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There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long. As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged. One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility. All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.

WalterBright 3y ago
The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
- ordersofmag 3y ago
  Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    It works everywhere in the private sector. Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month. > it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.
    - donw 3y ago
      It... really doesn't. Sales is a great example. In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time! Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals. But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all. Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.
        donw 3y ago
        That only applies to small companies. Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons. Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money. This problem can't be.
- donw 3y ago
  I don't think that would make a difference. Incentives are whack across the board in education. At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself. We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.
    - donw 3y ago
      Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference. The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        > Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference. If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        I’m generally supportive of finding ways to better use the talent of teachers and if paying incentives is part of that, great. But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts. Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.
        lacrimacida 3y ago
        Designed incentives can look good on paper but in reality they get gamed a lot until they are insignificant or detrimental to the final outcome.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I think that could work but you would need to give teachers more control over the discipline and syllabus in their classrooms. If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Of course there are limits on what can be achieved. But we won't know until we try. It's hard to be worse than the current system of no incentive whatsoever.
    - tremon 3y ago
      It's hard to be worse than the current system This is hardly ever true, for any kind of system.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis? They're doing pretty well, like they always have, but people are remarkably willing to simply accept claims (often by parties with financial interests in making them) that they aren't.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        > Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis? Declining achievement levels, the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools, and the disparities between different racial groups.
        bandrami 3y ago
        > Declining achievement levels Nope. Do the homework here. > the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools Another claim remarkably free of any data > the disparities between different racial groups. African American kids today score better than white kids 30 years ago did.
- waterhouse 3y ago
  One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Sure. Assign the students at random. Some years the teacher will get a better batch than other years, but it would all even out.
    - davidgay 3y ago
      Don't forget to bus the kids randomly across town (county? state?), or else your suggestion is ineffective. That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Why would it be ineffective? Suppose you're a teacher at a school where the kids are all below grade level. Sounds like a much larger opportunity to get those bonuses than a school where all kids are above average. > or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.
        davidgay 3y ago
        You claimed that the fix to getting lucky with a batch of good students (or unlucky with bad) is random assignment. Now it seems that you're claiming that getting a bad batch is a good deal as it will be easier to get them to improve...
        WalterBright 3y ago
        Both can be simultaneously true.
- wrp 3y ago
  While I'm not completely against performance-based pay, there are some issues that would make this particular approach unworkable. One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail. Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment. So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    A proper proposal would be a lot more words than my little posting! It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be significantly better than the existing system, which has zero incentive for the teachers to get results.
    - reverius42 3y ago
      > zero incentive for the teachers to get results Except, of course, wanting to educate -- which is ostensibly the reason they got into the profession in the first place. It probably wasn't for the pay.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Every job has its drudgery, no matter how much someone wants to have that job. I would also expect teachers who love to teach also want to teach those eager to learn. This is about teaching those who are not so interested in learning. Also, you can't say teachers are poorly paid by neglecting they only work 8 months of the year, have a gold plated medical plan, and can retire with a lifetime very generous pension.
- bandrami 3y ago
  I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    An incentive for the teachers is better than no incentive. I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time. They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them, did the $10 grand bonus motivate them to get it done on time? They were offended, saying they were professionals and would have worked just as hard without it. I laughed, and didn't buy it. Do you? Here's another case. There was an earthquake in LA, and one of the cloverleaf freeway interchanges fell down. They contracted out the job with a tight deadline, and a bonus of ONE MILLION BUCKS per day it was finished ahead of schedule. It was finished several weeks ahead. Ka-ching! Money talks, BS walks.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      Right but you give the incentive to the construction company, not to the food truck that feeds the workers. The teachers aren't the problem (to the extent there even is a problem, which is an embarrassingly unexamined question), the students are. So give them an incentive to stop being a problem.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Giving the teachers an incentive to find a way to incentivize the students is a perfectly reasonable approach.
        peterfirefly 3y ago
        How do you incentivize IQ?
- fn-mote 3y ago
  These suggestions of "pay for results" have a complicated history. I suggest anyone interested actually search the literature on it. Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3]) The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it). In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future. [1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214. [2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality-widely-diffused-nyc-ratings-indicate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall) [4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/ https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  > The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year. You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers. The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out. This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay. We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0002831220905580 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558... So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US. Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind. This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    Why does teaching to a test not work? If the curriculum was standard and the test was well made it should work fine. All my college grades were 50-100% test based and it seemed to work fine. Maybe you break down the content into testable units or something instead of one big test but still what’s wrong with tests?
    - 3y ago
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  We have already seen that such incentives produce the wrong effect. At the whole-school level, what we see from incentives like this is that the system gets gamed such that the standard is lowered so that pay milestones are achieved, as opposed to the actual results of educating the children. Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs. Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  That seems like more of an incentive to get a job at an already high-performing school than it is to do a better job of teaching.
ecshafer 3y ago
My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.
- twothamendment 3y ago
  My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop. Money talks.
  - hguant 3y ago
    My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read" There are worse problems to have!
  - stevekemp 3y ago
    We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing. We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter. The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick. (Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
wrp 3y ago
> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to. Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.
- SteveGerencser 3y ago
  There is a better, older, phrase that would be great to promote over that tired saying: “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    You are a contrarian in the best sense, thanks for sharing this!
    - SteveGerencser 3y ago
      As a true 'jack of all trades' I feel that it's my duty to share these quotes, or the full version of widely used quotes.
  - another_story 3y ago
    Great quote, thanks for sharing.
nebula8804 3y ago
>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc. How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  I work for an American company remotely from Europe. I didn't leverage any educational facility from the US yet I'm contributing to the fact that the US is "leading the way" in technology. And the reason is simple: not only do they pay me more than an equivalent European company, often it's hard to find an "equivalent" European company where I can work on something I find interesting. Now, something did originally created the conditions for why US is leading, but once that has happened it can become a self sustaining network effect, provided enough money is kept flowing
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Yes. The population drop alone is going to make all this happen. Nevermind the massive black hole of citizenry who know next to nothing and are proud of it.
- danaris 3y ago
  First of all, it's important to define what we mean by "innovation". Is cryptocurrency "innovation"? Credit-default swaps? Leveraged buyouts? So much of what's been making absurd amounts of money in recent decades—and which gets openly called "innovative" by many people—is not better ways of doing things for people, but simply better ways of separating people from their money. Second of all, it's important to look at who, exactly, is doing the hard work on the innovations that are pushing us forward, rather than simply making rich people richer. How many of these innovations come from people who got their education 15, 25, 40 years ago? Third of all, it's important to question the very premise: I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a strong thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and that there have been changes in our public school system that have caused some serious problems over the past few decades...but to what extent are these problems universal? To what extent do they actually leave graduates less well prepared to be innovative? Indeed, to what extent is innovation even a product of education, rather than culture and creativity?
coconuthacker42 3y ago
And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/

WalterBright 3y ago

The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

ordersofmag 3y ago
Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  It works everywhere in the private sector. Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month. > it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.
  - donw 3y ago
    It... really doesn't. Sales is a great example. In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time! Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals. But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all. Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.
      - donw 3y ago
        That only applies to small companies. Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons. Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money. This problem can't be.
donw 3y ago
I don't think that would make a difference. Incentives are whack across the board in education. At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself. We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.
  - donw 3y ago
    Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference. The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      > Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference. If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        I’m generally supportive of finding ways to better use the talent of teachers and if paying incentives is part of that, great. But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts. Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.
        lacrimacida 3y ago
        Designed incentives can look good on paper but in reality they get gamed a lot until they are insignificant or detrimental to the final outcome.
SoftTalker 3y ago
I think that could work but you would need to give teachers more control over the discipline and syllabus in their classrooms. If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Of course there are limits on what can be achieved. But we won't know until we try. It's hard to be worse than the current system of no incentive whatsoever.
  - tremon 3y ago
    It's hard to be worse than the current system This is hardly ever true, for any kind of system.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis? They're doing pretty well, like they always have, but people are remarkably willing to simply accept claims (often by parties with financial interests in making them) that they aren't.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      > Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis? Declining achievement levels, the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools, and the disparities between different racial groups.
      - bandrami 3y ago
        > Declining achievement levels Nope. Do the homework here. > the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools Another claim remarkably free of any data > the disparities between different racial groups. African American kids today score better than white kids 30 years ago did.
waterhouse 3y ago
One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Sure. Assign the students at random. Some years the teacher will get a better batch than other years, but it would all even out.
  - davidgay 3y ago
    Don't forget to bus the kids randomly across town (county? state?), or else your suggestion is ineffective. That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Why would it be ineffective? Suppose you're a teacher at a school where the kids are all below grade level. Sounds like a much larger opportunity to get those bonuses than a school where all kids are above average. > or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.
      - davidgay 3y ago
        You claimed that the fix to getting lucky with a batch of good students (or unlucky with bad) is random assignment. Now it seems that you're claiming that getting a bad batch is a good deal as it will be easier to get them to improve...
        WalterBright 3y ago
        Both can be simultaneously true.
wrp 3y ago
While I'm not completely against performance-based pay, there are some issues that would make this particular approach unworkable. One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail. Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment. So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  A proper proposal would be a lot more words than my little posting! It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be significantly better than the existing system, which has zero incentive for the teachers to get results.
  - reverius42 3y ago
    > zero incentive for the teachers to get results Except, of course, wanting to educate -- which is ostensibly the reason they got into the profession in the first place. It probably wasn't for the pay.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Every job has its drudgery, no matter how much someone wants to have that job. I would also expect teachers who love to teach also want to teach those eager to learn. This is about teaching those who are not so interested in learning. Also, you can't say teachers are poorly paid by neglecting they only work 8 months of the year, have a gold plated medical plan, and can retire with a lifetime very generous pension.
bandrami 3y ago
I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  An incentive for the teachers is better than no incentive. I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time. They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them, did the $10 grand bonus motivate them to get it done on time? They were offended, saying they were professionals and would have worked just as hard without it. I laughed, and didn't buy it. Do you? Here's another case. There was an earthquake in LA, and one of the cloverleaf freeway interchanges fell down. They contracted out the job with a tight deadline, and a bonus of ONE MILLION BUCKS per day it was finished ahead of schedule. It was finished several weeks ahead. Ka-ching! Money talks, BS walks.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    Right but you give the incentive to the construction company, not to the food truck that feeds the workers. The teachers aren't the problem (to the extent there even is a problem, which is an embarrassingly unexamined question), the students are. So give them an incentive to stop being a problem.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Giving the teachers an incentive to find a way to incentivize the students is a perfectly reasonable approach.
      - peterfirefly 3y ago
        How do you incentivize IQ?
fn-mote 3y ago
These suggestions of "pay for results" have a complicated history. I suggest anyone interested actually search the literature on it. Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3]) The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it). In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future. [1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214. [2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality-widely-diffused-nyc-ratings-indicate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall) [4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/ https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
light_hue_1 3y ago
> The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year. You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers. The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out. This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay. We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0002831220905580 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558... So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US. Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind. This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.
- throw9away6 3y ago
  Why does teaching to a test not work? If the curriculum was standard and the test was well made it should work fine. All my college grades were 50-100% test based and it seemed to work fine. Maybe you break down the content into testable units or something instead of one big test but still what’s wrong with tests?
  - 3y ago
slowmovintarget 3y ago
We have already seen that such incentives produce the wrong effect. At the whole-school level, what we see from incentives like this is that the system gets gamed such that the standard is lowered so that pay milestones are achieved, as opposed to the actual results of educating the children. Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs. Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
That seems like more of an incentive to get a job at an already high-performing school than it is to do a better job of teaching.

ecshafer 3y ago

My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.

SoftTalker 3y ago
This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.
twothamendment 3y ago
My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop. Money talks.
- hguant 3y ago
  My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read" There are worse problems to have!
- stevekemp 3y ago
  We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing. We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter. The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick. (Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago

wrp 3y ago

> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to. Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.

SteveGerencser 3y ago
There is a better, older, phrase that would be great to promote over that tired saying: “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  You are a contrarian in the best sense, thanks for sharing this!
  - SteveGerencser 3y ago
    As a true 'jack of all trades' I feel that it's my duty to share these quotes, or the full version of widely used quotes.
- another_story 3y ago
  Great quote, thanks for sharing.

nebula8804 3y ago

>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc. How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.

ithkuil 3y ago
I work for an American company remotely from Europe. I didn't leverage any educational facility from the US yet I'm contributing to the fact that the US is "leading the way" in technology. And the reason is simple: not only do they pay me more than an equivalent European company, often it's hard to find an "equivalent" European company where I can work on something I find interesting. Now, something did originally created the conditions for why US is leading, but once that has happened it can become a self sustaining network effect, provided enough money is kept flowing
datavirtue 3y ago
Yes. The population drop alone is going to make all this happen. Nevermind the massive black hole of citizenry who know next to nothing and are proud of it.
danaris 3y ago
First of all, it's important to define what we mean by "innovation". Is cryptocurrency "innovation"? Credit-default swaps? Leveraged buyouts? So much of what's been making absurd amounts of money in recent decades—and which gets openly called "innovative" by many people—is not better ways of doing things for people, but simply better ways of separating people from their money. Second of all, it's important to look at who, exactly, is doing the hard work on the innovations that are pushing us forward, rather than simply making rich people richer. How many of these innovations come from people who got their education 15, 25, 40 years ago? Third of all, it's important to question the very premise: I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a strong thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and that there have been changes in our public school system that have caused some serious problems over the past few decades...but to what extent are these problems universal? To what extent do they actually leave graduates less well prepared to be innovative? Indeed, to what extent is innovation even a product of education, rather than culture and creativity?

coconuthacker42 3y ago

And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/