>So they've found that encouraging students to take CS courses based on their skin color or genitals is less effective than encouraging students who have an interest or aptitude for the subject? Gee, I never would have guessed that result.
Yes, this is well known.
What traditionally happens is that teachers are very concerned with their pass rate, so they filter kids out of their class that they think won't pass the AP test.
I worked for a College Board program for four years designed to address this problem, as a lot of the people getting filtered out might very well pass anyway, and therefore be denied an opportunity for an advanced class and college credits for no other reason than the teacher's ego.
So they stopped talking about pass rates entirely, and heavily discourage teachers from using the term, instead quantifying teacher success based on *numbers of students who pass* instead. So even if little Timmy only has a 50% chance to pass, it would still encourage the teacher to let him try, since the expected value of letting Timmy stay in the class is better than if the teacher filtered him out.
Unfortunately, the fucking article perpetuates the old model of thinking, which is to emphasize the pass rate over the actual number of kids passing the AP test, and demonstrating that they have a freshman in college-ish level of understanding of the subject.
Anyone who knows anything about compression knows that universal lossless compression is impossible to always do, because if such an algorithm existed, you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit. And uncompresing a single bit that could be literally anything is problematic.
I sort of wish they'd picked some other sort of woo.
>>Hallam said it best: there has never been a time when humanity has successfully and peacefully coexisted with nature.
Out of the 2,000 or so species listed on the Endangered Species Act written 40 years ago, exactly three have gone extinct. And they were already endangered to begin with.
Seems like we're doing reasonably well here in America.
Um, no. There's a reason why you get a BA in Math, not a BS.
Math is an exemplar of a priori thinking. You can literally do math in your head by just picking some starting axioms and deriving from there, with no reference to the outside world.
Science is an exemplar of a posteriori thinking. You make empirical observations about the world, generate hypotheses, and see if the evidence matches the model.
>... Replace with cheap bland French beer? I know they have not-so-great beer, and if not, definitely some cheap staple table wine. So change the complement to suit the location. He didnt literally mean it had to be bud light.
Actually, Budweiser is appallingly popular in France. I saw teens everywhere drinking it.
>The idea that liberty and capitalism was what made America great is a giant lie. The US was just another Imperialist power like the European nations before it.
America was a very half-hearted Imperialist power, that just got into the game in the Philippines because all the cool kids were doing it. (Seriously - read some of the primary sources of the time in regards to McKinley and Funston.) America was much better about not keeping other countries after we conquer them than pretty much anyone else in the world.
Is Cuba an American state?
Iraq?
Germany?
You think Germany would have given back any of the other countries it overran?
No?
So you're wrong.
> It rose to power not because of voluntary mutually beneficial trade between free thinking people. It rose to power because it conquered, killed, stole, and was victorious in wars.
All countries, at some level, are founded on the right of conquest. What made the Aztecs have any more right to the land than the Spanish?
America's *strength* though, really was based on being an economic powerhouse of industry and trade. Look at the GDP of America in WWII and compare it with the USSR (whom it sounds like you would just love to pieces).
> This is what the interstate commerce clause is meant for: use federal power to force States to stop anti-business practices that hurt businesses and people when States attempt to destroy competition by preventing businesses and people from engaging in interstate commerce.
What?! No. Clearly you haven't been paying attention. "Interstate Commerce" means that if I grow wheat in my back yard and eat it, *that* is interstate commerce.
>What we need is a revision that turns incorrect automated takedown notices into a contempt charge. That is exactly what it is., a failure to show the care and seriousness due to the DMCA process.
They considered this, but Goodlatte and other representatives in the pockets of industry explicitly rejected it because it might have a cooling effect on takedowns.:p
> Electrically-powered synthesis of methane from H2O and CO2 already exists, and the process of forming longer hydrocarbons from methane do, too.
Yep. I think we ought to focus more of our research dollars on making this cheaper.
If we start having more solar/wind than we know what to do with, using excess capacity to build up hydrocarbons is theoretically a great way to store the energy that would play nicely with our existing infrastructure, and would suck carbon out out of the atmosphere (though it'd get cycled back out) rather than from the earth's crust.
>Yes - damn the city planners of the 1870's for not anticipating the conditions of 2014.
I know, right? It's not like all of San Francisco ever got hit by a massive earthquake and fire or something.
Actually, they did have their chance to rebuild the city right - they knew their layout was shit and considered it - the trouble was figuring out how property rights would work when you moved all of the lots around was too much of a nightmare for the city, especially given that they'd lost all their records in the fire. So they were basically forced to allow everyone to rebuild right where they were before, using a city layout that would make old European cities cry from dysfunction.
>I don't understand completely how this all has gone so far so fast. Just 15 years ago, this all would have been unthinkable.
The FISA court has been around a lot longer than 15 years. It was founded in 1978, and has been a civil rights issue for those of us paying attention for a long time now.
The American legal system, as you say, is based on being able to confront your accuser in a criminal case (6th Amendment), to examine evidence held against you, and that trials in abstentia are a violation of our natural rights.
>When the simplest functions require you to go to the internet to find out how to do them. My virgin W8 experience wasdoing a websearch on how to shutdown, and there were lots of hits. If we have problems trying to figure how to shut the computer down, there is something drastically wrong.
Yeah, that was my first experience as well. A waitress at a local Denny's had a brand new W8 laptop, and she was passing it around the Fresno Chess Club trying to get someone how to shut it down. Not one could do it. So she brought it over to me. I laughed at them a bit, and then realized I couldn't find the damn shutdown option either.
When you bury a very common operation under an invisible menu (the charms bar) under a nonsensical choice (Power Options) you have a contender for Worst UI of the Decade.
> SCOTUS actually ruled pretty much the opposite: it said -- in so many words -- that the EPA can NOT write its own rules contrary to the laws explicitly laid down by Congress.
Yeah. I listened to the live oral arguments for this case, because I'm a nerd I guess, and the justices were very, very skeptical of the EPA's position on the matter. They fully understood that maybe 250 tons of CO2 isn't as bad as 250 tons of cyanide or whatever, but they really didn't want to go down the road of letting the EPA write their own law and then regulate it.
What SCOTUS really wants done is for congress to come in and adjust the pollution threshold from 250 to 10,000 tons on CO2, and they don't seem opposed to the notion of regulating CO2 entirely as a 'pollutant' (something I take a bit of issue with, as pretty much anything could be called a pollutant in that case if you have enough of it), but given the dysfunction of Congress, it'll probably never happen.
>After all, science is not like philosophy. Science is meant to be used
You use philosophy every day. Everyone does. You just don't realize it because it has faded into the background.
Statements like "People will try to use it and it wont work and they will immediately know that there has been a falsification" reveal what sort of philosophical schools of thought you have bought in to. But they are not God-given, or even necessarily right or best. But you use it anyway because there's a hive mind in science that thinks that Naive Popperism is equivalent to science itself.
>Opting out in Facebook is like playing one of those old Flash games where you mouse around the screen, trying to find the hot spot that will accept a click.
>I note the difference in firing rate. And yet there is little to no evidence that private schools offer a better education or have better outcomes than public schools.
Not the difference, but the fact that public schools in California had effectively a 0% firing rate for tenured teachers. Are you telling me that no tenured teachers are actually bad, and should be fired? Because I can tell you the number is somewhere between 0% and 15%.
>I agree. But honestly, my first reaction to seeing a result like that is that there must be something wrong with the test, not the teacher.
Well, that was a pulling numbers-out-of-my-ass example. But the point is, we test students annually on their English and Math performance, so it's really not that hard to identify teachers that are doing a poor job, because we can see where their kids were at before and after their year of teaching.
I'll tell you another thing - the creative teachers that don't teach to the test, throw away the textbook, and give their kids an interesting and engaging experience? Their students actually do pretty well on the tests. I had Jan Gabay (http://preuss.ucsd.edu/faculty-and-staff/bio/teachers/jan-gabay.html) as a teacher for two years, and she didn't spend a single day in AP English teaching to the test. The class didn't even know what would be on the test, but pretty much everyone passed. I work with similar teachers across the country (Bill Coate being a notable example) and they uniformly do well on their test results (both on my assessments and on standardized state and national assessments).
So if a creative teacher is doing cool creative stuff and the students aren't doing any better on a standardized test after a *year* of their class, then yeah, I'll go ahead and say they're wasting the students' time. Remember, we're not interested in identifying who is creating the highest test scores, but rather which teachers are completely failing to educate their kids.
Maybe we have a system were they're given intervention first before they can lose tenure (like how schools get PI before being taken over), maybe we have principals do impromptu observations of their classrooms (which would turn up problems like my AP Physics teacher, who was simply old and burned out - he'd give students free passes anywhere on or off campus when he didn't feel like teaching, and would send them out to bring him donuts), but these systems can be implemented with the data technology we have available today (I know, I've done them for a decade). It's just that the unions don't want anything that will make teachers easier to fire.
>I agree the teacher unions could be a lot more cooperative. But then teacher unions and administrators have had a long history of animosity towards each other. They don't trust each other.
Depends on the district, really. Some get along great, some make each others' life miserable.
But I'm more talking about the state teachers' union, the CTA, which is the #1 donor to political campaigns in California. They have literally stood up in Congress and told our congressmen that "We put you there, we can get you out, too." In such an environment, there is zero chance that anything they don't want to go through, and they have no desire to see a teacher evaluation system put in place. Other states, like New York, are just as bad from what I can tell. Hawaii's education system is hilariously dysfunctional.
>Uh, sure, but is that because of tenure? I doubt it. Are experienced teachers blocking good ideas and protecting themselves from younger teachers with tenure? No, not likely. Experienced teachers are protecting themselves from administrators. The younger teachers don't have this protection, unfortunately.
Tenure means you can sit in the back of the classroom and read travel magazines all day, like my AP Physics teacher did, while the class does nothing but take problem sets. That the class then passes around and then grade.
The tenure system certainly doesn't protect the starry eyed new teachers who do all sorts of creative and interesting things (and get good results) but end up quitting because the system grinds them down. And no, giving tenure to them wouldn't really help either, as a lot of them quit, not get fired. Though some do get pink slipped in order to avoid giving them tenure. Some districts I work with pink slip pretty much everyone they can every year and then rehire them back.
>That is what I said above, but what would make this discussion more interesting would be some numbers. Exactly how many bad teachers are there? As a percentage of total teachers? And how many of those bad teachers have been identified as needing to be removed, but are being blocked by tenure? In my experience, "bad teacher" is often "teacher I don't like" which is another reason tenure exists.
Number would help us to fire bad teachers, wouldn't it? That's why teachers unions are so adamantly opposed to it. And yes, I've heard their spokesmen repeat the claim that you made, that they support "reasonable" evaluation of teacher performance, but the actual reality is that they don't. Teachers themselves are - and with good reason - paranoid about whatever evaluation system is implemented, but the CTA opposes everything in practice.
California applying for Race to the Top (RTTT), which will add accountability measures? The CTA offered $18k to every state senator who voted against it. It's nice being the organization with the most political money in the entire state, is it not?
LA implementing a reasonable evaluation measure? Opposed. Doesn't matter if it would actually be used to determine pay or firings or whatever.
I could probably do a fairly comprehensive analysis on what percentage of teachers are bad. I've got data spanning a large chunk of the state. But just pulling up one sample school district's results for a test I administered, elementary school teachers (and their students) were given a standards-based test in a core academic subject (which I won't mention so as to provide a bit of anonymity). Note that this was *the same test* their students took. It was a student test. So it was pretty basic stuff. Here's the results: Number of Teachers (N) taking test: 44 Those failing (= 60% && "bad teacher" is often "teacher I don't like" which is another reason tenure exists.
Which is, again, why we need a comprehensive and fair evaluation system. If teachers could lose tenure by scoring abysmally on a standardized content knowledge test, but keep it otherwise, then only the incompetent teachers could be fired. And only then if their principals thought they weren't salvageable. Teacher training programs can be effective at fixing these issues.
>All evaluations are subjective. Just because you can put a number on something doesn't mean it is helpful or meaningful.
I don't think you know what subjective means. Subjective means that a principal can do a classroom evaluation and give a teacher he likes a good review, and a teacher he doesn't like a bad review. Objective, by contrast, means observer-independent. It means that the system judges all people equally, It doesn't mean that the test is especially meaningful, as you say, since you could objectively assess things unrelated to a student's knowledge. But I will tell you that if Johnny comes in to your English class knowing 5000 words in the English language, and walks out of your class knowing only 3000, then you're failing at your job as an English teacher. Fair assessments can track this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Phillip K Dick wrote the novel by using the I Ching to randomly create plot points. The I Ching features pre-eminently in the novel.
I'm not sure how well that will translate to the big screen.
Certainly the whole "The Axis Won WW2!" thing will translate over easily, but the book really isn't about that.
>So they've found that encouraging students to take CS courses based on their skin color or genitals is less effective than encouraging students who have an interest or aptitude for the subject? Gee, I never would have guessed that result.
Yes, this is well known.
What traditionally happens is that teachers are very concerned with their pass rate, so they filter kids out of their class that they think won't pass the AP test.
I worked for a College Board program for four years designed to address this problem, as a lot of the people getting filtered out might very well pass anyway, and therefore be denied an opportunity for an advanced class and college credits for no other reason than the teacher's ego.
So they stopped talking about pass rates entirely, and heavily discourage teachers from using the term, instead quantifying teacher success based on *numbers of students who pass* instead. So even if little Timmy only has a 50% chance to pass, it would still encourage the teacher to let him try, since the expected value of letting Timmy stay in the class is better than if the teacher filtered him out.
Unfortunately, the fucking article perpetuates the old model of thinking, which is to emphasize the pass rate over the actual number of kids passing the AP test, and demonstrating that they have a freshman in college-ish level of understanding of the subject.
Anyone who knows anything about compression knows that universal lossless compression is impossible to always do, because if such an algorithm existed, you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit. And uncompresing a single bit that could be literally anything is problematic.
I sort of wish they'd picked some other sort of woo.
>>Hallam said it best: there has never been a time when humanity has successfully and peacefully coexisted with nature.
Out of the 2,000 or so species listed on the Endangered Species Act written 40 years ago, exactly three have gone extinct. And they were already endangered to begin with.
Seems like we're doing reasonably well here in America.
>I invite you to visit any developer's forum. Particularly for multiplayer games that get frequent patching.
Yep.
Calling them cesspools does a disservice to cesspools, which are a fine part of our public sanitation system.
>You know what's not a science but uses a lot of math? Economics, which is 3 parts ideology and 1 part math.
It sounds to me like you're running on three parts ideology and one part math.
Economics is actually very much a science! They make empirical studies of the world, and test them to see if they hold up.
Math is very much not a science.
>Maths is a science
Um, no. There's a reason why you get a BA in Math, not a BS.
Math is an exemplar of a priori thinking. You can literally do math in your head by just picking some starting axioms and deriving from there, with no reference to the outside world.
Science is an exemplar of a posteriori thinking. You make empirical observations about the world, generate hypotheses, and see if the evidence matches the model.
>... Replace with cheap bland French beer? I know they have not-so-great beer, and if not, definitely some cheap staple table wine. So change the complement to suit the location. He didnt literally mean it had to be bud light.
Actually, Budweiser is appallingly popular in France. I saw teens everywhere drinking it.
You can, you just need to phrase it right -
"I love how you can always find a table there!"
"You never need to tip the servers!"
"The bartender was at his best when serving Bud Light!"
>The idea that liberty and capitalism was what made America great is a giant lie. The US was just another Imperialist power like the European nations before it.
America was a very half-hearted Imperialist power, that just got into the game in the Philippines because all the cool kids were doing it. (Seriously - read some of the primary sources of the time in regards to McKinley and Funston.) America was much better about not keeping other countries after we conquer them than pretty much anyone else in the world.
Is Cuba an American state?
Iraq?
Germany?
You think Germany would have given back any of the other countries it overran?
No?
So you're wrong.
> It rose to power not because of voluntary mutually beneficial trade between free thinking people. It rose to power because it conquered, killed, stole, and was victorious in wars.
All countries, at some level, are founded on the right of conquest. What made the Aztecs have any more right to the land than the Spanish?
America's *strength* though, really was based on being an economic powerhouse of industry and trade. Look at the GDP of America in WWII and compare it with the USSR (whom it sounds like you would just love to pieces).
> This is what the interstate commerce clause is meant for: use federal power to force States to stop anti-business practices that hurt businesses and people when States attempt to destroy competition by preventing businesses and people from engaging in interstate commerce.
What?! No. Clearly you haven't been paying attention. "Interstate Commerce" means that if I grow wheat in my back yard and eat it, *that* is interstate commerce.
See? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
I don't know what kind of crazy English language you are speaking there, buddy.
>What we need is a revision that turns incorrect automated takedown notices into a contempt charge. That is exactly what it is., a failure to show the care and seriousness due to the DMCA process.
They considered this, but Goodlatte and other representatives in the pockets of industry explicitly rejected it because it might have a cooling effect on takedowns. :p
>Aliens ...sending us messages a million years ago ... ?
Drink your Ovaltine.
This is a great overview of gaming, thanks.
> Electrically-powered synthesis of methane from H2O and CO2 already exists, and the process of forming longer hydrocarbons from methane do, too.
Yep. I think we ought to focus more of our research dollars on making this cheaper.
If we start having more solar/wind than we know what to do with, using excess capacity to build up hydrocarbons is theoretically a great way to store the energy that would play nicely with our existing infrastructure, and would suck carbon out out of the atmosphere (though it'd get cycled back out) rather than from the earth's crust.
>Not "right" by the OP's definition, no. Even in 1906 they could not have reasonably predicted the conditions of 2014.
They wanted to widen and straighten the streets. This would have made a pretty significant impact on the road conditions in SF, even today.
Could you imagine what London would be like today if they didn't remodel a bit after 1666?
>Yes - damn the city planners of the 1870's for not anticipating the conditions of 2014.
I know, right? It's not like all of San Francisco ever got hit by a massive earthquake and fire or something.
Actually, they did have their chance to rebuild the city right - they knew their layout was shit and considered it - the trouble was figuring out how property rights would work when you moved all of the lots around was too much of a nightmare for the city, especially given that they'd lost all their records in the fire. So they were basically forced to allow everyone to rebuild right where they were before, using a city layout that would make old European cities cry from dysfunction.
>I don't understand completely how this all has gone so far so fast. Just 15 years ago, this all would have been unthinkable.
The FISA court has been around a lot longer than 15 years. It was founded in 1978, and has been a civil rights issue for those of us paying attention for a long time now.
The American legal system, as you say, is based on being able to confront your accuser in a criminal case (6th Amendment), to examine evidence held against you, and that trials in abstentia are a violation of our natural rights.
So yeah, Pope, I agree with you for once.
>When the simplest functions require you to go to the internet to find out how to do them. My virgin W8 experience wasdoing a websearch on how to shutdown, and there were lots of hits. If we have problems trying to figure how to shut the computer down, there is something drastically wrong.
Yeah, that was my first experience as well. A waitress at a local Denny's had a brand new W8 laptop, and she was passing it around the Fresno Chess Club trying to get someone how to shut it down. Not one could do it. So she brought it over to me. I laughed at them a bit, and then realized I couldn't find the damn shutdown option either.
When you bury a very common operation under an invisible menu (the charms bar) under a nonsensical choice (Power Options) you have a contender for Worst UI of the Decade.
> SCOTUS actually ruled pretty much the opposite: it said -- in so many words -- that the EPA can NOT write its own rules contrary to the laws explicitly laid down by Congress.
Yeah. I listened to the live oral arguments for this case, because I'm a nerd I guess, and the justices were very, very skeptical of the EPA's position on the matter. They fully understood that maybe 250 tons of CO2 isn't as bad as 250 tons of cyanide or whatever, but they really didn't want to go down the road of letting the EPA write their own law and then regulate it.
What SCOTUS really wants done is for congress to come in and adjust the pollution threshold from 250 to 10,000 tons on CO2, and they don't seem opposed to the notion of regulating CO2 entirely as a 'pollutant' (something I take a bit of issue with, as pretty much anything could be called a pollutant in that case if you have enough of it), but given the dysfunction of Congress, it'll probably never happen.
>After all, science is not like philosophy. Science is meant to be used
You use philosophy every day. Everyone does. You just don't realize it because it has faded into the background.
Statements like "People will try to use it and it wont work and they will immediately know that there has been a falsification" reveal what sort of philosophical schools of thought you have bought in to. But they are not God-given, or even necessarily right or best. But you use it anyway because there's a hive mind in science that thinks that Naive Popperism is equivalent to science itself.
>Opting out in Facebook is like playing one of those old Flash games where you mouse around the screen, trying to find the hot spot that will accept a click.
Copying Windows 8's UI, no doubt.
>I note the difference in firing rate. And yet there is little to no evidence that private schools offer a better education or have better outcomes than public schools.
Not the difference, but the fact that public schools in California had effectively a 0% firing rate for tenured teachers. Are you telling me that no tenured teachers are actually bad, and should be fired? Because I can tell you the number is somewhere between 0% and 15%.
>I agree. But honestly, my first reaction to seeing a result like that is that there must be something wrong with the test, not the teacher.
Well, that was a pulling numbers-out-of-my-ass example. But the point is, we test students annually on their English and Math performance, so it's really not that hard to identify teachers that are doing a poor job, because we can see where their kids were at before and after their year of teaching.
I'll tell you another thing - the creative teachers that don't teach to the test, throw away the textbook, and give their kids an interesting and engaging experience? Their students actually do pretty well on the tests. I had Jan Gabay (http://preuss.ucsd.edu/faculty-and-staff/bio/teachers/jan-gabay.html) as a teacher for two years, and she didn't spend a single day in AP English teaching to the test. The class didn't even know what would be on the test, but pretty much everyone passed. I work with similar teachers across the country (Bill Coate being a notable example) and they uniformly do well on their test results (both on my assessments and on standardized state and national assessments).
So if a creative teacher is doing cool creative stuff and the students aren't doing any better on a standardized test after a *year* of their class, then yeah, I'll go ahead and say they're wasting the students' time. Remember, we're not interested in identifying who is creating the highest test scores, but rather which teachers are completely failing to educate their kids.
Maybe we have a system were they're given intervention first before they can lose tenure (like how schools get PI before being taken over), maybe we have principals do impromptu observations of their classrooms (which would turn up problems like my AP Physics teacher, who was simply old and burned out - he'd give students free passes anywhere on or off campus when he didn't feel like teaching, and would send them out to bring him donuts), but these systems can be implemented with the data technology we have available today (I know, I've done them for a decade). It's just that the unions don't want anything that will make teachers easier to fire.
>I agree the teacher unions could be a lot more cooperative. But then teacher unions and administrators have had a long history of animosity towards each other. They don't trust each other.
Depends on the district, really. Some get along great, some make each others' life miserable.
But I'm more talking about the state teachers' union, the CTA, which is the #1 donor to political campaigns in California. They have literally stood up in Congress and told our congressmen that "We put you there, we can get you out, too." In such an environment, there is zero chance that anything they don't want to go through, and they have no desire to see a teacher evaluation system put in place. Other states, like New York, are just as bad from what I can tell. Hawaii's education system is hilariously dysfunctional.
Grr, Slashcode at the results.
Here's the results again.
N=44
Teachers failing: 6
Teachers marginal: 13
Teachers passing: 25
I also note several awkward sentences, which I apologize for. It's 2:10AM.
You might also be interested in the firing rate comparison between public and private schools here: http://teachersunionexposed.co...
>Uh, sure, but is that because of tenure? I doubt it. Are experienced teachers blocking good ideas and protecting themselves from younger teachers with tenure? No, not likely. Experienced teachers are protecting themselves from administrators. The younger teachers don't have this protection, unfortunately.
Tenure means you can sit in the back of the classroom and read travel magazines all day, like my AP Physics teacher did, while the class does nothing but take problem sets. That the class then passes around and then grade.
The tenure system certainly doesn't protect the starry eyed new teachers who do all sorts of creative and interesting things (and get good results) but end up quitting because the system grinds them down. And no, giving tenure to them wouldn't really help either, as a lot of them quit, not get fired. Though some do get pink slipped in order to avoid giving them tenure. Some districts I work with pink slip pretty much everyone they can every year and then rehire them back.
>That is what I said above, but what would make this discussion more interesting would be some numbers. Exactly how many bad teachers are there? As a percentage of total teachers? And how many of those bad teachers have been identified as needing to be removed, but are being blocked by tenure? In my experience, "bad teacher" is often "teacher I don't like" which is another reason tenure exists.
Number would help us to fire bad teachers, wouldn't it? That's why teachers unions are so adamantly opposed to it. And yes, I've heard their spokesmen repeat the claim that you made, that they support "reasonable" evaluation of teacher performance, but the actual reality is that they don't. Teachers themselves are - and with good reason - paranoid about whatever evaluation system is implemented, but the CTA opposes everything in practice.
California applying for Race to the Top (RTTT), which will add accountability measures? The CTA offered $18k to every state senator who voted against it. It's nice being the organization with the most political money in the entire state, is it not?
LA implementing a reasonable evaluation measure? Opposed. Doesn't matter if it would actually be used to determine pay or firings or whatever.
I could probably do a fairly comprehensive analysis on what percentage of teachers are bad. I've got data spanning a large chunk of the state. But just pulling up one sample school district's results for a test I administered, elementary school teachers (and their students) were given a standards-based test in a core academic subject (which I won't mention so as to provide a bit of anonymity). Note that this was *the same test* their students took. It was a student test. So it was pretty basic stuff. Here's the results:
Number of Teachers (N) taking test: 44
Those failing (= 60% && "bad teacher" is often "teacher I don't like" which is another reason tenure exists.
Which is, again, why we need a comprehensive and fair evaluation system. If teachers could lose tenure by scoring abysmally on a standardized content knowledge test, but keep it otherwise, then only the incompetent teachers could be fired. And only then if their principals thought they weren't salvageable. Teacher training programs can be effective at fixing these issues.
>All evaluations are subjective. Just because you can put a number on something doesn't mean it is helpful or meaningful.
I don't think you know what subjective means. Subjective means that a principal can do a classroom evaluation and give a teacher he likes a good review, and a teacher he doesn't like a bad review. Objective, by contrast, means observer-independent. It means that the system judges all people equally, It doesn't mean that the test is especially meaningful, as you say, since you could objectively assess things unrelated to a student's knowledge. But I will tell you that if Johnny comes in to your English class knowing 5000 words in the English language, and walks out of your class knowing only 3000, then you're failing at your job as an English teacher. Fair assessments can track this sort of thing.