5 ms·

Well, for whatever it's worth, when they're at the negotiating table, the 2nd most important issue (after comp of course) to the teacher's unions tends to be "a

by jbooth 16y ago

Well, for whatever it's worth, when they're at the negotiating table, the 2nd most important issue (after comp of course) to the teacher's unions tends to be "assorted protections against a psycho principal". So there's a lot of cruft in the typical collective bargaining agreement that was initially aimed at taking personalities out of the evaluation process but then turns into it's own monster.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
No, teachers tend to oppose having an evaluation process of any sort. They are just as hostile to objective measures of their performance (standardized testing) as they are to subjective ones.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Sure, everyone is, given the choice. I mean, you've described your own experience as getting out of the hidebound checklist mediocrity of university life to the dynamic 1-man-shop life. Similarly I pick startups to work at instead of big lumbering corporations. I was just explaining where the unions tend to be coming from when you sit across the table from them. I think the seniority rules are dumb, particularly last-in-first-out which is probably the worst thing about the current state of your typical municipal agreement. But I think you're mischaracterizing the opposition to standardized tests.. some % of teachers are lazy and don't want to teach the material but the strongest objections tend to come from some of the best teachers who resent having to "teach to the test" instead of using their judgment about the best way to teach/evaluate their students.
  - sethg 16y ago
    My oldest son, in his first year of preschool, had a teacher who recognized that The Officially Prescribed Curriculum was not meeting his needs, and found alternative ways to engage him. Her contract was not renewed. The following year, my son’s new teacher just had him sit by himself and read books. From a “raise test scores” perspective, the second teacher was at least as good as the first. From a “look at the classroom and see what’s going on” perspective, the first teacher was head and shoulders above the second.
- ebiester 16y ago
  The problem is that the objective standards are harder to measure then you would think. How are you judging the urban teacher against the suburban one? Is the kid who is getting abused at home ever going to match the one with two great parents? What percentage of your students eat breakfast? What percentage of your students have English as their first language? What percentage of the individual class are troublemakers? What tools are teachers allowed to use to subdue them? Principals differ on this. Are there bad teachers? Certainly! Do the metrics identify which teachers are the bad ones? Often, no.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    How are you judging the urban teacher against the suburban one? From my first post: For teacher..., they can use Value Added Modeling. Come up with a statistical predictor of performance, based on observable quantities such as income, ESL, race, free lunch, and previous year's performance. Teacher alpha = actual performance - predicted performance. All the factors you described are either highly correlated with easily available quantities (low income), or they are directly measurable. Thus, the predictor performance is likely to include them. I'd be curious to see if you could even hypothesize a systematic error (as opposed to sampling error) with a large effect that is not highly correlated with with easily observable base quantities (income, demographics, prior performance).
    - jbooth 16y ago
      I do think that's the general direction things should go in.. But that statistical predictor of performance will always be horribly flawed. Applying a rigid set of a dozen statistics to human beings always misses the mark in a ton of cases. The question is whether it's better than the current system -- personally I'd want to see several iterations experimented with before I'd feel confident at all that it wasn't making things worse. "First, do no harm" and all that. One huge problem a lot of good urban teachers have with testing is that the tests as written really don't "speak to" poor urban and minority students. The teachers complain that they spend more time teaching the students how to take the test and less time teaching them the material in a way that's relevant to their lives. I haven't ever taught, so I'm just repeating this, but I can see where they're coming from.

by jbooth 16y ago

yummyfajitas 16y ago

No, teachers tend to oppose having an evaluation process of any sort. They are just as hostile to objective measures of their performance (standardized testing) as they are to subjective ones.

jbooth 16y ago
Sure, everyone is, given the choice. I mean, you've described your own experience as getting out of the hidebound checklist mediocrity of university life to the dynamic 1-man-shop life. Similarly I pick startups to work at instead of big lumbering corporations. I was just explaining where the unions tend to be coming from when you sit across the table from them. I think the seniority rules are dumb, particularly last-in-first-out which is probably the worst thing about the current state of your typical municipal agreement. But I think you're mischaracterizing the opposition to standardized tests.. some % of teachers are lazy and don't want to teach the material but the strongest objections tend to come from some of the best teachers who resent having to "teach to the test" instead of using their judgment about the best way to teach/evaluate their students.
- sethg 16y ago
  My oldest son, in his first year of preschool, had a teacher who recognized that The Officially Prescribed Curriculum was not meeting his needs, and found alternative ways to engage him. Her contract was not renewed. The following year, my son’s new teacher just had him sit by himself and read books. From a “raise test scores” perspective, the second teacher was at least as good as the first. From a “look at the classroom and see what’s going on” perspective, the first teacher was head and shoulders above the second.
ebiester 16y ago
The problem is that the objective standards are harder to measure then you would think. How are you judging the urban teacher against the suburban one? Is the kid who is getting abused at home ever going to match the one with two great parents? What percentage of your students eat breakfast? What percentage of your students have English as their first language? What percentage of the individual class are troublemakers? What tools are teachers allowed to use to subdue them? Principals differ on this. Are there bad teachers? Certainly! Do the metrics identify which teachers are the bad ones? Often, no.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  How are you judging the urban teacher against the suburban one? From my first post: For teacher..., they can use Value Added Modeling. Come up with a statistical predictor of performance, based on observable quantities such as income, ESL, race, free lunch, and previous year's performance. Teacher alpha = actual performance - predicted performance. All the factors you described are either highly correlated with easily available quantities (low income), or they are directly measurable. Thus, the predictor performance is likely to include them. I'd be curious to see if you could even hypothesize a systematic error (as opposed to sampling error) with a large effect that is not highly correlated with with easily observable base quantities (income, demographics, prior performance).
  - jbooth 16y ago
    I do think that's the general direction things should go in.. But that statistical predictor of performance will always be horribly flawed. Applying a rigid set of a dozen statistics to human beings always misses the mark in a ton of cases. The question is whether it's better than the current system -- personally I'd want to see several iterations experimented with before I'd feel confident at all that it wasn't making things worse. "First, do no harm" and all that. One huge problem a lot of good urban teachers have with testing is that the tests as written really don't "speak to" poor urban and minority students. The teachers complain that they spend more time teaching the students how to take the test and less time teaching them the material in a way that's relevant to their lives. I haven't ever taught, so I'm just repeating this, but I can see where they're coming from.