to say that all of my best teachers were adept at being approachable and friendly while also maintaining the authority to be taken seriously by (all but the most deliquent) students.

The worst teachers erred on one side or the other. Some created an atmosphere where they could be treated as peers (and were often charismatic or generally thought of as "cool" by students) which undermined their authority when they finally did have to lay down any law, be it punishment, reward, policy, whatever. The rest were nothing but authority figures which made them less effective with most students because they were just another incarnation of "The Man."

My assessment of my own best and worst teachers is of course subjective, but it does include plenty of adult reflection after the fact, and the general observations apply to several teachers I had between 4th grade through undergraduate college. (I graduated from college in 1996. I recognize that the abililty to have "adult reflection" doesn't necessarily coincide with any age or event.)

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[reboot246]

Very good post.

I would have said it a bit differently, but you made the point pretty clear anyway.

The great teachers really care about their students, of course. They also know their subject well enough to know what part of it the students need to learn. Depending on the subject a lot of what's in the book may be outdated or just plain wrong.

I was graduated from high school in 1971, so I've seen the decline of our education system over a long period of time. It's interesting how the decline started as discipline was removed from the classroom. Some children will learn under even the worst conditions, but most need a controlled environment, especially the younger students who are learning the very basics. Without discipline you've lost the opportunity to reach the majority of the students when they need it the most.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[mjwx]

If I may add a few.

1) Gives a shit.
2) Knows their shit.
3) Low tolerance for shit.

4) Understands the difference between shit that needs to be acted on and shit that needs to be ignored.
5) Is allowed to get on with shit and not interfered with by mummy Snowflake getting up teachers and administrators because she's worried that Little Johnny Snowflake might get the idea that he's not the most special snowflake in the entire world.

Number 5 is the biggest problem facing educators. Some parents cant discipline their crotchspawns. Worse yet, they will sue the pants of anyone who tries to. Granted these parents are in the extreme minority but they make life difficult for everyone. Teachers are not permitted to discipline students these days out of fear of legal retribution from parents, who dont want to be parents, who are made to look bad because their crotchspawn is undisciplined.

Whilst I'm not one myself, I lived in a sharehouse with 2 teachers for over a year. At the end of every term (approx 3 months for the Americans playing along at home) they would dread writing reports for one or two of their students because those students were little shits they weren't permitted to discipline, hell the private school teacher was not even permitted to fail a student who didn't even bother to sit half his tests (instant fail). In the end, the report would say "Tom needs to pay more attention in class" when it should really say "Tom is a selfish, undisciplined little shit who cant keep his hands of other students".

Oh, and the phrase "zero tolerance policy" usually means "zero thought put into proper enforcement or deciding what constitutes infringement" which means "zero respect for authority learned at an early age."

Couldn't agree more. Bans will simply make kids want to break the rule more.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[opposabledumbs]

While I agree to much of your post, I have to argue about Piaget and language learning. Research has been done in that area, but it's not entirely conclusive when it comes to early vs. late language learning.

What is incontrovertible is that early learners learn all their languages in the same area of their brain, which is usually reserved for first language. Later learners (that is, after about 13 years old, but this varies according to sex and other individual characteristics) store other languages in another region of the brain.

It's not known whether this means that language stored in a different brain area is inherently weaker, however.

There are other major influences in language learning in the early and late levels, even strange things like ego: during your teens, you develop a sense of self and of belonging to a group (factors like accent are part of this process) and learning early can make a difference because there is no radical remaking of who you are (an English speaker changes to an English and French speaker, for example).

From my own experience, I have found that younger learners do well in some areas because of energy and enthusiasm, but older learners bring a much greater arsenal of cognitive assets to the classroom (things like memory), which you can tap into.

So pros and cons on both sides. Early advantage is a myth - and I'm a language teacher with years of experience in more than one country. I do agree that second languages should be learned as soon as possible, but that's from a systemic point of view: it's good for people to see similarities and differences between languages, and it helps you to view the world in a different way. But this should definitely not come at the expense of math, or science.

I'm all for a more rational approach to education, though, and in my opinion a huge part of the crisis in education comes from the fact that when formalized, whole-population schooling was adopted it was done not for the benefit of the children who were attending, but as a way of keeping the newly unemployed kids off the streets and out of trouble (this was during the industrial revolution but after the mechanization of the workplace, which took away a lot of the jobs that children did in factories).

It's because of this that school is structured by age rather than by ability. You should start at the same age, and then promotion should occur when you've shown you can handle the year's material.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[rtb61]

Lets at least make some effort to be realistic.
1. Willingness to become a teacher.
2. Sufficient patience to interact with children.
3. Knowledge of subject matter.
4. Understanding of and competence at various teaching techniques applicable to age of students and subject matter being taught.
5. Willingness to go over the same boring crap, again and again and ad nauseam whilst remaining interested.

Things outside of teachers control required for an effective teaching environment
1. Supportive parents who engage positively in the education of their children.
2. Comfortable classrooms in safe environments.
3. Limited class sizes to promote teacher student interaction.
4. The schools ability to supportively remove (place in special classes) problem children from typical classes ie. smart and bored, dumb and frustrated and psychological troubled children.
5. Quality education materials books, computers et al.
6. A sound competent and well educated board of education to manage all of the above.

It sounds like the research is the epitome of well intentioned for stupid. It is not about managing teachers, it is about managing schools, it is not about the best teachers it is about average teachers tens of thousands of them, it is not about individual focus it is about effective education support infrastructure that provides state and nationwide teacher selection and education guidelines, school management and regulation with extended uniform standards across states and nationwide.

Education in the US seems to be failing largely because management is being left to communities to small ie lacking in funding and expertise to do it properly. Simple most expedient solution to fixing most of the problems would be to take education management cost and tax basis from local communities and transfer it all to state based management. Federal funds would then to go each state's department of education, ensuring more uniform application of standards and, significantly reduced wasteful replication of costly administrative services. So reduced tax cost of education whilst still putting more well directed money into schools.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[MalachiK]

The stupid ones will always be stupid and the smart ones will always be smart no matter what I do.

Yeah, about that... I'm a physics teacher and in my experience there is certainly a point at which the lack of innate ability means that a student would be better employed trying to learn something else. Sure, we try to teach all of our students as much as we can, but if after a year or so of intensive teaching, extra support classes, peer supported group work &c. a student still struggles to grasp the basics of electrical circuit analysis or the process of resolving vectors into orthogonal components then it's time to run up the white flag and try something else. The myth that anyone can be successful at anything has lead many young people to waste a great deal of time and effort trying to master ideas that are frankly beyond them. What I think we forget sometimes is just how intellectually / academically weak it is possible for some people to be. Life is short and youth even shorter. Surely it is better to spend your time productively rather than on impossible and ultimately fruitless pursuits?

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[haystor]

Add in that your good and bad teachers are paid the same and have the same career prospects.

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[shilly]

Sorry but this is not good enough.

1) and 2) yes, but hardly a marker of a good teacher, merely a very very minimum bar.

3) is not quite right, as the other poster said -- discipline is more complex than "tough is good".

There's a whole series of other competencies that are important. They include:
- oral and written communication skills that work well for children
- ability to give feedback
- problem-solving (structuring, synthesis, etc) ...dozens more

Re:Elements of a good teacher

[BigDogCH]

I agree with you, but the part you need to expand on is number 3. What punishments should be used? Come up with a list. As a former teacher, I can assure you it is not easy. There are few things a teacher can do to actually punish students. Once they understand that.....game over.

Disclaimer: A good principal makes all the difference, but those are rare.......far more rare than a good teacher.

How you teach/learn

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it should be easier to identify a *bad* teacher than a good one.

Different people excel at learning different ways. I can't prove it, but different teachers will be better at teaching certain ways. No doubt an effective teacher would try multiple methods, but time may not be divided equally and the teacher will likely better at some methods than others. Ideally I believe students would be divided by how they learn the fastest, then you could assign them to appropriate classes and teachers.

In the current system, if a teacher uses method A to teach (let's say oral fill-in-the-blank with the class followed by worksheets) and 90% of the class learn 90% of the material but 10% of the class only understands 50% of it. Alternatively the teacher could use method B (let's say read instructions from book, take a practice quiz, then go over answers with Q&A) and 100% of the class understands 75% of it, which method is better? Is it better for everyone to get a C or 90% to get an A while 10% fail...

Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[trout007]

Back when Mazda joined with Ford to make cars in the US they had a problem. Ford was building all the parts to spec but the transmissions didn't run as nice as the Japanese built ones. Then Ford ripped apart some Japanese engines and found the parts were made to MUCH tighter tolerances than the specs called for. This was because of Deming's Quality program he taught the Japanese. Basically it is never stop improving quality. Even when you are within specs keep getting better because quality will improve and your customers will be happier.

This is what needs to happen in education. It's not setting a standard and making sure teachers meet it. It is setting up a culture of excellence and pursuit of perfection even knowing it is unobtainable.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[bratloaf]

Wish I had Mod points... Bit how to implement this in regards to teaching? Again, what are the metrics? Its simple to measure a gear/bearing/physical tolerance. How do you measure teaching? But I do agree, Total Quality as an overarching goal, even a mantra or culture, would go a long way. The Japanese have a culture that melds very well with this philosophy, in the US not so much...

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[openfrog]

Again trying to apply business solutions to public institutions. Your suggestion is particularly ironical since what is stated here is that the problem is actually the difficulty of measuring performance.

What's more, the obsession with measuring performance in education, regardless or resources invested or support for teachers, is getting ludicrous. You want good teachers? Then make taching a profession worth pursuing. The suggestion of trying to measure when real measure would cost more that educating in the first place, or would become the primary focus when it shouldn't, will make teaching as a profession even more unstable, with constant interference from well meaning people who know nothing about public education imposing new controls and imposing artificial measures of performance. The end result will be that you are just going to increase cynicism and drive even more good educators out.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[HeckRuler]

This is insightful?
"We need better quality! In fact, we need a culture of better quality"
That's great, but how do we do it? This is the sort of thing that motivational speakers spew and that self-help books churn out. Cheezy example and all.

You could have just as easily used the old and busted razor blade story:

"blah blah blah, give away the razor blades, make money on the razors.
This is what needs to happen in education. It's not teaching kids that 1+1=2, it's giving them the framework that synergizes their co-motivational buzzword buzzword."

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[martin-boundary]

So what you're saying is, the key to making great products^H^H^H^H students is throwing chairs at the teachers? Teachers! Teachers! Teachers! Teachers! Teachers! Teachers!

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[trout007]

Reading the article it gives the example of one teacher reviewing her own performance and thinking how she will do better next time. That is what I was trying to convey. You don't HAVE to measure how well the teachers are doing if you have a culture where everyone is expected to improve and given the tools to do it. In the case of the cars the machinists building the parts. They weren't told they had to make parts of a certain tolence or they would be fired. They were given the tools and the education to keep improving the process. These people were then allowed to do their job. Most parts coming off a Japanese line aren't inspected. Why? Because the parts that are inspected are of such high quality they know the process is under control and there is no need to waste money testing every part. In fact you make more money concentrating on making good parts than if you test everyone because you don't have to waste time and material on scrapped parts.

This is the same with teaching. You don't have to keep testing every single kid over and over. If you examine the process, ie teacher, and know they are good.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[iluvcapra]

That's great, but how do we do it?

Don't ask him, he's more of an idea rat.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[trout007]

Read about Deming. The idea is create a good process that is under control. You only have so many resources available. How do you allocate them teaching, improving, or testing? Demoing showed that testing every part is a waste of time and money. You only have to test every once in a while and as long as that testing shows the parts will be within specification statistically you are good. This allows you the time and money to keep improving the process making it better all the time.

Apply that to teaching. Every teacher k own that we test too much but they are forced to do it. The know it wastes time since every decent teacher knows what their students know or don't know. It would be better to spend their time helping the kids learn and improve their lessons than testing and grading. The principles job should be to help the teachers improve their skills and weed out the occasional teacher that refuses to improve. Again the principles know who the problem teachers are.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[ChrisMaple]

Back when automatic transmissions were new, Rolls-Royce decided that they wanted to start building automatic transmissions, so they bought one from GM and took it apart. RR engineers found one part that was rough, so they remachined it to Rolls-Royce standards and reassembled the transmission. It didn't work. Turned out that the roughness was essential to the operation of the transmission.

Lesson: quality is not always what it seems it should be.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[HeckRuler]

Let me boiled that down for you:

Read about Deming.
Test less, save money.

It'll be fine since good teachers know how their kids are doing. Principles will fire bad teachers. They just know.

Sorry, I really don't mean to pick on you. You have some good points in there. It's just that you come off as such a manager. In an empty suit sort of way. For example, you just assume that the principles inherently know who the bad teachers are. And then you trust them to behave accordingly. Suits look after suits. You also just kind of assume that principles can fire people. This isn't your business. There is the teachers union, tenure, seniority, and the parents, and maybe even some of the kids that would be up in arms if the principles fired off whoever they wanted. And there are a lot of ways to get fired besides not teaching well. If you weren't aware, there's a bit of a schism between teachers and administration. Probably because it's a position ripe for abuse.
Additionally, so what if the teachers know who the stupid kids are? What are they supposed to do about it? "Improve quality" is vague to the point of meaningless when it comes to teaching.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[trout007]

Actually I am a mechanical desgin engineer. I have used statistical process control when designing and debugging automated production equipment.

You actually boiled it down wrong. Instead of spending so much time testing the kids, evaluate and help teachers improve their skills.

Re:Comparison to Japanese Cars (Deming)

[HeckRuler]

Ah, swing and a miss. Sorry about that. Swore you were a manager.

It's good that you finally came out and suggested we evaluate the teachers. Because that didn't exist anywhere in the last 3 posts. But kids aren't machine parts and robots. Schools are not a production line. Someone elsewhere in the threads made a good point. Teachers are more like managers then line workers. How do people test managers? Well, by the output of the production line under them. Which means testing the kids.

Which is where we started at.

Bill needs to looking a little deeper

[tiberus]

While finding a way to quantify what makes someone a good teacher is all well and good, IMHO it's looking at a symptom and not what, at least what I consider, one of true challenges (problems) in education... That being which persons should and should not get a degree in education. It's stunning how many people think teaching is easy and teaching younger kids is easier. There are too many cases of hey I flunked "insert course here" I'm gonna major in education.

For one, student teaching needs to occur much earlier in the program and a down-check from a qualified evaluating teacher should result in your being dropped from the program, similar to having to pass your core classes in most majors with a B or above.

In short, it's rather pointless to evaluate teachers and hold them accountable when there simply is no one to replace them with.

Re:Bill needs to looking a little deeper

[tiberus]

AC, I think you missed my point. I was referring to the fact that it is possible for someone seeking an education degree to get a horrible review during their 'student teaching' experience and still graduate with a degree in education. I'd argue that anyone that cannot successfully complete a stint as a student teacher should NOT be granted a degree in education or at least not one that allows them to teach students.

Also teachers do have to know the subject material they are teaching. I have seen too many teachers in the elementary grades that are afraid of math, for example, and as a result don't teach it setting their students up for future failure.
 

Good teachers are only part of it.

[jellomizer]

The problem is finding good teacher to improve education is good in a perfect world but it isn't.
You got suburban schools with most of the parents working at a good middle class job. The students will on the whole do better then the students who live in the slums.
Also you have the overall culture of the school. Where some schools cultures are setup as an education facility where they demand the students to learn things. Then there are other schools who operate more like a day care that just make sure the kids are safe for when they are there, and they use teaching as a way to try to pacify them.
School have a hard time separating the slackers from the people who want to do good but are having problems.
There are parents who put unneeded political pressure on the school to make sure if F+ turns to a D or his C turns into an B+.
There are parents who do nothing and let their child slide.
Discussion about politics, religion is forbidden.
Standardized test make sure every child thinks that everything must have a right answer.

You take a good teacher and put them in a bad environment they will not perform, or they may get fired very quickly.
You take a bad teacher and put them in a good environment the students will learn in spite of them.

I spent my childhood in spite of most of my teachers. I got the message every year from one teacher "There is no way you will be able to make it threw the next level of school" I didn't get this message during Grad school though. Granted I wasn't an A+ student a Solid B+ was my standard. But it let me go by and by no means was I ever in any threat of failing out. The problem is I have a learning disability in writing it is a minor one so it never was considered a disability, however it makes getting my point across difficult.

Teams

[sgt101]

Because, just like in every big company in the world, in teaching it's all down to an individual heroically battling the odds to make a success.

Reward that hero, beat those who stand in the way, throw them to the dogs or the dole queue.

What is most important is that those that do what they are told, and tell you how good things are, are rewarded. And you will retire (in 18mths with $40m in the bank) sure in the knowledge that all will be well forever, or at least until the next fucking lunatic with a year of business school shows up to mess with everything.

And now they have jumped over the cage bars and into schools. Great.

sorry, but its the truth.

[vlm]

When that happens, we believe that districts will be on the cusp of

finding a way to fire all the older more expensive teachers and replace them with fresh college grads at the bottom of the salary scale.

Any number can be gamed, and this once certainly will.

Re:sorry, but its the truth.

[LifesABeach]

From my personal observations, it has already started.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[Fujisawa Sensei]

The people with money are already doing that.

A teacher's work yields results much later

[Hentes]

You can only understand to full extent what a teacher has done when the kids they have taught grow up.

Re:A teacher's work yields results much later

[dkleinsc]

A good example of this: My second grade teacher taught us all how to use different bases. Her effort helps me to this day in reading and understanding octal and hexadecimal without even thinking. And yet using octal was on no standardized test.

(Yes, as Tom Lehrer points out, base 8 is just like base 10, if you're missing 2 fingers)

Re:A teacher's work yields results much later

[openfrog]

Most insightful comment in this thread in the least amount of space. Thank you.

Re:A teacher's work yields results much later

[LifesABeach]

And if one becomes a Bill Gates, or President; that teacher is a god.

Re:A teacher's work yields results much later

[ryanov]

Which is part of the problem with the whole system, actually. My city (Newark) has a lot of problems with crime and poverty. They affect the school systems, meaning people here likely get a poor education or at least do not succeed... and poor areas seem to have even more children because they are not generally taught to be as careful or have parents that can't or won't supervise them as much.

The solution to most of this is improved education... but if you were to tell someone "I'm going to fix this city: we need to figure out how to get these kids a good education," your results will not appear for a decade or more -- long after the political cycle is over and much longer than most attention spans.

Re:A teacher's work yields results much later

[Tooke]

Good point. Interestingly, my dad apparently had the teacher from hell in 3rd grade. He says it's (negatively) affected his whole life, which seemed a little hard to believe at first, but not so much after hearing some stories about her (the teacher). He's a successful engineer now though, so I suppose it didn't affect him too much.

What research can teach education policy makers

[DoctorLard]

Large quantitative HLM studies show that (the variance in) academic success at school is determined more by home life (social capital - upbringing basically, positive self concept) than by any other factor - the school, the teaching or genetics (although they are contributing factors). If governments - or indeed the Bill Gates Foundation - want to raise student results, then the best place to spend the money is to address poverty, domestic violence and healthcare.

Re:What research can teach education policy makers

[fropenn]

Schools address poverty (by preparing students for careers and to develop new products and career fields), domestic violence (by teaching the importance of non-violence) and healthcare (by teaching hygiene, health lifestyle choices, etc.).

I agree that schools can't fix everything, but they play a major role in improving our society.

Re:What research can teach education policy makers

[DoctorLard]

I meant that spending money improving teaching, while laudible, won't be as beneficial as spending money improving the home life of children by addressing poverty, domestic violence and healthcare, independent of schooling. Unfortunately this reality does not match up with the right-wing reality distortion field, so the chances of this boring truth getting any air time in the US is approximately naught.

How to hire effective teachers: pay them.

[Changa_MC]

I taught for 3 years. Unfortunately the low pay and long hours and lack of facilities sucked, so I left. I find IT is much better by all relevant metrics.

School districts in California are so broke they are literally moving the kids into the least badly neglected buildings and letting the other half rot to the ground, while paying the teachers less than before to try to reach 40 students in one room all day.

You spend less on schools now than in the last half a century: less per child per year than you would sending them to 2 months of university classes.

You get what you pay for.

I call bullshit.

[slashfoxi]

Performance reviews in companies are a sham to justify the HR VP's salary. If Bill Gates knew how to motivate productive then I would expect Microsoft's tens of thousands of employees to give OSX and Ubuntu a little stiffer competition. Most of Microsofts productive inovations come from acquiring startups. Startups do know how to motivate, by employing small teams of people who large stakes in the actual success of their project and using natural selection to weed out those who can't or won't succeed.

Re:I call bullshit.

[LifesABeach]

Lets apply this concept to parents, students, teachers and administrators. What could possibly go wrong?

It's not a money problem

[Quila]

As you say, Finland accepts only the best, trains them well and lets them do their thing. It does work.

But the US spends more per child on education than Finland does. We're actually ranked #4 in the world, way ahead of Finland. So saying "more money" without serious reform for quality of education just means throwing more money down a hole where it won't necessarily make anything better.

Re:It's not a money problem

[squidflakes]

We spend more money because of overhead in administration and technology. The right amount and kind of administration is absolutely necessary, as is the right amount and kinds of technology.

Unfortunately, in the US, we seem to have lost sight of the "right" part of that statement and substituted "more".

Re:It's not a money problem

[Quila]

US, #4, by money spent per student.

Re:It's not a money problem

[jawahar]

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peter_Principle says it is opposite

Poor Schools actually get the MOST money

[davek]

Breaking that cycle requires real money to recruit better teachers, and the shitty schools usually have the LEAST money.

I agree with the rest of your post, but you miss the point entirely here. The problem isn't that poor schools aren't being funded. In fact, per-student costs in poorer districts is actually multiple times what it is in more affluent areas (if you want a citation, watch the documentary Cartel and count the luxary cars found in school admin parking lots in the "poor" school districts of NJ). The problem is that a tiny fraction of that function actually makes it into the classroom. Most of it goes to pensions and unions.

measurement vs the market of ideas

[scamper_22]

Measurement is great. However business schools have become obsessed with measurement as they try to emulate science. Wouldn't it be great if you could just have a metric for everything? After all, it makes decisions pretty easy at that point. You just compare numbers.

However, in anything complex, large scale measurement is difficult... if not impossible. Just like your engineering/it job. How do you measure performance? Lines of code is easy... but stupid. Bug fixed/week... well that doesn't account for the person who writes high quality code that doesn't need so many bug fixes... In the end, like teachers... you just 'know' them. Colleagues can recognize them.

At the end of the day you'll spend more time, money, resources trying to have metrics than actually producing things of value.

And don't forget that bad metrics are worse than no metrics.
If you have two groups of software developers.
One doesn't use metrics at all.
Another uses lines of code.
The one with no metrics will produce better results than the one that with bad metrics.

In education, if we have bad metrics, it could produce worse results. teachers might do all kinds of things to get their numbers to look good that would be detrimental to the students.

The way we have solved it as a society has been via the market place of ideas. Everyone is free to try out their ideas. Everyone is free to start a business. They try and entice people to try their goods/service... good companies tend to gain more market share and better ideas thrive.

[insert disclaimer about crony capitalism, monopolies, legal .... all the things that stand in the way of the free market place of ideas... ]

It's far from perfect. let's face it, the best product is often beat by the one that is better marketed, or from a more 'reputable' company. However, no one needs to prove it is perfect. Only that is better than the alternative. The alternative being that you can predetermine success by reports/metrics.

I don't know what the best school policies are. I don't know what makes the best teacher. I don't know how applicable those are to every community and student. I don't know how policies today can change with conditions tomorrow. It's a million variable equation.

I have more trust in the market place of ideas than on bureaucracy to predetermine the winner.

My solution to education is simply to open it up. At its most basic level, let schools do their own thing. Empower local schools do manage their own resources and policies better. Yes, you will get some bad school of course as they would be poorly run. That's a trade off you make for diversity of ideas... some will be bad. You can set a basic set of limits of course, but push more decisions locally.

Going a bit further than that, you could introduce free entry so anyone can setup a school (maybe mandate it be non-profit)... and people just choose the school they want.

Wrong answer

[wcrowe]

Teachers should be cooperating with each other, not competing with each other. This is why business practices should not be applied to schools. Schools are already suffering from this kind of thinking, and the teaching ranks are being filled with sociopaths who could care less about students.

Bill needs to ban Powerpoint

[Illpalazzo]

As someone who is recently started up college again. I have to say one of the biggest factors that separate the good teachers and the blatantly horrible teachers are those that overuse powerpoint. I'm once again being reminded of one the horrible truths of college is the number of 'teachers' whose teaching methods are reading off powerpoint slides being projected in front of the entire class. I can't help but think "I'm paying this person how much to read text for me?" I recall all my favorite teachers from high school to college and I remember the one thing that separated them from the others was how they interacted with the class.

If you interact with your class like a human being, you will see results.

If you blankly read off a presentation that you didn't even write, you will put your class to sleep.

I'm being tortured every week by sitting through 2.5 hours of staring at this screen and thinking "I'll just read the textbook at home". So I can't help but appreciate the irony of Bill Gates wanting to contribute to education. When it was his company that I think helped contribute to the laziness it now practices.

Re:Bill needs to ban Powerpoint

[bloodhawk]

powerpoint is a tool, generally all tools are made to make a job easier, hence why we create them. It can be used effectively, just because the majority use it as a crutch doesn't mean there is something fundamentally wrong with the tool. blame person that is incorrectly using it. do you also try to ban cars because of bad drivers?

um.....

[trum4n]

Theft?

In the words of Steve Jobs...

[TheSync]

Forget Bill Gates, in the words of Steve Jobs:

"what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "

Re:In the words of Steve Jobs...

[unimacs]

Except that it's not really true.

A principle that knows what they're doing and has a supportive administration backing them can get rid of teachers, - union or not. Even if you don't want to go the route of documenting their deficiencies, you can certainly make their job highly unpleasant and move them out of direct teaching roles.

I was sitting at a leadership council meeting at my son's public school a few years ago during a time when they were negotiating another teachers' contract with the district. One of the parents started talking about the difficulty that unions created in terms of retaining the best and getting rid of the worst.

The principle quietly listened and then said: "Believe me when I say, any teacher than I don't want here will not last." Then he turned to the teachers in the room, - one of which was a union steward. "Do any of the staff here have any doubts about that?". They all shook their heads.

Do unions make it more difficult than it probably should be? Very possible. But you don't want a situation where a bad principle can fire anybody he/she sees as a trouble maker either.

California pays teachers the most

[Quila]

Highest average pay in the country, yet very low in the education rankings. It mainly goes by seniority, so if you taught for only three years you were entry-level.

Many of those teachers protesting in Wisconsin were making well over $80,000 per year, and Wisconsin is only in the middle for teacher pay. The average California pay is over $60,000.

Re:California pays teachers the most

[ryanov]

So what?

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[squidflakes]

Get the government out of the way? Ok, so we'll ensure that every school in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Utah, and Texas teach that God snapped his fingers and created man, and that he really intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation, and only Republicans are real people. Anyone who disagrees obviously hates their mothers, America, and apple pie. Oh, also they are dirty communist terrorist nazi fag junkies so don't forget to bring your assault rifle to gun class little Jimmy!

I advise you get on this right away, and encourage you to live in the paradise you helped create.

Instant Fail

[FlyingGuy]

They will try, but this will fail and here is why:

Keep in mind I have a 5th grade boy in Oakland Ca Public School.

• Teachers are to the whims of politicians in the form of:
• • Local School Boards
  • State School Boards
  • Local Curriculum Committees
  • State Curriculum Committees
  • Local text book Committees
  • State text book Committees
• Teachers have little control over class size
• Teachers have little control over what students are in their class
• Teachers have little control over class budgets
• Teachers have little or no control over what students are can be taught

• • A principal can no longer expel a student, that decision has to be made by a committee and let me tell you that is one of the hardest things to get done.

    You could have Jaime Escalante and if you have a classroom full of kids that have no respect for teachers and authority it is a lose lose for the teachers. I have seen damn fine teachers at my sons school. Imaginative, innovative, young men and women simply just leave because they were not being allowed to teach outside the box since it was not in line with the Federal / State / Local "guidelines" ( read that as mandates ) even though they could show that their methods were working in relation to test scores and the like.

    The other problem is parents. Parents tend to come in a few flavors:

    • Very involved - These are parents that are actively involved with their child's education. They sit and do homework with them, they teach at home, they raise their kids to respect both teachers and authority and at the same time to think outside the box. Most of these are families with a stay at home parent who aslo gets involved with the school and volunteers.
    • Involved as much as they can be - These are parents who both work long hours and barely have enough energy to go over the homework with their kid to make sure it is mostly correct. These parents are so exhausted by the time they get home it is all they can do to get a good healthy meal on the table, make sure the kid gets to bed at a reasonable hour and up and fed, ready for school the next day.
    • Not involved, and sadly these seem to be the vast majority of the parents. They never even review or go over their kids work, allow massive screen time and generally get surprised and pissed off when they discover little Johnny cant read and go screaming at the schools, teachers, principals, school boards, etc.

    Education starts at home not at the local school house. The school is there to build on what kids should start learning at home. My son is evaluated twice a year once at the local and once at the state level and my wife and I see exactly where is he is on math, english and science and then we act accordingly. Are we a couple of standard deviations from the mean as far as parental involvement in our child's education? Yeah probably but we are nothing particularly special. We just want our kid to have the best start we and the public school system can give him. We have parent teacher conferences more often then the scheduled ones. Our son's teacher knows, because we have said it explicitly to her, that if our kid gets out of line she is free to nail his little ass for it. If his work in class falls off then we want to know it well before the grading period so we can kick his little butt a bit and start clamping down on privileges AND start spending more time with flashcards, more reading time with him etc. then we already do.

    Teachers who are left to try and educate children completely on their own with parents that just don't get involved will fail, that is a given. Why, well because when they have 30+ kids in a classroom and they have to deal with kids that are disruptive and they cannot eject them and a hundred different factors that they have had control over taken from them because there are 348 committees all trying to tell them ho

Easy answer for that.

[khasim]

In many cases, two people doing things that look on the outside to be very similar can lead to wildly divergent results.

That's because the variables also include the people being "managed" and the corporate culture.

How often have people here completed a project DESPITE the manager's attempts to "manage" said project and people?

The upshot of it is that the best managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and are successful, while the worst managers are unique snowflakes who follow their own rules and aren't successful

Pretty much that. But can the successful manager take over the spot of the unsuccessful manager and achieve the same results?

I think Scott Adams said it best about management and statistics. Statistically, SOME average (or even bad) managers will "succeed" just by happening to be in the right place at the right time.

Take a hundred pennies. Toss them into the air. The ones that come up "heads" have "won".
Discard the others. Repeat.
Some will come up heads again! Discard the others. Repeat.
Wow! Some pennies are super achievers. They've come up heads THREE TIMES! Discard the others. Repeat.
Now you have the elite pennies. You know that these pennies will "win" no matter what the circumstances. Discard the others. Repeat.
The pennies that come up heads this time are the ultra-super-elite pennies. Whatever these pennies do, you should emulate. These pennies really know the situation and are capable of adapting to changing circumstances.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Firmly disagree

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

We need more reviews, and more experimentation. I've had an idea that's been tickling in the back of my mind; call it an aggressive experiment in education.

Take some number, N. Let's say 10 for each state in the nation. Put aside $1,000,000 for each N. Hopefully it won't be necessary to adjust for inflation, but put that idea aside for now.

Choose N social security numbers (or another unique ID), entirely at random, from the people born in the past year. Put them in a safe without looking at them. Announce the intent and details of this program (see below) to schools that could possibly be affected, if you like. If you don't, there's no reason you couldn't do the following now with people born in the past.

In 25 years (A complete public education plus, if they're lucky enough, a college education, and either some work towards a higher degree or some time in business), pull the numbers out of the safe, find those N people, and offer them the following deal:

Right now, before anything else happens, you make a documentary about their life--about all the people that influenced them and about their entire education, from pre-school to current day. When all that documentation and research is done, give them the $1 Million. Tell them to start a business, project, whatever with it--but don't force them. Instead, watch the money. See if they spend it on business, on hookers, on charity, on family. Reconvene and finish the documentary in a few years, or after the initial seed money runs out.

There are three fundamental, interesting things you can learn with this sort of experiment:
* The state of the school system given a truly random sampling of students (even if it is very small)
* The effect of the school system on the student's life, along with other environmental factors, and how it shaped their future (as indicated by how they spend the money)
* If you announced the program, how that affected the way teachers viewed that particular year of students. For example, I can imagine that some teachers might refuse to give up on problem students, or work them harder, simply because they might be the lucky ones. Also, I can imagine school administrators forcing that sort of attitude, or punishing problem children more, or... who knows.

Cons: Well, it does cost $1M per child, plus the cost to do the documentary. It's also not well-controlled. But I think it would be fascinating. I want to see it happen, just to see the data, just to see someone's history right at this moment, and then watch them move on into the future with renewed purpose and a grand opportunity.

Re:Firmly disagree

[Nefarious Wheel]

Yes -- but could we get the 1% to fund it? They have all the money now.

Re:Firmly disagree

[wisty]

The con - it's useless.

However, you are right that there needs to be more randomized, long term experiments. At the moment, there's short-term optimizations (what grade 6 methodology will get Johnny to do his grade 6 exam better?), and unrandomized longitudinal stuff.

Exactly how is money going to help?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a teacher at quite an unusual educational institution that pays teachers 5 times the average salary. That lets it be really, really picky about who should be teaching here, and a lot of people apply who could otherwise have very successful carreers elsewhere.

Trust me, with the type of talent you can attract with good wages, our students get amazing results.

Re:Exactly how is money going to help?

[Fujisawa Sensei]

First off, when schools are asking for more money, first they spend it on administrator salaries, because they need talent to manage the system (See comment below). That's followed by whiz-bang gadgets, because they need something to show for that money. Next comes things like building maintenance; because they spend jack-and-shit on it until the poor kids roof starts leaking. Lastly it goes into teacher's salaries. Then if there's anything left, classroom supplies.

But money doesn't attract talent; it attracts bullshit artists. Just look at the overpaid fucks running Corporate America.

That isn't to say that you aren't an outstanding teacher, but I would guess that there are other mechanisms in place to help you along that most teachers hired off the street don't have access to.

Schools are obsolete and should declare bankruptcy

[Paul Fernhout]

http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

What Does "Good Teacher" Mean?

[jasnw]

Any effort like this is doomed to failure if there's no agreement on what "good" means. Does it mean all the teacher's students pass the standardized tests? Or maybe all the teacher's students stay out of jail all year? Perhaps all the teacher's students earn (your favorite percentage here) more than other teacher's students over the next 50 years? We can't even agree what the schools are supposed to impart on the poor souls that pass through them, so how are we to determine what a good teacher is?

That aside, I think everyone will agree that they could tell you which of their teachers were "good" in the context of their coming-of-age passage through the school system, and which were "bad" in some way (or all ways). However, if we wrote down why we thought a particular teach was "good" or "bad" (or perhaps more precisely "!good"), I suspect that we'd see a very wide range of criteria. This will end up as "what the Gates Foundation thinks good teachers are" more than anything, and will be only a source of more battles between the various stakeholders in teaching our kids (district management, teachers, unions, parents, politicians, etc).

The bottom line is that we need to decide just exactly what it is we want the schools to be doing for our society. If what we want is to produce fodder for the corporate engine, that needs one type of teacher. If we want to produce fully-functioning citizens of a free society who are able to think for themselves and sort out the difference between facts and bullshit, that requires quite a different skill-set in the teachers. Answer this question first, and the rest can follow. Ignore this question, and we'll never agree on what a "good" teacher really is.

In related news ....

[devleopard]

The recent accomplishments of the Steve Jobs Foundation and the Richard M. Stallman Foundation listed below:

Re:In related news ....

[Paul Fernhout]

Their accomplishments for humanity are in their actual work...

Re:In related news ....

[kiddygrinder]

that's not a really fair comparison, rms isn't richer than god.

Re:In related news ....

[mjwx]

Their accomplishments for humanity are in their actual work...

So that covers RMS....

What about Steve Jobs? Surely that cult of his counts for something (not the betterment of man kind but it must count for something).

re: Memorizing answers

[sconeu]

Yes, in most cases, memorizing and rote is the wrong way to go about things... AT A HIGHER LEVEL.

At the elementary school level, in math, for example, rote learning is, IMO, the only way to teach the basics. Kids *need* to know the multiplication tables by heart. When my daughters were learning them, we'd drill... until they could answer anything in the 1-12 table without thinking. To do any sort of advanced math -- and by advanced, I mean basic arithmetic with more than 1 digit, or anything above basic arithmetic -- you NEED to "just know" the answer to the single digit multiplication tables.

On the other hand, the hard sciences, or the social sciences, even at the entry level, are much less amenable to rote, even though that's how they teach many things.

And at the secondary level, schools tend to use shitty textbooks. See Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think, for a (possibly dated, but I doubt it) view of how textbook approval works.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[Paul Fernhout]

"There is no way for the parent to know if issues in the classroom are from poor learning on the child's side or poor teaching on the teacher's side."

Or just because the whole idea of compulsory school is broken:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html (A bit too business focused though and expands school instead of contracts it)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Maybe he should start at home

[kiddygrinder]

MS has a big shitty training system, maybe billy can start by making that suck less.

Answer? 42...

[laughing rabbit]

'We have all known terrific teachers,' write the Gates. 'But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.'

What makes them outstanding is the same thing that makes any working person outstanding when faced with a miserable job. They find a way to not be miserable and enjoy what they are doing so that they can do it well.

Why was that so hard?

Re:background ?

[iluvcapra]

So what, exactly, are Bill's credentials to talk about education?

He's am entrepreneur who's made more money than the median pizza chain CEO. In the United States, that's what passes for civic leader and elite opinionmaker.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[hexghost]

Wow, talk about some crazy links there. Kids are being forced to get dangerous medications? Really?

They sort of DO know...

[matthewv789]

At least some people do know what makes a teacher effective (or claim to). While it's distressingly unknown in the wider education community, the research I'd heard of essentially boiled down to this: About 50% of overall student achievement could be attributed to "classroom management"; that is, the teacher's ability to keep the students engaged, involved, paying attention, and doing what the teacher wants them to be doing at any given moment. And there are a number of specific skills (some might call them "tricks"), which can be taught, that can help teachers get better at doing that.

The teacher does need to know *enough* about the subject to not be leading the students astray, confusing them, be able to answer questions, etc. But beyond that (and perhaps more than that), it's classroom management that really matters.

Re:Headline: Schools Respond to Gates Suggestions

[hedwards]

It's perfectly acceptable English even if somewhat informal.

I realize that it's common for trolls around here to gripe about that sort of thing, but language variety is real and failing to teach students about it is almost as egregious as not teaching them any grammar at all.

How many kids does Bill Gate have?

[doesnothingwell]

I'm a parent and throwing Phds / politicians at the problem is how it got fudged up in the first place.

The current administration of schools is a bigger problem, we have them all chasing test scores.

Tell Mr. Gates to find a cure for rampant greed, the top %1 have taken enough already.

What Business Can Teach Schools

[tunapez]

How to speak without saying a single thing

How not to share and take everything for yourself

How to increase margins to infinity in a finite world

How to backstab and claw to the next rung of the ladder

How to lobby for laws to make your illegal activities magically no longer illegal

I'm just spitballing here... everything I learned in kindergarten is a lie.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[Paul Fernhout]

Legally, it may not be force. But is pretty much the social equivalent:
http://familyrightsassociation.com/bin/white_papers-articles/drugging_our_children/
"It should be noted that itâ(TM)s not just elementary and high schools that seem to need a drug to help them run smoothly, but preschools and day care centers also. As writer Robyn Suriano recently pointed out in the Orlando Sentinel,[xxvii] âoeThe drug [Ritalin] reached its heyday in the 1990s, after more children started attending day care. In a preschool, kids must follow instructions and behave just like older children in classrooms. Rambunctious ones are not easily tolerated in these surroundings, where workers must watch many children.â This is not to say that day care centers are necessarily bad, but there are a lot of inadequately staffed and equipped ones. These trap preschoolers in confining, boring situations for 10 hours a day and then complain when they act like the active, inquisitive, and needy young creatures that children just barely out of babyhood normally are. That drugs are used to remedy this situation is unconscionable, especially considering that Ritalinâ(TM)s label warns that the drug is only for those aged 6 and over. But âoeoff-labelâ prescription is legal, and itâ(TM)s happening. As a Wall Street Journal article reported,[xxviii] the use of prescription drugs to control toddlersâ(TM) behavior has increased dramatically in the past decade."

Why was a bill like this needed and sabotaged:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=21803

Why is this so common?
http://www.greatschools.org/special-education/other-disorders/1289-what-do-i-do-when-a-teacher-says-my-child-needs-meds.gs
"My daughter gets in trouble at school. The teacher says she is in high speed all the time, doesn't watch where she is going, knocks things over or trips over stuff. Her teacher says that she doesn't pay attention to her work, she does it fast all the time and it ends up messy. The teacher would like me to put her on medication to slow her down, but I refuse. I have told her teacher that I give her worksheets and reading to do at home, and she will sit down and do the homework, and does a fine job. What do you suggest I do?"

Much of this is just kids being kids, kids being vitamin D deficient (from being indoors so much), and kids eating junk food.

And what the banking business can teach schools...

[ATMAvatar]

...is that every kid who fails a test should have the grade thrown out and immediately get an A, along with some extra credit for effort on the next assignment.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[ChrisMaple]

Don't you see that you've just contradicted your own argument? There is no entity except the government that can force theistic education in all schools.

Government force has increasingly homogenized education, and that's very bad. The large part of the vast variety of culture is being lost, and if what you value isn't already gone, it will be soon.

mod parent up

[bussdriver]

Not to mention when you quantify something using a system (no matter how complex) people will evolve hacks for that system -- perhaps you've heard of hacking of metrics? aka "juking the stats" so any programmed system for management of humans is going to fail. All one can do is have good management staff; which is something business people haven't been figuring out in the "real world...." Plus education is NOT like anything else, when will people STOP likening it to everything else.

ALSO, just because you've been to the dentist doesn't mean you are a dentist or are fit to critique them. A professional educated and experienced educator has to put up with all kinds of crap questioning them; in a field that will NEVER be well understood until we figure out the human brain.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[SecurityGuy]

Your mileage may vary. I complained on a number of occasions that a particular teacher was doing a poor job. That teacher won "teacher of the year".

Re:Gates doesn't know, don't ask him

[ChrisMaple]

You need good, trained teachers.

That must be why homeschooling by parents with neither training nor experience in teaching do so poorly...Oh, wait, no, they do very well indeed.

Re:background ?

[Tom]

Well, the question is: Does he?

From his remarks, I don't see any actual research results. Applying what works in one field to another is not automatically a recipe for success. Try applying your Counterstrike skills to your love life...

There is certainly a lot that can be improved in education. As I said, I know people in the field, people who have degrees in the subject. Their feedback is that a lack of funding and resources in general is main problem #1, combined with a huge increase of responsibilities and demands on teachers, because parents increasingly outsource the whole "raising a child" thing. Teachers aren't expected to just teach, they also need to cover a lot of bases that parents used to. That's problem #2.
These two issues combined - more and more complex work with fewer resources - results in a very predictable outcome.

Making the teachers better certainly is a good idea. But if you want to improve education it's like buying a new graphics card when your problem really is that you don't have enough RAM.

Unions protect teachers from nutty parents

[fantomas]

Teachers unions protect teachers from nutty parents.... A few years ago a friend of mine, a dedicated teacher, had to pull apart two 10 year olds who were fighting. One parent walked in as he's trying to separate these boys and promptly accuses my friend of assaulting their child. My friend ends up in court, is suspended from work, is facing losing their job, being banned from their profession that they've gone to college to be qualified in, to be publicly denounced as violent: all because a parent is a complete idiot and thinks their little thug is all sweetness and light and butter won't melt in their mouth.

I don't know how it works in your country, but in my country (UK) sometimes the person in the right doesn't win, it's the person who can afford the best lawyer, can spend the most money. My poor friend was terrified. Luckily, he belongs to the union, so they could get a lawyer in on his behalf, fight his case. He was completely proved innocent. Idiot parents nearly destroyed his life but were proved totally wrong. The other parents, incidently, had apologised to him as soon as they found out their kid had been in a fight that the teacher had had to break up, and had disciplined their child.

Unions protect teachers from parents who believe the teachers are always in the wrong and that butter won't melt in the mouth of their little darling children. You want good teachers to work in run down areas? Protect teachers from crazy parents for a start, let them get on with teaching and ensuring order in their classrooms.

Surprised that different teachers get paid different amounts in different schools in your country - over here there is a national pay scale.

This is laughable

[plopez]

First off what can Gates really teach us? Start with daddy's money, "acquaire" technology from public sources and private companies, use patents and lawsuits to build a business, starve local schools of revenue by getting tax breaks for his company, send the labor forces overseas, and give you and your friends bonuses. Oh yeah, give a few scraps off of you table at the end for charity.

Second, running a business is not like running a school. In a school you are teaching children as a public service as a public institution. That is different than running a private company making "widgets" for a profit. They don't equate. The laws are different, local control is different, the goals are different.

Why do we think people with a business background can do this? The current economic crisis is enough to make us wonder if business leaders can get anything right.
Here's what I see a business solution would look like: offshore teachers to India, make the students audition for placement, and give bonuses
  to the school board and the administration.

Cynical? Yes I am and based on personal experience.

Re:Gates doesn't know, don't ask him

[plopez]

reference please.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[pnutjam]

Everybody wants their kids lives to be better then theirs, since our economic stagnation insures they won't have a better adulthood, they want them to have a better childhood and the kids run roughshod over their friend/parent.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[ByOhTek]

And don't forget - bad parenting causing the child to be encouraged NOT to learn. I've seen that a lot with other students when I was in grade school.

Mind you, these parents are less likely to go to a PTC for any purpose other than to yell at someone.

Reviews are bogus legal CYA

[Shotgun]

"Most workplaces build a system to evaluate worker performance, provide feedback that yields information employees can use to improve, and then hold employees accountable for results."

Bullshit.

Most workplaces build a system that gives the facade of evaluating worker performance, with the intent of providing a claim of unbiased reviews for legal defense against discrimination lawsuits. Every single one I've ever encountered boils down to stating a managers opinion using an official scale. They generally revolve around collecting reviews from co-workers that are scientifically combined in a witch's brew during the secret conclave of managers, and the employee's rating is spit out the other end.

Last year, the manager's secret conclave was held before the co-worker reviews were even collected. I got a low rating for having a "self effacing sense of humor" (The dumb asses were actually fool enough to write that in the report.)

As always, and as it is with teachers, reviews always boil down to popularity contests.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[BigDogCH]

"There is no entity except the government that can force theistic education in all schools."

Sorry, but this has to be the most unreasonable line I have read on slashdot today. It was a good debate, but you just lost. Without the fed forcing schools to do their job, we would have a laughing stock of an education system. We already have entire states trying to add bible crap to the science classroom. With that said, we do need school and teacher accountability......but we need this to come from the fed. If the states do it, this country is screwed. Travel to some of these states and talk to the members of the school board about what they think their school should teach........then come back.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[BigDogCH]

Not trying to be mean, but does this maybe imply that the teacher was not the problem (maybe not in your case, but other cases surely). Every teacher, even the best, have parents and students that they do not work well with. Reality. I agree, we need a review system for teachers.....just playing devils advocate here.

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[monkyyy]

my childhood can prove that emotional scaring medications are forced in a "do it or ur child will likely fail at life, and if ur child refuses more and more each passing day, its not the meds are bad, its just the child doesnt know better" way

Re:Teachers already have performance reviews

[Paul Fernhout]

Sad to read that (even if it agrees).

You might find this of interest, btw, to the extent that stuff like ADHD is a real thing and related to diet (food additives, lack of omega 3s, lack of vitamin D and iodine, lack of phytonutrients, too much sugar, and so on): http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/adhd-dr-fuhrmans-antiadhd-plan.html
"Many families who have adopted my diet of nutritional excellence, combined with judicious use of nutritional supplements, report that they begin to see improvement in as little as three months. Keep in mind, this nutritional approach to ADHD does not magically make the problem disappear overnight; it could take six months to observe a significant change in behavior. The chief factor that indicates a successful outcome is the entire familyâ(TM)s willingness and desire to adopt a new healthy eating style for the benefit of all members. The child with the ADHD problem is never singled out as the only one required to eat healthy. In fact, I encourage the children to take responsibility in helping the parents to eat healthy, too. This prescription calls for nutritional excellence for the entire family. When families choose to work as a unit to improve the childâ(TM)s emotional environment and nutrition simultaneously, it is rare that psychostimulant medications are necessary."

More on that theme:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/mental-health-and-learning-disorders/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/

And general on physical and mental health issues:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2478380&cid=37734208

All the best in making the most of the hand you've been dealt in life.