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Meet the ‘worst’ 8th grade math teacher in NYC

155 points by pstuart 15y ago

KaoruAoiShiho 15y ago
Is this a bug in the value add system or is it unfixable?
- adpirz 15y ago
  I honestly think, as benign as it sounds, this is the most pertinent comment. First off, I don't think that a teacher's performance eval should be entirely rooted in state tests, nor do I believe that the current method of testing is by any means perfect, but I think value-added measurement is a decent measure of how teachers are performing and how much knowledge students have gained. What we're looking at here is an extreme case where that value added measure has no more meaning and the actual evaluation has no statistical meaning (the students performance was already top notch, they were probably more likely to score a little worse.) What SHOULD have happened is that they should have been evaluated using a more rigorous / advanced curriculum that was aligned to what the teacher was teaching (ie, high school algebra). The system is not perfect, but it's not terrible--they just need to evaluate the system, adjust, and iterate, something many here are plenty familiar with. (Disclosure: I teach at a charter school)
  - colomon 15y ago
    How about giving the test on a computer and having it automatically change the difficulty level on the fly? (Obviously this may be a lot easier for math than for other subjects.) Test every grade level using the same program, just with different entry points based on the knowledge they are presumed to have learned at that point. Right now it sounds like they are awarding the teachers based on the percentile level of their students compared to other students in the same class level, which is pretty much guaranteed to be useless noise if your students all start at the 98th percentile. It would be much more meaningful to be able to say, "Each of your students clearly knows more algebra than he did last year." The other issue is how to motivate the children to actually want to do well on the test. Somehow rewarding a kid who does better than he did the previous time he took the test seems like a good first step...
    - adpirz 15y ago
      All valid points, and there are testing suites that do exactly what you say that are widely used (this one is pretty standard: http://www.nwea.org/products-services/computer-based-adaptive-assessments/map http://www.nwea.org/products-services/computer-based-adaptiv...), but they aren't the assessment that's measured by state departments. There are probably lots of reasons for this, (cynical: they were outlobbied by Pearson, which has million dollar contracts with many states to write their state tests.), but nonetheless they exist. The other problem is that this is a problem at which we should be throwing our best data scientists, and in many cases we're lucky if those involved have an intro stats course under their belt. Evaluating student performance is no trivial task (ESPECIALLY when trying to create some accurate measure of reading level), but we're not putting the brainpower behind it to figure out. And as much as I love it, I don't think Khan Academy will be solving those problems, but I'd love to be wrong.
Zarathust 15y ago
This treats teachers the same way I treat cpu benchmarks. Teaching is not a mechanical process!
- maxerickson 15y ago
  So is it never appropriate for teaching to be a mechanical process, or is it a failure of current techniques that they cannot be applied mechanically? I don't mean to be flip, I'm thinking about trying to teach the same lesson to 15 or 30 people and how some of them won't need the lesson and some of them won't have the base knowledge to understand it.
pstuart 15y ago
It seems almost libelous the way it was done.
blahedo 15y ago
I was glad to see this paragraph included in the article: > By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. Anytime anyone makes an argument that teachers should be evaluated based on their kids' test scores I have to explain about the problems of misaligned incentives. If the kids are not motivated to do their best, it's not going to be a fair evaluation of the teacher even if you manage to solve ALL the many other problems with high-stakes testing. And a lot of students aren't motivated to do their best on these kinds of tests, for a variety of reasons.
- ktizo 15y ago
  I did relatively badly in my last year of school compared to my previous years as I had been given an unconditional offer for university, so spent most of my time that year reading books and dicking around.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    How did university turn out? Why go if you don't want to learn?
    - ktizo 15y ago
      I love learning. Am currently using a lot of my spare time to teach myself 3d printing technologies, some basic fluid dynamics, the voronoi/delauney maths stuff, and the thermodynamics of engine design. Plus there is all the stuff I have to keep on top of professionally as a programmer, which is an inexaustable and ever growing list of often arbitrary methods and technologies. As for university, turns out I disliked it almost as much as I disliked school, so I dropped out and went into industry for a while. Dropped out of that too for ages as I got bored of all the corporate nonsense, although I have been back into it in the past few years to try and raise some cold hard cash for a few projects I've got going. Am considering going back to university at some point however, as I wouldn't mind doing either nanotechnology or neurology and most of the equipment involved in those is out of my current price range. To be honest though, most of my heroes are dead philosophers of one form or another, so I am pretty happy with a roof, food, clean clothes, regular showers, access to the internet and a large pile of books. Besides, in my experience the majority of people at university aren't there because they want to learn, but rather because they are expected to go by their parents. The people who are there purely for the pursuit of knowledge and without being pushed are the exception rather than the rule.
Tsagadai 15y ago
Sometimes, in professions like engineering and accounting, it is easy to miss the meaning that numbers actually have. If you only look at the numbers (especially when the numbers are a representation for a data model and not physical data) you can miss the forest for the trees. Reading this article makes me think their statistical model is broken.
- Drbble 15y ago
  And in social science, as we have here.
losethos 15y ago
God says... C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT seeketh thy life: but with me thou shalt be in safeguard. 23:1 Then they told David, saying, Behold, the Philistines fight against Keilah, and they rob the threshingfloors. 23:2 Therefore David enquired of the LORD, saying, Shall I go and smite these Philistines? And the LORD said unto David, Go, and smite the Philistines, and save Keilah. 23:3 And David's men said unto him, Behold, we be afraid here in Judah: how much more then if we come to Keilah against the armies of the Philistines? 2 ---- ROFLMAO killa "we be" Might be "keith", my bro, but doesn't make sense. ---- "Keith" doesn't make me think of anything relevant. He's a homo. Works at Boeing. To interpret, do brain storming. You know how old couples can communicate and complete each-other's sentences? God know what will trigger what thoughts in your head. Bible Acts 2, has tongues where everybody heard something different. The hilarious thing is they didn't bother to say what the tongues said! ROFLMAO God says... C:\Text\PLATO.TXT e fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two. SOCRATES - GLAUCON Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them up for the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two statues. I do my best, he said. And now that we know wh ---- retard. You do know this is a fixed set of 15 books I haven't changed in years? God says... C:\Text\QUIX.TXT m back flying."--And that being so, they might as well release him, particularly as it would be to the advantage of all; for, if they did not let him out, he protested he would be unable to avoid offending their nostrils unless they kept their distance. The canon took his hand, tied together as they both were, and on his word and promise they unbound him, and rejoiced beyond measure he was to find himself out of the cage. The first thing he did was to stretch himself all over, and then he went to
wisty 15y ago
For those who don't bother to read the article - the school in question has an accelerated program, and the students are ahead of the test. They no longer care about 8th grade curricular, because they are up to calculus by then. I'd guess that this means they understand 8th grade curricular, but the test isn't testing deep understanding, just speed and accuracy of the basic skills. Most tests are badly flawed like this, and create a misaligned incentive for teachers to grill students on a very narrow subset of the syllabus.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Algebra, not calculus, but yes. And not accuracy on basic skills, but regurgitating keywords and choosing plausible multiple choice options.
awbraunstein 15y ago
This is what happens when education law is created by politicians. Politicians who get their information from lobbyists lobbying on behalf of the test makers. They believe that more testing is good, mostly because it means more money for them. In NY, the ELA is mandatory for students in grades 1-10 iirc. And these are the scores we are judging teachers on. There are many teachers in schools who are given classrooms of students who need more attention and won't perform as well on exams. We need to seriously rethink education and how we are testing students and teachers.
- icarus_drowning 15y ago
  A friend of my summed this up in a twitter posting the other day: "Those who can, teach. Those who can't pass laws about teaching."
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  Education is going to run by politicians as long as politicians are allocating the funds for it. There is no way around this fact.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Politicians who get their information from lobbyists lobbying on behalf of the test makers. Yes, the politicians are clearly in the pockets of test makers. After all, the test makers are the #5 and #10 biggest politicals donors ever. http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A Oops, my mistake - it's actually teachers (generally opposed to accountability) who are the big political donors, not the test makers.
tokenadult 15y ago
As a parent of four children (but living in a different state), I had to think for a minute about what the real problem is here. If I knew that a particular teacher was teaching well in advance of the meager United States curriculum, perhaps even coming close to east Asian standards, I would (as a parent) take that into account when looking at teacher ratings based on a slower curriculum pace. My question might be, "How do I sign up?" rather than "What is the matter with this teacher?" (By the way, the school's answer about how to sign up is found on its website: http://www.ps334school.org/admissions/anderson-school-7th-grade-admissions http://www.ps334school.org/admissions/anderson-school-7th-gr... The school accepts new applicants for sixth grade or seventh grade, but not for eighth grade.) But, really, the problem with the system is not mostly about how teachers are rated, but how little power most parents have to shop. If a teacher is doing a good job for a particular learner, most parents will be glad to seek that teacher's instruction. And if the parents are shopping, the hard-to-measure things in the aggregate that are crucially important at the individual level, for example whether or not a teacher encourages a child to do his or her personal best, will be given proper weight among all the trade-offs involved in choosing one teacher over another. But right now the great majority of pupils, in New York City and elsewhere, are mostly assigned to teachers without parental power to shop, and teacher advancement in the profession is based mostly on seniority and degrees attained http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html rather than on the basis of the teachers meeting learner needs better than other teachers. The best way to promote system reform is to let the parents have more power to shop. They will ask for the information they need and weigh it in appropriate ways.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  The 'let's give parents the ability to shop' ethos is what directly led to the current clusterfuck that is the US public education system, through NCLB and its state equivalents. I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice. Signed, A victim of the evil socialist Canadian public school system.
  - ShabbyDoo 15y ago
mturmon 15y ago
The LA Times published a database of these value-added results two years ago, for teachers in the LA USD. The LA USD contains a mix of good teachers and time-servers, with the time-servers well-protected by the teachers' union's last-hired/first-fired policy. Teacher performance is not allowed to be a factor in layoffs. These value-added statistics, which on a per-teacher basis must be incredibly noisy (they measure a difference, the "value added", of two already-noisy performance numbers) resulted in the suicide of a low-ranked teacher: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39404037/ns/us_news-life/t/la-teacher-suicide-sparks-test-score-pushback/#.T7SBw3lYu00 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39404037/ns/us_news-life/t/la-te... I've been surprised to hear the credence placed in these statistics when I listen to presentations by principals and superintendents.
astrofinch 15y ago
That multiple-choice remark was a copout. Knowing material well seems like a sufficient condition to do well on multiple-choice exam.
- kijin 15y ago
  The students actually did do well. 89th percentile is nothing to scoff at. Especially when, as the article mentions, students had zero reason to care about that exam. (They already knew which schools they were going to.)
Umofomia 15y ago
If you want to see how basically meaningless these teacher evaluations really are, check out the graphs in these posts: http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/ http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/28/analyzing-re... The evaluations of the same teachers teaching the same subjects in two different classes are almost completely uncorrelated. The distribution of the scores on the scatterplots look almost random. It's a travesty that perfectly fine teachers are being publicly shamed based on these unreliable metrics.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  No, it's a travesty that Gary Rubinstein used an inappropriate plotting tool and then declared the metric flawed. See my previous post on the topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749530 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749530
ShabbyDoo 15y ago
We just sent in our six year-old's Montessori application for first grade next year. Our suburban public school system has an amazing reputation, and the passing rates for standardized tests are some of the highest in the state. Sadly, our little Aspie with ADHD issues has already expressed his dread of first grade. He doesn't want to do "seatwork", "paperwork", or any of the other drudgery that our local district tells him is "his job". [Quotes indicate words used by teachers with the best of intentions.] I can't figure out the value of this pseudo-rigor. Maybe I'm unusual in my autodidactism, but I can't think of anything I know which I (1) find valuable and (2) learned by force. I bought a K'NEX roller coaster kit and helped him put it together. At first, he didn't grok the pseudo 3D instructions or the way the pieces fit together. However, after an hour or so, he was rotating our partially assembled segments in his head to compare them to the illustrations. But, this doesn't count as rigorous seat work. Oh well. Our school actually does an excellent job of avoiding the binary incentives of No-Child-Left-Behind and attempts to provide somewhat individualized instruction to students. Ohio has yet to adopt a value-added measurement scheme, and I wonder how our district would fare, especially if achievement was normalized for socio-economic status (the average household income is over $100K, a high number for Ohio). We hope that the Montessori school's motivated teachers can use their freedom from mandated curriculum requirements, standardized testing, etc. to facilitate our son's exploration of what interests him. I don't care if his education is seen as incomplete, unbalanced, or otherwise non-standard so long as he grows to become a curious, thoughtful, and creative person. When has someone with these qualities ever failed because he had some perceived weakness in his childhood education?
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >When has someone with these qualities ever failed because he had some perceived weakness in his childhood education? // Define "failed". Failed to get a job, too right. Failed to fit in to society, check. Failed to be happy, seems to go with the territory(!?). Will you excuse a short aside:I'm interested in the diagnosis of a 6yo as having ADHD - what procedures and tests were performed to come to that decision. In my, albeit limited, experience of primary aged (4-11yo) boys if they're not running around half the time like some sort of sugar rushing lunatic then they're the exception to the rule. Can he sit and watch a TV show for 20 minutes without leaving to do something else?
snikolov 15y ago
Gary Rubinstein wrote an excellent series of posts debunking the value added metrics http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/ http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-re...
- johnhess 15y ago
  I don't think that's a debunking. yummyfajitas covered the plotting tool, but that's only the start. Clearly, the metric is far from perfect -- you can tell that without his analysis. Year-over-year variation is high, indicating that there's likely a lot of noise in the measure. That said, year-to-year scores do correlate. This means that the measure is at least a little bit reliable in the sense that if you measure the same thing twice you'll get an answer that's close to the original. All he's shown is that these are "noisy". There's no reason not to use a noisy metric, you just need to know that's what you've got, and make responsible decisions. For example, don't fire teachers who rank poorly, but do review their performance. In that case, we'd find that the "Worst Teacher" is underperforming on this metric because it wasn't designed to test great students, and we can move on. Another example of the same phenomena in education is looking for teachers who help students cheat exams. When there are suspicious correlations found, administrators investigate. One last thing: What he doesn't investigate -- and this is much more important -- is the (lack of a) correlation between value added ratings and other metrics (say, peer evaluations).
simonh 15y ago
The sad truth is that schools actually only have a minimal effect on the educational outcome for students, the dominant effect is the home environment and parental attitudes. I cared deeply about how well I did in exams when I was at school, and so do my children. Politicians won't say this because they answer to voters and telling parents it's their fault wins no votes. It's the great fat elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. Forget incentives for children and bad teacher witch hunts. Better education for parents about how to meet their responsibilities is the way to go. There are plenty of books on good parenting and how to raise happy and motivated kids. I know this because I have read several of them. In this, and other public forums we aren't beholden to political constraints. We can tell it like it is. There are no excuses.
- koide 15y ago
  I agree. Although I think that the right combination of parenting and schooling can take a child much further than good parenting and bad schooling only. After all, the children spend lots of time at school. By the way, care to share a list of the books on parenting you found more useful or interesting?
  - simonh 15y ago
    A few to start with. To be honest, even one good book is a great start. Raising Happy Children - Jan Parker, Jan Stimpson, Dorothy Rowe Playful Parenting - Lawrence J. Cohen The Well-Trained Mind - Jessie Wise, Susan Wise Wise Bauer I don't agree with everything they say, but they are pointed in the right direction. I don't home school our kids, but we do homework with them and I go out of my way to talk to them about anything they're interested in and look things up with them. It does help that my mother was head teacher of a primary school and did an Open University degree in child psychology when I was a teenager. We're engineers, right? When you've got a new piece of equipment or software or a new language to get to grips with we read the manuals and find out about best practices. It's the same with kids.
    - koide 15y ago
      You actually read manuals?! Thanks for the pointers, I have read some myself, but I'm in the search for new ones.
peterhunt 15y ago
I'm surprised to see so many HNers come out against standardized testing. Sure, it's imperfect and this teacher got screwed, but how are administrators supposed to make informed, data-driven decisions on what the right course of action is? Many of us extol the virtues of A/B testing landing page designs and gathering deep metrics and analytics but turn around and slam educators for making decisions based on standardized test scores. Give me a better metric for success that you can measure over the course of a year.
- rapala 15y ago
  So if you have 10 good teachers, you just rank them and kick out the "worst" 2? If your rank the teachers in a strict order, you have to make someone the worst and someone else the best teacher. But is the administration going to check how much worse the worst teacher really is? I doubt it.
  - peterhunt 15y ago
    No. You set performance goals for teachers specific to the teacher and district, evaluate the performance objective and make educated decisions based on that data. It doesn't need to be ranked, but it does need to be empirical.
    - ColinWright 15y ago
      I'm interested to know how you set objective performance goals.
      - peterhunt 15y ago
        "Did test scores improve relative to everybody else year over year?" is a pretty good start. Of course, by definition, this won't work for all districts.
        ColinWright 15y ago
        Actually, based on my experience of dealing with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, that won't work either. Test scores are a poor proxy for what students actually know or can do, especially in mathematics. The original linked article provides evidence for that. You put in the caveat "Of course ... this won't work for all districts" but then you're arguing for exceptions to be allowed. That's just a mess. There is no simple fix. There are bad teachers (and I'm leaving the term undefined - it's a bit like porn - undefinable, but recognisable) who get good test results and glowing evaluations, and there are superb teachers who get mediocre test results and undistinguished evaluations. It's easy from the outside or from a limited perspective to suggest "obvious" methods of assessment or "obvious" actions to improve the situation, but in the end, no one has really defined what they mean by "good teaching," so proposing assessments of something undefined will just result in more proxies to be distorted.
SagelyGuru 15y ago
> “They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.” I don't believe that 'the professionals' setting up, promoting and administering a system like this can possibly be ignorant of this fact and/or well meaning. Of course Abbott had to be eliminated as a teacher. She was interfering with the program of deliberate dumbing down.
mrobataille 15y ago
This is the natural result of a commoditized profession. Talented people will not be rewarded to the extent they deserve, and will leave.
mathattack 15y ago
Standardization helps aim everyone to B quality. It tries to pull up the underachievers, but drags down those at the top. On average it may be helpful, but not at the very top. The standards of Walmart, P&G, and similar companies help the companies achieve economies of scale. They allow C level performers to overachieve. But... You don't want to be the only free thinker in Mayberry. Similarly, standardizing education may help the masses, but it's not for the best students or teachers.
basseq 15y ago
"You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.” I think you can, it's just that the Teacher Data Report doesn't seem to be doing a good job of it. It's a broken model, not a broken idea.
chubbard 15y ago
This is a disheartening story about education in the US. People aren't going to continue to work a job if you call them terrible at it. I feel I have strong self esteem, but I don't think I could handle that. What's sad is our over reliance on these statistics. First thing you have to do when using stats is setup checks and balances to verify you are getting what you expect. This is a counter example that might indicate you aren't measuring the right thing. Does this value add measurement of prior year improvement even predict anything about the students comprehension? It's like the BCS system of education where you just scratch your head over the outcomes. America has a long time fascination with measurement and quantifying. We created Scientific Management Theory dating back to 1880s, but it ended mostly because workers rebelled. However, its influence is still felt everywhere in American society so much so I have a hard time understanding how the Finish model achieves its results without measuring. I know its better, but I can't explain it.

155 points by pstuart 15y ago

KaoruAoiShiho 15y ago

Is this a bug in the value add system or is it unfixable?

adpirz 15y ago
I honestly think, as benign as it sounds, this is the most pertinent comment. First off, I don't think that a teacher's performance eval should be entirely rooted in state tests, nor do I believe that the current method of testing is by any means perfect, but I think value-added measurement is a decent measure of how teachers are performing and how much knowledge students have gained. What we're looking at here is an extreme case where that value added measure has no more meaning and the actual evaluation has no statistical meaning (the students performance was already top notch, they were probably more likely to score a little worse.) What SHOULD have happened is that they should have been evaluated using a more rigorous / advanced curriculum that was aligned to what the teacher was teaching (ie, high school algebra). The system is not perfect, but it's not terrible--they just need to evaluate the system, adjust, and iterate, something many here are plenty familiar with. (Disclosure: I teach at a charter school)
- colomon 15y ago
  How about giving the test on a computer and having it automatically change the difficulty level on the fly? (Obviously this may be a lot easier for math than for other subjects.) Test every grade level using the same program, just with different entry points based on the knowledge they are presumed to have learned at that point. Right now it sounds like they are awarding the teachers based on the percentile level of their students compared to other students in the same class level, which is pretty much guaranteed to be useless noise if your students all start at the 98th percentile. It would be much more meaningful to be able to say, "Each of your students clearly knows more algebra than he did last year." The other issue is how to motivate the children to actually want to do well on the test. Somehow rewarding a kid who does better than he did the previous time he took the test seems like a good first step...
  - adpirz 15y ago
    All valid points, and there are testing suites that do exactly what you say that are widely used (this one is pretty standard: http://www.nwea.org/products-services/computer-based-adaptive-assessments/map http://www.nwea.org/products-services/computer-based-adaptiv...), but they aren't the assessment that's measured by state departments. There are probably lots of reasons for this, (cynical: they were outlobbied by Pearson, which has million dollar contracts with many states to write their state tests.), but nonetheless they exist. The other problem is that this is a problem at which we should be throwing our best data scientists, and in many cases we're lucky if those involved have an intro stats course under their belt. Evaluating student performance is no trivial task (ESPECIALLY when trying to create some accurate measure of reading level), but we're not putting the brainpower behind it to figure out. And as much as I love it, I don't think Khan Academy will be solving those problems, but I'd love to be wrong.

Zarathust 15y ago

This treats teachers the same way I treat cpu benchmarks. Teaching is not a mechanical process!

maxerickson 15y ago
So is it never appropriate for teaching to be a mechanical process, or is it a failure of current techniques that they cannot be applied mechanically? I don't mean to be flip, I'm thinking about trying to teach the same lesson to 15 or 30 people and how some of them won't need the lesson and some of them won't have the base knowledge to understand it.

pstuart 15y ago

It seems almost libelous the way it was done.

blahedo 15y ago

I was glad to see this paragraph included in the article: > By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. Anytime anyone makes an argument that teachers should be evaluated based on their kids' test scores I have to explain about the problems of misaligned incentives. If the kids are not motivated to do their best, it's not going to be a fair evaluation of the teacher even if you manage to solve ALL the many other problems with high-stakes testing. And a lot of students aren't motivated to do their best on these kinds of tests, for a variety of reasons.

ktizo 15y ago
I did relatively badly in my last year of school compared to my previous years as I had been given an unconditional offer for university, so spent most of my time that year reading books and dicking around.
- Drbble 15y ago
  How did university turn out? Why go if you don't want to learn?
  - ktizo 15y ago
    I love learning. Am currently using a lot of my spare time to teach myself 3d printing technologies, some basic fluid dynamics, the voronoi/delauney maths stuff, and the thermodynamics of engine design. Plus there is all the stuff I have to keep on top of professionally as a programmer, which is an inexaustable and ever growing list of often arbitrary methods and technologies. As for university, turns out I disliked it almost as much as I disliked school, so I dropped out and went into industry for a while. Dropped out of that too for ages as I got bored of all the corporate nonsense, although I have been back into it in the past few years to try and raise some cold hard cash for a few projects I've got going. Am considering going back to university at some point however, as I wouldn't mind doing either nanotechnology or neurology and most of the equipment involved in those is out of my current price range. To be honest though, most of my heroes are dead philosophers of one form or another, so I am pretty happy with a roof, food, clean clothes, regular showers, access to the internet and a large pile of books. Besides, in my experience the majority of people at university aren't there because they want to learn, but rather because they are expected to go by their parents. The people who are there purely for the pursuit of knowledge and without being pushed are the exception rather than the rule.

Tsagadai 15y ago

Sometimes, in professions like engineering and accounting, it is easy to miss the meaning that numbers actually have. If you only look at the numbers (especially when the numbers are a representation for a data model and not physical data) you can miss the forest for the trees. Reading this article makes me think their statistical model is broken.

Drbble 15y ago
And in social science, as we have here.

losethos 15y ago

God says... C:\Text\BIBLE.TXT seeketh thy life: but with me thou shalt be in safeguard. 23:1 Then they told David, saying, Behold, the Philistines fight against Keilah, and they rob the threshingfloors. 23:2 Therefore David enquired of the LORD, saying, Shall I go and smite these Philistines? And the LORD said unto David, Go, and smite the Philistines, and save Keilah. 23:3 And David's men said unto him, Behold, we be afraid here in Judah: how much more then if we come to Keilah against the armies of the Philistines? 2 ---- ROFLMAO killa "we be" Might be "keith", my bro, but doesn't make sense. ---- "Keith" doesn't make me think of anything relevant. He's a homo. Works at Boeing. To interpret, do brain storming. You know how old couples can communicate and complete each-other's sentences? God know what will trigger what thoughts in your head. Bible Acts 2, has tongues where everybody heard something different. The hilarious thing is they didn't bother to say what the tongues said! ROFLMAO God says... C:\Text\PLATO.TXT e fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two. SOCRATES - GLAUCON Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them up for the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two statues. I do my best, he said. And now that we know wh ---- retard. You do know this is a fixed set of 15 books I haven't changed in years? God says... C:\Text\QUIX.TXT m back flying."--And that being so, they might as well release him, particularly as it would be to the advantage of all; for, if they did not let him out, he protested he would be unable to avoid offending their nostrils unless they kept their distance. The canon took his hand, tied together as they both were, and on his word and promise they unbound him, and rejoiced beyond measure he was to find himself out of the cage. The first thing he did was to stretch himself all over, and then he went to

wisty 15y ago

For those who don't bother to read the article - the school in question has an accelerated program, and the students are ahead of the test. They no longer care about 8th grade curricular, because they are up to calculus by then. I'd guess that this means they understand 8th grade curricular, but the test isn't testing deep understanding, just speed and accuracy of the basic skills. Most tests are badly flawed like this, and create a misaligned incentive for teachers to grill students on a very narrow subset of the syllabus.

Drbble 15y ago
Algebra, not calculus, but yes. And not accuracy on basic skills, but regurgitating keywords and choosing plausible multiple choice options.

awbraunstein 15y ago

This is what happens when education law is created by politicians. Politicians who get their information from lobbyists lobbying on behalf of the test makers. They believe that more testing is good, mostly because it means more money for them. In NY, the ELA is mandatory for students in grades 1-10 iirc. And these are the scores we are judging teachers on. There are many teachers in schools who are given classrooms of students who need more attention and won't perform as well on exams. We need to seriously rethink education and how we are testing students and teachers.

icarus_drowning 15y ago
A friend of my summed this up in a twitter posting the other day: "Those who can, teach. Those who can't pass laws about teaching."
waterlesscloud 15y ago
Education is going to run by politicians as long as politicians are allocating the funds for it. There is no way around this fact.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
Politicians who get their information from lobbyists lobbying on behalf of the test makers. Yes, the politicians are clearly in the pockets of test makers. After all, the test makers are the #5 and #10 biggest politicals donors ever. http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A Oops, my mistake - it's actually teachers (generally opposed to accountability) who are the big political donors, not the test makers.

tokenadult 15y ago

As a parent of four children (but living in a different state), I had to think for a minute about what the real problem is here. If I knew that a particular teacher was teaching well in advance of the meager United States curriculum, perhaps even coming close to east Asian standards, I would (as a parent) take that into account when looking at teacher ratings based on a slower curriculum pace. My question might be, "How do I sign up?" rather than "What is the matter with this teacher?" (By the way, the school's answer about how to sign up is found on its website: http://www.ps334school.org/admissions/anderson-school-7th-grade-admissions http://www.ps334school.org/admissions/anderson-school-7th-gr... The school accepts new applicants for sixth grade or seventh grade, but not for eighth grade.) But, really, the problem with the system is not mostly about how teachers are rated, but how little power most parents have to shop. If a teacher is doing a good job for a particular learner, most parents will be glad to seek that teacher's instruction. And if the parents are shopping, the hard-to-measure things in the aggregate that are crucially important at the individual level, for example whether or not a teacher encourages a child to do his or her personal best, will be given proper weight among all the trade-offs involved in choosing one teacher over another. But right now the great majority of pupils, in New York City and elsewhere, are mostly assigned to teachers without parental power to shop, and teacher advancement in the profession is based mostly on seniority and degrees attained http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html rather than on the basis of the teachers meeting learner needs better than other teachers. The best way to promote system reform is to let the parents have more power to shop. They will ask for the information they need and weigh it in appropriate ways.

redthrowaway 15y ago
The 'let's give parents the ability to shop' ethos is what directly led to the current clusterfuck that is the US public education system, through NCLB and its state equivalents. I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice. Signed, A victim of the evil socialist Canadian public school system.
- ShabbyDoo 15y ago

mturmon 15y ago

The LA Times published a database of these value-added results two years ago, for teachers in the LA USD. The LA USD contains a mix of good teachers and time-servers, with the time-servers well-protected by the teachers' union's last-hired/first-fired policy. Teacher performance is not allowed to be a factor in layoffs. These value-added statistics, which on a per-teacher basis must be incredibly noisy (they measure a difference, the "value added", of two already-noisy performance numbers) resulted in the suicide of a low-ranked teacher: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39404037/ns/us_news-life/t/la-teacher-suicide-sparks-test-score-pushback/#.T7SBw3lYu00 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39404037/ns/us_news-life/t/la-te... I've been surprised to hear the credence placed in these statistics when I listen to presentations by principals and superintendents.

astrofinch 15y ago

That multiple-choice remark was a copout. Knowing material well seems like a sufficient condition to do well on multiple-choice exam.

kijin 15y ago
The students actually did do well. 89th percentile is nothing to scoff at. Especially when, as the article mentions, students had zero reason to care about that exam. (They already knew which schools they were going to.)

Umofomia 15y ago

If you want to see how basically meaningless these teacher evaluations really are, check out the graphs in these posts: http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/ http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/28/analyzing-re... The evaluations of the same teachers teaching the same subjects in two different classes are almost completely uncorrelated. The distribution of the scores on the scatterplots look almost random. It's a travesty that perfectly fine teachers are being publicly shamed based on these unreliable metrics.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
No, it's a travesty that Gary Rubinstein used an inappropriate plotting tool and then declared the metric flawed. See my previous post on the topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749530 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749530

ShabbyDoo 15y ago

We just sent in our six year-old's Montessori application for first grade next year. Our suburban public school system has an amazing reputation, and the passing rates for standardized tests are some of the highest in the state. Sadly, our little Aspie with ADHD issues has already expressed his dread of first grade. He doesn't want to do "seatwork", "paperwork", or any of the other drudgery that our local district tells him is "his job". [Quotes indicate words used by teachers with the best of intentions.] I can't figure out the value of this pseudo-rigor. Maybe I'm unusual in my autodidactism, but I can't think of anything I know which I (1) find valuable and (2) learned by force. I bought a K'NEX roller coaster kit and helped him put it together. At first, he didn't grok the pseudo 3D instructions or the way the pieces fit together. However, after an hour or so, he was rotating our partially assembled segments in his head to compare them to the illustrations. But, this doesn't count as rigorous seat work. Oh well. Our school actually does an excellent job of avoiding the binary incentives of No-Child-Left-Behind and attempts to provide somewhat individualized instruction to students. Ohio has yet to adopt a value-added measurement scheme, and I wonder how our district would fare, especially if achievement was normalized for socio-economic status (the average household income is over $100K, a high number for Ohio). We hope that the Montessori school's motivated teachers can use their freedom from mandated curriculum requirements, standardized testing, etc. to facilitate our son's exploration of what interests him. I don't care if his education is seen as incomplete, unbalanced, or otherwise non-standard so long as he grows to become a curious, thoughtful, and creative person. When has someone with these qualities ever failed because he had some perceived weakness in his childhood education?

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
>When has someone with these qualities ever failed because he had some perceived weakness in his childhood education? // Define "failed". Failed to get a job, too right. Failed to fit in to society, check. Failed to be happy, seems to go with the territory(!?). Will you excuse a short aside:I'm interested in the diagnosis of a 6yo as having ADHD - what procedures and tests were performed to come to that decision. In my, albeit limited, experience of primary aged (4-11yo) boys if they're not running around half the time like some sort of sugar rushing lunatic then they're the exception to the rule. Can he sit and watch a TV show for 20 minutes without leaving to do something else?

snikolov 15y ago

Gary Rubinstein wrote an excellent series of posts debunking the value added metrics http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/ http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/02/26/analyzing-re...

johnhess 15y ago
I don't think that's a debunking. yummyfajitas covered the plotting tool, but that's only the start. Clearly, the metric is far from perfect -- you can tell that without his analysis. Year-over-year variation is high, indicating that there's likely a lot of noise in the measure. That said, year-to-year scores do correlate. This means that the measure is at least a little bit reliable in the sense that if you measure the same thing twice you'll get an answer that's close to the original. All he's shown is that these are "noisy". There's no reason not to use a noisy metric, you just need to know that's what you've got, and make responsible decisions. For example, don't fire teachers who rank poorly, but do review their performance. In that case, we'd find that the "Worst Teacher" is underperforming on this metric because it wasn't designed to test great students, and we can move on. Another example of the same phenomena in education is looking for teachers who help students cheat exams. When there are suspicious correlations found, administrators investigate. One last thing: What he doesn't investigate -- and this is much more important -- is the (lack of a) correlation between value added ratings and other metrics (say, peer evaluations).

simonh 15y ago

The sad truth is that schools actually only have a minimal effect on the educational outcome for students, the dominant effect is the home environment and parental attitudes. I cared deeply about how well I did in exams when I was at school, and so do my children. Politicians won't say this because they answer to voters and telling parents it's their fault wins no votes. It's the great fat elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. Forget incentives for children and bad teacher witch hunts. Better education for parents about how to meet their responsibilities is the way to go. There are plenty of books on good parenting and how to raise happy and motivated kids. I know this because I have read several of them. In this, and other public forums we aren't beholden to political constraints. We can tell it like it is. There are no excuses.

koide 15y ago
I agree. Although I think that the right combination of parenting and schooling can take a child much further than good parenting and bad schooling only. After all, the children spend lots of time at school. By the way, care to share a list of the books on parenting you found more useful or interesting?
- simonh 15y ago
  A few to start with. To be honest, even one good book is a great start. Raising Happy Children - Jan Parker, Jan Stimpson, Dorothy Rowe Playful Parenting - Lawrence J. Cohen The Well-Trained Mind - Jessie Wise, Susan Wise Wise Bauer I don't agree with everything they say, but they are pointed in the right direction. I don't home school our kids, but we do homework with them and I go out of my way to talk to them about anything they're interested in and look things up with them. It does help that my mother was head teacher of a primary school and did an Open University degree in child psychology when I was a teenager. We're engineers, right? When you've got a new piece of equipment or software or a new language to get to grips with we read the manuals and find out about best practices. It's the same with kids.
  - koide 15y ago
    You actually read manuals?! Thanks for the pointers, I have read some myself, but I'm in the search for new ones.

peterhunt 15y ago

I'm surprised to see so many HNers come out against standardized testing. Sure, it's imperfect and this teacher got screwed, but how are administrators supposed to make informed, data-driven decisions on what the right course of action is? Many of us extol the virtues of A/B testing landing page designs and gathering deep metrics and analytics but turn around and slam educators for making decisions based on standardized test scores. Give me a better metric for success that you can measure over the course of a year.

rapala 15y ago
So if you have 10 good teachers, you just rank them and kick out the "worst" 2? If your rank the teachers in a strict order, you have to make someone the worst and someone else the best teacher. But is the administration going to check how much worse the worst teacher really is? I doubt it.
- peterhunt 15y ago
  No. You set performance goals for teachers specific to the teacher and district, evaluate the performance objective and make educated decisions based on that data. It doesn't need to be ranked, but it does need to be empirical.
  - ColinWright 15y ago
    I'm interested to know how you set objective performance goals.
    - peterhunt 15y ago
      "Did test scores improve relative to everybody else year over year?" is a pretty good start. Of course, by definition, this won't work for all districts.
      - ColinWright 15y ago
        Actually, based on my experience of dealing with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, that won't work either. Test scores are a poor proxy for what students actually know or can do, especially in mathematics. The original linked article provides evidence for that. You put in the caveat "Of course ... this won't work for all districts" but then you're arguing for exceptions to be allowed. That's just a mess. There is no simple fix. There are bad teachers (and I'm leaving the term undefined - it's a bit like porn - undefinable, but recognisable) who get good test results and glowing evaluations, and there are superb teachers who get mediocre test results and undistinguished evaluations. It's easy from the outside or from a limited perspective to suggest "obvious" methods of assessment or "obvious" actions to improve the situation, but in the end, no one has really defined what they mean by "good teaching," so proposing assessments of something undefined will just result in more proxies to be distorted.

SagelyGuru 15y ago

> “They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.” I don't believe that 'the professionals' setting up, promoting and administering a system like this can possibly be ignorant of this fact and/or well meaning. Of course Abbott had to be eliminated as a teacher. She was interfering with the program of deliberate dumbing down.

mrobataille 15y ago

This is the natural result of a commoditized profession. Talented people will not be rewarded to the extent they deserve, and will leave.

mathattack 15y ago

Standardization helps aim everyone to B quality. It tries to pull up the underachievers, but drags down those at the top. On average it may be helpful, but not at the very top. The standards of Walmart, P&G, and similar companies help the companies achieve economies of scale. They allow C level performers to overachieve. But... You don't want to be the only free thinker in Mayberry. Similarly, standardizing education may help the masses, but it's not for the best students or teachers.

basseq 15y ago

"You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.” I think you can, it's just that the Teacher Data Report doesn't seem to be doing a good job of it. It's a broken model, not a broken idea.

chubbard 15y ago

This is a disheartening story about education in the US. People aren't going to continue to work a job if you call them terrible at it. I feel I have strong self esteem, but I don't think I could handle that. What's sad is our over reliance on these statistics. First thing you have to do when using stats is setup checks and balances to verify you are getting what you expect. This is a counter example that might indicate you aren't measuring the right thing. Does this value add measurement of prior year improvement even predict anything about the students comprehension? It's like the BCS system of education where you just scratch your head over the outcomes. America has a long time fascination with measurement and quantifying. We created Scientific Management Theory dating back to 1880s, but it ended mostly because workers rebelled. However, its influence is still felt everywhere in American society so much so I have a hard time understanding how the Finish model achieves its results without measuring. I know its better, but I can't explain it.