5 ms·

Don't forget being able to fire the terrible teachers. The practice of giving lifetime tenure after two years needs to end.

by ericd 15y ago

jasonlotito 15y ago
How do you define terrible? Test scores? Parental opinion? Student vote? Passing grades? Ability to babysit kids?
- dkarl 15y ago
  There's no fair and objective way to measure the performance of programmers, managers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, marketers, or actuaries, yet we have no problem with giving them performance reviews and performance-based raises and promotions. In government, we have soldiers, FBI agents, CDC researchers, traffic engineers, and prosecutors, all front-line workers who are paid and promoted according to their performance. Soldiers don't become SEALs through seniority. In all of those fields we find it adequate to rely on the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful. It would expose teachers to injustice and favoritism, sure. So what? Those are professional hazards we all face. It is teachers themselves who inform us that grades are always imperfect measurements of performance yet must be accepted because they play a constructive role in our system of education. It is in school that we learn how favoritism and personal animosity affect the official story of our performance. Those are important lessons because they prepare us to work in a world where judgment is necessary but perfect justice is never achieved. Don't you find it ironic that teachers refuse to submit to any unscientific and less-than-perfectly-just evaluation of their performance when they themselves teach children to accept such evaluations as an inevitable fact of modern life?
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    > There's no fair and objective way to measure the performance of people... blah blah blah... You've avoided the question, and assumed I'm arguing against measuring performance. Basically, wrong on both accounts. I'm not arguing that teachers shouldn't have some form of review. However, considering the nature of a public school system, knowing what we know, how should teachers be reviewed? The goal is to have good teachers teaching. Simply saying "we need to review teachers" doesn't help matters, as the question isn't whether we need to. It's the method that is the question.
    - dkarl 15y ago
      I did answer the question: "the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful." Just like most other jobs.
      - jasonlotito 15y ago
        > the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful. No. That's merely saying "Their performance should be measured" with a few more words. > augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful. So, once again, I repeat: What metrics are useful? You can't judge someone without knowing what metrics you are using. > Just like most other jobs. Most other jobs use specific metrics. When you come up for review, you know what you are being judged on. Take a sales position. The total revenue brought in, along with net profit from that revenue might be one metric that is useful. For programmers, meeting deadlines and customer needs consistently might be one of those metrics. For a writer, meeting deadlines for first draft, second draft, as well as overall sales of a book. In the end, you are simply saying the same thing over and over again: Judge them by whatever useful means. You've yet to provide any opinion on what those useful means might be. If you don't know, just say you don't. But don't pretend like you are offering any insight. Essentially, you've answered the question of "What's air speed velocity of a laden swallow?" with the answer of "The air speed velocity of a laden swallow."
        dkarl 15y ago
        You're missing the point. I'm being vague because it's entirely appropriate to be vague. Performance in most jobs is highly subjective. People judge employees the way they judge code. There are vague rules of thumb for judgment -- software developers are expected to write solid code, use source control well, follow company standards, and keep their manager informed of their work -- but there is rarely any way to measure performance. Metrics are often disregarded, if they're gathered at all. For example, did a writer miss a deadline after an unexpected event required changes (e.g., someone writing a piece about Bin Laden needing to make major changes after his death)? That's a pretty solid defense, but if the editor knows that the writer has been screwing up and consistently running behind, he might use the delay as an excuse to reprimand him anyway. Did a programmer not finish his project because he was asked to support someone else's failing project? If his boss values him, he will run damage control and explain to upper management why the project did not get finished. Were a salesman's numbers down because of bad PR from a safety scandal? If the salesman's peers felt that he expressed a flippant attitude towards the safety problems in front of customers, thus contributing to the company's bad safety image, his boss might fire him. That can't be measured. Was a prosecutor's 80% conviction rate actually pretty crappy because he handled nothing but slam-dunk cases? The difficulty of his cases can't be measured. There is no difficulty grade for a legal case like there is for an ice skating routine. Sure, there are exceptions: call center employees and data entry clerks come to mind. The point is that we don't limit performance evaluations and performance-based pay and promotion to jobs where performance can be measured. Instead, we fall back on human judgment, justified -- but not fettered -- by accepted rules of thumb about how a person should do their job. Do you really think I need to spell out what those are for teachers? There's an entire college curriculum for teacher training. I don't think they spending four years telling them to "just go do what feels right." Even today, teachers' classroom performance is evaluated before they're certified. There's a rubric. And in the end the rubric doesn't matter anyway, because it boils down to personal opinion of the evaluator. Big bureaucratic companies, including mine, have rubrics for performance evaluations where workers are given numerical ratings in various categories, but that isn't measurement. It's just a way for a manager to record his opinion about whether an employee is doing a good job or not, using numbers instead of words. No boss sits down to write a glowing review, fills out the ratings and adds them up, and says, "Oh my goodness! I thought Jason was doing a great job, but the numbers say he's only average! I must have been wrong." If the numbers don't reflect his intuitive sense of whether you're doing a good job or not, he'll fix them. Heck, even my subsidiary's baseline bonus for last year, which is calculated according to a precise mathematical formula, got a hefty boost because the VP over our subsidiary made a convincing case to the top executives that the numbers didn't accurately reflect our contribution to the company's bottom line. A few numbers got adjusted here and there, the formula was recalculated using the new numbers, and our bonus went up. Human judgment for the win.
- ericd 15y ago
  Learning is obviously hard to quantify, but some teachers are much better at inspiring and helping children to learn than others. But that's a high bar. Currently the bar is far below that, with many teachers obviously phoning it in to anyone paying attention. They can't be fired, and that's the problem I was talking about. I went to an excellent public school, and I was tiered with the 'smart kids', so I generally had relatively good teachers, and some that were absolutely excellent. Even there, though, some were blatantly awful, and should have clearly been fired. I took a couple of non-"Gifted and Talented" classes, and the teachers there were a good bit worse on average. Some seemingly knew less about their subject than some of their students, and taught things that were just false in some cases. It's demoralizing to have terrible teachers. A few terrible teachers, and it makes kids restless and bored during the school day. Talent/quality density is important in many organizations, and schools are no exception. The stakes are a good bit higher, though. It's cliched, but the kids in schools do form the base of the country's economy a few years down the road, and if a high percentage of them can't do much more than manual labor or service work because they weren't inspired and decided that learning sucked, the US is screwed in the long term. None of the benefits of a teacher's union are worth the risk they're creating. It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. As dkarl says, it works in other professions.
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    > It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. Straw man much? Avoid the question? You wrote a lot, but said absolutely nothing. By what measure should we measure teachers? It's easy to say "get rid of terrible teachers," but if you can't define it, then you are back to square one. I'm not the one throwing my hands up. You and dkarl are basing saying one thing: "Fire bad teachers." I asked you to define bad, and you merely respond with: "You have to fire bad teachers." So, I'll try again: By what measure should we measure teachers? Test scores? Student performance? Parental voting? Secret peer ballots? Teacher testing? School board review (which pretty much amounts to parental votes)?
    - ericd 15y ago

Don't forget being able to fire the terrible teachers. The practice of giving lifetime tenure after two years needs to end.

by ericd 15y ago

Don't forget being able to fire the terrible teachers. The practice of giving lifetime tenure after two years needs to end.

jasonlotito 15y ago

How do you define terrible? Test scores? Parental opinion? Student vote? Passing grades? Ability to babysit kids?

dkarl 15y ago
There's no fair and objective way to measure the performance of programmers, managers, doctors, lawyers, chefs, marketers, or actuaries, yet we have no problem with giving them performance reviews and performance-based raises and promotions. In government, we have soldiers, FBI agents, CDC researchers, traffic engineers, and prosecutors, all front-line workers who are paid and promoted according to their performance. Soldiers don't become SEALs through seniority. In all of those fields we find it adequate to rely on the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful. It would expose teachers to injustice and favoritism, sure. So what? Those are professional hazards we all face. It is teachers themselves who inform us that grades are always imperfect measurements of performance yet must be accepted because they play a constructive role in our system of education. It is in school that we learn how favoritism and personal animosity affect the official story of our performance. Those are important lessons because they prepare us to work in a world where judgment is necessary but perfect justice is never achieved. Don't you find it ironic that teachers refuse to submit to any unscientific and less-than-perfectly-just evaluation of their performance when they themselves teach children to accept such evaluations as an inevitable fact of modern life?
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  > There's no fair and objective way to measure the performance of people... blah blah blah... You've avoided the question, and assumed I'm arguing against measuring performance. Basically, wrong on both accounts. I'm not arguing that teachers shouldn't have some form of review. However, considering the nature of a public school system, knowing what we know, how should teachers be reviewed? The goal is to have good teachers teaching. Simply saying "we need to review teachers" doesn't help matters, as the question isn't whether we need to. It's the method that is the question.
  - dkarl 15y ago
    I did answer the question: "the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful." Just like most other jobs.
    - jasonlotito 15y ago
      > the judgment of peers and superiors, augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful. No. That's merely saying "Their performance should be measured" with a few more words. > augmented with whatever metrics are deemed useful. So, once again, I repeat: What metrics are useful? You can't judge someone without knowing what metrics you are using. > Just like most other jobs. Most other jobs use specific metrics. When you come up for review, you know what you are being judged on. Take a sales position. The total revenue brought in, along with net profit from that revenue might be one metric that is useful. For programmers, meeting deadlines and customer needs consistently might be one of those metrics. For a writer, meeting deadlines for first draft, second draft, as well as overall sales of a book. In the end, you are simply saying the same thing over and over again: Judge them by whatever useful means. You've yet to provide any opinion on what those useful means might be. If you don't know, just say you don't. But don't pretend like you are offering any insight. Essentially, you've answered the question of "What's air speed velocity of a laden swallow?" with the answer of "The air speed velocity of a laden swallow."
      - dkarl 15y ago
        You're missing the point. I'm being vague because it's entirely appropriate to be vague. Performance in most jobs is highly subjective. People judge employees the way they judge code. There are vague rules of thumb for judgment -- software developers are expected to write solid code, use source control well, follow company standards, and keep their manager informed of their work -- but there is rarely any way to measure performance. Metrics are often disregarded, if they're gathered at all. For example, did a writer miss a deadline after an unexpected event required changes (e.g., someone writing a piece about Bin Laden needing to make major changes after his death)? That's a pretty solid defense, but if the editor knows that the writer has been screwing up and consistently running behind, he might use the delay as an excuse to reprimand him anyway. Did a programmer not finish his project because he was asked to support someone else's failing project? If his boss values him, he will run damage control and explain to upper management why the project did not get finished. Were a salesman's numbers down because of bad PR from a safety scandal? If the salesman's peers felt that he expressed a flippant attitude towards the safety problems in front of customers, thus contributing to the company's bad safety image, his boss might fire him. That can't be measured. Was a prosecutor's 80% conviction rate actually pretty crappy because he handled nothing but slam-dunk cases? The difficulty of his cases can't be measured. There is no difficulty grade for a legal case like there is for an ice skating routine. Sure, there are exceptions: call center employees and data entry clerks come to mind. The point is that we don't limit performance evaluations and performance-based pay and promotion to jobs where performance can be measured. Instead, we fall back on human judgment, justified -- but not fettered -- by accepted rules of thumb about how a person should do their job. Do you really think I need to spell out what those are for teachers? There's an entire college curriculum for teacher training. I don't think they spending four years telling them to "just go do what feels right." Even today, teachers' classroom performance is evaluated before they're certified. There's a rubric. And in the end the rubric doesn't matter anyway, because it boils down to personal opinion of the evaluator. Big bureaucratic companies, including mine, have rubrics for performance evaluations where workers are given numerical ratings in various categories, but that isn't measurement. It's just a way for a manager to record his opinion about whether an employee is doing a good job or not, using numbers instead of words. No boss sits down to write a glowing review, fills out the ratings and adds them up, and says, "Oh my goodness! I thought Jason was doing a great job, but the numbers say he's only average! I must have been wrong." If the numbers don't reflect his intuitive sense of whether you're doing a good job or not, he'll fix them. Heck, even my subsidiary's baseline bonus for last year, which is calculated according to a precise mathematical formula, got a hefty boost because the VP over our subsidiary made a convincing case to the top executives that the numbers didn't accurately reflect our contribution to the company's bottom line. A few numbers got adjusted here and there, the formula was recalculated using the new numbers, and our bonus went up. Human judgment for the win.
ericd 15y ago
Learning is obviously hard to quantify, but some teachers are much better at inspiring and helping children to learn than others. But that's a high bar. Currently the bar is far below that, with many teachers obviously phoning it in to anyone paying attention. They can't be fired, and that's the problem I was talking about. I went to an excellent public school, and I was tiered with the 'smart kids', so I generally had relatively good teachers, and some that were absolutely excellent. Even there, though, some were blatantly awful, and should have clearly been fired. I took a couple of non-"Gifted and Talented" classes, and the teachers there were a good bit worse on average. Some seemingly knew less about their subject than some of their students, and taught things that were just false in some cases. It's demoralizing to have terrible teachers. A few terrible teachers, and it makes kids restless and bored during the school day. Talent/quality density is important in many organizations, and schools are no exception. The stakes are a good bit higher, though. It's cliched, but the kids in schools do form the base of the country's economy a few years down the road, and if a high percentage of them can't do much more than manual labor or service work because they weren't inspired and decided that learning sucked, the US is screwed in the long term. None of the benefits of a teacher's union are worth the risk they're creating. It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. As dkarl says, it works in other professions.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  > It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. Straw man much? Avoid the question? You wrote a lot, but said absolutely nothing. By what measure should we measure teachers? It's easy to say "get rid of terrible teachers," but if you can't define it, then you are back to square one. I'm not the one throwing my hands up. You and dkarl are basing saying one thing: "Fire bad teachers." I asked you to define bad, and you merely respond with: "You have to fire bad teachers." So, I'll try again: By what measure should we measure teachers? Test scores? Student performance? Parental voting? Secret peer ballots? Teacher testing? School board review (which pretty much amounts to parental votes)?
  - ericd 15y ago