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NYC To Release Teacher Evaluation Data Over Union Protests
langelgjm writes "Bringing a lengthy legal battle to a close, New York City's Department of Education will today release detailed evaluation reports on individual English and math teachers as a result of a request under public information laws. The city's teachers union has responded with full page ads (PDF) decrying the methodology used in the evaluations. The court's decision attempts to balance the public interest in this data against the rights of individual teachers. Across the country, a large number of states are moving to evaluate teachers based on student performance in an attempt to raise student achievement in the U.S."
I went thru the public skool sistum.
There is nothing like the court of public opinion to prosecute bad teachers... Nothing like it at all. /sarcasm
Student performance is obviously important, but is the performance measurement metric just as transparent as these evals are going to be? Who is measuring the performance (and lack of bias) on the part of the evaluators and those who decide what tests to apply, when, and how much they will be weighted? There is a lot more to learning than passing a test.
Personally, I think it would be a good thing to make teachers (and a lot of other workers in a lot of other industries) pay based on their results in the form of either salary + commission or in some instances Rewards Only Work Environments (ROWE). If teachers are their to teach, then their Key Results Area is getting students to learn. The problem comes in finding a fair and effective measure for how much a student learns during the course, without getting instances of teaching to the test. I'm sure there is way to do it right, but I think it will take some trial and error to hone such a system.
*there
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I've taught in the military, public schools, and private industry. As a teacher, I know that evaluations of my technique can help me hone my skills and become more effective. The public teachers in NYC should take the critique and act upon it to make them better at their jobs.
aka Mediocrity-R-Us
Rather than focus on actual learning, teachers will be tempted to just focus on getting their students pass various tests, going as far as actively cheating or encouraging/enabling students to do so.
And here I thought everyone read Freakonomics...
I think the job performance of any public employee should be public information as long as it doesn't included protected information such as health (which it shouldn't). The union has every right to protest evaluation methods, but then they should work on changing the methods - not hiding the information.
Let's evaluate the parents using the same criterion.
While I detest the notion that a report of that sort would be kept secret from the people who are paying for, and entrusting their children to, those being reported on, I would be quite interested to know whether the evaluations are actually worthwhile, useless, or even worse than useless.
As with the story about Australia pruning academics who didn't push papers fast enough that we discussed yesterday, there are a lot of bad ways to measure teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, these include many of the easy ones and many of the popular ones.
Teachers aren't mystically unquantifiable flowers; but in a world where people can, with a straight face, propose 'Hey, just tot up their students' scores on the standardized test! Now you know which teachers are good!' without any sort of correction for such minor matters as 'student demographics' it is hard to be uniformly optimistic about teacher evaluations...
The other, broader, consideration is whether the teachers should feel justified in complaining about the level of public scrutiny that they are being subjected to relative to other state functionaries in positions of trust and authority... While there is a good argument to be made that teachers' job performance is a matter of public importance, I wonder if you could get a detailed evaluation of a NYC cop's record as easily as you could an NYC English teacher?
Before the rants start about over-entitled public employees I think it's worth thinking this situation through. How many people in the IT field would want their performance, as measured by some random measurement (such as the ever popular Lines-of-Code-per-Hour), published by their employer? For their clients and future employers and clients to see?
There are major problems with this approach. It gives even stronger incentives for the teachers to try to game the system, which is generally detrimental to the quality of teaching. It frequently punishes teachers working in badly run schools, while it rewards teachers for working in well run schools (as their performance will in most cases be better when they work in a well functioning school). In addition to this the statistics are rather jiffy...
There are much better ways to improve the educational system than this... Such as for example paying teachers a decent salary. The day an average teacher earns as much an average engineer you will start to huge improvements in your educational system. Of course it will take 20 years before that approach starts to really pay off, in having a better educated workforce.
On the other hand, who am I to offer advice on the American educational system? It offers us engineers in northern Europe a great competitive advantage. Please keep destroying it! ;)
"decrying the methodology used in the evaluations" loose translation: "we don't like it because it's not rigged to make us look good". Cry me a river. Most of the rest of us in the corporate world have regular evaluations, sometimes against unrealistic metrics and could lose our job based on the results. Welcome to the real world where you have to prove you're worth retaining. I can't blame it on the parents, my boss, my coworkers, the weather, lack of funding. Just be glad you can't be outsourced. yet.
Makes you wonder just how bad the results are if there's this much fuss from the union.
and start holding parents accountable. Oh, wait the culture of victimization says we have to blame somebody... The teachers, no the unions - If your kid sucks in school it is because you are a shitty parent, I know several people that went to Cleveland public schools and went on the get college educations and do well in the world, yeah - I am sure they had some good teachers some bad ones and everything in between but you know what they did have for sure? They had parents who expected and demanded no less they became educated and made something of themselves.
I find it amusing so many people think that the only way to improve student performance is to critique the teachers. How come we don't make the actual student's data public? How come we don't create a list of parents whose children failed these tests? If we're going to determine teacher salaries by student achievement, why not asses fines to parents whose child doesn't do well?
Of course, those are mostly rhetorical questions. The answer to all of them is because, "then people won't vote for me". If you want to improve student achievement in school, start with the parents. A teacher sees a high school student an average of 1 hour a day, or 5 hours a week. A parent (theoretically) sees their child 16 hours a day, or 80 hours Monday-Friday.
Want to improve student achievement on tests? Critique the parents instead.
Full disclosure - I am a teacher at a public middle school in an area with a 90% free and reduced lunch rate, high unemployment and 85% poor minority.
The problem is really how you evaluate teachers and schools, there are so many ways to take data and interpret that data. Do you give a standardized test and grade every student exactly the same and base a teacher’s performance off of the pass/fail ratio? If so, those teachers in buildings like mine which have traditionally low performing students will look bad. The cynics will say that it shouldn’t matter but I have many students who come to me from foreign countries who have had little to no formal education and do not speak English. Even after a few years in the United States their English is many time not proficient enough to pass a formal exam. The teachers in my building do a great job but I see more and more good teachers leaving our building for “better” students because the pressure is so high teaching traditionally low performing students and they don’t like being called a bad teacher when in fact they work their tails off to get the results they do.
Do you base a teacher’s performance off of the progress made by students while in that teacher’s classroom? Take a baseline score and see how they progress through the year. Critics of this method will argue that a failing grade is a failing grade no matter how much progress the students have made.
We have created a system in the US in which every child is treated exactly the same, assumed to be that same and assumed to be able to meet the exact same “high” standards. The realist among us realizes that this is far from the case. Because of this attitude that everyone is the same our high achieving students are being cheated because we teachers spend the majority of our time trying desperately to bring the low end up and ignore the high end while those in the middle are coasting along. We refuse as a nation to serve each student in the way they should be served. The trend in education today is to mix all students together in a classroom and this creates a nearly impossible scenario for a teacher who may have over thirty kids in a classroom (I know physics instructors in our district with over 40) in which they have to serve all levels of students at once.
I will step off my soapbox now.
Take a method from real estate and use comparable on evals. Let's compare teachers from similar student demographics and compare the results. This way teachers on poorer districts aren't automatically rated down.
That's not the point he was making. Try again.
So you are hypothesizing that citations do not improve the quality of internet discussions.
Could you cite an example please?
I'm not sure if releasing the information publicly is particularly important. In just about any other profession, your evals are private. The real difference is that it's relatively easy to terminate you if the eval is poor. Management also has the flexibility to not promote you, or pay you less than others based on the eval.
There is no such thing, IMHO, as a perfectly scientific eval. There will always be some subjectivity, some human factor.
Making the evals fair and public doesn't matter. Making them ACTIONABLE does. I suspect that the union might have successfully shifted the focus from the real issue. Again.
Rating teachers based on student performance is probably more accurate than rating students. The statistical base is larger.
Although the pros and cons of this subject will be argued forever, one likely result of making teachers' lives even more difficult will be a mass exodus from the profession. Given that schools are already understaffed and education in the US is under huge stress from numerous social, religious, and funding problems, is this really a good idea?
Teaching is a pretty dreadful profession to be in, horribly underpaid, tied up in regulations, at the mercy of religious nutjobs, an almost impossible task in a TV age that discourages study and encourages getting out of school for socializing and sex. Pupils don't wish to learn, and when they don't, the teachers are blamed. Parents almost never recognize that it is they who are most to blame for their child not learning.
It's a very bad situation for the country, and it's not going to improve by whipping the teachers because the main hindrance to teaching quality isn't the teachers themselves but the overall situation. Try being one for a day, you'll be running for the hills within hours.
If teachers are [there] to teach, then their Key Results Area is getting students to learn.
Would would a rewards-only work environment do for teachers who end up getting stuck with students with learning disabilities?
There are at least 3 issues of note in this: how do you measure the performance of a teacher, how do you measure the performance of a system of education, and how do you improve educational outcomes. We want to do the third, but we seem to frequently get confused between individual teacher performance and systemic performance.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
If we are truly thinking of the children, let's consider the consequences of this release. The recent shift towards student performance metrics rely on standardized testing. Teachers typically must demonstrate improved test scores in order to received satisfactory marks during their review. If we make these reviews public, what would necessarily be the result?
1) More teaching to the test. Outside of the obvious irony concerning transparency and standardized testing, what does this mean for your child? It means less innovative thinking, less creativity and less time spent on non-tested subjects (music, science and even social studies).
2) Further restriction of a teacher's autonomy. Imagine being put in a room with thirty-odd children from an underprivleged background. Now imagine that instead of being able to reach out to these kids, you're instead worried about how many (C)s are bubbled in a scantron sheet. Real education is not a science as much as its an art. Teachers could reach out to address the real problems -- not enough support at home, little social incentive to do work, curbed expectations of the future -- or they can teach your kids to be drones. Your choice.
3) Increased socio-economic segregation in schools. Focusing on narrow metrics like test scores will increase pressure on underfunded districts to preform. However, if the resources are constant, what will most likely change? Will the district a) make difficult choices to really improve the educational integrity of their schools or b) sweep the issue under the rug by either cheating or fudging the numbers. If you answered (A), I would refer you to the NOLA school districts, post-Katrina. Public schools have been ravaged by the charter system there. Why? Because charter schools segregate underprivledged students into the public school system. Unsurprisingly, charter schools are more white and come from higher socio-economic backgrounds.
As a parting shot, I'd like to challenge anyone who thinks this is a good idea with releasing their own personnel reviews, especially if you've worked in customer service. If you have, you must already understand the contradiction between the reality of work and supposedly objective metrics from above.
Yes, overall education is VERY dependent on homelife, but in the same school you can easily see which teachers are making a difference and which are not, even if overall the students are good or bad.
we don't see individual job evals for IT personnel, police, air traffic controllers, attorneys, scientists, doctors. This is a political tactic, not transparency.
You obviously didnt read the study. The teachers were ranked based upon the change in students per year, not absolute scores. Seriously. read something before you shit all over it.
I went so far as to get a provisional teaching certificate in my local high school district; my starting salary, full-time, even in a "high demand" STEM field, was $26K/year, less than half of what I was making as a software engineer at the time. (And I wouldn't be working full-time initially -- only way in the door is subbing, and hoping something opens up). To put that in perspective, my mortgage plus utilities (in central Florida) run me about $18K/yr, leaving $6K for taxes, food, transportation, clothing, oh, and classroom supplies that the district can't pay for either.
It's one thing to take a salary hit to do soemthing you love; but quite frankly I love a roof over my head and (healthy) food on my table even more.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
[Citation Required]
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Meh, everyone is out there just playing CYA. It's amazing that there are some dedicated teachers around making things work in spite of all the hurdles and accompanying low morale.
What would be really cool (and probably more effective) is if administrators were to start tracking metrics on services they should be providing to their staff, like "days gone by without a working copier" and "resources provided vs. resources requested" and stuff. Instead the teaching staff is kinda treated like students... we don't care about you, just deal with it yourself and see how you turn out. Which is a bit apropos for public education... after all, you can't fire students, so what's the point of fostering a culture where you can fire teachers? Just make the whole experience a weed-out drop-out environment :-P (well except that the students can eventually survive and leave for something better :P )
-- I support public education; I married a teacher
Evaluate teachers based on their knowledge of their subject and their knowledge of how to educate. It isn't perfect, but they should at least be competent in these areas.
What "right" does a teacher have to keep their employment evauations secret? Please.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of ridiculous things they *do* have a "right" to:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2406704/How-To-Fire-An-Incompetent-Teacher
This will NOT be a way to improve instruction. Ultimately, this will be a way to violate an umpteen number of privacy laws. I smell a lawsuit coming which will end of further detracting from the goals at hand. Improving instructtion begins with improving the quality of instructional material available to the teacher and deeper analysis of "teaching teachers how to teach." The entire model is broken. It is not only a matter of a teacher learning to address the needs of multiple learning styles, but a learning how to motivate and inspire without using fear of failure. A teacher that can inspire a student to learn is far more effective because the student will then want to learn. A student that genuinely wants to learn will create that opportunity and realize it.
No. Bitching about teachers is just fine, they are sometimes *part* of the problem. Either directly through their performance or through their union whose leadership they choose.
You are correct about parents sometimes being part of the problem, that students are also sometimes part of the problem and that administrators are sometimes part of the problem. The teachers are blameless meme is just as false as the victimization meme. Teachers could support transforming their union from an organization that is a corrupt and politicized self serving machine into an organization that is the guardian of their craft, like the unions of old that not only looked after their members interests but policed their members by ensuring training and quality standard and ejecting those whose could not perform to the high standard of the union.
Basing teacher 'performance' on student grades and exam scores is very open to corruption and manipulation. For one, students who do not like their teacher may purposefully underperform in an attempt to get rid of what is actually a good teacher. Such evaluations also unfairly give the view of a good teacher who works with poor performing students, even if the students improved significantly. There have also been many instances of teachers, principals, and even school districts who cheat the system by giving students a leg up on what is on the actual exams. How can we, as parents and tax payers, allows this to be the sole method of determining a teacher's performance? So what could be done? That is the hard part. Performance reviews are always a subjective matter, which is part of the reason why they were never meant to be seen by the public. In my opinion, school/district/government administrators should have more ability to actually observe performance without the teacher knowing they are being observed. But if test scores continue to become the focus of government and public scorn towards teachers, then an independent review board should be used to assess the reviews in order to incorporate real-life situations into the final assessment.
Okay, so we can identify the teachers doing poorly (by this metric) and chase them from the profession by peer and social pressure. Great. So now where is the untapped well of expert teachers with which we can fill their places? Or are the excellent teachers not chased away from public service going to be forced to take up the slack (thus making them not-as-exccelent). I work with students prepraring to be teachers at our college and already you will never find the high GPA students in the teacher preparation tracks. Society's push to constantly punish teachers is only making this problem worse, not better.
It ends only when parents (and students) realize it is they, and only they, who control whether a student learns. A good or even mediocre teacher can take a student with a thirst for learning and advance them to ever higher levels. But even the most excellent teacher can do nothing with a student that does not care. And hold on to your seats, students learn what to care about from parents and not teachers.
I think bad for everyone. Got a class of bright kids, you will look awesome. Got a class of a few bright kid and mostly below average, you'll have to do everything for larger group as improving just the few bright kids wont make an impact. IMO, teacher cannot be measured by the kinds test results alone.
keeping the incompetent employed.
... if it ever really existed. This just ensures that teachers and schools under the most pressure from 'externalities' - poor district, high unemployment, low wages - will be the ones who are most heavily sanctioned. Selective schools will always look good because they pick and choose which kids they educate (i.e., raise), and with few exceptions, these aren't disadvantaged kids. They have all the resources they need. This is the era of the anti new deal - designed to create and sustain a permanent underclass with shitty prospects (apart from killing foreigners for lobbyists and wealthy interests), no hope of social mobility, and no chance of ever owning a home or escaping debt.
So you are hypothesizing that citations do not improve the quality of internet discussions.
Could you cite an example please?
No, he asked for an example of taking the idiocy to ridiculous lengths, than thanked him for the example.
I agree that there is no magic bullet and that standardized tests seem to be a magic bullet like solution.
However, perhaps teachers could stop protecting their own deadwood and the underlying problem would be lessened. Your unions seem to be corrupt and politicized self serving organizations that only give lip service to students. Your unions seem to be the partners of administration, not the teachers, and in concert with administration milk the system for financial and political gain. Teachers need to reform their unions, change their union leadership. Unions used to represent the interests of the members and also be the guardians of the craft, ensuring proper training and high standards of work by its members. Apprentices that failed to learn the craft properly were ejected, members who did not perform to high quality standard were ejected.
Power should be paired with responsibility, modern unions seem to have lost this balance. Perhaps if teachers and their unions were perceived to be the guardians of their craft then there will be no motivation for these silly standardized test based solution. These silly solutions are a direct result of your union's failure to self police.
Since the crash it has now become acceptable to state that pure performance based rewards in the financial industry encouraged a culture where only the next quarter counts and damn the long term consequences. Make a sale now, you get your bonus and by the time it all falls down, you are long gone.
There are two simple problems at work here and they can be easily translated to coding. Say that as a developer your performance was rated on how well your users used your program. Everytime a user uses the CD tray as a cupholder, your performance goes down. Every time a user tries to eat the manual, you loose money.
Judging teachers on the performance of their pupils will quickly result in the dumping of everyone who has trouble learning on... well... who would willingly get payed even less then ordinary teachers while teaching the most difficult pupils?
Another part is the old story of IBM paying by the line... so... what would a coder do? Optimize or write extra lines? It would be very tempting for teachers to teach to pass the test, not teach so the pupils actually become smarter. Cramming will become the order of the day and those who can't will be off loaded to make sure the rating stays high.
It is not as if this is unknown. The financial industry again has this. Once Holland had a state bank in the Postbank, it offered "free" accounts (no interest payed) with lots of transaction options, it was the bank for the common man. When it was sold to ING, promises were made to keep it but these of course slowly eroded, more and more money is charged and constant attempts to cut services. Commercial thinking doesn't fit with marginal groups.
Would you as a physical education teacher want any teenage girls in your group? No, they are constantly down with cramps and other things so any teacher who cares about his pay, would arrange it that his class has fit students.
Think this is good for smart kids? Smart kids take extra effort to teach as they don't take well to cramming... effort == time == fewer students scoring a score to get a bonus. Why spend an hour on a A student when you can get 100 a passing grade and get a big bonus?
A lot of things in the world just don't work efficiently, doesn't mean everything always has to stay the same but trying to improve teaching requires the understanding of just what it is all about. Teaching is throwing a lot of different kids into a building and hoping that at the end, they can become useful members of society in their own way. For some that means becoming a doctor, for others that means working in the sewers. Society needs both. In fact, I take a crap a lot more then I visit the doctor.
BUT making this efficient, when performance based pay has had such bad results in other sectors, just isn't really possible.
Already teaching ain't a real career, it is something you do if making good money doesn't appeal to you. You can't advance, the pay is lousy, every year you have to teach the same thing to a new load of increasingly over privileged kids with parents that don't care. And everyone thinks they can do it better then you...
If I was a teacher, I wouldn't be. Fuck your kids, you teach them yourselves. It is a dead end job.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As per the main article subject line, here's my take on it. A teachers appraisal should be treated like any other private or public employee. The general public in my mind fit into two different categories (but one person can be in both categories):
1) A customer (consumer of goods). By this, I mean they have a student in the district being taught.
2) A share holder. By this, I mean the people paying the taxes to fund the school.
How many of those private companies share their detailed employee appraisals? None that I know of. The customers and share holders do expect that management will have access to those and work with the employees based on them to improve the services being provided, but they aren't demanding to see them. Teachers should be the same way. There are a lot of employees salaries I pay in the private industry that I really have no choice in paying (gas, internet, phone to name a few), but I'm not demanding to see each employee appraisal.
With that said, my next issue is people that are teacher / union bashing. I'm not a teacher and never have been. My mother was a teacher and my wife is a teacher, so I have a really good understanding of what's going on. On top of that, it seems every one of my friends had to go out and marry a teacher. The short answer is, my wife's union has saved her a few times and I would not call it a completely horrible union, while one of my friends wife's union is one I agree with people on is horrible. Here are a few thoughts on each:
My wifes school just went through negotiations. There were no pay increases for 3 years (actually a 3% pay decrease for each of those years). During those negotiations, one of the three elected school board officials that were on the school side was fighting for a steep (about 50%) pay cut because he didn't feel that a teacher should be making much more than someone doing childcare. Without the union there, it probably would have passed and it would have came down to a teacher leaving or taking the cut. My wife has gotten amazing appraisals every year, she would have been in a nursing program and guess how many great kids would have been in the school district left. They didn't care, like a lot of private managers, the $ amount was more than the quality. On top of all that, my wife's health insurance costs more than mine does in the private sector; her copay is now up to $35 for most things non surgical; she doesn't pay social security, but she pays pretty close to what I pay into the program; she has no 401k options; she's required to go back and get college credit on a schedule, but the school pays none of that. Overall, my feeling of her union is that it is pretty on par with what's going on in the private sector. Also, she does have tenure. It wasn't automatic. It was basically she had to teach there 5 years, then she had to apply (not automatic). The year that she applied in she is observed and appraised by all the principals multiple times a month, her lessons plans are inspected weekly, and the final word for tenure comes down at the end of the year. She doesn't get it, then she has to apply again the next year. Needless to say, she got it with amazing reviews from all the administration (as high as they were allowed, since the superintendent stipulated that no reviews are allowed a perfect score).
Now the bad side of the equation, my friends wife. She actually started complaining that at the same year negotiations for her school district, that they were only getting a 2% raise the next two years, that she had to pay a $5 copay now, and that she has to start paying into her pension retirement (schools not going to pay it all anymore). That my friends, is a union not keeping up with the private industry. Oh ya, she also got automatic tenure after three years without doing anything. The only way to fire her now is to have the union do it basically.
I have an acquaintance who's a teacher in the New York public school system. She came from Asia recently and was shocked at the low standards here. At one point she came across a teacher who had been teaching something incorrectly. When she tried pointing that how she faced nothing but animosity.
At the other extreme, especially in upper class communities, there is a serious problem with parents coming down on the schools. Parents spoil their kids rotten, don't raise them properly, dump them on schools and then don't allow schools discipline them. And it's not just that, they take the side of their kids even when they've obviously done wrong. That's quite a lesson to teach your kids; you can get away with anything because your parents will always have your back.
And in the inner city the bad kids are pretty much ruining things for everyone. I have a friend who's taught in one of these schools and his attitude is that some of these kids are a lost cause. Too much time is wasted just trying to keep order in the class. Forcing them to go to school only ensures that their classmates are getting a compromised education.
There's this duality in the American school system that's causing some serious problems. Teachers obviously need some protection from idiotic parents. They also can't be held accountable if they're stuck teaching in a school system full of troublemakers. On the other hand, it doesn't mean they deserve a pass, that they shouldn't be held accountable for the quality of their work.
That said, I think the problems with the American educational system can be countered with good parental involvement. I've known quite a few people, particularly in the Asian community, who demonstrate that all the time. Last year I had the opportunity to move back to Asia and one of the big considerations was education. On a basic level the quality of education there is light years beyond what we have here. You're kids are more likely to learn and retain the essentials there. And it's awesome how much they value education.
On the other hand, they're taught like drones. Despite efforts to change the system, there's still an excessive fixation on passing tests. Kids spend all their time in cram schools and the fixation is all on rote memorization. But there's no real independent and creative thought. That was painfully obvious at college-level student design fairs. Impressive work would be on display, but then you'd get these people in the workplace and they were incapable of performing. It all stemmed from the fact that while in school their hands were held constantly, they were basically just repeating whatever instruction the professor was giving them.
And that mindset is so pervasive and imposing that there's really no way to effectively counter it in the home. There are schools that offer a Western-style education, but those schools are generally extremely expensive and have all the same discipline and educational problems that American schools do. In fact, from what I hear it's even worse because wealthy Asians tend to spoil their kids even worse than Americans do.
In the US, as long as your kid isn't in a school that's a total disaster, your kids should be fine. But it's essential that you're involved. You need to interact with teachers and strongly encourage education at home. And there's one essential factor I've noticed. The kids who seem to run into more trouble has a social life that revolves entirely around the school they attend. The Asian kids I've come across who excel tend to have friends and family outside of school. And in that world kids who study hard is routine. So there's less of that desperate need to fit in at school because they realize that the outside world is different. If your kid only knows his or her school and they've got friends who don't take academics seriously, which is painfully common for your average American, it's going to be a challenge.
The big issue is that Americans seem to believe that throwing money at a problem will fix it. The US already spends far more per student than any other country on Earth and it clearly isn't happening. What the US needs are some fundamental changes.
Teacher's should evaluate each other's students. Like in interational student competition winners. With categories. Like, best underfunded unaided loser student performers' teachers.
The international teachers of the best in each category ought to evaluate the other teachers' student results. Some things will be easy. Mathematics, for example. Science, etc.
History, geography, literature, etc. would probably be more regional issues. I'm sure consensus panels could be set up to solve that, bother it as it may most chest pounding drum beatung chauvinists.
Is /. now part of FAUX News? What is this doing in here?
I was going to moderate, but decided to post instead.
I want to see "No Child Left Behind" repealed/revoked/removed NOW. That massive, steaming pile of feel-good horse shit is one of the final nails in what used to be a good education system. As a reference, I am in my 40s. I remember when, based on your individual testing and academic excellence, you were placed in one of three "tracks" - Track 1 for children that excelled and didn't need a lot of hand holding but instead needed to be challenged, Track 2 for those who fell in the middle of the pack for whatever reason and maybe needed a little extra hand holding or more reinforcement of the subject being learned, and Track 3 for those who needed more individual teaching/hand holding and a lot more reinforcement of the subject matter (some of those who landed in here were those we now know were autistic or had dyslexia or other issues that can now be better managed which allows them greater success). For the most part, parents didn't bitch because their child was in Track 3 schooling - they understood that the SCHOOL SYSTEM had been following their child's achievements and abilities over the years to determine which teaching method best suited them and could, hopefully, help them to the attain the next track. I also remember that schools were not afraid to fail children who _should not have passed that grade_!!! For the love of all that is holy (or unholy as your case may be), can we not simply pass on troubled learners to a higher grade just so that they won't feel bad about themselves?
Ooh, ooh, I know! How about the PARENT'S actually take some responsibility and gain some understanding of the situation before just pitching a bitch and screaming at a teacher who has done their best to teach their child? How about school counselors assist the parents of these children in talking with them about why they are not getting passed to the next grade with their friends and together help try to pinpoint the problems that child is having with school? Despite the jokes about Picard's insistence on discussing everything in ST:TNG, dialogue works in this case. It can help get to the crux of the issue and help that child excel. Let's not stop there, either. If the child who isn't passing to the next grade has 10 really close friends, they and THEIR parents should be brought into the school counselor so that they can be helped to understand that it is NOT ok to pick on their friend because he did not pass and - if it is cleared with the parents of the child not passing to the next grade - explain to that child's friends why he is being held in the current grade. EXPLAIN it to them as if they were adults, help them to understand as well. If they are really his friends, they will understand and help defend him in case someone else decides to take potshots and bully him.
There does need to be new metrics to grade teachers on, and we do need to pay our teachers an assload more than they are making now for those teachers who a) "make the grade" and b) really do want to teach and make a difference in children's lives. Teachers should be our sports stars and rock gods, since they (should) actually make a difference.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
And that is that some students/parents just don't care. I have a few relatives that teach in the public system and 1 that is at a private school. In public you tend to get mixed groups. Some kids really want to work and are quick to pickup the information. Other students are not fast on the pickup but are willing to work on it. Then you have the students that just don't care either way. Versus the 1 that teaches at the private school you better believe that when a student isn't doing anything the parents care because they are forking out money for it. Now you still have people that don't care but its by far a minority. The reason I see an issue with this is if both the parent and student don't care and don't do anything, and the teacher can't remove them from their class why should they have to take a negative review because of it.
Generally everyone in a given school knows exactly who the good and bad teachers are. It is rare that it makes any difference whatsoever to the careers of the teachers.
I failed a single class during my time in school. The failure rate for that teacher was 75%, vs ~40% in classes taught by other teachers. He told his boss "it's your fault. Every year! Every year you put all the bad students in my class." He was not the worst teacher, just the worst teacher teaching a challenging first year class, before students learned how to deal with such teachers. I remember one prof actually being fired (and re-hired at a different university, sigh) but it was more because of his crappy research than his crappy teaching (he could make the simplest material impenetrable, I don't know if anyone showed up for his lectures after the first day, I didn't, the course was easy if you missed the lectures)..
Here in Canada some high school teachers' jobs depended on students taking their courses (non-critical non-science courses). A few teachers briefly risked their jobs by offering challenging courses. It did not last. The courses became meaningless, high marks, low effort, low standards. But many students were happy (other than the ones trying to differentiate from the average to get into med or whatever, how far above a 92% average can you go?), and the teachers kept their jobs. Not really good for anyone.
Not much difference from the average office. Some people are great, some are terrible. It is more obvious with teaching because instead of a few constant co-workers raving or bitching you have 30 students a year propagating praise and/or criticism.
One reasonable evaluation would be to look for a teacher who reverses typical grades, i.e. students who generally do well do poorly and vice versa. It normally indicates a teacher who evaluates based on something other than the material (often sucking up).
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
There is ONLY ONE real solution for all of that. Make a centralized exam, made by expert university profcessors, and the students can choose which school\teachers they go to. They could choose teachers individually for each subject, and go to them in private sessions, or public education centers. If the kid is really good, perhaps using the web well, then no need to have a teacher at all.
That way, good teachers would bubble up, and kids would pick them, instead of being forced to take the same set the school chooses for a kid.
The only catch here is that the exams must be original, so kids know they must have genuine knowledge of the subject in order to pass, and therefore more intencise to go to teachers who really make them understand the material.
That would also remove a lot of the financial problems, and would forc eparents to look at their kids more, otherwise they would get totally lost. And would let more and more kids discover the ways of learning through the web by themselves.
If teachers are going to be graded on a metric that depends in large part on individual students' aptitudes, then perhaps some level of segregation might be necessary for a school district to retain both mainstream teachers and teachers who specialize in teaching students with disabilities and students unfamiliar with the dominant culture. Such segregation might be accomplished first by busing affected students to specialty schools, and then once the student's aptitude approaches average, through special education programs in mainstream schools. That way, for example, LD teachers can be graded against other LD teachers.
Privatize all public schools, so we don't have to worry about it. If parents cant afford to send their kids to a private school, then they should just get another higher paying job. In the meantime, their kids can earn credits by sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms. End the free ride that has braught this once great nation to its knees. Liberalism has destroyed this country and these useless teachers and unions are the PRIMARY cauze.
First problem of DISCUSSING education: make sure everyone in the discussion shares the same definition of the term "education".
Second problem of DISCUSSING education: agree on who is responsible for making education possible.
There are a large number of factors that impact the kind of test scores a teacher gets. Consider:
- Children who don't speak English are not offered ESL programs.
- Children who need special education are placed in regular classes.
- School days per year continue to shrink, giving teachers less time to cover the material and students less time to learn.
The first two points drag down scores by an incredible amount and there's nothing a teacher can do. You can't teach English to a child in a year, and you can't mix special education children with regular kids and expect them to keep up (they can't, they fail -- they need special courses tailored to their needs, something that USED to be available but has been largely phased out)
Yet school administrators are adamant in penalizing teachers based on scoring that does not account for these factors.
What is this is really about? Having a biased scoring system so they can fire tenured or veteran teachers and hire green thumbs. It's a money saving procedure. Never mind that the experienced teachers do a better job teaching (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did extensive research into this).
Both my parents are teachers, both are Teacher of the Year recipients, and they have spent their entire careers (60 years total) fighting the school administrators and watching them work hard to ruin education. Administrators hoard money that should go to the kids, cut ever service possible to maximize profit, and have perks like cars, cellphones, and bonuses for doing essentially nothing compared to the kind of work a teacher does in the classroom every day. They try everything they can to bust up unions and make older teachers quit.
Sounds familiar? It's the same as the business execs who raid pensions and screw works to maximize profit, even if it hurts the company's reputation or the quality of their product. Those assholes with MBAs that make your job a nightmare are the same dicks making your kid's school terrible.
Sorry, all the theories above are just pipe-dreams. Here is how to improve the school systems:
1) flunk students who cannot do the work - especially in the math and science subjects.
2) arrest any student who commits assault - re-establish corporal punishment ( paddles only )
3) evaluate teachers by assessing their students performance in the following grades and relevant subjects,
not by subjective tests.
These three will make a good start. Parents will be much more involved when they are told that their little
johnny and jane will have to attend the 'special' school since they have flunked seventh grade for the third time,
and pay fees, etc. for little johnny and jane to do so. Parents will also become more involved when little johnny
and jane are told they are expelled for the rest of the year and will have to repeat - same scenario.
Oh! I almost forgot -
4) let the teachers tell the class that the ones who flunked are not up to par with the other students.
( encourage upward peer pressure for grades, behavior, and dress - punish the whole class if they all let
little johnny cause trouble....)
And
5) reduce the number of administrators, out-of-class events, administrative passing, remove sports/music/theatre
if academics are below par.
It's not that bad teachers would feel bad about themselves.
It's that most teachers are bad.
If we compensated teachers based on performance, we would have better teachers.
But since we don't, the people who will work hard for better compensation choose a different career path, creating a bias for those who DON'T want to perform better for better performance in the teaching profession.
Thus, even though pay for performance would attract better teachers to the teaching profession, CURRENT teachers don't want pay for performance, because the existing system is attractive primarily to those who don't want to perform.
Put another way, for most current teachers, supporting pay-for-performance doesn't mean more pay for current teachers, it means more pay for individuals who have avoided teaching as a profession due to poor pay who take the jobs from the current teachers.
(That's not to say all teachers are bad - I certainly had some great teachers who chose that profession despite the poor compensation because it's just what they wanted to do, and they were going to do it well no matter what. But I've had plenty of people who just showed up for the paycheck too.)
paintball
Provides comprehensive day care / early childhood education starting at 8 months
This is wrong. An 8 month old child should be with mom. Even the Soviets figured this out: in Soviet Russia, mom loves you. Also, an 8 month old ought to be breastfeeding. (for real, not pumped)
receive periodic visits to ensure child safety.
...and if they don't want intrusive monitoring?
That is exactly what a certain school of political thought desires. They already have most of the simple-minded, marching in lockstep and voting against their own interests; destroy effective and honest public education and you easily swell those ranks for generations to come.
The teacher has many job requirements and those sometimes conflict.
This does lead to no-win situations for the teacher, especially when other peoples' agendas want to shift responsibility.
In the end you can be sure of this: It gets close to impossible for teachers to have high job satisfaction.
Now they should release the evaluations of the elected officials as well.
But first let's get the politicians rated. Not sure on what, exactly. Number of bills passed in relation to number proposed? Number of times they actually voted for what their constituents wanted, as opposed to what the lobbying groups wanted. Things like that. Then we can base their pay on some arbitrary rating of all these factors.
What, bills didn't pass because the other pols were too dense to understand their value? Too bad, that's a negative mark on the record.
Oh, you voted against the people's whims because, well, sometimes people are stupid? Too bad, that's a negative.
This could be fun!
(Disclosure: I have a professional educator in my immediate family.)
Finally discussing the MERIT of releasing the "merit" results....
Cons:
- This is a precedent that every employee's job evaluation should be public record.
- Very good odds that this will lower the job satisfaction of teachers even further, making it yet harder to keep good teachers.
- Any discussions that come about from publishing these measurements will be pointless. The publication will out of context from the GOALS and METHODS of making them.
Pros:
- A few teachers who do well in the evaluations will have more ability to show they are being under-paid.
- Arguments to improve the measurement system can be made and will get more attention.
Basing teacher on student progress, means that you will value teacher based on the socio economic layer they teach in predominentely.
What "right" does a teacher have to keep their employment evauations secret? Please.
Please post your mid-year and year-end review for the last three years for us to evaluate. The slashdot community will then reach a determination on whether your opinion is worth listening to.
After all, what "right" do you have to confidentiality on your employer's opinion of how well you do your job?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Cops next, followed by lawmakers.
Please keep in mind the huge biases associated with the metric in use to measure a teachers performance. Their performance isn't solely dependent upon their individual performance, but rather upon the performance of their students. While some people believe a good teacher will motivate students to learn, I can point out this simply isn't true if the student doesn't want to learn in the first place. It doesn't matter how good the teacher is. You know how I know? Because I was one of those students. I wasn't interested in anything remotely till college and generally got around a C average due to this.
This puts undue stress on not only the student who doesn't care for various reasons and the teacher whose job is at stake, who inevitably ends up going to lengths to protect their lively hood (such as letting students cheat). This doesn't even take into account funding, the community around that area, their classmates, their friends, their parents (which are a integral part of learning), or how they generally interact with those around them. The biases don't stop there, learning in itself is hugely complex.
The current metric is quite stupid, but sadly there aren't a lot of ways to measure a teachers performance outside of this.
As No Child Left Behind.
Learning is the *student's* responsibility; or has the old adage "You can lead a horse to water..." been thrown out the window along with common sense?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Can we even call them teachers anymore? They teach from a script.. And well, the results are obvious.. TERRIBLE. However, its not all the teachers fault.. You can place plenty of blame on Govt regulation and red tape. Why did we ever let them control our education in the first place? I'm sure it was supposed to be for the good of 'all'. Then there is the fact that much of the younger generation has little to no motivation or aspiration; mostly about image and popularity.
I gradeated from da pulick scool systum and got a more betterer educashun.
I don't expect public sector reviews to be any less unbiased than they are in the private sector. If your boss doesn't like you / writes a bad review, it is in your best interested to find a boss that does. Public sector employees are not exempt from this workplace reality.
As the guy that used to correct, grade, and return school flyers sent home while my BIL was living with us I think that testing is NEEDED...
Grammer, spelling, and word choice errors were in each and every product sent home... SUPPOSEDLY prepared by the teachers, administration, and even some signed by the School Principal...
I think we just wrote off that year of his "education" when we sent him back to his mom....
A teacher OUGHT to be able to get a passing score on ANY class material they've taught for two years or more... period!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Public Records.
Don't want your work records released then work in the private sector instead. ( even teachers can do this )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I understand that:
+ UK surgeons' performance statistics are available to all, eg, for bypass operations: (# performed; # w/ complications; # without)...
+ AU's schools' literacy & numeracy test results are public (how useful standardized-test results are is a Q, but it's a step in the right direction)
+ SE's tax-payers' incomes (for local & state tax purposes) are published in books in all public libraries (ie, "Taxeringskatalog" or similar)
+ Better Business Bureaus (BBB) have, at least in past, recorded complaints (from customers) & made them available to those who ask
At least sometimes, the effects can be IMPROVED performance, since those ultimately responsible for the performance could focus on how to improve.
Why not change our -expectations- ie:
- from "Don't ask, Don't tell" about our performances...
+ to "We all need to know, to get better outcomes" (so, data would be easily accessible & always public for all service providers & businesses).
Let those with disappointing (or even dangerous) performances either re-train or change fields of work.
Employers, mentoring colleagues, trainers, self-study, reducing hours of work (to bring Life-work balance), etc, could be brought to the task of improving performance; "performance tribunals" could be created to "insist" that seriously deficient individuals try some of them or - in worst cases - leave the field.
Clearly, "competition" doesn't seem to be enough to motivate some to address their under-performing.
"The people that claim that unions only protect lazy teachers..."
No one seriously claims that. They protect all teachers including lazy teachers. And child molesters. http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/31554
I don't know. Can you name another field where employee evaluations are released to the public?
They need to categorize the students before evaluating the teachers. One category should be students who absolutely refuse to learn (headphones on in class, throwing paper balls, walking out of class). Another category should be students who prevent other students from learning (vandalizing the school, bullying, fighting). And the third category would be those students who are actually trying to get an education, regardless of how well they do it. Then evaluate the teachers performance with those three groups separately, so the teacher doesn't get a poor evaluation because the class is full of thugs and another teacher doesn't get a high evaluation because the class is full of Doogie Howsers. I personally think the students should be in separate classes based on the categories too, with the ability to switch categories based on behavior.
Rather, you look at improvement during the year, and you compare that value with classrooms at the same school or schools with similar socioeconomic makeup. And you also average over several years, because the data is still too noisy otherwise.
I'll note that when the LA TImes did this analysis for a bunch of schools and published their results, they found that certain teachers consistently outperformed and others consistently underperformed. They also found that the administrators of the school, when asked who their best and worst teachers were, were no better than guessing at random.
There should have been a full disclosure of the bank's accounts, portfolios and investments.
What's fair is FAIR.
Don't like it, don't accept TARP!
Shit, next thing I'll be talking about is expecting our elected officials to disclose trips and services received from those organizations!!
Of all things that can be measured we know that the best students tend to come from the most expensive homes. If a teacher gets a lot of affluent kids in a class the test scores will be just fine. If a poor neighborhood feeds the school then the test scores will be inferior. That is something that can be measured and verified. But the methods used to evaluate teachers are very subjective and prone to great error. Teachers need to walk off the job when these evaluations are made of them.
This is where I have a problem with the union and tax money. These people get paid to much, on top of that tax payers have to fork out there retirement plus the benefits. They should be forced to pay there own retirement, and benefits. I like how they can ostracize students but when the tables are turned they run behind that union bullshit. This is part of the reason major cities have no money to maintain anything or struggle to keep up. This is an area in which washington should have passed laws against unionizing when public or tax payers money will be required for a paycheck.
If my job were to educate children at a public facility at which their attendance was compelled by law, and also I were paid by taxpayers, then I would expect to have my reviews made public.
Do you really not see the difference? It seems not. The smugness + dumb combo means that your opinion of whether my opinion is worth listening to ... isn't worth listening to.