How much more valuable is the 6th or 7th or 8th year of experience? If the students learn more, then teachers would be happy to be paid based of student test scores.
There is no scientific evidence that any standardized test of students can demonstrate the ability of teachers, and quite a bit of evidence that it can't. Well-designed tests can give information about broad patterns like entire schools, or the nation as a whole, but they can't say anything about an individual teacher.
Just about all education experts (like Diane Ravitch, for example) who have looked at the data have found that the most significant factor predicting student test scores is the students' family income. You want to raise test scores? Give parents more money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch By Valerie Strauss May 3, 2014 Louis C.K. tweeted “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!”
Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, took him to task and asked Diane Ravitch to critique what he wrote. Ravitch criticized Nazaryan and defended Louis C.K. on her blog. Nazaryan makes the false claim that teachers' unions oppose Common Core. Actually, the NEA and AFT accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core, which they support, but they complained about implementation after their members complained about lack of resources, professional development, curriculum, etc.
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.
Report by American Educational Research Association/National Academy of Education said test scores are affected by factors beyond the control of teachers.
Diane Ravitch:
Your belief in using test scores to hold teachers accountable has no research to support it, nor is there any real-world evidence. Many districts have tried this for four or five years and there is no evidence–none–that it produces better teachers or better education.
Tenure was designed for college-level professors so that they could conduct their basic research without concern for short-term profit.
To apply such a noble cause to sub-college teachers is a travesty of concept.
Back in the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy, high school and college teachers used to get fired because of anonymous accusations that they were Communists, or once were Communists, or once belonged to an organization that allowed Communists to join. One of my physics teachers had to leave the country and teach abroad until the Red scare blew over.
In 2007, a high school principal in New York City was fired basically because the New York Post went after her because she was a Muslim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... She was fired for things she never said, because the Post, it came out in court, misquoted her.
More prosaically, when you don't have tenure, you have nepotism. Somebody on the school board wants a job for his niece, so he fires a teacher and puts the niece in the teacher's place. This already goes on in the non-unionized private sector.
You realize that without tenure, civil servants are usually forced to contribute to political campaigns, in order to keep their jobs, right? Alfonse D'Amato, the one-time Republican Senator from New York, used to be county supervisor of Suffolk County in Long Island. During a lawsuit, some letters turned up signed by D'Amato discussing how much of a percentage of their salary civil servants should contribute to the Republican Party. By the time the letters turned up, the statute of limitations for bribery and extortion had expired.
So some politically motivated judge makes a pretty crap ruling based upon ideology and not law.
Judge Treu isn't able to get his facts right, either. Treu quoted David Berliner as saying that 1-3% of teachers in California are "grossly ineffective." What Berliner actually said was that 1-3% of teachers would give him "cause for concern."
Despite his efforts, it might have been better for the defendants if Dr. Berliner had stayed home. 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:
“There does seem to be a small percentage of teachers who show consistency no matter what classroom and school compositions they deal with. Those few teachers who have strong and consistent positive effects on student outcomes, we should learn from and reward. And, those few teachers who have strong negative effects on student outcomes need to be helped or removed from classrooms. But the fundamental message from the research is that the percentage of such year-to-year, class-to-class, and school-to-school effective and ineffective teachers appears to be much smaller than is thought to be the case. When the class is the unit of analysis, and student growth is the measure we use to judge teacher effectiveness, what we find is a great deal of adequacy, competency, and adeptness by teachers in response to the complexity of the classroom. And, we see much less of the extraordinarily great and horribly bad teachers of political and media myth. The thousands of welfare queens that Ronald Reagan railed against and the thousands of disability cheats that have contemporary Republicans in such a snit may be like the thousands of terrible teachers in our public schools—more hype than it is reality.”
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.
This allows the school district as the employer to identify teachers that are struggling or are bad-fits for the grades that they're teaching, or to identify teachers whose majority of students do poorly for the long term.
Unfortunately there are no tests that have been demonstrated with anything approaching scientific validity to identify the ability of teachers by testing their students. Go ahead, cite one. I challenge you. There are none. I read a pair of "policy forum" articles about testing in Science magazine. The anti-testing guy said that the tests were statistically invalid, and couldn't predict teacher quality any better than rolling dice. The pro-testing guy admitted he was right, but said that they would come up with valid tests in the future. Too bad if you get fired because of those invalid tests today.
Most value added measurement 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.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch By Valerie Strauss May 3, 2014 Louis C.K. tweeted “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!” Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, took him to task and asked Diane Ravitch to critique what he wrote. Ravitch criticized Nazaryan and defended Louis C.K. on her blog. Nazaryan makes the false claim that teachers' unions oppose Common Core. Actually, the NEA and AFT accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core, which they support, but they complained about implementation after their members complained about lack of resources, professional development, curriculum, etc. 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. Report by American Educational Research Association/National Academy of Education said test scores are affected by factors beyond the control of teachers. Common Core has become a national marketplace for Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and other vendors. There are conferences for entrepreneurs on cashing in on Common Core. The U.S. government is prohibited by law from controlling curriculum or instruction, and Common Core violates the law. Diane Ravitch: You are right that it is far too soon to judge Common Core’s efficacy. But that is the fault of those who wrote it. In 2009, when I met at the Aspen Institute with the authors of the Common Core, I urged them to field test it so they would find out how it works in real classrooms. They didn’t. In 2010, I was invited to the White House to meet with Melody Barnes, the director of domestic policy; Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff; and Ricardo Rodriguez, the President’s education advisor, and they asked me what I thought of Common Core. I urged them to field test it. I suggested that they invite 3-5 states to give it a trial of three to five years. See how it works. See if it narrows the achievement gap or widens the achievement gap. They quickly dismissed the idea. They were in a hurry. They wanted Common Core to be rolled out as quickly as possible, without checking out how it works in real classrooms with real teachers and real children. We would be far better off investing more money in providing di
Are you talking about the children or the teachers?
Yes.
To clarify that, most of the charter schools routinely expel students who have any problems, either academic or behavioral.
It's the Pareto principle: 90% of the students are easy to teach; 10% of them are difficult. The difficult 10% cost the school as much as the easy 90%. That includes for example handicapped kids, or kids whose parents speak a foreign language, or kids who are having trouble with math, or English, or any other subject. And yes, there are some kids having disciplinary or behavioral problems.
The reason public schools are so expensive is that they have to take all students. The reason charter schools are cheaper is that they can pass the difficult kids on to the public schools.
Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, described all this in an article about Eva Moskowitz' charter schools. Moskowitz' students do very well on the tests, because if any of their students is having trouble, she expels them. And they go to the public schools.
Why would a bad teacher only affected (and disproportionately affected) poor and/or minority students ?
And who are the minority students ? Those coming from the South of the Border ? Those with a dark complexion ?
How come then the poor White and the poor Asians are never counted as students needing help ?
Why ?
Why? The reason is that they made it up in order to find an excuse to apply the 14th Amendment. Their real purpose is to destroy unions.
They're crying crocodile tears about poor and minority students.
If they were so concerned about poor and minority students, they would equalize education in all the districts, and bring back the low-cost taxpayer-supported public universities in California.
You narrative that children are getting cheated out of an education because of tenure is a complete myth.
Right. Judge Treu either misunderstood and misquoted, or deliberately lied, about the teachers' expert testimony.
Treu wrote that the teachers' expert, David Berliner, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are "grossly ineffective." Berliner actually said that no more than 1-3% gave him "cause for concern."
The "economic study" Treu relied upon was one study -- a white paper that wasn't peer reviewed.
http://www.eiaonline.com/inter... Judge Rules in Favor of Vergara Thanks to David Berliner?! Mike Antonucci - Jun 10, 14 Despite his efforts, it might have been better for the defendants if Dr. Berliner had stayed home. 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: “There does seem to be a small percentage of teachers who show consistency no matter what classroom and school compositions they deal with. Those few teachers who have strong and consistent positive effects on student outcomes, we should learn from and reward. And, those few teachers who have strong negative effects on student outcomes need to be helped or removed from classrooms. But the fundamental message from the research is that the percentage of such year-to-year, class-to-class, and school-to-school effective and ineffective teachers appears to be much smaller than is thought to be the case. When the class is the unit of analysis, and student growth is the measure we use to judge teacher effectiveness, what we find is a great deal of adequacy, competency, and adeptness by teachers in response to the complexity of the classroom. And, we see much less of the extraordinarily great and horribly bad teachers of political and media myth. The thousands of welfare queens that Ronald Reagan railed against and the thousands of disability cheats that have contemporary Republicans in such a snit may be like the thousands of terrible teachers in our public schools—more hype than it is reality.” 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.
Please, in spite of how much worse some things have gotten, the respect for dissent in the US has expanded, no contracted.
I'm not sure about that. Daniel Ellsberg went free. Bradley Manning went to jail. Snowden and Assange have arrest warrants out for him.
Back in the 1950s, the FBI identified spies, like Stephen Hall, that they decided not to prosecute, because in court the accused had a right to hear the evidence against him under the Fifth Amendment, and the FBI decided it wasn't worth having their sources and methods disclosed.
Now, they prosecute somebody, and simply say that the defendant doesn't have a right to hear the evidence against him, and the Constitution doesn't apply.
50% efficacy seems like a big deal to me. In order for an epidemic to be propagated, each individual has to transmit the infection to at least 1 other person. If the transmission rate is above 1, the infection will be propagated. If you can get the transmission rate below 1, the infection will die off. The main purpose of a vaccine is to get the transmission rate below 1, and a 50% reduction in transmission will often do that. That's basic epidemiology, BTW.
I am sure that when you write about systems engineering you know what you're talking about.
I'm glad that your education included the great books and not just the sciences. The classical Greeks had many great insights. However, in the 2000 years since then, people have had time to come up with additional insights.
The people who wrote your source seem to think that there is something unusual about the fact that in 2013 the CDC reported that the effectiveness of the flu virus was a little over 50% overall. My 9-year-old edition of Harrison's Internal Medicine says that the effectiveness of the flu virus is 50-80%, depending on the strain and lots of other factors, and that the effectiveness in people over 65 is much lower. Everybody has known that for decades. There are many vaccines that are ~50% effective. What's your point?
When "rest and liquids" don't work, our ability to treat dehydration today is exceptional. We can also safely medicate for pain, reduce fever, and treat other complications very well.
You probably know as well as I do too, that anti-viral medication is rarely used because of the impact to mutation.
Our ability to treat dehydration didn't work too well in these 111 cases of PCR-confirmed influenza, which had a fatality rate of 27%. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... When a patient is dying from influenza, they use anti-viral medication (and everything else they've got).
Nor did it help this 15-year-old Texas girl who died of H1N1. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... This article says that in order for the CDC to count a case as influenza, it has to be diagnosed at least with a rapid diagnostic kit, and it says, as other articles do, that the CDC probably underestimates the number of influenza cases by applying this strict criteria.
I apologize that this article is apparently behind a paywall. But then, if you can't get to a NEJM article, how can you know the facts about influenza?
Considering that the CDC fluffs flu death numbers by including all cases of pneumonia in their results, we don't know how many people the influenza virus actually kills each year.
That's because you can't tell whether somebody actually had the flu without DNA testing, which would be prohibitively expensive and medically unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.
The total number of deaths for all strains of influenza AND pneumonia is around 20,000.
According to my copy of Harrison's Internal Medicine, which is written by doctors and epidemiologists, there are at least 20,000 influenza-associated excess deaths a year, and 40,000 deaths in one of the regular epidemics once every decade. These are the guys who actually treat patients with influenza, and are responsible for making recommendations. If you want to take a couple of courses in epidemiology and check their numbers, I'd be interested in your results. Back-of-the-envelope calculations are appropriate for dinner-table conversations, but not for serious business.
BTW, the number of motor vehicle deaths is about 40,000 a year, which is one of the major causes of preventable death, so comparing influenza deaths to automobile deaths is not reassuring.
Influenza is also very treatable even in severe cases.
Not true. I've been following that in the medical journals and in Science. Adamantane and neuraminidase inhibitors turned out to be a bust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Beyond a certain critical mass of vaccinations, additional vaccinations are subject to diminishing returns.
Very true, but that critical mass is around 95%. The original article makes it clear that in Canada, the vaccination rates are nowhere near that number. Articles I've read in the US place the rates below that number as well. Especially in regions where non-medical vaccination abstentions are high (religious groups, Wealthy communities suffering from the misconception that vaccines are related to autism, etc.).
I don't think so. If you have the vaccination rate up to 95%, getting the last 5% (together with other measures) can eliminate the disease.
Usually those last 5% are in religious communities, which get outbreaks of diseases like measles or whooping cough regularly.
Should everybody be vaccinated? What about people with other health conditions who cannot tolerate the vaccine? Pushing the issue might actually be harmful to some peoples' health in exchange for little if any real societal benefit.
The people with impaired immune systems, usually from treatment for autoimmune diseases, leukemia or lymphoma, are the very people who have the greatest benefit from herd immunity and the greatest risk if others don't get vaccinated.
The important point to understand about infectious diseases is that (1) some people don't get infected at all, (2) some people (most people) get infected but don't have any symptoms or any effect, like Typhoid Mary, and (3) some people get infected and come down with a disease.
The ones we have to worry about are (2). If they don't get vaccinated, they become carriers, and spread it to the people who are vulnerable.
Beyond a certain critical mass of vaccinations, additional vaccinations are subject to diminishing returns.
Actually, you got it backwards. When you have a high rate of vaccinations, around 95%, the other 5% are particularly dangerous because they're the ones who spoil it for everybody.
If you can get the vaccination rate to 100%, with polio, for example, you can eradicate the disease entirely, until somebody comes in from a country like Pakistan that doesn't vaccinate adequately.
Doctors have been required to report certain "reportable diseases" to state health departments for the last century.
The original purpose for that was to trace the spread of disease, and for treatable STDs, to contact their sexual partners so that the partners could also be treated and encouraged not to spread it.
Public health efforts like this, including vaccination, have been very effective, and eliminated many diseases around the world.
New York City's public health commissioners keep saying, we put Typhoid Mary away.
There are privacy issues, and I don't want the government intruding into my private life any more than I want my insurance company intruding into my private life.
But there is a cost-benefit test. I would ask the libertarians (hello, Jacob Sullum) whether they would eliminate disease reporting if the result would be that we would get regular epidemics of diseases like measles every few years, killing the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike (since vaccines aren't 100% effective).
Of course in a Rand Paul world, we would also have smallpox epidemics, since there would be no UN, and no World Health Organization, to eradicate it.
nobody as far as i know is advocating a publicly-accessible database here, are they? we already have large data stores full of patient information and i still am not able to look up my neighbor's medical records on the internet.
If your neighbors are so irresponsible as to be unvaccinated, you should know that, so you can avoid them, and keep them out of public schools, restaurants, movie theaters, public transportation, and public events where they can spread their diseases to others.
There are a lot of people being treated for cancer and autoimmune diseases who take drugs that lower their immune systems and make them vulnerable to infections that others could fight off.
So if your anti-vax neighbor gets infected with measles, he might not show any symptoms, but he could kill you if you're taking cortisone drugs.
Unless we boost immunization rates, we can expect to see more and more outbreaks of measles like the ones that have occurred in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario, not to mention much larger outbreaks in the US and the European Union. And let's not forget that measles can be fatal. During a measles outbreak the lasted from 2008 until 2011, France had ten deaths that were attributed to the disease.
Yes and the same should be done for those with STDs as that data should be considered public health information; as the public healthcare costs and risks in this area are far greater than, lets say measles as an example. You should be able to go to a government web site and enter a persons name to check and see if they have vaccinations, STDs, etc./sarcasm
In many jurisdictions, it's a crime to have sex with someone without informing them that you have certain STDs, and many people have been sent to jail for spreading HIV that way.
Agreed. Iran has some pretty intelligent people there, and much of the population is college educated.
Indeed.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/n... The Star Students Of The Islamic Republic Aug 8, 2008 8:00 PM EDT Forget Harvard—one of the world's best undergraduate colleges is in Iran. In 2003, a group of students from Sharif University of Science and Technology in Iran aced the Stanford U EE Department's PhD entrance exam, getting some of the highest scores ever. Bruce A. Wooley said Sharif has one of the best undergrad EE programs in the world, among MIT, Caltech, Stanford. Tsinghua and Cambridge. Other top schools are U. Tehran and Isfahan U. of Technology. They are major players in the international Science Olympics, in physics, mathematics, chemistry and robotics, and =90% go to graduate school or work abroad. Silicon Valley companies including Google and Yahoo employ hundreds of Iranian grads. Iranian parents push their children into medicine and engineering, rather than other fields like law, and entrance is extremely selective. Sharif U. was founded in 1965 by the Shah, under the guidance of MIT advisers. Iranian high-school system also stresses science, with subjects taught in the U.S. only to undergraduates. Education is also a way out of the country, but Iran is suffering a brain drain. Iran's history includes Avicenna, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, and Omar Khayyam.
Like the president of the United States of America, who solicits written advice from a bishop, an archbishop, a reverend, a most reverend, a sister, an elder and a rabbi?
Not President Bush. He gets advice directly from God.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't treat schizophrenia with drugs, but I am saying that there's a tradeoff.
Sometimes when people with schizophrenia refuse to take drugs, it's because they decided that they'd rather suffer the symptoms than the side effects of the drugs. Sometimes that can be a reasonable choice. If I were faced with tardive dyskenesia, I might go with the symptoms of schizophrenia. If I were faced with gaining another 100 pounds, I might go with the symptoms of schizophrenia.
In an ideal world, people with mental illness would be treated by psychiatrists who would spend as much time as it takes, and give them drugs based on good scientific evidence.
The real world isn't like that. Most of the psychiatric drugs are approved and used on the basis of studies with relatively few people, and the evidence for them is weak. Many of the medical education programs for psychiatrists are paid for by drug companies and promote drugs even for inappropriate indications. Medicaid and Medicare don't pay psychiatrists enough money to survive if they used best practices, so a lot of psychiatrists are running Medicaid mills. Sometimes drugs with fewer side effects are too expensive for the state programs.
You can't assume that just because one psychiatrist prescribed a drug for a patient, the only rational decision is for the patient to take the drug.
There's a pretty high level of suicides among schizophrenics. If the schizophrenia is severe, they can also engage in dangerous behavior, like walking into traffic or onto subway tracks.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they are more experienced, duh!
How much more valuable is the 6th or 7th or 8th year of experience? If the students learn more, then teachers would be happy to be paid based of student test scores.
There is no scientific evidence that any standardized test of students can demonstrate the ability of teachers, and quite a bit of evidence that it can't. Well-designed tests can give information about broad patterns like entire schools, or the nation as a whole, but they can't say anything about an individual teacher.
Just about all education experts (like Diane Ravitch, for example) who have looked at the data have found that the most significant factor predicting student test scores is the students' family income. You want to raise test scores? Give parents more money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch
By Valerie Strauss
May 3, 2014
Louis C.K. tweeted “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!”
Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, took him to task and asked Diane Ravitch to critique what he wrote. Ravitch criticized Nazaryan and defended Louis C.K. on her blog. Nazaryan makes the false claim that teachers' unions oppose Common Core. Actually, the NEA and AFT accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core, which they support, but they complained about implementation after their members complained about lack of resources, professional development, curriculum, etc.
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.
Report by American Educational Research Association/National Academy of Education said test scores are affected by factors beyond the control of teachers.
Diane Ravitch:
Your belief in using test scores to hold teachers accountable has no research to support it, nor is there any real-world evidence. Many districts have tried this for four or five years and there is no evidence–none–that it produces better teachers or better education.
Tenure was designed for college-level professors so that they could conduct their basic research without concern for short-term profit.
To apply such a noble cause to sub-college teachers is a travesty of concept.
Back in the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy, high school and college teachers used to get fired because of anonymous accusations that they were Communists, or once were Communists, or once belonged to an organization that allowed Communists to join. One of my physics teachers had to leave the country and teach abroad until the Red scare blew over.
In 2007, a high school principal in New York City was fired basically because the New York Post went after her because she was a Muslim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... She was fired for things she never said, because the Post, it came out in court, misquoted her.
More prosaically, when you don't have tenure, you have nepotism. Somebody on the school board wants a job for his niece, so he fires a teacher and puts the niece in the teacher's place. This already goes on in the non-unionized private sector.
You realize that without tenure, civil servants are usually forced to contribute to political campaigns, in order to keep their jobs, right? Alfonse D'Amato, the one-time Republican Senator from New York, used to be county supervisor of Suffolk County in Long Island. During a lawsuit, some letters turned up signed by D'Amato discussing how much of a percentage of their salary civil servants should contribute to the Republican Party. By the time the letters turned up, the statute of limitations for bribery and extortion had expired.
So some politically motivated judge makes a pretty crap ruling based upon ideology and not law.
Judge Treu isn't able to get his facts right, either. Treu quoted David Berliner as saying that 1-3% of teachers in California are "grossly ineffective." What Berliner actually said was that 1-3% of teachers would give him "cause for concern."
http://www.eiaonline.com/inter...
Judge Rules in Favor of Vergara Thanks to David Berliner?!
Mike Antonucci - Jun 10, 14
Despite his efforts, it might have been better for the defendants if Dr. Berliner had stayed home. Judge Treu’s decision contains this paragraph:
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:
“There does seem to be a small percentage of teachers who show consistency no matter what classroom and school compositions they deal with. Those few teachers who have strong and consistent positive effects on student outcomes, we should learn from and reward. And, those few teachers who have strong negative effects on student outcomes need to be helped or removed from classrooms. But the fundamental message from the research is that the percentage of such year-to-year, class-to-class, and school-to-school effective and ineffective teachers appears to be much smaller than is thought to be the case. When the class is the unit of analysis, and student growth is the measure we use to judge teacher effectiveness, what we find is a great deal of adequacy, competency, and adeptness by teachers in response to the complexity of the classroom. And, we see much less of the extraordinarily great and horribly bad teachers of political and media myth. The thousands of welfare queens that Ronald Reagan railed against and the thousands of disability cheats that have contemporary Republicans in such a snit may be like the thousands of terrible teachers in our public schools—more hype than it is reality.”
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.
Too bad we can't fire posters on /.
This allows the school district as the employer to identify teachers that are struggling or are bad-fits for the grades that they're teaching, or to identify teachers whose majority of students do poorly for the long term.
Unfortunately there are no tests that have been demonstrated with anything approaching scientific validity to identify the ability of teachers by testing their students. Go ahead, cite one. I challenge you. There are none. I read a pair of "policy forum" articles about testing in Science magazine. The anti-testing guy said that the tests were statistically invalid, and couldn't predict teacher quality any better than rolling dice. The pro-testing guy admitted he was right, but said that they would come up with valid tests in the future. Too bad if you get fired because of those invalid tests today.
Most value added measurement 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.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch
By Valerie Strauss
May 3, 2014
Louis C.K. tweeted “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!”
Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, took him to task and asked Diane Ravitch to critique what he wrote. Ravitch criticized Nazaryan and defended Louis C.K. on her blog. Nazaryan makes the false claim that teachers' unions oppose Common Core. Actually, the NEA and AFT accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core, which they support, but they complained about implementation after their members complained about lack of resources, professional development, curriculum, etc.
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.
Report by American Educational Research Association/National Academy of Education said test scores are affected by factors beyond the control of teachers.
Common Core has become a national marketplace for Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and other vendors. There are conferences for entrepreneurs on cashing in on Common Core.
The U.S. government is prohibited by law from controlling curriculum or instruction, and Common Core violates the law.
Diane Ravitch:
You are right that it is far too soon to judge Common Core’s efficacy. But that is the fault of those who wrote it. In 2009, when I met at the Aspen Institute with the authors of the Common Core, I urged them to field test it so they would find out how it works in real classrooms. They didn’t. In 2010, I was invited to the White House to meet with Melody Barnes, the director of domestic policy; Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff; and Ricardo Rodriguez, the President’s education advisor, and they asked me what I thought of Common Core. I urged them to field test it. I suggested that they invite 3-5 states to give it a trial of three to five years. See how it works. See if it narrows the achievement gap or widens the achievement gap. They quickly dismissed the idea. They were in a hurry. They wanted Common Core to be rolled out as quickly as possible, without checking out how it works in real classrooms with real teachers and real children.
We would be far better off investing more money in providing di
Yes.
To clarify that, most of the charter schools routinely expel students who have any problems, either academic or behavioral.
It's the Pareto principle: 90% of the students are easy to teach; 10% of them are difficult. The difficult 10% cost the school as much as the easy 90%. That includes for example handicapped kids, or kids whose parents speak a foreign language, or kids who are having trouble with math, or English, or any other subject. And yes, there are some kids having disciplinary or behavioral problems.
The reason public schools are so expensive is that they have to take all students. The reason charter schools are cheaper is that they can pass the difficult kids on to the public schools.
Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, described all this in an article about Eva Moskowitz' charter schools. Moskowitz' students do very well on the tests, because if any of their students is having trouble, she expels them. And they go to the public schools.
When I saw the above sentence my alarm bells rang
Why would a bad teacher only affected (and disproportionately affected) poor and/or minority students ?
And who are the minority students ? Those coming from the South of the Border ? Those with a dark complexion ?
How come then the poor White and the poor Asians are never counted as students needing help ?
Why ?
Why? The reason is that they made it up in order to find an excuse to apply the 14th Amendment. Their real purpose is to destroy unions.
They're crying crocodile tears about poor and minority students.
If they were so concerned about poor and minority students, they would equalize education in all the districts, and bring back the low-cost taxpayer-supported public universities in California.
You narrative that children are getting cheated out of an education because of tenure is a complete myth.
Right. Judge Treu either misunderstood and misquoted, or deliberately lied, about the teachers' expert testimony.
Treu wrote that the teachers' expert, David Berliner, testified that 1-3% of teachers in California are "grossly ineffective." Berliner actually said that no more than 1-3% gave him "cause for concern."
The "economic study" Treu relied upon was one study -- a white paper that wasn't peer reviewed.
http://www.eiaonline.com/inter...
Judge Rules in Favor of Vergara Thanks to David Berliner?!
Mike Antonucci - Jun 10, 14
Despite his efforts, it might have been better for the defendants if Dr. Berliner had stayed home. 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:
“There does seem to be a small percentage of teachers who show consistency no matter what classroom and school compositions they deal with. Those few teachers who have strong and consistent positive effects on student outcomes, we should learn from and reward. And, those few teachers who have strong negative effects on student outcomes need to be helped or removed from classrooms. But the fundamental message from the research is that the percentage of such year-to-year, class-to-class, and school-to-school effective and ineffective teachers appears to be much smaller than is thought to be the case. When the class is the unit of analysis, and student growth is the measure we use to judge teacher effectiveness, what we find is a great deal of adequacy, competency, and adeptness by teachers in response to the complexity of the classroom. And, we see much less of the extraordinarily great and horribly bad teachers of political and media myth. The thousands of welfare queens that Ronald Reagan railed against and the thousands of disability cheats that have contemporary Republicans in such a snit may be like the thousands of terrible teachers in our public schools—more hype than it is reality.”
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.
Please, in spite of how much worse some things have gotten, the respect for dissent in the US has expanded, no contracted.
I'm not sure about that. Daniel Ellsberg went free. Bradley Manning went to jail. Snowden and Assange have arrest warrants out for him.
Back in the 1950s, the FBI identified spies, like Stephen Hall, that they decided not to prosecute, because in court the accused had a right to hear the evidence against him under the Fifth Amendment, and the FBI decided it wasn't worth having their sources and methods disclosed.
Now, they prosecute somebody, and simply say that the defendant doesn't have a right to hear the evidence against him, and the Constitution doesn't apply.
50% efficacy seems like a big deal to me. In order for an epidemic to be propagated, each individual has to transmit the infection to at least 1 other person. If the transmission rate is above 1, the infection will be propagated. If you can get the transmission rate below 1, the infection will die off. The main purpose of a vaccine is to get the transmission rate below 1, and a 50% reduction in transmission will often do that. That's basic epidemiology, BTW.
I am sure that when you write about systems engineering you know what you're talking about.
I'm glad that your education included the great books and not just the sciences. The classical Greeks had many great insights. However, in the 2000 years since then, people have had time to come up with additional insights.
The people who wrote your source seem to think that there is something unusual about the fact that in 2013 the CDC reported that the effectiveness of the flu virus was a little over 50% overall. My 9-year-old edition of Harrison's Internal Medicine says that the effectiveness of the flu virus is 50-80%, depending on the strain and lots of other factors, and that the effectiveness in people over 65 is much lower. Everybody has known that for decades. There are many vaccines that are ~50% effective. What's your point?
Your comments seem to be lacking supporting citations.
When "rest and liquids" don't work, our ability to treat dehydration today is exceptional. We can also safely medicate for pain, reduce fever, and treat other complications very well.
You probably know as well as I do too, that anti-viral medication is rarely used because of the impact to mutation.
Our ability to treat dehydration didn't work too well in these 111 cases of PCR-confirmed influenza, which had a fatality rate of 27%. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... When a patient is dying from influenza, they use anti-viral medication (and everything else they've got).
Nor did it help this 15-year-old Texas girl who died of H1N1. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... This article says that in order for the CDC to count a case as influenza, it has to be diagnosed at least with a rapid diagnostic kit, and it says, as other articles do, that the CDC probably underestimates the number of influenza cases by applying this strict criteria.
I apologize that this article is apparently behind a paywall. But then, if you can't get to a NEJM article, how can you know the facts about influenza?
Considering that the CDC fluffs flu death numbers by including all cases of pneumonia in their results, we don't know how many people the influenza virus actually kills each year.
That's because you can't tell whether somebody actually had the flu without DNA testing, which would be prohibitively expensive and medically unnecessary in the vast majority of cases.
The total number of deaths for all strains of influenza AND pneumonia is around 20,000.
According to my copy of Harrison's Internal Medicine, which is written by doctors and epidemiologists, there are at least 20,000 influenza-associated excess deaths a year, and 40,000 deaths in one of the regular epidemics once every decade. These are the guys who actually treat patients with influenza, and are responsible for making recommendations. If you want to take a couple of courses in epidemiology and check their numbers, I'd be interested in your results. Back-of-the-envelope calculations are appropriate for dinner-table conversations, but not for serious business.
BTW, the number of motor vehicle deaths is about 40,000 a year, which is one of the major causes of preventable death, so comparing influenza deaths to automobile deaths is not reassuring.
Influenza is also very treatable even in severe cases.
Not true. I've been following that in the medical journals and in Science. Adamantane and neuraminidase inhibitors turned out to be a bust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Beyond a certain critical mass of vaccinations, additional vaccinations are subject to diminishing returns.
Very true, but that critical mass is around 95%. The original article makes it clear that in Canada, the vaccination rates are nowhere near that number. Articles I've read in the US place the rates below that number as well. Especially in regions where non-medical vaccination abstentions are high (religious groups, Wealthy communities suffering from the misconception that vaccines are related to autism, etc.).
I don't think so. If you have the vaccination rate up to 95%, getting the last 5% (together with other measures) can eliminate the disease.
Usually those last 5% are in religious communities, which get outbreaks of diseases like measles or whooping cough regularly.
Should everybody be vaccinated? What about people with other health conditions who cannot tolerate the vaccine? Pushing the issue might actually be harmful to some peoples' health in exchange for little if any real societal benefit.
The people with impaired immune systems, usually from treatment for autoimmune diseases, leukemia or lymphoma, are the very people who have the greatest benefit from herd immunity and the greatest risk if others don't get vaccinated.
The important point to understand about infectious diseases is that (1) some people don't get infected at all, (2) some people (most people) get infected but don't have any symptoms or any effect, like Typhoid Mary, and (3) some people get infected and come down with a disease.
The ones we have to worry about are (2). If they don't get vaccinated, they become carriers, and spread it to the people who are vulnerable.
Beyond a certain critical mass of vaccinations, additional vaccinations are subject to diminishing returns.
Actually, you got it backwards. When you have a high rate of vaccinations, around 95%, the other 5% are particularly dangerous because they're the ones who spoil it for everybody.
If you can get the vaccination rate to 100%, with polio, for example, you can eradicate the disease entirely, until somebody comes in from a country like Pakistan that doesn't vaccinate adequately.
I have a better idea. If you're concerned about STDs, don't have sex. That's the best defense against society's lack of self control with sex.
It's people like you who are responsible for those stereotypes of socially maladjusted nerds.
Doctors have been required to report certain "reportable diseases" to state health departments for the last century.
The original purpose for that was to trace the spread of disease, and for treatable STDs, to contact their sexual partners so that the partners could also be treated and encouraged not to spread it.
Public health efforts like this, including vaccination, have been very effective, and eliminated many diseases around the world.
New York City's public health commissioners keep saying, we put Typhoid Mary away.
There are privacy issues, and I don't want the government intruding into my private life any more than I want my insurance company intruding into my private life.
But there is a cost-benefit test. I would ask the libertarians (hello, Jacob Sullum) whether they would eliminate disease reporting if the result would be that we would get regular epidemics of diseases like measles every few years, killing the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike (since vaccines aren't 100% effective).
Of course in a Rand Paul world, we would also have smallpox epidemics, since there would be no UN, and no World Health Organization, to eradicate it.
nobody as far as i know is advocating a publicly-accessible database here, are they? we already have large data stores full of patient information and i still am not able to look up my neighbor's medical records on the internet.
If your neighbors are so irresponsible as to be unvaccinated, you should know that, so you can avoid them, and keep them out of public schools, restaurants, movie theaters, public transportation, and public events where they can spread their diseases to others.
There are a lot of people being treated for cancer and autoimmune diseases who take drugs that lower their immune systems and make them vulnerable to infections that others could fight off.
So if your anti-vax neighbor gets infected with measles, he might not show any symptoms, but he could kill you if you're taking cortisone drugs.
Do you often catch measles, whooping cough or polio? Do you really think catching one of those is more likely than catching an STI?
Quite a bit, actually, especially if you're an ignorant American and live in a religious community. From TFA:
Yes and the same should be done for those with STDs as that data should be considered public health information; as the public healthcare costs and risks in this area are far greater than, lets say measles as an example. You should be able to go to a government web site and enter a persons name to check and see if they have vaccinations, STDs, etc. /sarcasm
In many jurisdictions, it's a crime to have sex with someone without informing them that you have certain STDs, and many people have been sent to jail for spreading HIV that way.
Agreed. Iran has some pretty intelligent people there, and much of the population is college educated.
Indeed.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/n...
The Star Students Of The Islamic Republic
Aug 8, 2008 8:00 PM EDT
Forget Harvard—one of the world's best undergraduate colleges is in Iran.
In 2003, a group of students from Sharif University of Science and Technology in Iran aced the Stanford U EE Department's PhD entrance exam, getting some of the highest scores ever. Bruce A. Wooley said Sharif has one of the best undergrad EE programs in the world, among MIT, Caltech, Stanford. Tsinghua and Cambridge. Other top schools are U. Tehran and Isfahan U. of Technology. They are major players in the international Science Olympics, in physics, mathematics, chemistry and robotics, and =90% go to graduate school or work abroad. Silicon Valley companies including Google and Yahoo employ hundreds of Iranian grads. Iranian parents push their children into medicine and engineering, rather than other fields like law, and entrance is extremely selective. Sharif U. was founded in 1965 by the Shah, under the guidance of MIT advisers. Iranian high-school system also stresses science, with subjects taught in the U.S. only to undergraduates. Education is also a way out of the country, but Iran is suffering a brain drain. Iran's history includes Avicenna, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, and Omar Khayyam.
Like the president of the United States of America, who solicits written advice from a bishop, an archbishop, a reverend, a most reverend, a sister, an elder and a rabbi?
Not President Bush. He gets advice directly from God.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't treat schizophrenia with drugs, but I am saying that there's a tradeoff.
Sometimes when people with schizophrenia refuse to take drugs, it's because they decided that they'd rather suffer the symptoms than the side effects of the drugs. Sometimes that can be a reasonable choice. If I were faced with tardive dyskenesia, I might go with the symptoms of schizophrenia. If I were faced with gaining another 100 pounds, I might go with the symptoms of schizophrenia.
In an ideal world, people with mental illness would be treated by psychiatrists who would spend as much time as it takes, and give them drugs based on good scientific evidence.
The real world isn't like that. Most of the psychiatric drugs are approved and used on the basis of studies with relatively few people, and the evidence for them is weak. Many of the medical education programs for psychiatrists are paid for by drug companies and promote drugs even for inappropriate indications. Medicaid and Medicare don't pay psychiatrists enough money to survive if they used best practices, so a lot of psychiatrists are running Medicaid mills. Sometimes drugs with fewer side effects are too expensive for the state programs.
You can't assume that just because one psychiatrist prescribed a drug for a patient, the only rational decision is for the patient to take the drug.
There's a pretty high level of suicides among schizophrenics. If the schizophrenia is severe, they can also engage in dangerous behavior, like walking into traffic or onto subway tracks.