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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 def

by 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.
      - shasta 16y ago
        Well, by your own admission, 30-50% of knowledge should be held in common. In early grades, the number is probably more like 90%. By high school, sure, there's plenty of room for diversified knowledge of literature and history, but there's also a core of math, logic, and reading that everyone should know. Why not test this stuff? Standardized tests are objective. Now, the current system focuses on meeting minimums, and most standardized tests quickly hit a ceiling. I'd much prefer to see tests that attempt to gage the entire breadth and depth of student learning. Practically, that's going to require different questions asked of different students, or you'll end up with a 10,000 question exam. But I still consider it standardized testing. The SAT and AP exams are great - we should do more of that earlier.
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.

by lutorm 16y ago

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.
    - shasta 16y ago
      Well, by your own admission, 30-50% of knowledge should be held in common. In early grades, the number is probably more like 90%. By high school, sure, there's plenty of room for diversified knowledge of literature and history, but there's also a core of math, logic, and reading that everyone should know. Why not test this stuff? Standardized tests are objective. Now, the current system focuses on meeting minimums, and most standardized tests quickly hit a ceiling. I'd much prefer to see tests that attempt to gage the entire breadth and depth of student learning. Practically, that's going to require different questions asked of different students, or you'll end up with a 10,000 question exam. But I still consider it standardized testing. The SAT and AP exams are great - we should do more of that earlier.

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.