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Are Teachers Headed For Obsolescence?
dstates writes "One Laptop Per Child reports encouraging results of a bold experiment to reach the millions of students worldwide who have no access to primary school. OLPC delivered tablets to two Ethiopian villages in unmarked boxes without instructions or instructors. Within minutes the kids were opening the boxes and figuring out how to use the Motorola Zoom tablets, within days they were playing alphabet songs and withing a few months how to hack the user interface to enable blocked camera functionality. With the Kahn Academy and others at the high school level and massive open online courses at the college level, are teachers going the way of the Dodo?"
Yeah, you try to implement something that threatens teacher jobs and just WATCH what happens, sparky. I was once part of an effort to design some online courses (just a few, mind you) for a local school district and learned the hard way to watch my step when treading anywhere near teachers. Unfortunately, my superiors made the STUPID mistake of pitching the program to the district as being a potential money-saver (since fewer teachers would be needed to oversee the online courses than traditional classroom courses). The teachers mobilized like a fucking Roman Legion.
Now, for those of you dumb enough to think that teachers are sweet old schoomarms with low salaries and little power...well, you just keep thinking that. But I know that they broadsided us like the a school bus. Suddenly, those sweet schoolmarms were on every newscast, decrying the courses as a poor substitute for classroom education, something that "cheated the students," as Satan incarnate basically. Their union was all but threatening to break legs. School district elected officials were told in no uncertain terms that the sweet schoolmarms were ready to bend them over and do bad things to them with a slide rule at the next election. We learned the hard way what happens when you threaten the schoolmarms' jobs in ANY way.
Needless to say, our online course plan was SIGNIFICANTLY modified. Most notably, provisions were added to make it clear that the online courses were to be treated exactly like classroom courses, with a teacher getting assigned to each one just as if he/she were in the classroom each day teaching it as a traditional course (even if they basically had to do nothing)--complete with the same class size limitations as a traditional course. Even though this all made no sense with online courses, it's what we had to do to get them implemented. Not a single teacher job was to be lost, nor salary reduced, nor workload increased (only significantly decreased).
Teachers and their unions are masters at playing the emotion card. And they are PR masters too. We're talking teachers, some of whom were making north of $80k a year in this district (and this was in an area with a relatively low cost of living, mind you), who were able to convince everyone that they weren't getting paid enough and needed raises (4-6% annual raises, EVERY YEAR). You fuck with them at your own peril.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
No.
The idea that pieces of software and one way communication videos can compete with responsive human beings and solely provide first world education is laughable.
The idea that a third world nation can spend little and utilizes said technologies is critical to their economic success and transitioning to second and first world status.
Yes, these things will successfully replace teachers where there were no teachers in the first place. Everywhere else they are important as augmenting tools on the path of education but the place where they will make the most progress for us is where they need teachers but have none.
My work here is dung.
Slashdot's obsession with the disaster that is OLPC is laughable, as is the conclusion that it could replace teachers.
Is an OLPC better than nothing? Yes. Is it better than a proper teacher and resources? Heck no.
Siri will replace all teachers in the future.
where are you that teachers make $80K? That does not jive with national salary rates.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
A good teacher is more than a textbook-reader. It's someone who sees in a kid, where it has strong points, where there are weak points. What the kid really gives shiny eyes in terms of interests and hobbies. He know if the kid has parents who are in a divorce and will anticipate on it. He will ask a normally happy kid that all of sudden is all down, what's wrong. So no, you can not replace a good teacher. A good teacher is a source of inspiration and a safe haven.
Asimov wrote a short fictional story about this in 1951. It' about a kid who finds an old-fashioned paper book in the attic. In the story, there are no classrooms, kids all learn from computer terminals.
Free Martian Whores!
I was basically going to post this very thing but you beat me to it.
Unionized government employees do not simply step aside gracefully and change jobs or learn new skills. They fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo, with increasing ferocity the more obsolete they become.
Home-schooling, especially in the mid-western states, is a greater threat to teachers than OLPC.
are teachers going the way of the Dodo?
1. See Betteridge's law of headlines.
2. No. But the current methodologies of teaching are. Unfortunately, teaching methods do not adapt fast enough, and this in turn causes a lot of trouble, e.g. kids not having enough and up-to-date knowledge and information about certain fields so as they can properly choose their further study fields, which can even result in badly planned and chosen careers (yes, this is a bit on the extreme side, but true nonetheless).
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Within minutes the kids were opening the boxes and figuring out how to use the Motorola Zoom tablets, within days they were playing alphabet songs and withing a few months how to hack the user interface to enable blocked camera functionality.
Just imagine what they could do if they had electricity.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Anyone who has had to learn outside of a classroom understands that sometimes it's necessary: training manuals, certifications, just learning for personal enjoyment. Sometimes time and money are a factor. However, if you've ever struggled with a concept, you understand how much simpler it is when another person is involved imparting their knowledge in a personalized way to help you learn.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Having spent a lot of time in traditional education, and a lot of time teaching myself new things on the Internet, no, just throwing computers at kids is not going replace classroom education. The main difference between the two is depth and breadth. With a classroom education, you are confronted with topics that you are unlikely to have ever considered on your own, sometimes out of lack of interest, sometimes because the Internet tends to focus on certain aspects of various topics while ignoring others. You just can't get anything approaching a comprehensive education in any field just by reading things online.
Perhaps even more importantly, a good fraction of education lies in not just learning facts, but in doing: in learning how to research a topic so as to produce a compelling argument, in learning how to solve problems, in learning how to perform laboratory experiments. These experiences are irreplaceable.
But perhaps most crucially: most people just aren't self-motivated enough to educate themselves. And even for those that are, it isn't easy to do it yourself.
Hey Samzenpus, when you hit rock bottom, STOP DIGGING!
Sure, I can see it now. 2000 kids in high-school, no teachers.
After the break, can monkeys be employed as caretakers for banana plantations. Next week an in-depth look at the results of giving the lunatics the keys to the asylum, test case: slashdot.
For those who are terminally stupid/libertarians, most people need oversight at least part of the time. Give kids a tablet and they will indeed use it, just as easily as my generation used a dictionary. To look up dirty words and hitting other kids with.
Yes some kids will indulge in self-study without encouragement, these kids need teachers most of all, to stop the other kids from beating them up.
A tablet is not anymore a teacher then a TV is a baby sitter.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm stunned that this is the first place this conversation went. The article is about the ability of a digital device to do the job of a teacher and the first thing people can think of to say is that they're overpaid and too politically entrenched to remove. It really is election season isn't it...
A computer might be able to teach anyone how to program, math, English, etc. if they have the desire to learn, but it's the teachers job to give them that desire, and to assist, control and monitor the children.
If a child has a problem, then a teacher can easily help, especially if the child needs another way to look at the issue.
It's the teachers job to control the classroom and to make sure they don't start to beat up each other; another hard job at 2pm on a Friday.
It is the teachers job to monitor the children and to know if something is wrong with one of them. A teacher can be the only person a 12 yr old can go to and ask for help.
A lot of teachers are also more educated then most other professionals, with Masters degrees at least, and several years of experience before they are handed a classroom of their own.
And the most important thing: They have to deal with elected officials telling them how to teach, when the officials only qualification is "my kid goes to school".
Ya, we need to hand a kid a computer and tell them to teach themselves. It will be porn and WoW only within a couple of weeks.
But others do. A kid who has someone who can understand his thought processes and teach accordingly will come out better than if left alone (talking about the average kid here, not Mr G&T who'll be a physicist no matter what). So, I guess good teachers will always be needed, bad teachers have always been obsolete.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Try New York City, for one. You do need to eat if for a few years and get your Masters degree, but the pay does become quite good.
Particularly when you consider that it comes with a three month vacation. And before you start with how teachers are doing work during the summer, date a couple of teachers, especially the lower grades.
Which is amusingly ironic, considering how Slashdotters lay down and whine like helpless mewling pussies when they can't find a job, blaming offshoring, ageism, non-degreed-ism, and affirmative action.
They didn't all make that (I believe the average is $52k in my state). But quite a few of them did. You can imagine what 30 years of 4-6% yearly raises and bonuses for tons of other stuff (incl. a $9,000 a year bonus for becoming nationally certified) would get you to from an already generous starting salary. Teachers were actually some of the better paid people in the county I was in.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I know Slashdot loves to pull up these kinds of articles every time they're available. TED is susceptible similar lectures as well, so we who have actually worked in education have to keep our eyes open before the "computers will solve all our complex problems" crowd runs away with an invaluable source of social evolution.
Before the average Slashdotter writes off brick-and-mortar schools in favor of online learning with justifications like, "I was always bored in class", "I was smarter than my teacher", and "Just be open to change!" consider this: Is your average Slashdotter ANYTHING like your average American student?
The answer is that they simply are not. Slashdotters likely grew up in smaller than average social groups with access to technology. We adapt to new technology with little issue. We understand the underlying concepts of nested menus and function taxonomy. We are nerds and geeks who thrive on learning.
The rest of America's children do not thrive on learning and providing online education will not change that.
Having worked in middle schools, high schools, with community college transfer students, and then the resulting university undergrads, I have to say: If the general population doesn't HAVE to learn something or if there isn't something someone sufficiently passionate to help them learn something new regardless, they won't bother. Humanity is curious about the universe in that we consistently have some extremely smart people come to global acclaim for their works, but most people just want to live easy, have sex, and do so as long as possible.
It's the role of the educator to affect everyone, regardless of station or passion, and get them the minimum (plus) standard of knowledge and analytical capability so that they can learn more things and more complex concepts at the next level. This is something a computer with programed or limited responses cannot do.
Yes, OLPC can get kids excited about new things. Those children will NOT be starting hospitals in their villages with simple access to online education. They will not become cultural philosophers through online education. They will not begin building Motorola Zoom tablets with they learned via online learning. The concepts required to do any of those complex actions cannot be taught in a single plug-and-play manner. It requires a talented individual and as social an environment as possible to adjust the content to the user, to adjust the lesson plan to the person that day.
The only way teachers will ever go obsolete is if we are ignorant to assume that computers will ever substitute for the adaptive human mind.
The thought that children will be able to learn anything by watching a video is just laughable...
I teach middle school math, and the level of apathy and carelessness in work is very high. There is no substitute for students being in a classroom, actually doing work.
However, if all you want to do is compare a LECTURE to a VIDEO, then sure, "teachers" can be replaced. However, "Teacher" in that context really is just "Lecturer".
There's a lot more to teaching than being on a stage and talking at people. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, selling something, or both.
Yes, as soon as the printing press was invented, teachers became fundamentally unnecessary and put on the road to extinction, decreasing in number every year.
[/sarcasm]
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Unions are simply a group of individuals meeting together and deciding to all walk out of work on the same day if they don't like the conditions. You cannot make unions illegal without violating the right to free association that all Americans have. You can only bar the state from engaging with these unions in collective bargaining, institute a "right to work" law, and/or fire anyone that tries to organize.
For what it's worth, the fact that a country with a much greater dedication to organized labor than the US, namely Finland, is currently the envy of the developed world for its educational achievement in public schools, the existence of teachers' unions per se is clearly not the problem here.
Teachers in Chicago make nearly that yet their students' score poorly on standardized tests.
where are you that teachers make $80K? That does not jive with national salary rates.
In my school district (Santa Clara, California) elementary school teachers make an average of $78k. Many make more than $80k. If you live in California, you can use this site to see what teachers in your district are paid.
True, the Canadian dollar is worth 0.000371$ less than the US dollar. What a significant difference that makes.
He was clear enough: public unions, which even FDR was against.
A public union is an absurd idea in the first place, who is supposedly 'oppressing' these teachers? They are working for the government, who is this 'evil capitalist' that is oppressing them?
Also who is paying their salaries, is it the politicians that they are negotiating with? NOPE. It's the tax payer and the tax payer is the one who is getting screwed on this deal, he is the sheep that 'participates' in the decision what's for dinner, except the other two sides at the table are 2 wolves (politicians and the public unions).
MY OTHER COMMENTS
So... you consider 80k to pay for living in NYC quite good pay, when you got a Masters degree?
You got to be fucking kidding me, that is low pay for a tech flunkie.
And you contract yourself, how many teachers for lower grades got a Masters degree?
My bet is your a republican by the ease by which you select among several made up statistics to combine in a non-existing entity which you claim to represent everything.
Proof me wrong, become a teacher if the pay is so good and the vacations that long, you would have to be an idiot not to switch. So why haven't you? Because you know you are pulling stats out of your ass?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
1 Canadian dollar = 1.0003 US dollars
Things are a bit more expensive in Canada and don't forget the taxes. On the other hand, teachers have a great pension plan.
where are you that teachers make $80K? That does not jive with national salary rates.
Senior teachers. Average teacher pay is no where near 80k, and starting teacher pay is less than half of that. But if you can get a job in teaching and stay in the profession for 25 or 30 years you can get up to 70 or 80 in big cities.
One of my highshool buddies is about 65k, and that's after 10 years. His cost of living makes that not really a great salary for the area, but it's not bad.
I'm a teacher (university). I'm afraid that I often use a rather antique method in teaching: the Socratic method. Since I teach philosophy, most often one-to-one or one-to-two, perhaps it isn't such an inappropriate method.
If you can get a machine to do the teaching nearly as well and as inexpensively (although it isn't an inexpensive method), have at it.
Best wishes,
Bob
That does not jive with national salary rates
That don't jibe neither, honky! ;)
TFA is about an OLPC deployment in Africa. So maybe teachers in Africa and other developing nations are more replaceable than their unionized counterparts in the US and other industrialized, or should that be de-industrializing, countries? I see the Orwellian possibilities of replacing skilled or moderately skilled teachers with government minders whose only job would be to ensure that the kids are using the tablets in the prescribed manner. Obviously there would be holes in the most locked-down product, but gadget-based learning is easier to administer or manage.
I know there are evil unions. But in a world where there are evil corporations, that sort of evens up things a bit.
Here is what I anticipate something along these lines in the next 10+ years.
1) Students are required to learn via computer.
2) Reduce the number of Course hours by 2 and extend Art, Music, Sports, Ect time by two hours.
3) Students who progress test poorly via computer are forced to have extended after school tutoring with 4 kids per teacher for two hours extra of school per day of your grades slip below a B or you TEST anything below a C.
4) The hours that students report to tutoring is in blocks. Teacher has 8 blocks allowing for 32 dumb students.
5) Kids that get an F require 2 Hours of EXTRA tutoring 1 student per teacher.
Kids are motivated to stay in C+ range because they don't want to be required stay after school later and miss out on sports or whatever they do at home.
Teachers are still on staff for tutoring basis but not as many and hopefully only the ones that work well with students who have learning issues.
If a student wishes to OPT for Tutoring they can do so.
As senior teacher should be making as much if not more than a developer. We programmers like to think we're the shit, but what we do is really quite unimportant when compared to what a teacher does.
Current issue of American Educator has an interesting article -- 10-year study in Philadelphia, comparing rich and poor sections of town, in libraries where a multimillion dollar grant allowed them to provide equivalent resources in books and computer learning software. The results seen by those researchers are that the rich kids were guided by their parents in using all of those things, while the poor kids without any assistance or background knowledge failed to use them successfully. End result: poor kids actually fell more behind the rich than when they started out.
"Over the 10 years we spent in these two libraries, the gap in the amount of time adolescents spent reading increased substantially. Regardless of technology (books or computers), reading tends to predominate in Chestnut Hill but not in Lillian Marrero. After years of technology improvements, there is now a larger gap between these two communities in the amount of time spent reading than before. In fact, our rough estimates indicate that 10- to 12-year-olds at Chestnut Hill were reading more than twice as many words as their peers at Lillian Marrero." [p. 23]
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall2012/Neuman.pdf
These are dedicated researchers studying the issue for 10 years. This is not the head of OLPC pitching questionable and unverifiable extraordinary claims, in the quest for more funding (“If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said, FTA).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Don't forget, the teacher's union got teachers awesome perks.
Retirement, bonuses for continuing education, health benefits, etc ... all paid for by the school system.
- Mother was an accountant for a school system.
It's like the cops who complain at the crappy pay they get, but what you don't hear publicly, is all the perks and shift differentials, holiday pay, and also an awesome retirement. If a cop works a Sunday night that is also Christmas, he'll make a weeks pay in one night - and all he has to do is pull over drunks.
Both of those professions allow you to retire after 20 years with full pay. So, you're out of college at 22 or HS at 18 in the case of a cop, and you're "retired" at 42 - pretty young. Ready to go off for a second career to retire at 65 with TWO retirements.
Being a teacher can be a sweet deal: less than 40 hours a week, Summers off, holidays out the yin yang,.... I'd do it but I hate children: they should be eaten and not seen.
The difference is that only government employees can use the state's taxing power to enforce their demands on the rest of the population. The most everybody else can do is bitch about it.
The bigger problem is that people don't recognize that these devices AREN'T replacing the teacher. They can make the teacher way more effective. Think of the classroom like an assembly line for a moment. Traditional teaching has one person working (the teacher) during lecture and the other 30 are relatively inactive. Now, we can let the kids consume the lecture on their own, at their own pace, and they can come to school and do examples, and problems, and there are 30 students in the classroom actively working. They can ask each other questions, and can escalate questions to the teacher. Right now, we let them be inactive, and then send them home where, often, there isn't a person they can ask questions of, to do their homework. If they are completely lost, they wasted a full day, and have to wait until the next day to ask questions, which often means they are behind for the new day's lecture as well.
Do you actually _know_ any teachers? Teachers do get some vacation in the summer, but they also have to prepare their lesson plans for the fall. They work long hours during the school year because they have to grade papers and be prepared for each day's lesson. Imagine teaching from 8am to 3pm every day—that's five hours of teaching. How much time would you want to prepare? Now add in correcting tests, quizzes and papers. How long does that take? Yes, they get two and a half months off in the summer, during which they may spend time doing useless things like taking professional improvement courses to keep up with new material. But the notion that they are getting an incredible deal is simply untrue.
My upstairs neighbors until recently were school teachers. They do not get $80k/year—if they did they would be buying a house, not renting, and driving a BMW (or maybe a Prius), not a tiny econobox. They certainly wouldn't have put up with their upstairs neighbors for six months (yelling, swearing, loud music, doors slamming, garbage in the basement). We only put up with it because we knew we'd be moving into the house we were building on our geek salaries and parental largesse.
The idea that people should don a hair shirt in order to do useful and important work for society is deeply fucked up.
You're kidding, right? The evil capitalist who is oppressing them is you, demanding that teachers do incredibly hard work for crappy benefits and crappy pay. Just because someone is working a government job doesn't mean that there's no price pressure. The price pressure is actually worse, because jerks like you think it's perfectly fine to just keep cutting their pay year after year, and moreover think that they shouldn't be entitled to complain when you do.
In the 3rd world this is the model for how education will be done in the future. How many Stanford professors would be willing to travel in person to the African continent to conduct lectures? Not many I'm willing to bet. But prerecorded lectures could be easily available on cheap tablet computers. The main problems with university education is logistics (you have to travel to the class) and cost (it's too expensive - even for 1st world students). Prerecorded lectures are not ideal but they are a heck of a lot better than what is available to them now. And they can be delivered 1000 times cheaper than in person lectures.
Because of the unions, and the political implications of campaign contributions, this is going to be difficult tower to topple. Universities are already starting to provide distance learning, partly to keep up with places like University of Phoenix and partly because of the sheer economics of it. Recorded lectures are way, way cheaper to provide. Eventually it will be like the news broadcasts - you have attractive actors reading from scripts. Presentation will become more important than content and content will become a commodity. One day you might see professors working as independent contractors and selling lectures by the download.
However, as someone that has worked in Higher Ed I can tell you that things change there very slowly. If they are not careful the new technology will simply leapfrog over them.
A three month vacation? Pardon me but uhmmmmm no. What you get as a teacher is a three month layoff without pay. Yes they might receive paychecks but that is money withheld from their "in-session" checks. As for working during the summer, yes teachers do. Even if it's two weeks it's still two weeks without pay.
load "$",8,1
Who is 'oppressing' these teachers?
Administrators who suddenly decide to have a 3 hour meeting at the very end of the work day. Administrators who fire qualified teachers and hire their unqualified good buddy for the same position. Administrators who refuse to purchase enough text books for the number of students in a class. Administrators who don't plan man-power properly and have 40-50 kids in a classroom built to hold 30 max. Administrators who give performance reviews based on the attractiveness of a teacher. Administrators who maintain physical environments that are not condusive to learning (too hot, too cold, dirty, depressing, interruptions to class time). Administrators who assign extra duties that interfere with student's education, at no extra pay. Administrators who create a schedule that does not allow for even a lunch break, much less a restroom break for the teachers.
All of these examples are things that actually happend in the district that I worked for, and had clauses in the contract that were added, negotiated by the union and the school district.
Teachers in many California districts can make more than most engineers, and the majority of them get lifelong pensions. Talking about public school teachers, mind you. I agree with the thread starter. The teachers WILL take heavy casualties as the information age blossoms and is more offreely distributed, but it will take a long time because of said teachers union. I suspect the only way for it to happen is for self studiers of unaccredited online courses to enter the workforce without massive student debt, and for his to catch on.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
You wouldn't imaigne the new developments year in, year out, in Algebra, History, and English are staggering.
Imagine the innumerable hours of prep time that were worked re-working astronomy classes once it was determined that Pluto is no longer a planet...
In my district, teachers are paid $50/hour for curriculum development - teachers don't willy-nilly re-work curricullums every year, that's insane.
Ken
It's easy to find teachers in North America making $80k. Sometimes that's just handling cost of living in an area like New York, but frequently it comes from a trick education "reformers" have pushed over the last few decades to gut the unions.
1. Offer teachers per student overage fees to handle larger than normal classes. Teachers agree because, hey, the district is going to screw us on class size anyway, might as well get paid for it.
2. Lay off/make redundant/fire every second teacher, dumping those students on the first teacher, who now makes not-double their salary, but quite a lot more. Bitching and moaning ensue, district makes noise about saving taxpayers money, parents who voted in Republicans say "at least our taxes didn't go up..."
3. Wait a couple years.
4. Run for office on a platform of cutting teacher's salaries and point to the gym teacher making $90k/year because he's got a class of 60 students. Cue outraged parents exclaiming "why does my kid's teacher make more than me! I'm a manager!"
5. Salaries are frozen, or experienced/high paid teachers are laid off, and inexperienced teachers hired in their stead who don't get the overage fee originally negotiated.
Unions are the front lines of the class size debate. Every administrator wants to increase class size to economize on the number of teachers. Teachers want to keep class sizes sane so they can actually teach as opposed to doing crowd control. The union negotiates class size limits. This is how districts con the union into breaking class size limits, and it's a trap.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
More than 80% of students in Chicago public schools are poor enough to qualify for free lunches. Try improving the test scores of a group of kids living under the poverty line.
My wife teaches at an inner city high school. She has kids who skip school to work fast food jobs because their parent is a junkie and they're the only one bringing money in; students who skip to watch siblings while their single parent works; students who can't sleep because they hear sirens all night; students whose parents didn't teach them to wash with soap; students whose parents get drunk and trash their textbooks because they're offended that their kid might try to be smarter than them; students who haven't eaten in days, or whose only meal is the free lunch.
She had a student approach a speaker she brought in on bullying (afterwards), and tell him that he was being raped several times a week by a group of boys in the school.
Every problem to do with poverty shows up in the public schools. Among the many idiocies of standardized tests is that poor kids require a ton of effort just to get them to focus on being in school. You can't even start educating them until you've mitigated the worst of their circumstances somehow. You can't even start on test scores until you've solved basic social issues with poverty that are far out of your scope as a teacher--and in Chicago's public school system, that's a majority of the kids.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
There seems to be a corrolation between Slashdot posters and incompetent teachers. According to NCES the national average for teachers salaries is $56,069. Given all of the Slashdot posters who claim they are, they are related to, and know teachers making less than $25k a year, you might have to consider that your dad just might have been lying to you.
Standardized tests correlate more strongly than any other measurement with later academic success, college graduation rates, and later life success.
Not true. According to Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, the one factor that correlates most strongly with achievement on standardized tests is family income. This is the consensus, unchallenged by people who follow the data.
Some standardized tests are validated, like the NAEP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assessment_of_Educational_Progress However, the NAEP measures aggregate scores for groups of students (and for small subsets, it isn't valid). It will tell you how well the school system as a whole is doing, but it can't tell how well individual teachers or students are doing. It doesn't have statistical power to evaluate individual teachers and students. That's the best test we have.
The standardized tests that are used for rating teachers are not validated. That's the big argument against them. A science teacher at Stuyvesant high school ran some standardized statistical tests on the NYC teacher tests, and the tests reported literally a random distribution. Principals were complaining that the tests were giving low rankings to teachers that were doing an excellent job, that they wanted to rehire the next year.
Standardized tests are worthless for rating teachers. They're worse than worthless, because they're used to fire perfectly competent people and reward people who are at best skilled at teaching to the test. How would you like to be a principal, and have a system that removed 5% of your teachers at random every year?
Standardized tests give the greatest rewards to teachers and principals who cheat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee#Test_erasures
Tests have to be validated to make sure they measure what they're supposed to measure, to make sure they're statistically valid, and to make sure they don't have any of the well-recognized problems of tests.
The NAEP is validated. The standardized tests used by schools to judge teachers are not validated. Even the testing advocates admit that.
If you want to do basic science, have scientifically validated tests.
The New York Times had a story about a probationary teacher in a middle school. Her students did very well, they were getting into New York's specialized science schools, their grades were good, and the principal wanted to rehire the teacher.
Yet, in the standardized test, she had been rated in the bottom 5% of all teachers. Under city rules, the principal couldn't rehire her.
However, her 5% score had a confidence interval between 0 and 52%. That meant she was either one of the worst teachers in the school, or in the top half.
How are your math skills? Do you know what a confidence interval is?