While I tend to be pro-link and pro-uber, it's clear to me that taxi's are required to serve bad areas and less profitable areas while link and uber are not.
Part of the process of transitioning to link and uber may eventually require percentage of service of these types.
Otherwise, we'll end up with great competative service in the profitable areas and poor to no service elsewhere. Which will be a failure of the public transportation system.
One of the problems that we had with the taxi industry in New York City is that they had a difficult time carrying wheelchairs. New yellow cabs being phased in have to carry wheelchairs.
If Uber drivers are private cars, then only a small proportion of them will be able to carry wheelchairs. If they follow the free market, they will charge more. So instead of getting a $20 cab ride to the doctor or a theater, a wheelchair rider may have to pay $50 or $100.
I don't know if that will happen. I'd like to see what happens in a city that had Uber working for a year or two.
Will the free market fairy really solve all problems, or will she kill off the weak and helpless as she's done in the past?
Unless, of course, you're speaking for yourself being "hapless", since it is clear you can't figure out even the simple solutions to the imaginary problems you see with technology.
Those who are truly hapless are the ones who don't understand that you don't know whether new, hyped solutions will actually work or whether they will have unforeseen problems until you actually try them out for a while and see what happens in reality.
Yes but the blacks who get frisked give the officer reason to suspect that they are up to no good because they dress like gangsters, stare aggressively at everyone within eyesight, swear every second word, smell of weed, wear their pants half way down their disgusting sweating ass cracks and generally deserve to be harrassed given that they are walking around making everyone else feel uncomfortable. Did Carlton from the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air ever get frisked?
So Cubans are oppressed but Americans deserve to be punished?
Maybe this will help - armed robbery is a crime in both countries and you will go to prison. Only in Cuba would you go to prison for advocating democratic reform of the government. Cubans are in jail for both armed robbery and advocating democratic reform of government. Only Americans committing armed robbery would be in jail, advocating reform of government isn't a crime. Political oppression is a regular fact of life in Cuba. People go to jail for criticizing the government, making Castro jokes, wanting to practice their religious faith, or simply desiring to leave the country. Is that making sense to you?
Your line about blacks in Cuba is nonsensical.
Americans certainly do go to jail for criticizing the government -- and especially for trying to use the electoral system to change it.
You also obviously don't know that Americans were prevented from leaving their country too. Go look up "Linus Pauling" and "Paul Robeson" on Wikipedia. The U.S. passport had a department for deciding whether American citizens were politically reliable enough to get a passport.
And black people certainly got killed for trying to vote.
Where did you learn American history?
Obviously not in a state where they allowed teachers to assign books like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.
"Being black in a black neighborhood" isn't a chargeable offense. Unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon or drugs is.
Yes, but stopping and frisking people without legal grounds is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And in the U.S., blacks get stopped in black neighborhoods all the time. Whites don't.
All the information in those two entries is well-sourced and legitimate comment.
According to the Texas Supreme Court, "VitaPro did not fare well with the TDCJ staff or inmates. In its motion for summary judgment, TDCJ presented evidence that the frequent serving of VitaPro demoralized the staff and inmates and led to adverse health effects, including rampant flatulence."[
That seems like legitimate information, sourced to a Texas Supreme Court decision.
That's right. I read the legal papers and the talk archives of the Yank Barry article. It all seems to be well-documented with reliable sources like the Globe & Mail. It meets the Wikipedia Biographies of Living Persons standards. If it didn't Yank Barry could have complained and some admin would have come along and deleted it.
I didn't even see anything on the Talk pages saying, "I'm Yank Barry and you got this wrong." I did see a lot of apparent sock puppets and Yank Barry fanboys arguing that the article is giving too much weight to all the negative stuff.
In fact in the Talk pages I saw stuff that was even more negative and well-sourced that should have gone into the article, like the details of his blackmailing or extorting his partner, or the prosecution that he was acquitted for.
I also didn't see anything to indicate that Yank Barry had complained to the Wikipedia foundation under the BLP complaint process. Maybe he did complain and Wikipedia's lawyers decided that it wasn't libelous.
IANAL but it didn't look like a very good case. California has an anti-SLAPP law so if Wikipedia defends it he'll have to pay their legal fees. http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guid... He's a celebrity, he's raising investment money in his businesses, he has a criminal record. He's a public figure.
So, if push comes to shove, whatever is expressed there is an opinion. And last time I checked you're entitled to one in the US, and also to saying it.
Actually you're not. That's the whole basis of libel laws. If you spread false or misleading information that could tarnish the reputation of another person you are most definitely not entitled to an opinion as far as the law is concerned.
Actually, under U.S. libel law, you are entitled to spread false and misleading information that can tarnish the reputation of another person, if that person is a public figure.
That was the ruling in Times vs. Sullivan, which you can look up in, oh, I don't know, somewhere on the Internet.
Sullivan was actually right in his complaint. He was indeed defamed. The Supreme Court decided that if a newspaper was requited to be right all the time, we couldn't have newspapers. They're immune from damages for their mistakes as long as they didn't publish it knowing that it was false, or published it without regard to whether it was true or false. That's what they mean by "malice." The New York Times got off, even though they printed false, defamatory statements about Sullivan.
Yank Barry is probably a public figure, since he hired a pr agency, calls himself a philanthropist, and got people to nominate him for the Nobel peace prize. In addition, there have been a lot of articles exposing him in established newspapers. He was in jail.
the same measurement as he is. thousands of hours observing teachers in classrooms (being a student) and talking with teachers and principals (a good 50% of my friends are teachers) The 3rd one ill admit I got nothing
Well, I pay attention to people who know more than I do, and I recommend you do the same. Berliner knows a lot more than I do about education, and I take him seriously. You have no basis for dismissing his ideas like that.
Go ahead and complain all you want about this ruling....until YOUR child is stuck with one of those 3% of poor performing tenured teachers and you can't do anything about it until all the union appeals are done with.
The people who are bringing this suit don't care about your child. They want to destroy public schools and unions, and leave you with nothing but private schools.
It will be like Obamacare, where you don't have a public system any more, but you have to choose from among private for-profit systems run by billionaires. The rich will have their choice among good and bad schools, and as for the rest of us -- well, I hope you're rich.
Michelle Rhee's charter schools had plenty of bad teachers. They just got away with it by erasing the wrong answers on the standardized tests and replacing them with the right answer.
When collecting and analyzing data is difficult, the solution is not to stop collecting data. It's to collect more data, and try harder.
Education researchers have been collecting and analyzing data since at least 1970. Most people agree that the NAEP has the best overall data. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo... There are other more specialized studies.
Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... studied the data when she was an assistant secretary of education and a conservative writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal. She believed that standardized testing could tell you which teachers were good and bad, and she was trying to figure out how to do it. She finally gave up, and admitted she was wrong. It can't be done. The data was able to give broad, general trends among large populations, like black students vs. white students, or wealthy students vs. poor students, but it couldn't identify which schools were good or bad, and it definitely couldn't tell you which teachers were good or bad.
Ravitch (and every other education researcher) said that the main factor that predicted student test scores was family income. It wiped out everything else.
Further, I'd much rather have guesses based on some data, than guesses based on nothing.
That's not the way statistics works. If you have statistically invalid data, that's not "some data," that's noise. If you base hiring and firing decisions based on noise, you have unfair, arbitrary firings.
Here's an example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03... On Education Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie By MICHAEL WINERIP March 6, 2011
A new New York City middle school teacher was doing a great job, in the opinion of her principal and everyone else, working 10-hour days, her students were getting good grades, and admission to the specialized science high schools. As the article explains, she was a good teacher in every way that you could judge a teacher.
Yet, according to a New York City high-stakes test algorithm, her students didn't improve enough from one year to the next, and they placed her in the bottom 7% of teachers. So the principal couldn't hire her again the following year, as she wanted to. However, the confidence interval of that 7% was 0 to 52%. So she could have been in the top half. Any statistician will tell you that this 7% is meaningless. I read medical studies all day, and if the confidence interval is that wide, you say that there's no correlation. Not some correlation. No correlation.
The problem this teacher had was that she was teaching a class of good students. Good students already have high grades, in the high 90s. Once your grades are at the top of the scale, you have nowhere to improve. So the best teachers, with the best students, were getting the worst rankings because their students didn't improve enough on the tests. Teachers all over the country were complaining about this. The test people really don't have an answer.
How would you like it if you were driving 35 mph, and a cop gave you a speeding ticket because, according to his poorly-calibrated radar gun, there was a 25% probability that you were driving 70 mph? How would you like to get fired because, according to your urine test, there was a 25% probability that you were using opioid drugs?
And lastly, if teachers only account for 1-14% of test results, that tells me that we need some dramatic improvement in teacher quality.
This is true of every education system, all over the world, free market, socialist, high stakes testing, low stakes testing, charter schools, public schools, Catholic schools, everything.
As I said before, the most important factor is the child's family income. If you wa
The reason charter schools are cheaper is that they can pass the difficult kids on to the public schools.
I keep hearing this but in Minnesota this isn't the case.
It's certainly the case in New York State. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (The Wikipedia entry had more detail but Eva Moskowitz' fans kept deleting it, so you'll have to go to the citations.) The Success Academy Charter School kept kicking out underperforming students, which had the effect of increasing the scores. This happens every time you make a principal's job and salary dependent on high-stakes test scores.
I was very impressed at the beginning when there were one or two charter schools that allocated slots based on a lottery, so they could compare the kids who went to the charters with the kids who went to the neighborhood schools, and the charter kids seemed to do better. I go with the facts. However, there were only a very few charter schools like that, and (if you believe in student test scores) when the NAEP did a study of charter schools, they found that some charter schools scored better than public schools but in general they scored worse.
And as Steve Brill finally admitted, those successful charter schools required their teachers to work such long hours, at such low pay, that no teacher could raise a family at that job, so teachers quit after 2 or 3 years.
Teachers' unions actually came up with the idea of charter schools. Their idea was that if they could get rid of the bureaucrats and regulations, they could just teach and enjoy themselves and do a good job. They could have laboratories to try out different techniques. Charter schools could work.
This idea got hijacked by the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-union movement who want to lower workers' salaries. Look at the people who paid for that lawsuit. Do you trust the Koch brothers?
Berliner actually said that no more than 1-3% gave him "cause for concern."
If he honestly believes that he must have been taught math by some of these bad teachers he does not think exist.
He's a teacher who based his opinions on thousands of hours of observing teachers in classrooms, on talking with teachers and principals, and on reviewing the scientific literature on teaching.
When you mess up as a lawyer, you get disbarred by a committee of lawyers. That is what we need to do.
How many lawyers do you know who got disbarred? There was a series of stories in the New York Times and elsewhere about prosecutors who had put innocent people in jail for prison terms of 30 and 40 years for murder, after falsifying evidence and not disclosing information that demonstrated that the accused were innocent, which required the prosecutor to commit perjury. Some people were asking why those prosecutors weren't disbarred, or even punished. Nobody could find an example of a prosecutor who had been disbarred after committing perjury and sending an innocent person to jail.
If, for example, the NEA looked at the bottom 1% of its national membership each year for potential ejection, nobody would have any problems.
The teachers' unions have said that when a teacher can't do his job, and can't be taught to improve, and he gets a fair hearing, then they could accept having him fired.
However, these anti-tenure movements don't want to simply get rid of incompetent teachers. They want to destroy the unions, give school boards the right to fire teachers at will (i.e. arbitrarily for any reason they feel like), and lower teachers' salaries. If you look at the people who are paying the bills for these lawsuits, it's the anti-tax, anti-government billionaires like the Koch brothers.
Very well, I'll hand the ball back to you. What metric *should* we use to judge teacher performance?
Experienced, successful teachers know how to judge other teachers. Some of those teachers go on to become principals and administrators.
One of the jobs of a principal is to sit in the classroom of a teacher and evaluate how well the teacher is doing. You can't replace that principal with a Touring machine (which is what student testing is).
Significantly, the principal doesn't evaluate the teacher to decide whether the teacher should be fired. If the teacher is doing something wrong, the principal teaches the teacher how to do it right. These high-stakes testing and anti-tenure movements keep talking about firing teachers. That reveals their hostility to teachers and unions. They're not trying to make better schools.
How would you like it if your kids weren't doing well in school, and the school dealt with it by kicking them out and telling them to prepare for a life as an unskilled worker? How would you like it if you were having problems with something at work -- perhaps because they didn't give you the resources you need to do your job -- and your employer dealt with it by firing you and getting somebody else?
Here's a story from the New York Times about how a principal rated a teacher very highly, but the student testing formula that New York City used said that she was in the lowest 7th percentile of teaching. As a result, the principal couldn't rehire the teacher next year. But her students were doing very well, and getting into the top NYC high schools, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. In addition, the testing formula had a confidence interval of 0 to 52nd percentile. Do you know what a confidence interval is? Her 7th percentile ranking was statistically meaningless. Even according to that formula, she might have been in the top half of teachers. She was a good teacher. The formula was wrong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03... On Education Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie By MICHAEL WINERIP Published: March 6, 2011
Department of Education accountability formula ranks an apparently excellent teacher as 7th percentile, prevents her from being rehired and maybe from getting tenure. Confidence interval 0-52nd percentile. Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, Stacey Isaacson, teaching 7th grade English and social studies 2y. Works 7am-5:30pm.
Over 2 dozen students went to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High.
Formula ranks Isaacson 7th percentile among her teaching peers.
If mayor and governor have their way, layoffs based on formulas, Isaacson is sure she would be laid off. Math and English teachers get teacher data report. Isaacson’s students had prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students predicted 3.69 based on comparable students, actually scored 3.63. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.
Calculation based on 32 variables. Margin of error for Isaacson’s 7th percentile 0 to 52nd percentile, which would have made her eligible for tenure.
All that'll happen is the kids in the disadvantaged areas will now have no teachers.
You'd have to offer me a LOT to work in a bad school, but I'll bet pay is the same or less than in the good areas, the only thing making it viable for even bad teachers is 'tenure'.
So, you've just got rid of that, market forces take over - well doh, we can't get even bad teachers in these areas now.
There's another reason now why teachers will avoid disadvantaged areas.
Everybody in education knows that the one factor that predicts a kid's test results is family income. Family income also predicts a kid's increase in test results over a year.
Teachers who teach disadvantaged kids will get lower ratings because their kids progress more slowly, and these rating systems blame the teachers for that. So they'll get fired.
The plaintiffs pounded home the message that ineffective teachers harm students, and ineffective teachers are prohibitively hard to dismiss due to 5 specific job-protections enshrined in CA law, and poor students are much more likely to be stuck with an ineffective teacher.
The plaintiffs pounded away with a white paper that was never peer reviewed and never published by conservative economists who massaged data to get the results they wanted. As I understand it, this is the only paper that came to such a conclusion.
A scientist would make predictions and then try to confirm them in the real world. Economists don't do that.
But, what I'm really wondering is: Just what was the creative logic that the/judges/ used to conclude that tenure violated something (civil rights?) enshrined in the state constitution..
The "creative logic," as you correctly describe it, was that one of the consequences of unions was supposedly that they kept incompetent teachers on the job, that this was harmful to students, and that it was more harmful to black, minority and poor kids. Therefore, it violated the non-discrimination provisions of the 14th Amendment.
It's quite a chain of events from tenure to discriminating against minority and poor kids. Of course there's no evidence to back this up.
There's a more direct connection between school funding and discriminating against minority and poor kids. (The original purpose of charter schools was to be able to run state-funded, private schools known as segregation academies that could refuse to admit blacks during the Civil Rights days).
There's a much more direct connection between family income and student achievement. So if you really want to eliminate discrimination against minorities and the poor, then you should raise their incomes to Western European levels.
Finally, a judge with common sense in the most liberal state in the country, fed by the donation of teachers' union. Wha-da-ya-know ? There still are people with integrity. I meant the judge. Take an example from him big bald governor of shame...
Judge Treu is a fucking idiot who can't listen to a witness' testimony and repeat it accurately a day later. He can't tell the difference between "grossly ineffective" and "cause for concern." He can't tell the difference between "no more than" and "equal to." Treu didn't have to take a test for his job. He's a political appointment.
Judge Treu’s decision contains this paragraph: There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms. Dr. Berliner, an expert called by State Defendants, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are grossly ineffective.
David Berliner says: June 10, 2014 at 15:56 You and the judge misquote me. I said during deposition That I had never seen a “grossly ineffective” teacher. I said I estimated that the number of poor teachers I’d like to get rid probably is no more than 1-3 percent. The questioning i got was about this statement in TCRECORD...
When asked what percent might actually show up as cause for concern regularly, I said no more than 1-3%. I said nothing about 1-3% being grossly inadequate.
Extract "school grades" from standardized tests with local added questions. Measure teachers by the delta in each student between end of last year and end of current year. That way they're only measured on how much the student learns. Put in a demographic correction and there you go. Doesn't add any more tests, really does measure the teacher's teaching instead of the student's performance at grade level.
People have tried that. It doesn't work.
According to Diane Ravitch (and pretty much everybody else who has studied the data) the one factor that most strongly predicts standardized test scores (and their delta) is family income. That wipes out every other factor. Once you've done the demographic correction, the effect of the teacher is too small to be measured.
There's no statistically valid test that measures the teacher's teaching ability.
the American Statistical Association issued a report a few weeks ago warning that “value-added-measurement” (that is, judging teachers by the scores of their students) is fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable. The ratings may change if a different test is used, for example. The ASA report said:
Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions
Slashdot Mirror
While I tend to be pro-link and pro-uber, it's clear to me that taxi's are required to serve bad areas and less profitable areas while link and uber are not.
Part of the process of transitioning to link and uber may eventually require percentage of service of these types.
Otherwise, we'll end up with great competative service in the profitable areas and poor to no service elsewhere. Which will be a failure of the public transportation system.
One of the problems that we had with the taxi industry in New York City is that they had a difficult time carrying wheelchairs. New yellow cabs being phased in have to carry wheelchairs.
If Uber drivers are private cars, then only a small proportion of them will be able to carry wheelchairs. If they follow the free market, they will charge more. So instead of getting a $20 cab ride to the doctor or a theater, a wheelchair rider may have to pay $50 or $100.
I don't know if that will happen. I'd like to see what happens in a city that had Uber working for a year or two.
Will the free market fairy really solve all problems, or will she kill off the weak and helpless as she's done in the past?
Any industry that can be replaced by technology, should be.
You can replace butter with saturated corn oil.
You can replace your doctor with a touch-tone phone where you answer questions on a key pad, and a computer tells you what to do.
That doesn't mean the replacement will be as good as the technology it's replacing.
Unless, of course, you're speaking for yourself being "hapless", since it is clear you can't figure out even the simple solutions to the imaginary problems you see with technology.
Those who are truly hapless are the ones who don't understand that you don't know whether new, hyped solutions will actually work or whether they will have unforeseen problems until you actually try them out for a while and see what happens in reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you want to express force in conceptually simple terms, you should convert it to elephant pulls. Or Schwartzneggers.
Yes but the blacks who get frisked give the officer reason to suspect that they are up to no good because they dress like gangsters, stare aggressively at everyone within eyesight, swear every second word, smell of weed, wear their pants half way down their disgusting sweating ass cracks and generally deserve to be harrassed given that they are walking around making everyone else feel uncomfortable. Did Carlton from the Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air ever get frisked?
Oh yeah. Staring at white women. Can't have that.
Ah - don't forget to hang your flag out the frontyard.
The one with the 50 states or the Confederate one?
So Cubans are oppressed but Americans deserve to be punished?
Maybe this will help - armed robbery is a crime in both countries and you will go to prison. Only in Cuba would you go to prison for advocating democratic reform of the government. Cubans are in jail for both armed robbery and advocating democratic reform of government. Only Americans committing armed robbery would be in jail, advocating reform of government isn't a crime. Political oppression is a regular fact of life in Cuba. People go to jail for criticizing the government, making Castro jokes, wanting to practice their religious faith, or simply desiring to leave the country. Is that making sense to you?
Your line about blacks in Cuba is nonsensical.
Americans certainly do go to jail for criticizing the government -- and especially for trying to use the electoral system to change it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You also obviously don't know that Americans were prevented from leaving their country too. Go look up "Linus Pauling" and "Paul Robeson" on Wikipedia. The U.S. passport had a department for deciding whether American citizens were politically reliable enough to get a passport.
And black people certainly got killed for trying to vote.
Where did you learn American history?
Obviously not in a state where they allowed teachers to assign books like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.
"Being black in a black neighborhood" isn't a chargeable offense. Unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon or drugs is.
Yes, but stopping and frisking people without legal grounds is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And in the U.S., blacks get stopped in black neighborhoods all the time. Whites don't.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Americans who condemn Cuba for oppression should spend some time condemning their own country for its oppression.
Well digging through some of the other pages I image it is stuff like this that he objects to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
Which was immediately deleted.
All the information in those two entries is well-sourced and legitimate comment.
That seems like legitimate information, sourced to a Texas Supreme Court decision.
That's right. I read the legal papers and the talk archives of the Yank Barry article. It all seems to be well-documented with reliable sources like the Globe & Mail. It meets the Wikipedia Biographies of Living Persons standards. If it didn't Yank Barry could have complained and some admin would have come along and deleted it.
I didn't even see anything on the Talk pages saying, "I'm Yank Barry and you got this wrong." I did see a lot of apparent sock puppets and Yank Barry fanboys arguing that the article is giving too much weight to all the negative stuff.
In fact in the Talk pages I saw stuff that was even more negative and well-sourced that should have gone into the article, like the details of his blackmailing or extorting his partner, or the prosecution that he was acquitted for.
I also didn't see anything to indicate that Yank Barry had complained to the Wikipedia foundation under the BLP complaint process. Maybe he did complain and Wikipedia's lawyers decided that it wasn't libelous.
IANAL but it didn't look like a very good case. California has an anti-SLAPP law so if Wikipedia defends it he'll have to pay their legal fees. http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guid... He's a celebrity, he's raising investment money in his businesses, he has a criminal record. He's a public figure.
So, if push comes to shove, whatever is expressed there is an opinion. And last time I checked you're entitled to one in the US, and also to saying it.
Actually you're not. That's the whole basis of libel laws. If you spread false or misleading information that could tarnish the reputation of another person you are most definitely not entitled to an opinion as far as the law is concerned.
Actually, under U.S. libel law, you are entitled to spread false and misleading information that can tarnish the reputation of another person, if that person is a public figure.
That was the ruling in Times vs. Sullivan, which you can look up in, oh, I don't know, somewhere on the Internet.
Sullivan was actually right in his complaint. He was indeed defamed. The Supreme Court decided that if a newspaper was requited to be right all the time, we couldn't have newspapers. They're immune from damages for their mistakes as long as they didn't publish it knowing that it was false, or published it without regard to whether it was true or false. That's what they mean by "malice." The New York Times got off, even though they printed false, defamatory statements about Sullivan.
Yank Barry is probably a public figure, since he hired a pr agency, calls himself a philanthropist, and got people to nominate him for the Nobel peace prize. In addition, there have been a lot of articles exposing him in established newspapers. He was in jail.
the same measurement as he is. thousands of hours observing teachers in classrooms (being a student) and talking with teachers and principals (a good 50% of my friends are teachers) The 3rd one ill admit I got nothing
Well, I pay attention to people who know more than I do, and I recommend you do the same. Berliner knows a lot more than I do about education, and I take him seriously. You have no basis for dismissing his ideas like that.
Second, it allows teachers to notice good and bad habits in other teachers and emulate or avoid them.
That's a good point. I didn't think of that.
It's strange that none of these anti-tenure movements talk about improving bad teachers, they only talk about firing them.
Go ahead and complain all you want about this ruling....until YOUR child is stuck with one of those 3% of poor performing tenured teachers and you can't do anything about it until all the union appeals are done with.
The people who are bringing this suit don't care about your child. They want to destroy public schools and unions, and leave you with nothing but private schools.
It will be like Obamacare, where you don't have a public system any more, but you have to choose from among private for-profit systems run by billionaires. The rich will have their choice among good and bad schools, and as for the rest of us -- well, I hope you're rich.
Michelle Rhee's charter schools had plenty of bad teachers. They just got away with it by erasing the wrong answers on the standardized tests and replacing them with the right answer.
When collecting and analyzing data is difficult, the solution is not to stop collecting data. It's to collect more data, and try harder.
Education researchers have been collecting and analyzing data since at least 1970. Most people agree that the NAEP has the best overall data. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo... There are other more specialized studies.
Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... studied the data when she was an assistant secretary of education and a conservative writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal. She believed that standardized testing could tell you which teachers were good and bad, and she was trying to figure out how to do it. She finally gave up, and admitted she was wrong. It can't be done. The data was able to give broad, general trends among large populations, like black students vs. white students, or wealthy students vs. poor students, but it couldn't identify which schools were good or bad, and it definitely couldn't tell you which teachers were good or bad.
Ravitch (and every other education researcher) said that the main factor that predicted student test scores was family income. It wiped out everything else.
Further, I'd much rather have guesses based on some data, than guesses based on nothing.
That's not the way statistics works. If you have statistically invalid data, that's not "some data," that's noise. If you base hiring and firing decisions based on noise, you have unfair, arbitrary firings.
Here's an example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
On Education
Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie
By MICHAEL WINERIP
March 6, 2011
A new New York City middle school teacher was doing a great job, in the opinion of her principal and everyone else, working 10-hour days, her students were getting good grades, and admission to the specialized science high schools. As the article explains, she was a good teacher in every way that you could judge a teacher.
Yet, according to a New York City high-stakes test algorithm, her students didn't improve enough from one year to the next, and they placed her in the bottom 7% of teachers. So the principal couldn't hire her again the following year, as she wanted to. However, the confidence interval of that 7% was 0 to 52%. So she could have been in the top half. Any statistician will tell you that this 7% is meaningless. I read medical studies all day, and if the confidence interval is that wide, you say that there's no correlation. Not some correlation. No correlation.
The problem this teacher had was that she was teaching a class of good students. Good students already have high grades, in the high 90s. Once your grades are at the top of the scale, you have nowhere to improve. So the best teachers, with the best students, were getting the worst rankings because their students didn't improve enough on the tests. Teachers all over the country were complaining about this. The test people really don't have an answer.
How would you like it if you were driving 35 mph, and a cop gave you a speeding ticket because, according to his poorly-calibrated radar gun, there was a 25% probability that you were driving 70 mph? How would you like to get fired because, according to your urine test, there was a 25% probability that you were using opioid drugs?
And lastly, if teachers only account for 1-14% of test results, that tells me that we need some dramatic improvement in teacher quality.
This is true of every education system, all over the world, free market, socialist, high stakes testing, low stakes testing, charter schools, public schools, Catholic schools, everything.
As I said before, the most important factor is the child's family income. If you wa
The reason charter schools are cheaper is that they can pass the difficult kids on to the public schools.
I keep hearing this but in Minnesota this isn't the case.
It's certainly the case in New York State. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (The Wikipedia entry had more detail but Eva Moskowitz' fans kept deleting it, so you'll have to go to the citations.) The Success Academy Charter School kept kicking out underperforming students, which had the effect of increasing the scores. This happens every time you make a principal's job and salary dependent on high-stakes test scores.
I was very impressed at the beginning when there were one or two charter schools that allocated slots based on a lottery, so they could compare the kids who went to the charters with the kids who went to the neighborhood schools, and the charter kids seemed to do better. I go with the facts. However, there were only a very few charter schools like that, and (if you believe in student test scores) when the NAEP did a study of charter schools, they found that some charter schools scored better than public schools but in general they scored worse.
And as Steve Brill finally admitted, those successful charter schools required their teachers to work such long hours, at such low pay, that no teacher could raise a family at that job, so teachers quit after 2 or 3 years.
Teachers' unions actually came up with the idea of charter schools. Their idea was that if they could get rid of the bureaucrats and regulations, they could just teach and enjoy themselves and do a good job. They could have laboratories to try out different techniques. Charter schools could work.
This idea got hijacked by the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-union movement who want to lower workers' salaries. Look at the people who paid for that lawsuit. Do you trust the Koch brothers?
Berliner actually said that no more than 1-3% gave him "cause for concern."
If he honestly believes that he must have been taught math by some of these bad teachers he does not think exist.
He's a teacher who based his opinions on thousands of hours of observing teachers in classrooms, on talking with teachers and principals, and on reviewing the scientific literature on teaching.
What do you base your opinion on?
When you mess up as a lawyer, you get disbarred by a committee of lawyers. That is what we need to do.
How many lawyers do you know who got disbarred? There was a series of stories in the New York Times and elsewhere about prosecutors who had put innocent people in jail for prison terms of 30 and 40 years for murder, after falsifying evidence and not disclosing information that demonstrated that the accused were innocent, which required the prosecutor to commit perjury. Some people were asking why those prosecutors weren't disbarred, or even punished. Nobody could find an example of a prosecutor who had been disbarred after committing perjury and sending an innocent person to jail.
If, for example, the NEA looked at the bottom 1% of its national membership each year for potential ejection, nobody would have any problems.
The teachers' unions have said that when a teacher can't do his job, and can't be taught to improve, and he gets a fair hearing, then they could accept having him fired.
However, these anti-tenure movements don't want to simply get rid of incompetent teachers. They want to destroy the unions, give school boards the right to fire teachers at will (i.e. arbitrarily for any reason they feel like), and lower teachers' salaries. If you look at the people who are paying the bills for these lawsuits, it's the anti-tax, anti-government billionaires like the Koch brothers.
Very well, I'll hand the ball back to you. What metric *should* we use to judge teacher performance?
Experienced, successful teachers know how to judge other teachers. Some of those teachers go on to become principals and administrators.
One of the jobs of a principal is to sit in the classroom of a teacher and evaluate how well the teacher is doing. You can't replace that principal with a Touring machine (which is what student testing is).
Significantly, the principal doesn't evaluate the teacher to decide whether the teacher should be fired. If the teacher is doing something wrong, the principal teaches the teacher how to do it right. These high-stakes testing and anti-tenure movements keep talking about firing teachers. That reveals their hostility to teachers and unions. They're not trying to make better schools.
How would you like it if your kids weren't doing well in school, and the school dealt with it by kicking them out and telling them to prepare for a life as an unskilled worker? How would you like it if you were having problems with something at work -- perhaps because they didn't give you the resources you need to do your job -- and your employer dealt with it by firing you and getting somebody else?
Here's a story from the New York Times about how a principal rated a teacher very highly, but the student testing formula that New York City used said that she was in the lowest 7th percentile of teaching. As a result, the principal couldn't rehire the teacher next year. But her students were doing very well, and getting into the top NYC high schools, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. In addition, the testing formula had a confidence interval of 0 to 52nd percentile. Do you know what a confidence interval is? Her 7th percentile ranking was statistically meaningless. Even according to that formula, she might have been in the top half of teachers. She was a good teacher. The formula was wrong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
On Education
Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: March 6, 2011
Department of Education accountability formula ranks an apparently excellent teacher as 7th percentile, prevents her from being rehired and maybe from getting tenure. Confidence interval 0-52nd percentile.
Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, Stacey Isaacson, teaching 7th grade English and social studies 2y. Works 7am-5:30pm.
Over 2 dozen students went to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High.
Formula ranks Isaacson 7th percentile among her teaching peers.
If mayor and governor have their way, layoffs based on formulas, Isaacson is sure she would be laid off.
Math and English teachers get teacher data report. Isaacson’s students had prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students predicted 3.69 based on comparable students, actually scored 3.63. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.
Calculation based on 32 variables. Margin of error for Isaacson’s 7th percentile 0 to 52nd percentile, which would have made her eligible for tenure.
All that'll happen is the kids in the disadvantaged areas will now have no teachers.
You'd have to offer me a LOT to work in a bad school, but I'll bet pay is the same or less than in the good areas,
the only thing making it viable for even bad teachers is 'tenure'.
So, you've just got rid of that, market forces take over - well doh, we can't get even bad teachers in these areas now.
There's another reason now why teachers will avoid disadvantaged areas.
Everybody in education knows that the one factor that predicts a kid's test results is family income. Family income also predicts a kid's increase in test results over a year.
Teachers who teach disadvantaged kids will get lower ratings because their kids progress more slowly, and these rating systems blame the teachers for that. So they'll get fired.
The plaintiffs pounded home the message that ineffective teachers harm students, and ineffective teachers are prohibitively hard to dismiss due to 5 specific job-protections enshrined in CA law, and poor students are much more likely to be stuck with an ineffective teacher.
The plaintiffs pounded away with a white paper that was never peer reviewed and never published by conservative economists who massaged data to get the results they wanted. As I understand it, this is the only paper that came to such a conclusion.
A scientist would make predictions and then try to confirm them in the real world. Economists don't do that.
Sure, tenure makes no sense for schools.
But, what I'm really wondering is: Just what was the creative logic that the /judges/ used to conclude that tenure violated something (civil rights?) enshrined in the state constitution..
The "creative logic," as you correctly describe it, was that one of the consequences of unions was supposedly that they kept incompetent teachers on the job, that this was harmful to students, and that it was more harmful to black, minority and poor kids. Therefore, it violated the non-discrimination provisions of the 14th Amendment.
It's quite a chain of events from tenure to discriminating against minority and poor kids. Of course there's no evidence to back this up.
There's a more direct connection between school funding and discriminating against minority and poor kids. (The original purpose of charter schools was to be able to run state-funded, private schools known as segregation academies that could refuse to admit blacks during the Civil Rights days).
There's a much more direct connection between family income and student achievement. So if you really want to eliminate discrimination against minorities and the poor, then you should raise their incomes to Western European levels.
Finally, a judge with common sense in the most liberal state in the country, fed by the donation of teachers' union. Wha-da-ya-know ? There still are people with integrity. I meant the judge. Take an example from him big bald governor of shame...
Judge Treu is a fucking idiot who can't listen to a witness' testimony and repeat it accurately a day later. He can't tell the difference between "grossly ineffective" and "cause for concern." He can't tell the difference between "no more than" and "equal to." Treu didn't have to take a test for his job. He's a political appointment.
http://www.eiaonline.com/inter...
Judge Rules in Favor of Vergara Thanks to David Berliner?!
Mike Antonucci - Jun 10, 14
Judge Treu’s decision contains this paragraph:
There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms. Dr. Berliner, an expert called by State Defendants, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are grossly ineffective.
David Berliner says:
June 10, 2014 at 15:56
You and the judge misquote me. I said during deposition That I had never seen a “grossly ineffective” teacher. I said I estimated that the number of poor teachers I’d like to get rid probably is no more than 1-3 percent. The questioning i got was about this statement in TCRECORD...
When asked what percent might actually show up as cause for concern regularly, I said no more than 1-3%. I said nothing about 1-3% being grossly inadequate.
Extract "school grades" from standardized tests with local added questions. Measure teachers by the delta in each student between end of last year and end of current year. That way they're only measured on how much the student learns. Put in a demographic correction and there you go. Doesn't add any more tests, really does measure the teacher's teaching instead of the student's performance at grade level.
People have tried that. It doesn't work.
According to Diane Ravitch (and pretty much everybody else who has studied the data) the one factor that most strongly predicts standardized test scores (and their delta) is family income. That wipes out every other factor. Once you've done the demographic correction, the effect of the teacher is too small to be measured.
There's no statistically valid test that measures the teacher's teaching ability.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch
By Valerie Strauss
May 3, 2014
the American Statistical Association issued a report a few weeks ago warning that “value-added-measurement” (that is, judging teachers by the scores of their students) is fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable. The ratings may change if a different test is used, for example. The ASA report said: