I always pay attention to someone who has first-hand experience.
I think American unions have lots of flaws, but we are better off with them than without them. I'd like to see American unions act more like German unions. The biggest problem with American unions, I think, is that they pursue the short-term interests of their individual workers, rather than the benefits of the company as a whole and workers as a whole.
Salesmen who attended trade shows in New York City told me that they couldn't put a plug in the wall themselves; they had to hire a union electrician for $60 an hour, minimum of 4 hours. Now New York lost the trade show business.
But the American conservatives aren't talking about more cooperation with unions; they want to destroy unions. That's what these right-to-work laws are all about. I don't mind making America more like Germany, but I don't want to turn us into Mississippi.
I think the proverbial incompetent teacher that the school can't get rid of is very rare. In New York City and elsewhere, the school boards ignore the teachers' union argument that (1) teachers know when a fellow teacher is not doing a good job, (2) they can evaluate fellow teachers by sitting in the classroom, better than a test can, (3) you can usually train a teacher to improve, (4) those few teachers who can't teach and can't improve do belong in another job.
This is what I've been reading about it lately. As far as I know this is accurate. I'm always interested in first-hand facts to the contrary.
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
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Ger
Right, I can think of all kinds of good educational experiences that won't show up on a test.
Suppose instead of sitting in a classroom studying a textbook, a teacher helps the kid with a project on robots or fruit flies.
It's a great learning experience, but how will that improve his test scores? How many questions are there about robots on the standardized exam? Standardized exams don't test knowledge in depth.
You could eliminate poverty, as many of the European countries (Scandinavia, Holland, etc.) have done. All you have to do is make the rich pay their fair share of taxes, and use that money for necessary social services like housing, education, health care and transportation.
You have to educate people to vote according to their own interests (broadly defined), rather than according to the interests of the people who are running the country now.
True, it might be difficult. But that's the job we have to do.
No, you're reading that "suggestion" into it incorrectly. The factories in Germany and the U.S. are equally profitable for the company, but they're not equally profitable for the workers.
In Germany, the workers get $67 an hour, and in the U.S., the workers for those same German companies (in non-union factories) get $14.50 to $19.50 an hour.
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
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
A tale of two systems By Kevin C. Brown Remapping Debate Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of
They don't say there's no way to rate a teacher. They say there's no way to rate a teacher with a machine-scoreable test. This particular algorithm is statistically invalid. It gives bizarre results. A teacher ranks in the top one year, and in the bottom the next year.
They say good teachers can rate fellow teachers and tell them how to improve rather than firing them.
What study? The major predictor of student grades and advancement is family income. The NYC board of education formula tries to correct for that, and many other factors, and it fails. The problem with the evaluation system is that it's statistically and scientifically invalid. It produces nonsensical results. Read the teacher's ad. http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/uft-teacher-data-reports-formula-ad.pdf
Studies have shown repeatedly that the one factor that predicts a student's performance more than any other is family income. If every kid in the school is doing badly, you're most likely in a low-income neighborhood.
According to the educators who have been working on school reform for years, the only way to evaluate a teacher is to have good educators evaluate him/her by sitting in the classroom. Teachers know how good their colleagues are.
That would have the advantage of having a colleague in the room who can tell the teacher after class what he/she is doing right and wrong. There are programs like that. You can teach people how to teach. You don't have to fire them (except in extreme cases).
If you want a metric that you can give in a machine-scoreable test, it doesn't exist. You can't reduce everything to algorithms and computerized management.
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.
Your understanding of statistics and scientific validity is naive.
The tests don't work. They don't measure achievement with enough accuracy to use them for anything more than a rough guide. People are assuming that the tests are valid, when they're not.
This is explained in the teachers' newspaper ad linked in TFA, and also here:
Union workers in the profitable VW and BMJ plants in Germany get $67 an hour.
Non-union workers in the equally profitable VW and BMJ plants in the non-union American south get $17 an hour.
That's what unions do.
Of course, unions are no more perfect than any other American institution. Do you think employers don't sometimes bully and abuse employees either? If you want democracy, you have to work on it. Look up Eugene Debs on Wikipedia.
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?
Diane Ravitch says the same thing you did. The National Academy of Education says the same thing you did. Every scientific review of these teacher evaluation systems says the same thing you did.
If you want to be fair to the teachers -- which most people are not -- before you fire them, you should read what they have to say in their own defense in the ad linked in TFA http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/uft-teacher-data-reports-formula-ad.pdf . They say that the tests have a huge margin of error. Teachers in the top 50% could be rated in the bottom 50%, and vice versa, simply because of the error ranges in the testing system that have nothing to do with how well their students learn.
If you want to conceptualize it, consider this: A good teacher in a top school with good students might have a class in which the average grade is 98%. Students like that have nowhere to go on a standardized test. They're already at the top. When they run the formula on teachers like that, they get bad evaluations because their students aren't improving.
Here's what Diane Ravitch said. I recommend the entire article for those who want to be fair to the teachers and are interested in the facts:
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.
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.
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.
Teachers teaching the tests? Then critical thinking tests, creativity tests, should also be used, to see if the teacher teach the students to think, rather than memorize.
Brilliant!
Now all we need is a test for measuring critical thinking and creativity.
Read this article. Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. She has a PhD, and she understands the statistics and data much better than you or I ever will. She started out believing in these educational reforms, particularly charter schools, and she said that, when the data came in, the reforms didn't work.
Most significantly, in terms of what we were discussing, she says:
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.
I don't have a PhD, and I don't understand statistics and the data as well as Ravitch does, so I can't help you understand this any more. But this is what the peer-reviewed literature consistently says. This is what I read in Science magazine. This is what the National Academy of Education says. Who are you going to believe, Mayor Bloomberg or the expert panel of the National Academy of Education?
Using student test scores to measure teacher's teaching ability doesn't work. The evidence is against it.
The education historian and writer, Diane Ravitch, paints a picture of the teacher evaluation system that offers a sobering contrast to the giddiness that greeted the announcement of the agreement with the city, state and teachers’ unions.
On The New York Review of Books blog, NYR, in a post titled “No Child Left Untested,” Ms. Ravitch calls it “madness” to rely on a system of teacher accountability based on student test scores.
The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other 60 percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.
But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective over all.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective over all, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining 60 percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.
She goes on to say:
No high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students; and no state or district in this nation has a successful program of this kind.
Compounding the problem, she writes, is the inability of the United Federation of Teachers to block a legal push by the media to publish the data reports of teachers a few years ago that issued grades based on improvements in student test scores, known as “value-added.”
The consequences of these policies will not be pretty. If the way these ratings are calculated is flawed, as most testing experts acknowledge they are, then many good educators will be subject to public humiliation and will leave the profession. Once those scores are released to the media, we can expect that parents will object if their children are assigned to “bad” teachers, and principals will have a logistical nightmare trying to squeeze most children into the classes of the highest-ranked teachers. Will parents sue if their children do not get the “best” teachers?
Ms. Ravitch does not defend unsuitable teachers. But she objects to doing it based so extensively on test scores.
Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can’t teach and can’t improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality.
In The Daily News, the columnist Juan Gonzalez takes on the same subject, saying the combination of the new evaluation system and the public release of teacher ratings signals “a new low” for the public schools.
Pointing out flaws in the system, and the city’s failure to react to critics’ objections to the implementation of many of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education initiatives, he writes:
I don't know the education literature in detail, so I can't explain it in detail.
But I did read a few articles about student testing in Science magazine (pro and con) and I do think I understand one critical point about this story.
Almost everybody in the education field who follows the data agrees (like Diane Ravitch) that the factor that is most associated with student test scores is family income. Low-income students start with lower scores, and their scores increase more slowly than upper-income students. So if you want to compare a teacher's effect on student test scores, you have to adjust the raw scores, and the increases, for family income. In my reading of the NYT article, that's what the reporter meant when he said that the teacher scores aren't averages.
I'm familiar with this problem in medicine, a field in which I did review some of the literature. Suppose you have 100 heart surgeons, and you want to know which ones have the lowest death rates. Do you divide the number of deaths by the number of surgery, and get a percentage? No, because (simplifying slightly) the greatest risk factor in this surgery is the patient's age. 50-year-old patients have a much lower death rate than 70-year-old patients. One surgeon told me that if he wanted to lower his mortality rate, he would just treat younger patients. So you have to take the surgeon's surgical mortality rate, and correct it for the age of his patients. (And other factors, like lung and kidney function.) There's a big debate about whether it's possible to correct for these factors enough to judge individual doctors.
When I look at a study, I look at the P of the results. If the P is 95% or more, I can trust the numbers. If the P is less than 95%, I know I can't trust the numbers. Doctors, who make life-and-death decisions, based on extensive discussions with statisticians, won't make a change in policy based on a P of less than 95%.
As I understand it, if the confidence interval hits 0 in a case like this, that means P is less than 95%. It also means in this case that this teacher could be among the worst teachers in the school system, or among the top half, but you can't tell which.
So the school system is deciding to not rehire this teacher based on a an adjusted test result that doesn't meet the standard tests of statistical validity (particularly P=>95%).
You assume that there would be other safeguards in the system to prevent a qualified teacher from being fired on the basis of this test score alone. That's the point of the story. There are no other safeguards. This principal is not allowed to re-hire a teacher that she thinks is highly qualified, whose students are getting into the top competitive high schools, because of a statistically invalid test result.
Michael Winerip is not an ordinary reporter. He's been writing about education for the NYT for decades. NYC teachers read the NYT regularly, so it's a major beat. And many of the NYT reporters actually have training in statistics, because the NYT made a special effort several years ago to improve their treatment of statistics.
You say that a teacher with 2.5 years experience shouldn't get tenure. That wasn't the issue. They don't get tenure until after teaching 3 years with a satisfactory evaluation. (And they're willing to reconsider the 3 years.)
The issue was that first, the principal can't rehire her next year because of her ranking on this evaluation. Second, even if she works elsewhere in the NYC school system, she can't get tenure because of this statistically invalid ranking. And she's likely to be laid off in the near future because of this statistically invalid ranking.
I remember from my statistics that there are two kinds of validity to the test. The first is the question of whether they actually measure what they're supposed to measure -- if the test tells you that you have cancer, and you do a gold standard biopsy, does the biopsy show you really have cancer? And second, there's the statistical validity of the test
As I said before, there is no point in trying to have a rational argument with conservatives, because they're not rational. They just sit at the computer and spill bile.
Slashdot Mirror
I always pay attention to someone who has first-hand experience.
I think American unions have lots of flaws, but we are better off with them than without them. I'd like to see American unions act more like German unions. The biggest problem with American unions, I think, is that they pursue the short-term interests of their individual workers, rather than the benefits of the company as a whole and workers as a whole.
Salesmen who attended trade shows in New York City told me that they couldn't put a plug in the wall themselves; they had to hire a union electrician for $60 an hour, minimum of 4 hours. Now New York lost the trade show business.
But the American conservatives aren't talking about more cooperation with unions; they want to destroy unions. That's what these right-to-work laws are all about. I don't mind making America more like Germany, but I don't want to turn us into Mississippi.
I think the proverbial incompetent teacher that the school can't get rid of is very rare. In New York City and elsewhere, the school boards ignore the teachers' union argument that (1) teachers know when a fellow teacher is not doing a good job, (2) they can evaluate fellow teachers by sitting in the classroom, better than a test can, (3) you can usually train a teacher to improve, (4) those few teachers who can't teach and can't improve do belong in another job.
This is what I've been reading about it lately. As far as I know this is accurate. I'm always interested in first-hand facts to the contrary.
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
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Ger
Right, I can think of all kinds of good educational experiences that won't show up on a test.
Suppose instead of sitting in a classroom studying a textbook, a teacher helps the kid with a project on robots or fruit flies.
It's a great learning experience, but how will that improve his test scores? How many questions are there about robots on the standardized exam? Standardized exams don't test knowledge in depth.
You could eliminate poverty, as many of the European countries (Scandinavia, Holland, etc.) have done. All you have to do is make the rich pay their fair share of taxes, and use that money for necessary social services like housing, education, health care and transportation.
You have to educate people to vote according to their own interests (broadly defined), rather than according to the interests of the people who are running the country now.
True, it might be difficult. But that's the job we have to do.
No, you're reading that "suggestion" into it incorrectly. The factories in Germany and the U.S. are equally profitable for the company, but they're not equally profitable for the workers.
In Germany, the workers get $67 an hour, and in the U.S., the workers for those same German companies (in non-union factories) get $14.50 to $19.50 an hour.
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
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/tale-two-systems
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states. ... the UAW has made significant concessions on wages, especially through the creation of
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
They don't say there's no way to rate a teacher. They say there's no way to rate a teacher with a machine-scoreable test. This particular algorithm is statistically invalid. It gives bizarre results. A teacher ranks in the top one year, and in the bottom the next year.
They say good teachers can rate fellow teachers and tell them how to improve rather than firing them.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch
What study? The major predictor of student grades and advancement is family income. The NYC board of education formula tries to correct for that, and many other factors, and it fails. The problem with the evaluation system is that it's statistically and scientifically invalid. It produces nonsensical results. Read the teacher's ad. http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/uft-teacher-data-reports-formula-ad.pdf
Studies have shown repeatedly that the one factor that predicts a student's performance more than any other is family income. If every kid in the school is doing badly, you're most likely in a low-income neighborhood.
According to the educators who have been working on school reform for years, the only way to evaluate a teacher is to have good educators evaluate him/her by sitting in the classroom. Teachers know how good their colleagues are.
That would have the advantage of having a colleague in the room who can tell the teacher after class what he/she is doing right and wrong. There are programs like that. You can teach people how to teach. You don't have to fire them (except in extreme cases).
If you want a metric that you can give in a machine-scoreable test, it doesn't exist. You can't reduce everything to algorithms and computerized management.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch
And the number one priority of Michelle Rhee is what?
That's what the NYC school board is trying to do. They're trying to measure the difference. They created a complicated formula to do that.
The formula doesn't work. http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/uft-teacher-data-reports-formula-ad.pdf
If you want to be fair to the teachers you want to fire, you should at least read what they say in their defense.
The same teacher scores in the top 10% one year and the bottom 10% the next year. It's not accurate enough.
The random fluctuations in classes is greater than any effect of the teacher.
The effect of family income is greater than the effect of the teacher.
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.
Your understanding of statistics and scientific validity is naive.
The tests don't work. They don't measure achievement with enough accuracy to use them for anything more than a rough guide. People are assuming that the tests are valid, when they're not.
This is explained in the teachers' newspaper ad linked in TFA, and also here:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch
http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf
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.
Union workers in the profitable VW and BMJ plants in Germany get $67 an hour.
Non-union workers in the equally profitable VW and BMJ plants in the non-union American south get $17 an hour.
That's what unions do.
Of course, unions are no more perfect than any other American institution. Do you think employers don't sometimes bully and abuse employees either? If you want democracy, you have to work on it. Look up Eugene Debs on Wikipedia.
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?
Diane Ravitch says the same thing you did. The National Academy of Education says the same thing you did. Every scientific review of these teacher evaluation systems says the same thing you did.
If you want to be fair to the teachers -- which most people are not -- before you fire them, you should read what they have to say in their own defense in the ad linked in TFA http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/uft-teacher-data-reports-formula-ad.pdf . They say that the tests have a huge margin of error. Teachers in the top 50% could be rated in the bottom 50%, and vice versa, simply because of the error ranges in the testing system that have nothing to do with how well their students learn.
If you want to conceptualize it, consider this: A good teacher in a top school with good students might have a class in which the average grade is 98%. Students like that have nowhere to go on a standardized test. They're already at the top. When they run the formula on teachers like that, they get bad evaluations because their students aren't improving.
Here's what Diane Ravitch said. I recommend the entire article for those who want to be fair to the teachers and are interested in the facts:
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.
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.
Teachers teaching the tests? Then critical thinking tests, creativity tests, should also be used, to see if the teacher teach the students to think, rather than memorize.
Brilliant!
Now all we need is a test for measuring critical thinking and creativity.
It's not repeatable. That's one of the problems Ravitch mentioned. The same teachers get high scores one year and low scores the next year.
If Ravitch can't explain it to you, I can't.
Read this article. Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. She has a PhD, and she understands the statistics and data much better than you or I ever will. She started out believing in these educational reforms, particularly charter schools, and she said that, when the data came in, the reforms didn't work.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch
Most significantly, in terms of what we were discussing, she says:
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 National Academy of Education study http://aera.net/uploadedFiles/Gov_Relations/GettingTeacherEvaluationRightBackgroundPaper(1).pdf as her supporting data.
I don't have a PhD, and I don't understand statistics and the data as well as Ravitch does, so I can't help you understand this any more. But this is what the peer-reviewed literature consistently says. This is what I read in Science magazine. This is what the National Academy of Education says. Who are you going to believe, Mayor Bloomberg or the expert panel of the National Academy of Education?
Using student test scores to measure teacher's teaching ability doesn't work. The evidence is against it.
Here's a better explanation than I can give.
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/02/22/ravitch-new-evaluation-system-is-madness/
Ravitch Says New Evaluation System Is 'Madness'
The education historian and writer, Diane Ravitch, paints a picture of the teacher evaluation system that offers a sobering contrast to the giddiness that greeted the announcement of the agreement with the city, state and teachers’ unions.
On The New York Review of Books blog, NYR, in a post titled “No Child Left Untested,” Ms. Ravitch calls it “madness” to rely on a system of teacher accountability based on student test scores.
The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other 60 percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.
But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective over all.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective over all, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining 60 percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.
She goes on to say:
No high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students; and no state or district in this nation has a successful program of this kind.
Compounding the problem, she writes, is the inability of the United Federation of Teachers to block a legal push by the media to publish the data reports of teachers a few years ago that issued grades based on improvements in student test scores, known as “value-added.”
The consequences of these policies will not be pretty. If the way these ratings are calculated is flawed, as most testing experts acknowledge they are, then many good educators will be subject to public humiliation and will leave the profession. Once those scores are released to the media, we can expect that parents will object if their children are assigned to “bad” teachers, and principals will have a logistical nightmare trying to squeeze most children into the classes of the highest-ranked teachers. Will parents sue if their children do not get the “best” teachers?
Ms. Ravitch does not defend unsuitable teachers. But she objects to doing it based so extensively on test scores.
Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can’t teach and can’t improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality.
In The Daily News, the columnist Juan Gonzalez takes on the same subject, saying the combination of the new evaluation system and the public release of teacher ratings signals “a new low” for the public schools.
Pointing out flaws in the system, and the city’s failure to react to critics’ objections to the implementation of many of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education initiatives, he writes:
This fixation on rating
I don't know the education literature in detail, so I can't explain it in detail.
But I did read a few articles about student testing in Science magazine (pro and con) and I do think I understand one critical point about this story.
Almost everybody in the education field who follows the data agrees (like Diane Ravitch) that the factor that is most associated with student test scores is family income. Low-income students start with lower scores, and their scores increase more slowly than upper-income students. So if you want to compare a teacher's effect on student test scores, you have to adjust the raw scores, and the increases, for family income. In my reading of the NYT article, that's what the reporter meant when he said that the teacher scores aren't averages.
I'm familiar with this problem in medicine, a field in which I did review some of the literature. Suppose you have 100 heart surgeons, and you want to know which ones have the lowest death rates. Do you divide the number of deaths by the number of surgery, and get a percentage? No, because (simplifying slightly) the greatest risk factor in this surgery is the patient's age. 50-year-old patients have a much lower death rate than 70-year-old patients. One surgeon told me that if he wanted to lower his mortality rate, he would just treat younger patients. So you have to take the surgeon's surgical mortality rate, and correct it for the age of his patients. (And other factors, like lung and kidney function.) There's a big debate about whether it's possible to correct for these factors enough to judge individual doctors.
When I look at a study, I look at the P of the results. If the P is 95% or more, I can trust the numbers. If the P is less than 95%, I know I can't trust the numbers. Doctors, who make life-and-death decisions, based on extensive discussions with statisticians, won't make a change in policy based on a P of less than 95%.
As I understand it, if the confidence interval hits 0 in a case like this, that means P is less than 95%. It also means in this case that this teacher could be among the worst teachers in the school system, or among the top half, but you can't tell which.
So the school system is deciding to not rehire this teacher based on a an adjusted test result that doesn't meet the standard tests of statistical validity (particularly P=>95%).
You assume that there would be other safeguards in the system to prevent a qualified teacher from being fired on the basis of this test score alone. That's the point of the story. There are no other safeguards. This principal is not allowed to re-hire a teacher that she thinks is highly qualified, whose students are getting into the top competitive high schools, because of a statistically invalid test result.
Michael Winerip is not an ordinary reporter. He's been writing about education for the NYT for decades. NYC teachers read the NYT regularly, so it's a major beat. And many of the NYT reporters actually have training in statistics, because the NYT made a special effort several years ago to improve their treatment of statistics.
You say that a teacher with 2.5 years experience shouldn't get tenure. That wasn't the issue. They don't get tenure until after teaching 3 years with a satisfactory evaluation. (And they're willing to reconsider the 3 years.)
The issue was that first, the principal can't rehire her next year because of her ranking on this evaluation. Second, even if she works elsewhere in the NYC school system, she can't get tenure because of this statistically invalid ranking. And she's likely to be laid off in the near future because of this statistically invalid ranking.
I remember from my statistics that there are two kinds of validity to the test. The first is the question of whether they actually measure what they're supposed to measure -- if the test tells you that you have cancer, and you do a gold standard biopsy, does the biopsy show you really have cancer? And second, there's the statistical validity of the test
I rest my case.
As I said before, there is no point in trying to have a rational argument with conservatives, because they're not rational. They just sit at the computer and spill bile.