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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.
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.
Tough rocks. A few shitty teachers made life a living hell for one of my kids so pardon me if I'm not on the worship-the-teacher bandwagon.
Why *shouldn't* they live under the same thumb they so firmly implant on their students?
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.
I think the teacher's union would have more credibility if teachers were ever fired for poor performance. If there appeared to be any kind of performance-based accountability, the public might not care about this.
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! ;)
The issue is that it's not entirely the responsibility of the teacher.
If the kid has a bad home life and their peers and family do not value education it's likly they will not either, and thus perform more poorly.
Ever notice how schools in low income areas perform worse, even when they bring in special teachers who have done well in other schools to try and bring up the performance?
I have a friend who is a teacher, she was have a parent teacher conference about the poor performance of the child. The parent basically concentrated on their phone the whole time, all the while being told about how the student was not turning in their home work and thus getting a zero. Parent then looked up and asked "Well what are you going to do about it?"
As though they had no part in their child's education.
There are bad teachers, and there needs to scrap the current system, but blaming it all on the teachers is not going to help, since that's what we have currently.
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.
Oh, wait, no they're not.
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.
I think the teacher's union would have more credibility if teachers were ever fired for poor performance. If there appeared to be any kind of performance-based accountability, the public might not care about this.
That's the core of the argument, but the part the union is fighting. This is the kind of fight which erodes the union's credibility.
Back when I lived in Michigan the auto workers unions were busy blaming the car companies for their eroding market share, quality of cars, etc. Then an amazing magazine, as part of the Detroit Free Press, was published containing several accounts by former auto workers, who seemed to be lacking a lot of guile or simply felt there was nothing to lose, confessing how overstaffed the assembly lines where - because the union would never back down. At the least little action by companies the workers would go on strike, so they hamstrung the automakers. Now it's a different generation of auto workers and a leaner, more competitive several auto companies. The excesses forced upon the manufacturers have taken decades to undo, nearly bringing GM and Chrysler to the end in 2008, because they were still saddled with retirement and benefit plans, negotiated decades before, which were crushing the companies.
The teachers unions should take a page from this: Don't ruin the education or the credibility of all teachers for the sake of a few - embrase performance review and become a part of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Their are so many things that effect student performance outside of the classroom. The child's home conditions, parent involvement, etc. Yes testing can provide a certain measure of understanding, but using test scores exclusively or even as a large part of an overall evaluation of a teacher is incredibly flawed.
Teachers in my state at least(Utah) just are not paid enough in the first place(25-35k per year), if people want to implement merit pay based on some "report card" developed by a bunch of ideological extremists(like say the Utah Legislature) the end result isn't going to be pretty. All the tests will be designed to fail teachers and schools to push charter school rent seekers and likely used as an excuse to push privatization schemes.
But the ratings for individual teachers do matter, taken in the context of how other teachers in that school (and area) are doing. You're right that it's much more complex than just having good teachers/bad teachers. If one or two teachers in a whole school are having poor evaluations, that probably points to lousy teachers. If all the teachers have poor evaluations, you're looking at a broken school. If the pattern is consistent across multiple schools in a particular area, you know it's an even bigger problem than just one bad school.
Individual teacher ratings are just one part of a much larger puzzle, I just wonder who is going to take the time to put the puzzle together and figure out which problems are caused by bad teachers, bad administrators, bad parents, or even bigger socioeconomic issues. Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents. But there would certainly be times when there's an obviously bad teacher whose poor performance is downplayed or covered up by the administration (or the union.)
While I'm in favor of teachers' unions, the job of a union should not be to protect crappy employees, but to look out for the interests of the employees as a whole. You can't tell me the union is served by protecting shitty teachers!
Check out my world simulator thingy.
The problem is that most of the proposed merit-based evaluation systems that are going into place are as bad as, if not worse than, the existing system.
Evaluating teachers based on student performance results in:
1) Teachers that "teach the test" - as a result we have mediocre educational performance getting rewarded.
2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
However the current seniority-based system is also shit - once a teacher receives tenure there is no incentive to continue performance.
We need to move away from the current system - that much is clear. The problem is that so far, all of the "merit" based proposals don't have any metrics for "merit" that are worth jack shit, and will make our educational system even worse than it already is.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
The teachers unions should take a page from this: Don't ruin the education or the credibility of all teachers for the sake of a few - embrase performance review and become a part of it
And the problem comparing autoworker unions and teacher unions is the lack of competition public education faces. If unions bring down an auto company, the company fails, or at least it is supposed to if it does not get federal funding. Education is going to get public money no matter what. For that matter, the worse they do, the more money they get. How many times have we heard, "The schools are failing. We must increase funding and pay teachers more!"?
The answer is to increase competition. Stop sending kids to schools based on where they live, but actually give parents a choice as to where the students go and fund the schools accordingly. The voucher program was an attempt to do this and has worked very well where it has been tried. It even leveled the playing field for kids who could never afford to go a private school. Of course, the teacher's unions rapidly opposed this and pulled out all the stops. The main argument was that it would cut funding to public schools. To which I answer, So? It may cut funding to PUBLIC schools, but it also cut the number of students. It did not cut funding to education, however, and all the kids still received an education. Not just any education, but the education the parents wanted them to receive while still meeting guidelines.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The biggest secret about the teacher's union is that their role is the protection of the teacher, not the students. The Teacher's Union has as it's number one priority increasing compensation & benefits, and protecting the employment of teachers. It makes sense - it is what a union is supposed to do.
Think how much different schools would be if it were the students that were unionized, not the teachers...
Ken
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.
No shit.
Friend of mine worked in public education in Dallas. Was a great teacher, repeated teacher of the month and a couple teacher of the year ratings by the district, ESL certified, the works - but they were under the gun to hire more "native spanish speaking ESL teachers."
Their solution? Stick all the troublemaker kids in his class, and REFUSE to give him a second adult to back him up for classroom discipline. We're talking the ones whose dads were in jail for gang violence, who would regularly start fights, who it was known their relatives were members of antagonistic gangs. Sure enough, one day, two of them went at it - one (black) kid trying to stab one (latino) kid in the eye over a fight between their older sibs' gangs. He got the class up, separated the kids, marched them down the hall to the principal's office, holding each by the arm so that they couldn't try to go at each other again.
He gets put "on leave" and let go at the end of the year for - wait for it - "touching a student against policy" by breaking up the fight. And they would have run him off the other way if he'd let a kid get stabbed in his classroom.
Teacher evaluations based on student performance or incidents? Fucking bullshit, there are a dozen ways administrators with an axe to grind or who decide they just don't like someone in an office-politics way can screw with the numbers.
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
Yeah, let's teach these inner city kids and expect them to do as well as the children of millionaires!
Daddy wear's his pants down around his knees, he's fathered six kids, he's twenty five years old, he can't read at a second grade level, he's unemployable and has a record. Momma has had three kids, in on public assistance, lives in public housing uses drugs and alcohol is twenty six years old and bipolar, she is a felon and is functionally illiterate!
The kids live in a poisonous environment, constant fear, noise, violence, unstable parents who (might) speak English well enough to understand what is being said to them and kids who struggle to understand the lessons.
Gee, do you think that Bloomberg's Park Avenue, spoiled, billionaire, candyassed mind can even begin to grasp what most of these teachers deal with!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I got one for ya. I was subbing for a 7th grade class. Kid squeezes behind my desk and the wall - no reason to be behind me, anyway - and takes a mock swing at my head; I felt the breeze from his hand. I haul him down to the principal's office for punishment, restraining myself from knocking in his teeth. Later, momma shows up demanding to know why I'm bringing her precious child down to the office. Principal throws me under the bus. Last day I subbed, there.
2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
What makes you think this would be the case? All the test-based evaluation systems I have heard of measure performance above expectations. If you have two fifth grade teachers at the same school, and one's students perform significantly better at the end of the year, year after year, than the other's, that should be reflected in teacher evaluations. Those promoting the status quo seem to have a very difficult time understanding this aspect.
Teaching the test is what most teachers do to some extent. That doesn't change the end goal that they get students to pass the tests. If the teach the test method also transfers the necessary skills to solve the test questions then the result is desirable. No Child Left Behind is a good example of this. Although very flawed in many respects, it has shown a marked improvement in reading, math, at least in the lower grades. Unfortunately those skills don't translate well into higher grades where more complex problem solving skills are required. I do think they need to address this at both the teacher level, and at the course level. If the courses as they are being taught don't teach the necessary skills, then they should also look at different methods to help students acquire those skills. I find it odd that with all of the advancements in psychology, human studies, and in computer science, that we haven't invented a better method to teach students. Other than the introduction of computer equipment in most schools, they all use the same basic method to teach, which unfortunately seems to leave a fairly large group out that requires extra hand holding.
As to the privacy issue, these teachers, working for a public school system, need to understand that the people who pay for their jobs need to be able to see what they are getting for their pay. Whether or not they need the level of detail down to a per-teacher review is questionable, but I think a more general review of the data, possibly averaged would alleviate some of those concerns. I agree about seniority. No job should be guaranteed. It rarely works that way in any other field. You perform well or you are fired. This is a no brainer.
What, prey tell, is the "existing system" - the ability to turn oxygen into CO2 year after year appears to be the only system in place once a teacher makes tenure.
Wow, that sounds really bad, until you realize that the questions on "the test" are taken from the state curriccullum! - you know, the things the teachers are supposed to be teaching already. If they have to stop what they are doing to "teach to the test" they were most likely not advancing the students in the way they are supposed to.
Then explain charter schools where student success is either the same or better with a student population choosen by random chance and the schools have fewer resources than public schools?
A teacher put "at a fundamental disadvantage" that doesn't want to face the challenges they are presented with can do what every other employee can do - change jobs. When a school can't keep it's teachers, someone will decide to see what the problem is.
The guarantee of lifetime employment obliterates any incentive the community can offer the teacher to improve - especially if the teacher's union refuses to allow merit pay for excellent teachers (apparently because it makes bad teachers feel bad about themselves - not the kids that had to suffer them for the year)...
I wish we could start putting teacher's children in the classrooms of the lowest performing teachers - maybe that will drive home the idea all teachers aren't the same...
Ken
The solution isn't that clear cut. In Florida (at least where I lived), we were allowed to choose any school we wanted for the child, so long as it was within their little district/area. What ended up happening is the more well off families filled the new, nice, "good" schools and all of the children with broken/criminal/poor families populated the one or two schools that were left at the end. Your solution may solve YOUR problem in your head, but it completely ignores any ramifications of such an act.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Stop sending kids to schools based on where they live
A big problem is that many are not sent to school based on where they live. They get bussed to other parts of the city to make up a politically correct ethnic mixture in all the schools across the district. When your child attends a school that isn't in the local neighborhood it's a lot harder for some parents to be involved, get to know the teachers, etc.
I probably forgot to mention the weapon the kid was trying to use was a sharpened pencil. Not that I suppose it makes much difference.
The point I am making is: IT DID NOT MATTER WHAT HE DID. If he'd allowed a kid to be stabbed, the question would be "why didn't you stop it" and they were planning to railroad him out for that. If he did what he did, they were going to railroad him out for "touching a kid." They set him up, they put kids into his classroom with a history of gang contact and being involved in fights... they were waiting and PLANNING for him to get stuck in the no-win situation. The moment he was out of the picture, they split the kids into different classrooms again.
Why is racial segregation assumed a priori something to be avoided?
If you implement a voucher system, parents who care more about education will be more inclined to take advantage of those vouchers to move their children to better schools. This is a good thing, right? Parents can move their kids out of a bad school to a good one.
How does anything change if the kids who leave tend to be white and the kids who stay tend to be black? Nobody is discriminating on the basis of race (hell, the abstract of that study says so). The black kids can use the vouchers too, after all. Are you saying that we ought to force white kids to stay in a bad school just so the black kids who are there can have some white classmates?
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.
It's irresponsible and dangerous for an adult in a position fo authority to exert that authority to get a dangerous situation defused and under control without cowering like a timid sheep in the corner while he waits 3 hours for the 911 responders to show up? Get the fuck out of here and return to the Utopia you came from. The rest of us are busy living in the real world and trying to encourage people to act like responsible adults.
He should probably complain to his union. They are meant to provide him representation to defend against exactly this kind of railroading.
But that's not what unions are anymore. They are political activists and spend union dues attempting to inflate salaries in order to further inflate union dues and enrich a very small group of thugs who bully and abuse both the employers and the employees they "represent". The unions have become little more than accepted crime families.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
The problem is in evaluation. It is very difficult to define good metrics for teachers. We've tried a lot of things.
We tried judging on test scores, but this just made teachers coach their students for the test, rather than provide them with a good education.
We've tried judging them on test score deltas, but this just makes teachers concentrate on students who are close to grade boundaries - getting someone from a high C to just scraping a B, but ignoring the ones that could go from a low B to a high B (and then maybe to an A next year).
We've tried judging them based on pupil evaluation, but that just encourages teachers to be lenient on students who don't deserve it, and spend more time trying to be liked than on teaching.
If you have a metric that lets us identify the bad teachers, then please let us know. Education systems around the world would love to use it...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents.
Exactly. The next logical step is therefore to allow teachers to fire students. If teachers are liable for students performance, then they need to have the power to remove failing students. And if that isn't possible due to social reasons, then it is difficult to assign blame to the teacher for having a poor performing class.
Imagine being the boss of a company, where the employees are unpaid, and often not motivated or interested in the work that you want them to do. Add to that the fact that you can't select the employees, and you can't fire them, but you *personally* will be judged on their performance. Oh, and all the employees are teenagers and many just plain don't want to be there... Does that sound like an appealing prospect?
I like metrics, and I support the idea of improving teaching, but I don't trust that the government will implement either the correct metrics or the correct system to deal with the results of those metrics. For example, everyone is gungho about firing teachers, but the most effective solution may well be to spend more money and train the teachers better in the first place. More research is needed - for example, how come countries like Finland have the shortest hours per week spent on school teaching in the Western world, but also manage to get the best performing students? Do they have teacher metrics? Do they fire teachers who perform badly on those metrics? We should learn from the best in the world, instead of assuming that adopting some unproven system is going to magically make things better. Maybe firing poor metric teachers will put off people from joining the profession, and education as a whole will suffer? These things need to be considered before changing systems wholesale.
What teachers make
This is a ridiculous statement. You are suggesting a policy in which society never attempt to help their fellow citizens. Don't touch! It's not your job!
It's this weak-minded insanity that contributes to our decline. You get sued/fired/condemned if you try to stop a stabbing? Guess what, you get sued/fired/condemned for doing nothing and letting a kid get killed while you stand there watching and waiting for cops to show up to mop up the aftermath too. You are exactly the kind of polically correct hands-off nutjob that puts a teacher in a hostile environment in a no win situation. Why the hell would any good and honest human being put themself in a situation in which they are nearly gauranteed to be eventually burned to the ground?
You are actually telling people to not do the right thing and try to stop violence and crime. It's no wonder this world is so fucked up.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Again, I apologize for not explaining myself a bit better.
It's not that integration is more important than education
It's that we, as a country, and as a culture, accept that poor, minority schools are going to be bad. It's that we not only accept it, but support when people, white, black, brown, yellow or whatever, want to run from the problem, instead of fixing it.
It's one thing to be a 'throw-away' culture when it comes to the cheap plastic junk that surrounds us. It's entirely another when it comes to neighborhoods and sub-cultures.
As a side-note, I would contend that letting students run is more of a social indoctrination, because it leads to ignorance of others, and maintains the current status quo. But that's just my opinion.
The Teacher's Union has as it's number one priority increasing compensation & benefits...
Exactly. The problem is that this is NOT what a union is SUPPOSED to prioritize. They are supposed to act in the best interests of the employees, and bankrupting the employer does not accomplish that.
A union's function is to protect the rights of the employees and act as a representative of them to the employers in case of disputes. Increasing compensations can be a part of that, but not the the only part and not without limit. More and more money and compensations are not rights. It is counterproductive for a union to forever baloon the income and benefits of the employees if it means that the company can no longer remain profitable.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
I can't stand people who oversimplify shit like that. It's not my/your job, so let the situation get much worse, have the kid locked up, because them be the rules... It is also not my job to put out that fire in the waste basket either, but if a throw my water on it now, problem is solved. If I call the fire department and leave, the whole place burns to the ground before they get there. Punishing people for seeing a problem they can solve and solving it; simply because it wasn't their job is Bull. Also, I highly doubt that a typical police officer is as well qualified to deal with students as your typical teacher is anyway.
Is this different than a non-teaching job? You get stuck with an a-hole boss like that and you're going to be canned no matter what you do. It happens. Should we tailor the entire system to accommodate what is likely an edge case? I hope the teach in question looked into his legal options. What utter bullshit. Someone was probably very jealous.
I don't accept that those schools are going to be bad, but what you have to accept is that they are bad, and all the social experimentation in the world are not going to make them better for the kids that are trapped there right now.
So the way out may be to bring in more opportunity for the youngest generation in those areas. Vouchers can provide that ticket to opportunity for many in that community, and that raises the prospects for the entire area. That doesn't mean we're throwing away the culture - it just means we're bringing in the good parts of a nearby culture (a quality education). It almost sound like you're conflating ignorance and poor education as a cultural component that needs to be preserved. It's not - and neither is any cultural influence that denigrates knowledge and academic abilities.
As a side-note, I would contend that letting students run is more of a social indoctrination, because it leads to ignorance of others, and maintains the current status quo.
I really don't know how you arrive at that conclusion. The current status quo is that there are a lot of schools that simply do not serve their community or students in any positive way, and the administration, the school system, and sometimes even the teachers want to keep the students trapped in that negative environment with no other options. As long as we accept that these schools must be preserved, we will not be able to provide the impetus for improvement.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
"We shouldn't allow the white kids to leave."
And there's your Liberal comment of the day. Yes, because it's your job to enforce racial diversity in a school as the most important metric.
In a voluntary society, if people racially segregate, it's their business. It doesn't mean that that's bad, or good. It's just how it is.
As for the vouchers, as long as all students have equal access to them, the racial component should be left out of the equation.
I don't think there are any easy metrics because it's a hard problem. Of the ones you mentioned, student evaluation is the worst because there's no way to safeguard that. Test score deltas seems like a good idea, and your criticism of it is incredibly easy to solve - the delta should be on the numerical score, not the grade letter. But of course since it's a test, it also shares the "teaching the test" problem of the first idea. I think that's also easy to solve -- don't tell the teachers details of what's on the test. Yes, scores will plummet. That's okay, curve them back up.
Seriously, you can't "teach the test" if all you know is "this test is about US history from the Civil War to WWII."
YES! Because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away!
For FUCK'S SAKE, man, the teacher was supposed to stand around dialing 911 on his cellphone, while he witnessed an eyeball being gouged out? If we ever consider going anywhere together, remind me of your asinine fucking post here.
Allow me to define "irresponsible" for you. It's failing to take responsibility for an action, an inaction, a condition, or a situation. In this case, the teacher obviously TOOK responsibility for a dangerous situation. You, on the other hand, have declared that you will not take responsibility in this, or, quite likely, any other emergency situation. I don't want to be in a car, or in a crowd, or at a party, or anywhere with you around!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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
You're wrong. That's the problem. The tests can't measure performance above expectations because there is no way to figure out what the expectations should be. The evaluations are scientifically invalid.
The UFT ad in TFA makes that argument. If you want to be fair to the teachers before you fire them, you ought to at least read what they say in their defense.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch
New York’s education officials are obsessed with test scores. The state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren’t able to produce higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe that the methods for calculating teachers’ assumed “value-added” qualities—that is, their abilities to produce higher test scores year after year—are inaccurate, unstable, and unreliable. Teachers in affluent suburbs are likelier to get higher value-added scores than teachers of students with disabilities, students learning English, and students from extreme poverty. All too often, the rise or fall of test scores reflects the composition of the classroom and factors beyond the teachers’ control, not the quality of the teacher. A teacher who is rated effective one year may well be ineffective the next year, depending on which students are assigned to his or her class.
and she cites the NAE study http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf as her supporting data.
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.
You're talking about racial hiring.
One of the reasons tenure is so important to teachers is that without tenure, they would get fired and the school board, or whomever is responsible for hiring, would put in their friends, based on race, religion, politics, or whatever.
One of the most dramatic cases was in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, NY (where I grew up) several years ago. Under Mayor Lindsay, the local school boards had more control. This board came up with a plan that had the result of firing most of the white (mostly Jewish) teachers and replacing them with local teachers who were black. This was one of the most disruptive things that ever happened to New York politics. There are people who have hated each other ever since.
Before tenure, teaching was part of the spoils system. When Democrats won the elections, the they would fire all the teachers and replace them with Democrats. When Republicans got in, they would fire all the teachers and replace them with Republicans. You think it's hard getting rid of an incompetent teacher? Try getting rid of an incompetent brother-in-law of a city councilman. Try getting rid of Mayor Giuliani's girlfriend.
Tenured teachers can be fired in New York City. It's difficult and it *should* be difficult. Principals and administrators *do* play favorites. Do you want it to be easy to destroy a teacher's life with accusations that may or may not be justified?
His legal options were to find a labor lawyer and give him a $5,000 retainer. If he had a union, they would take care of that for him.
Those union dues look pretty small when you have to hire a lawyer to do the same thing.
In a non-teaching union job, the union looks out for your rights too.
Your post is a bit short on specifics. What do the jobs entail? If "what unions do" involves forcing the rest of society to pay $67/hour for a monkey with a torque wrench, I think we'll be fine without them, thanks.
Time will tell if that kind of bullshit is any more sustainable in Germany than it was in Detroit. I'm guessing not.
One of the fundamental mistakes you make is not realizing that the one factor that predicts test scores most significantly is the child's family income. Everything else, including the teacher, has a smaller predictive value.
Teachers with high test scores are being rewarded for teaching rich kids.
Oh, yeah, so you say correct the test scores for family income. That's the problem. The NYC evaluation system is trying to do that. That's what that complicated formula is trying to do. The problem is that, when they tried to validate it, they found it doesn't work.
They're trying to calculate where teachers rank on a 100-point scale. The ranking has a range of error of over 50 points. You might as well rank teachers with a pair of dice.
Non-union workers in the equally profitable VW and BMJ plants in the non-union American south get $17 an hour.
By your own statement (assuming it has any validity whatsoever), the manufacturers are EQUALLY PROFITABLE. By that very statement you must conceed that in the absence of unions, American workers are still making exactly the same percentage of overall profit after other operating costs are considered as their German counterparts. You must also conceed that if the American workers were earning more money than they are, the American manufacturer would be LESS PROFITABLE than its German counterpart.
So by your figures, the suggestion is that union membership status within a single corporation actually has no impact on the income of the employees. The Germans have to pay union fees and yet gain no greater percentage of the corprorate earnings.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
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.
I am not really sure where you get the idea that tenure = lifetime job security. All tenure does is ensure that due process is followed in the removal of a teacher. Believe me as a teacher we don't want the lazy, unqualified person around any more than you do. It is up to the administrators to do their job to get the ineffective persons out of the system. It is actually going to take longer to remove an ineffective teacher under the new system rather than the old system.
Your comment about charter schools. Were you aware that they send a number of the poorly performing students back to the public system before June to make themselves look good? Meanwhile they have taken valuable money away from the public school. Money that does not come back with the student.
Are you so naive that you believe that socioeconomic factors play no role in education? I'm sorry but a student who has only one parent at home that works 15 hours a day to put food on the table in a violent poverty stricken neighborhood is more likely to have little regard for school and no desire to perform well. Whereas the student from an upper middle class home with two parents in the home is typically going to perform much better and actually have a drive and desire to do well.
In what job is a persons performance and evaluations based upon someone else's desire to improve? I have no prolem being evaluated on MY WORK. I have no problem with that evaluation being made public, even though no other profession has to worry about that. Look to see what I am doing to get my students to pass not what is beyond my control. I have each of my students in class 4.3 hours each week out of 168 hours , that is 2.6% of the entire week. There is only so much I can do in that short amount of time to overcome what is done the other 97.3% of the week.
I feel like you've already made up your mind about this issue, and I'm just wasting time typing. Still, I guess it doesn't hurt to try.
It's really not that easy. Criteria for "continuing contract" vary from state to state and district to district, but it is usually some combination of
1) Years experience in total and in the district
2) Level of education, frequently a masters
3) Approval by administration
I received a continuing contract by completing my masters and undergoing several evaluations. At any point, the administration could have decided to NOT offer me continuing contract. As an alternative, they could have chosen to fire me. The only thing the law prohibits them from doing to stringing me along year after year, which I think is fair.
I think its fair, because continuing contract (mislabeled "tenure"), is not a "guarantee of lifetime employment." I can easily think of several things I could do to get fired and/or laid off, and I personally know of several teachers (new and old) who were let go for various reasons. Continuing contract merely means that I can't be fired without some due process. I can't be fired just because a new principal doesn't like me, or a student claims I screamed "fuck" in class, or a handful of parents have it in for me. If you think about that, that's also tremendously fair. Some kind of "paperwork trail" is required in dismissal at many jobs, and if you don't have that at your job, maybe you ought to look in to forming a union!
Since I've gotten continuing contract, I work just as hard now as I did before I got my "magical firing shield". Ditto for all of my colleagues. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of a colleague who isn't putting in whatever it takes to help their students succeed. The only people that I can think of who didn't put in their best are people who got fired.
The data is charter schools is far more mixed than you suggest. Yes, there are success stories, as there should be. Charter schools were initially intended as "test tubes" where innovators were free to try new ideas, and filter the good ones back into public schools. There are also charter schools that are very successful, but also spend a tremendous amount of money per pupil and offer a battery of services in addition to education (see Harlem Children's Zone). I would personally LOVE to see that kind holistic of model spread, but I don't think we have the political will to spend a minimum of 15k per student to offer all those services.
Unfortunately, there is a sizable number of charter schools that operate simply as money-making ventures, and the results show
I've worked in Worldwide Operations Strategy for a major unionized manufacturing company. I've done colossal projects looking at whether to shift capacity to Germany, the Northern USA, the Southern USA, India, Mexico, etc. There's a reason why Germans get the wages they do and Southern Americans get the wages they do.
German line workers generally have years of technical training on and outside the job before they get those wages. To make a comparison, German Technician to German Engineer is a bit like Nurse to Physician. They know their stuff. You can hand them 1 page of tech specs and they can figure out how to assemble it and make dramatic improvements to line efficiency. We did an experiment handing the assembly documents to American workers and it took a TON of engineering time to get them up to speed.
I do no exaggerate when I say that the hardest thing we have in the US South is hiring enough functionally literate employees. 75% of applicants recently were functionally illiterate. The ones we do hire want to spend about half their workday chatting. This is in multiple locations (Tennessee, NC, Mississippi). This BS about Americans being great workers is no true. Some are, some are not. Guys in Wisconsin and MI typically know their stuff but have terrible attitudes. Guys in the South know next to nothing and have bad attitudes.
I have tremendous respect for union employees. They do great things, and I'm more than happy to pay for productivity. This is NOT what union leaders want. They value solidarity above all else. They feel that as soon as management can divide and conquer employees by separating the good ones from the bad ones, the union leaders will no longer be necessary and they'll be out of a job.
The teachers union will fight tooth and nail to prevent evaluations of teachers, regardless of effectiveness. Despite the fact that Math is Math and kids are kids (for the most part), the teachers union management LOVES the system that locks teachers into a lifetime at one school system. They fear the concept that good teachers could bounce around seeking their own better wages through an efficienct market system because it completely short circuits their x% of the wages.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011 @ 5:42PM |60,178 views
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
You do know that the majority of teachers "unions" are barred from striking, and about half are barred from collective bargaining.
You see, this is the big problem with all the people who want to blame teachers. They use terminology but have no idea what it means.
Teachers Union: Often just a rough union-like organization that offers group rates on legal counsel and representation to the local school boards. Most unions cannot strike, cannot take part in salary bargaining, and have no right to intervene or even take part in either the hiring or firing process. The majority of teachers unions are so weak and toothless that they can barely be called unions.
Teacher Tenure: I have not seen a state that has the tenure that people talk about here. At best, teachers are granted long term contracts which state that the contract cannot be terminated without documented reasons. These "tenured" teachers can absolutely be fired and I've seen over a dozen teachers with over 15 years of experience fired for various failures. Half of the point of "tenure" is to give some incentive to enter into a contract that is as lopsided as those offered to teachers: The school can fire you at any time with monetary recourse on your end based on your performance, but if the school fails to support a teacher (ie: administration are jerks to them, or otherwise harass or abuse them), they cannot leave without triggering a penalty clause in their contract. The other half, shockingly enough, is a protection for the local citizens, ensuring them that the school board or administration won't frivolously fire teachers and force taxpayers to continually pay the costs of searching for and hiring new teachers.
Three Months of Vacation: This has to be the funniest idea. Teachers don't get summer vacation, they get a mandatory furlough every year, and the kicker is that the majority of them are still expected to do some amount of work during that time. Of course, that doesn't fit a political agenda or make you feel better about that teacher in 10th grade that gave you a B after you slacked off in her class because you were a selfish jerk and wanted her to cater to your every whim. I used to live in a coal mining town, and I don't remember anyone ever talking about how lucky the plant maintenance workers were when they got a "two month" vacation every winter. They seemed to think that it sucked that they didn't get paid for two months and had no real ability to find another job to fill the time.