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The problem with this debate is that if you speak to most teachers, they agree wholeheartedly that procedures need to be in place to fire bad teachers. The iss

• lutorm 16y ago
  This is the real issue. I have absolutely no problem with rewarding good teachers and sanctioning bad ones. The crucial question is how good and bad will be defined. Standardized testing is absolutely not the way to do it.
  • richieb 16y ago
    Perhaps we should ask the students and student parents? After all the parents are paying the bill (even when it's indirect via taxes)
  • shasta 16y ago
    If you mean that a teacher's salary shouldn't be a simple function of test scores, then sure. If you mean standardized testing shouldn't be used to evaluate children, or that evaluations of students - even relative ones - shouldn't be used in evaluations of teachers, then can you please explain what you have in mind as the alternative?
    • _delirium 16y ago
      I'd go with subjective judgment by human observers, which is fallible but I think reasonable enough, and harder to game, when you're looking for large differences. We're not really talking about distinguishing 50th-percentile from 60th-percentile, but trying to pick out "absolutely horrible at teaching" (get rid of them) from "fine at teaching" (keep them) and "amazingly great teacher" (give them raises/bonuses). I think principals might actually have a good estimate of that even today: the worst teachers, at least, are usually something of an open secret. If principals ideally stuck around longer (instead of the current musical-chairs that seems to go on), they'd have even better estimates. Sort of the same way that companies do it, really. Engineering firms, or good ones anyway, rely more on subjective judgment of management ("so-and-so is a [terrible|great] engineer") than they do on code metrics. I think they'd have some of the same morale problems if they were heavily metrics-based as well: imagine if every year your company ran a script over their VCS+bug-tracker with whatever metrics were currently in place, and fired everyone who scored in the bottom 5%.
      • shasta 16y ago
        Lines of code produced is a terrible metric of software progress and especially software quality. By comparison, a well constructed test is an excellent metric of learning. Also, have you ever written software for the government? I think if you had, you'd yearn for an objective evaluation procedure as accurate as standardized tests. For your proposal to work, you'd have to carefully set up incentives for the judges and try to figure out how to keep the politics to a minimum. If "teaching to the test" is a bad thing, that just means you have a bad test. With varied enough questions, the easy way to prepare for a test is to understand the material. I agree that teachers shouldn't be judged directly by the scores of their students, because not all students have equal background and ability. But any time you have an opportunity to measure something objectively, jump at the chance. That goes for software, too.
        • sprout 16y ago
          >If "teaching to the test" is a bad thing, that just means you have a bad test. Look at it this way: We do not want students to all know the same things. We want to increase the amount of learning, but ideally, only 30-50% of the knowledge kids learn should be held in common. In a perfect world, the remaining 70% would be different from classroom to classroom. Varied experience is crucial to making our society function better. So if we take varied experience as a value we want to encourage in our classrooms, you cannot have a good standard test, because the standard is more amount and quality of knowledge than a predefined notion of what knowledge is necessary to get by in the world. And likewise, because this is how I value it, I would prefer that standardized testing be around one-third of the evaluation score, if not 20%. I want teachers and school administrations to be free to take big risks like teaching everyone computer science instead of math - because teaching a well-thought-out course of study is not a risk. Classrooms should definitely do instruction in ideas of the past (history is always vital), but more than anything they should be incubators for new ideas.
  • yummyfajitas 16y ago
    If you object to standardized tests, what do you propose we use? Non-standard tests? The opinions of assorted cronies?
    • ewanmcteagle 16y ago
      If students weren't locked into schools enrollment levels and parent feedback would provide a lot of information.
      • ktsmith 16y ago
        Parent feedback isn't worth nearly as much as you might think. Parents aren't in the classroom, they tend to get one side of things (their child's). Some parent's are objective and some aren't. This leads to plenty of horror stories about parents that assume all teachers are morons and their children are infallible, I've seen it first hand and it's really pathetic. The flip side of that would be the parents of my wife's former students. She has been teaching in poor neighborhoods and a significant percentage of the parents are illiterate. While these parent's are very happy with my wife and they request all their children (and cousins etc) have her, using their feedback to rate my wife as a teacher would be seriously flawed as they really don't have the ability to judge if the teaching is effective at all.
    • jbooth 16y ago
      Well, that's sort of like saying we should use lines of code as a metric, because what else to we have to go on. The opinions of assorted developers? There needs to be some attempt at normalization between teachers and school districts, of course. But there's room for qualitative measures instead of quantitative ones. Especially when the tests seem (unintentionally) designed to punish teachers for teaching poor/minority/ESL students.
      • yummyfajitas 16y ago
        We have much better metrics for developers than lines of code - bug fixes/feature requests weighted by importance, P&L, etc. Do you have a better metric for teachers than standardized tests? Especially when the tests seem (unintentionally) designed to punish teachers for teaching poor/minority/ESL students. This is utterly false if we reward teachers based on deltas rather than absolute values, that is we compare actual performance to statistically predicted performance and reward/penalize teachers when actual performance exceeds predicted performance.
• _delirium 16y ago
  You get this in milder form in higher-level education as well. If you look at some of the recent debates over tenure, lots of professors will agree that there are dead-weight profs who basically quit working after tenure, and we ought to be able to fire them. But the crucial question is: who decides if they're a dead-weight prof, and who gets to fire them? And will this add a bunch of new non-research work to satisfy whatever process gets invented? Academics have basically zero trust in university administrators being the ones to do that--- the worry is that if tenure's abolished, people will be hired/fired for metrics-based reasons, like citation count and how many grant $$ they brought in in the past 5 years, or even for trendy university-marketing reasons ("I hear X is hot, we need more profs there, not in Y" or "we need more of the kinds of profs who get interviewed on CNN a lot").
  • gaius 16y ago
    It is right that we should be suspicious of people who want to be paid without being evaluated. What other industries operate like this? Even "creative" industries, where everything is subjective, have cold hard metrics in place.
    • _delirium 16y ago
      I'd say most good industries don't have cold hard metrics in place, and the companies with more metrics within industries are generally the worse ones. There are engineering firms that have heavily metrics-based evaluations of engineers (e.g. bug-fix counts being directly tied to bonuses), but I don't think I've seen them being called out as good examples. The better companies usually have engineering managers who are actually in touch with what their team's doing, and can give accurate subjective judgments of who on their team is contributing what and what the relative value of their team members is. It's the companies/managers who don't have any idea what's going on in their teams who fall back on metrics to try to answer those questions.
      • gaius 16y ago
        At the simplest level: if the company doesn't meet its revenue and profit targets, I don't get a bonus. Teachers aren't even evaluated at the level of "more exams passed than last year" or overall results relative to comparable schools.
• gaius 16y ago
  ultimately tie teachers' hands and force them to teach from only state-approved curricula But that is the point! If the union makes it impossible to fire a bad teacher, you must try to limit the damage that teacher can do, hence the set curriculum. If the union makes it impossible to single out bad teachers for this kind of prescription, then you must do it to ALL teachers. Get the union out of the picture and the situation becomes self-correcting.
  • sprout 16y ago
    You're too focused on bureaucratic nonsense (unions vs. administration vs. state vs. local vs. federal government.) In fact, it seems like you're just taking it as a given that unions are the problem and everything will be made better if you take away the teachers' first amendment rights to assembly and petition for redress. Which has nothing to do with teaching students, which is the problem at hand.
• anamax 16y ago
  > The issue is that they are very hostile to the educational administration establishment that has decided test scores are the ideal measure by which to base this. The problem with that arguement is that teachers are hostile to every form of evaluation that has been proposed and are unwilling to propose anything that they'd find acceptable. > Peer review is the ideal. No, it's not. That's like asking ford to review chevy. It leads to backscratching. > it certainly will create cliques of teachers, but only rarely cliques of bad teachers. You clearly don't have any experience with teachers. > those facts that are deemed convenient and useful by powerful cliques in the state legislatures. Those facts have the interesting property that they're at least nominally under the control of the folks paying the bills.
  • dhimes 16y ago
    anamax, you clearly have some experience here. To add to your points: (1) I've never met an adminstrator that said that test scores were the ideal measure of a teacher, it's just that its the best they have. Furthermore, (2) the tests are made by teachers. If they don't like what is being tested, then change it. When news came down the pipe that Virginia was going to have a "Standards of Learning" type exam for colleges, the first thing I did was jump on board to help scope (and my plan was to help author) the test (I was physics faculty). I'm no fool: if we're going to give the administration a vehicle this powerful, I'm driving. On the other hand, when the Standards of Learning for K-12 schools were first implemented, a remarkable thing occurred in education: teachers started talking about teaching again. Until then, every conversation with them was about how bad the administration was, how difficult parents were, how unprepared and unmotivated the kids were, etc. When those tests went in the conversation turned to: how in the world am I going to teach all of this? How in the world, indeed. You are also correct that the way peer review is implemented leads either to back scratching or very poor morale. The way to do it is to get folks from one institution to review folks (as a team) from another. That would place a huge demand on the personnel, though, and I think you would have trouble getting it in place.