6 ms·

There are many important factors which teachers (no matter how good they are) can't control: 1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents ar

by gnosis 14y ago

There are many important factors which teachers (no matter how good they are) can't control: 1. How wealthy, poor, educated, or uneducated a child's parents are. 2. How many resources the school and teacher are given. 3. Whether a child's parents are abusing them at home. 4. Whether a child is witnessing violence, hopelessness, despair in their neighborhood. 5. The attitude of a child's family and friends towards education. 6. Whether a child's parents are active in their child's education and in a PTA. Study after study has shown that these factors greatly influence a child's attention and attitude to school work, their attendance, and ultimately their performance at school. No child's performance on a standardized test, and no evaluation of a teacher's performance is going to pick up on the above factors, yet they can critically impact how well the child ultimately learns and what the child learns. Standardized testing of a child that is unfortunate enough to live in a situation where the above factors are against them will likely notice a poorly performing student, one who gradually does worse and worse on the tests until they finally flunk out. Then, instead of getting extra aid, the funding to the school that has a lot of such children will be cut (thanks to programs like No Child Left Behind), and their teachers penalized. These factors, which are strongly associated with poverty, are things a given teacher is in no position to influence, but which society as a whole could address. If it has the will.

Mvandenbergh 14y ago
That's why they do value-added testing rather than just evaluating teachers based on the score of their pupils. Obviously there are confounding factors, but if a teacher can make a statistically significant difference to the the test scores - as measured by before and after testing then that is valuable to know.
Symmetry 14y ago
So, if a teacher has as little effect on a child's performance as you seem to be implying should we then reduce teacher pay, accept the lower quality applicants we would get since it doesn't matter, and spend the extra money on anti-poverty measures?
crusso 14y ago
And at my job, there are many factors out of my control. I don't control the home life of my engineers. I don't control my customers' decision making processes. I don't control my competitors' actions in the market. But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control. What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situation that they do have. How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control?
- Mvandenbergh 14y ago
  You may not control the home life of your engineers, but you presumably have at least some control over who you hire and fire. Even if you don't have the authority to fire someone directly you can still give your subordinates poor evaluations. Imagine being a situation where not only did you not have any control over which engineers worked on your team - or even whether they were engineers at all, or even basically literate. Now imagine that your whole industry pretty much worked liked that and that changing from one company to another (which most likely worked the same way) always meant moving cities. Incidentally, what they did in this study is to measure the value-addition of each teacher, not their raw test scores. Presumably you're not evaluated based on things you have absolutely no control over, as you said - you get judged based on the slice of the pie that you do control.
- nnnnnnnninnnnnn 14y ago
  You do however get to control who your engineers are. It's rather difficult for a teacher to "fire" a student.
  - crusso 14y ago
    I don't get to control the projects sent my way. I'm not allowed to "fire" customers with difficult expectations. Hell, I've only ever fired one engineer in a 20+ year career, and that was because he was the equivalent of a violent student whom you would expel and send to juvi. Why is it so hard to deal with the information as presented in the study. Fine, question the details or methods of the study. Offer counter evidence. The study presented evidence that good teachers can have a noticeable and measurable level of control on the output of their students. Why is dealing with evidence not the central part of this discussion?
bjhoops1 14y ago
So true! All of those factors exert an enormous effect on the outcome of a student's education. Unfortunately (except for the school resources issue) they are all completely out of the teacher/school/district's ability to control. Whenever teacher/school issues come up, it is important to remember that far beyond anything a school or teacher can do, the single-most important factor in a child's education (or their life in general!) is their PARENTS. If a kid has parents who value education, discipline their kids and make time for learning at home, that kid can do just fine no matter what kind of conditions they experience at school. Conversely, it takes a Stand and Deliver-style superteacher to be able to coax success out of a kid growing up in a home where education is not valued and productive personal habits are not modeled. The biggest problem with education? There are far, far too many parents out there who have absolutely no business raising children at all. We require tests for people to operate a jet ski, but when it comes to absolute power and responsibility for a human child, anybody can do it! That's your right! Don't worry about saddling the rest of society with your child who doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of ending up well-adjusted, educated or successful. It's YOUR kid. I understand that people who are struggling with extreme poverty are often too caught up with bare survival to find the time to focus on their children's educational needs. That is really awful and sad. It is especially sad for their children. The fact is, as long as society is full of self-centered, thoughtless parents who either fail to understand the basic components of child-rearing or are too busy surviving to care, we will be plagued with students who are going to struggle no matter how great of an educational system they are placed in. That being said, perhaps the only way to raise a generation of education-valuing, quality parents is to do what we can to create them. So maybe it is best after all to focus on what CAN be done - effective teaching methods for today's teachers. Hopefully a much-improved school system can help raise the prospects of children whose parents are doing nothing to give them a hand up. And then they in turn can become the kinds of nurturing, education-valuing parents that their own children deserve.
yummyfajitas 14y ago
Irrelevant. The study uses Value Added Modeling, which accounts for these factors. Unless the student's parents started abusing them in the year the teacher is being evaluated, it is already accounted for. VAM measures deltas, not absolute levels.

by gnosis 14y ago

Mvandenbergh 14y ago

That's why they do value-added testing rather than just evaluating teachers based on the score of their pupils. Obviously there are confounding factors, but if a teacher can make a statistically significant difference to the the test scores - as measured by before and after testing then that is valuable to know.

Symmetry 14y ago

So, if a teacher has as little effect on a child's performance as you seem to be implying should we then reduce teacher pay, accept the lower quality applicants we would get since it doesn't matter, and spend the extra money on anti-poverty measures?

crusso 14y ago

And at my job, there are many factors out of my control. I don't control the home life of my engineers. I don't control my customers' decision making processes. I don't control my competitors' actions in the market. But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control. What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situation that they do have. How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control?

Mvandenbergh 14y ago
You may not control the home life of your engineers, but you presumably have at least some control over who you hire and fire. Even if you don't have the authority to fire someone directly you can still give your subordinates poor evaluations. Imagine being a situation where not only did you not have any control over which engineers worked on your team - or even whether they were engineers at all, or even basically literate. Now imagine that your whole industry pretty much worked liked that and that changing from one company to another (which most likely worked the same way) always meant moving cities. Incidentally, what they did in this study is to measure the value-addition of each teacher, not their raw test scores. Presumably you're not evaluated based on things you have absolutely no control over, as you said - you get judged based on the slice of the pie that you do control.
nnnnnnnninnnnnn 14y ago
You do however get to control who your engineers are. It's rather difficult for a teacher to "fire" a student.
- crusso 14y ago
  I don't get to control the projects sent my way. I'm not allowed to "fire" customers with difficult expectations. Hell, I've only ever fired one engineer in a 20+ year career, and that was because he was the equivalent of a violent student whom you would expel and send to juvi. Why is it so hard to deal with the information as presented in the study. Fine, question the details or methods of the study. Offer counter evidence. The study presented evidence that good teachers can have a noticeable and measurable level of control on the output of their students. Why is dealing with evidence not the central part of this discussion?

bjhoops1 14y ago

So true! All of those factors exert an enormous effect on the outcome of a student's education. Unfortunately (except for the school resources issue) they are all completely out of the teacher/school/district's ability to control. Whenever teacher/school issues come up, it is important to remember that far beyond anything a school or teacher can do, the single-most important factor in a child's education (or their life in general!) is their PARENTS. If a kid has parents who value education, discipline their kids and make time for learning at home, that kid can do just fine no matter what kind of conditions they experience at school. Conversely, it takes a Stand and Deliver-style superteacher to be able to coax success out of a kid growing up in a home where education is not valued and productive personal habits are not modeled. The biggest problem with education? There are far, far too many parents out there who have absolutely no business raising children at all. We require tests for people to operate a jet ski, but when it comes to absolute power and responsibility for a human child, anybody can do it! That's your right! Don't worry about saddling the rest of society with your child who doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of ending up well-adjusted, educated or successful. It's YOUR kid. I understand that people who are struggling with extreme poverty are often too caught up with bare survival to find the time to focus on their children's educational needs. That is really awful and sad. It is especially sad for their children. The fact is, as long as society is full of self-centered, thoughtless parents who either fail to understand the basic components of child-rearing or are too busy surviving to care, we will be plagued with students who are going to struggle no matter how great of an educational system they are placed in. That being said, perhaps the only way to raise a generation of education-valuing, quality parents is to do what we can to create them. So maybe it is best after all to focus on what CAN be done - effective teaching methods for today's teachers. Hopefully a much-improved school system can help raise the prospects of children whose parents are doing nothing to give them a hand up. And then they in turn can become the kinds of nurturing, education-valuing parents that their own children deserve.

yummyfajitas 14y ago

Irrelevant. The study uses Value Added Modeling, which accounts for these factors. Unless the student's parents started abusing them in the year the teacher is being evaluated, it is already accounted for. VAM measures deltas, not absolute levels.