5 ms·

It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality). The definition of "good teacher" they seem to be using is some variant of the "value-a

It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality). The definition of "good teacher" they seem to be using is some variant of the "value-added" model, by which teachers are evaluated based on how much the test scores of their students improve. However, the tests are only barely valid (if at all), and don't measure much (if anything) worth measuring. Meanwhile, the reading and writing go by the wayside in favour of multiple-choice "comprehension" questions, math becomes an exercise in gaming in the arithmetic, and science (held up so high in theory and so low in practice) becomes a glorified exercise in vocabulary memorization. This isn't even beginning to mention the arts. I'd have more faith in Superman if I thought schools knew what they wanted to do, or if there were a cohesive and coherent philosophical approach. As it is now, there is a system which reduces good teachers, protects bad teachers, and hamstrings learning in favour of that which can be easily measured and that which can be taught with only a modicum of thoughtfulness required. Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach.

jerf 16y ago
"It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality)." Consider it a necessary, but not sufficient, start. Right now, getting rid of a teacher that is committing actual crimes is a challenge in many places, getting rid of a teacher who merely objectively doesn't teach to any standard you care to name is a challenge everywhere. You can play with all the other knobs on the system you like, but until you change this you've already lost. I would argue that exactly because of this fact, the blundering around the rest of the system has done is the expected result. No matter what the system does, this means the problem just gets worse every year as more dead wood is accumulated. Therefore, the system never gets any feedback about the value of what the changes were. When everything uniformly produces the same negative result, you can't get any information from the results. (At least human systems are less prone than individual humans to learned helplessness and things are still being tried.) Until you fix this problem, the question of what changes actually work can not even be properly asked, in a way that can actually obtain useful and actionable answers. (I have simplified this for internet-debate purposes; in fact some schools sometimes manage to improve, there's always variations, etc. But I don't think I need to go too far in defending the premise that the system as a whole has been sinking for decades now.)
- andrewce 16y ago
  I'll gladly concede that getting rid of incompetent teachers (or otherwise having some ability with which to help those who want to improve improve), or at least securing the ability to do so, is an extremely necessary start. Particularly with teachers who are committing actual crimes, though in fairness, I think that difficulty is overstated (point of note: I'm in the midwest, where the unions are not as strong, so that colours my perceptions a bit). That said, though, I don't think we have any way of determing who is/isn't a good teacher if we haven't yet determined what good teaching looks like (in turn, we can't determine that until we figure out what we actually want out of school). As a teacher, I've been on all sides of this; while working in a large public school, I've had lots of freedom and leeway (so long as I could justify it to my administrators, who were either down with it or completely and totally indifferent). I've also worked in a small school where the "system" I was expected to carry out was complete and utter rubbish ("Students should not write at all until at least their junior year. They should spend the time prior to this diagramming sentences and memorizing the parts of speech, so that they understand what good sentences look like. They may only begin writing AFTER they have mastered identifying these patterns.") When you couple that with an authoritarian administration, I was a "bad teacher" in the latter system, and had I not resigned I'd have likely been the first to go when budget cuts rolled around the summer after I left (as it was, my successor was let go instead). I agree that incompentent teachers are a problem, but there's more to it than just that. Frankly, so many things have been screwy for so long (William Pinar, out of the U of British Columbia, places it at about 4 decades) that I'm amazed that anything gets done.
  - stretchwithme 16y ago
    I can tell when someone knows how to teach me something and if they care. I can't believe somehow most parents aren't just as able to determine when someone is capable of teaching their kids. They just aren't given a chance. You may not be able to tell whether someone is a good mechanic but you may know bs when you hear it. And you may recognize very smart people who care about their kids whose opinion's you respect. And we have all kinds of ways of rating things and we tell which ones work well over the long haul. We make these murky decions all the time. Its the fact that we do not use these resources when our decisions are turned over to the state that is the problem.
andreyf 16y ago
Don't forget everything they do teach: being wholly subjugated to the control of a superior (where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom?), unquestioning obedience, working hard without a hint of interest, etc.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  > where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom? In the interests of being complete- any time you are visiting someone's house for the first time? i.e. "do you mind if I use your restroom?"
  - noonespecial 16y ago
    I've never been told no when I ask this as a guest. School, however, presented a very different scenario.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    That is really a point of courtesy - nobody ever says no.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      It's also often more a roundabout request for directions than request for permission--- "can I use your bathroom?" translates to "so, uh, where's your bathroom?"
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- matwood 16y ago
  Well they don't seem to be doing a good job since discipline seems to be the most lacking quality in todays youth.
  - andreyf 16y ago
    There's a difference between discipline and subjugation. Many kids have the mentality of slaves - disgruntled, fearful, and angry.
DanielN 16y ago
The issue of getting good teachers in the classroom and re-organizing curriculum around creativity and "non-test-centric" priorities are very much one in the same. See http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ or http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ for examples. But I think most advocates of changing the way teachers are hired and fired would tell you that one must follow the other.
houseabsolute 16y ago
> Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach. Is it really like that nowadays? I have heard this said before, but it doesn't match my experience a mere ten years past. When I was in school, sure, there was a general curriculum of the sorts of things we ought to learn in class. But the means and methods of conveying that knowledge did seem to be at the teachers' discretion. Any teachers on this web zone care to comment?
- andrewce 16y ago
  I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midwest). In the last calendar year, I've been roughly 25 different schools. In addition to this, I do research with a former professor of education, and maintain a pretty wide network of friends and professional contacts who are teachers. And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this. The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script. The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning). A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee. While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch."). There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.
halostatue 16y ago
Hypothesis: the performance gap between good teachers and great teachers is as hard to quantify and as elusive to define as the performance gap between good programmers and great programmers. We all know that some programmers are 10x more effective than other programmers. What we don't know is why. I suspect the same is true of teachers. Otherwise, ++ for your comment about teachers having to follow scripts. The best programs aren't scripted, and the modern "money" solution (not necessarily supported by teachers or teachers' unions, by the by) is to tightly tie down the curriculum so that teachers have minimal impact on the delivery. Teacher friends who have taught in England have said that it's to the point of "it's November 4th, so we must be doing Triangles"; every student is supposed to be learning exactly the same thing on the same day. Nice in theory, but it doesn't work.

jerf 16y ago

"It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality)." Consider it a necessary, but not sufficient, start. Right now, getting rid of a teacher that is committing actual crimes is a challenge in many places, getting rid of a teacher who merely objectively doesn't teach to any standard you care to name is a challenge everywhere. You can play with all the other knobs on the system you like, but until you change this you've already lost. I would argue that exactly because of this fact, the blundering around the rest of the system has done is the expected result. No matter what the system does, this means the problem just gets worse every year as more dead wood is accumulated. Therefore, the system never gets any feedback about the value of what the changes were. When everything uniformly produces the same negative result, you can't get any information from the results. (At least human systems are less prone than individual humans to learned helplessness and things are still being tried.) Until you fix this problem, the question of what changes actually work can not even be properly asked, in a way that can actually obtain useful and actionable answers. (I have simplified this for internet-debate purposes; in fact some schools sometimes manage to improve, there's always variations, etc. But I don't think I need to go too far in defending the premise that the system as a whole has been sinking for decades now.)

andrewce 16y ago
I'll gladly concede that getting rid of incompetent teachers (or otherwise having some ability with which to help those who want to improve improve), or at least securing the ability to do so, is an extremely necessary start. Particularly with teachers who are committing actual crimes, though in fairness, I think that difficulty is overstated (point of note: I'm in the midwest, where the unions are not as strong, so that colours my perceptions a bit). That said, though, I don't think we have any way of determing who is/isn't a good teacher if we haven't yet determined what good teaching looks like (in turn, we can't determine that until we figure out what we actually want out of school). As a teacher, I've been on all sides of this; while working in a large public school, I've had lots of freedom and leeway (so long as I could justify it to my administrators, who were either down with it or completely and totally indifferent). I've also worked in a small school where the "system" I was expected to carry out was complete and utter rubbish ("Students should not write at all until at least their junior year. They should spend the time prior to this diagramming sentences and memorizing the parts of speech, so that they understand what good sentences look like. They may only begin writing AFTER they have mastered identifying these patterns.") When you couple that with an authoritarian administration, I was a "bad teacher" in the latter system, and had I not resigned I'd have likely been the first to go when budget cuts rolled around the summer after I left (as it was, my successor was let go instead). I agree that incompentent teachers are a problem, but there's more to it than just that. Frankly, so many things have been screwy for so long (William Pinar, out of the U of British Columbia, places it at about 4 decades) that I'm amazed that anything gets done.
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  I can tell when someone knows how to teach me something and if they care. I can't believe somehow most parents aren't just as able to determine when someone is capable of teaching their kids. They just aren't given a chance. You may not be able to tell whether someone is a good mechanic but you may know bs when you hear it. And you may recognize very smart people who care about their kids whose opinion's you respect. And we have all kinds of ways of rating things and we tell which ones work well over the long haul. We make these murky decions all the time. Its the fact that we do not use these resources when our decisions are turned over to the state that is the problem.

andreyf 16y ago

Don't forget everything they do teach: being wholly subjugated to the control of a superior (where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom?), unquestioning obedience, working hard without a hint of interest, etc.

sliverstorm 16y ago
> where else do you need to ask before going to the bathroom? In the interests of being complete- any time you are visiting someone's house for the first time? i.e. "do you mind if I use your restroom?"
- noonespecial 16y ago
  I've never been told no when I ask this as a guest. School, however, presented a very different scenario.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  That is really a point of courtesy - nobody ever says no.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    It's also often more a roundabout request for directions than request for permission--- "can I use your bathroom?" translates to "so, uh, where's your bathroom?"
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
matwood 16y ago
Well they don't seem to be doing a good job since discipline seems to be the most lacking quality in todays youth.
- andreyf 16y ago
  There's a difference between discipline and subjugation. Many kids have the mentality of slaves - disgruntled, fearful, and angry.

DanielN 16y ago

The issue of getting good teachers in the classroom and re-organizing curriculum around creativity and "non-test-centric" priorities are very much one in the same. See http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ or http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ http://coxmath.blogspot.com/ for examples. But I think most advocates of changing the way teachers are hired and fired would tell you that one must follow the other.

houseabsolute 16y ago

> Wake me up when "education" is something other than scripts delivered to teachers by bureaucrats and specialists who haven't ever felt what it's like to actually teach. Is it really like that nowadays? I have heard this said before, but it doesn't match my experience a mere ten years past. When I was in school, sure, there was a general curriculum of the sorts of things we ought to learn in class. But the means and methods of conveying that knowledge did seem to be at the teachers' discretion. Any teachers on this web zone care to comment?

andrewce 16y ago
I make my living by substitute teaching right now, as well as running creative writing workshops for K-12 students in the state in which I live (I'm in the midwest). In the last calendar year, I've been roughly 25 different schools. In addition to this, I do research with a former professor of education, and maintain a pretty wide network of friends and professional contacts who are teachers. And, depending on the grade and on the school, it is like this. The professor whom I work with has this as one of her primary research areas, and has told me story after story of going into elementary schools (particularly on the western, less populated half of our state) in which teacher-student interactions are scripted down to the minute, and teachers are evaluated based on whether or not they follow the script. The major high school across the street from where I live (~1500 students) has a science department where none of the teachers have written their own lesson plans in about 3 years; they use the lesson plans in the district binder (I've taught from those lesson plans; they're barely rigorous, and conflate superficial knowledge memorization with actual learning). A friend of mine is a language and communication arts teacher in a middle school; if he wants to deviate from the lesson plan binder, he has to submit a proposal for the new unit (there can't just be one lesson) during the summer, at which point it's at the mercy of the committee. While I was teaching in Kansas, my lesson plans were written for me, and I was punished any time I went away from them, even when it was clear that my students needed more time with something before they understood it ("If you were a good teacher, and if they were paying attention, they'd get it the first time. Make them come in during lunch."). There are plenty of holdouts, thankfully; schools which serve mostly affluent students (particularly schools with strong enough test results that they can get away with it) seem to have done well. Additionally, there are a lot of more urban schools which serve students who are not quite so affluent and which have managed to hold out, though I suspect some of this is an accident of the difficulties of administrating a big school in which math is the least of most students' worries.

halostatue 16y ago

Hypothesis: the performance gap between good teachers and great teachers is as hard to quantify and as elusive to define as the performance gap between good programmers and great programmers. We all know that some programmers are 10x more effective than other programmers. What we don't know is why. I suspect the same is true of teachers. Otherwise, ++ for your comment about teachers having to follow scripts. The best programs aren't scripted, and the modern "money" solution (not necessarily supported by teachers or teachers' unions, by the by) is to tightly tie down the curriculum so that teachers have minimal impact on the delivery. Teacher friends who have taught in England have said that it's to the point of "it's November 4th, so we must be doing Triangles"; every student is supposed to be learning exactly the same thing on the same day. Nice in theory, but it doesn't work.