7 ms·

Based on the headline and the first few paragraphs I was excited to read about a free market approach to public teaching. But most of his students are "high-sc

by aresant 13y ago

Based on the headline and the first few paragraphs I was excited to read about a free market approach to public teaching. But most of his students are "high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea's version of the SAT." So is the article really about a $4m/yr teacher? Or a $4m/yr test prep guru? Test-prep is a HUGE industry in the USA. "Princeton Review" alone pulled down ~$150,000,000 in 2012.(1) John Katzman, a Princeton grad, founded it in 1981. So we've already tread this right? And the major criticism of Princeton review and other testing houses is that they drastically skew the balance of the tests by (a) Giving privileged kids an unfair advantage (b) Damaging the test integrity which is designed to find bright kids, not just "well prepared for this one day" kids. So that's not really that unique and, in fact, we've got a long history of how this type of market has under-served the US' own system. But great headline, got me to click. (1) http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20100830/PRINTEDITION/308309977/princeton-review-bets-on-online-learning--framingham-based-company-needs-recent-acquisition-to-help-it-reach-profitability http://www.wbjournal.com/article/20100830/PRINTEDITION/30830...

jessriedel 13y ago
Concurring with yummyfajita, test prep courses don't have too much impact: > On average students with private tutors improve their math scores by 19 points more than those students without private tutors. The effect is less on the verbal section, where having a private tutor only improves scores on average by seven points. Taking a commercial course has a similarly large effect on math scores, improving them on average by 17 points, and has the largest effect on verbal scores, improving them on average by 13 points. http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst... These differences (~15 points on a test with a standard deviation of 100 points) are rather small compared to the huge gaps between different socio-economic and racial backgrounds (~100 points between rich and poor). Probably worth the boost if you have the money, though.
- cynicalkane 13y ago
  The way you get better at something is with deliberate, difficult practice, and deep inquiry. When I was in high school preparing for the SAT I found this was the opposite of how most test prep worked. I found one book--called something like SAT 1600, which was the max at the time--that talked about how test makers try to assess you, and how questions are constructed. The drill questions were very hard and came with an explanation of how the questions worked. Taking a practice test before and after the book my score went up by over 100 points. It got to the point where I could usually answer a math problem by guessing what the answer "should" be, based on how the question was built, and then just work backwards to verify the answer. But most test prep was boring drills together with strategies like "use the process of elimination." Yeah, duh. That sort of brain-switched-off busywork is the common pattern in test prep and, more broadly, American education.
  - mopedDreams 13y ago
    I agree. And isn't the idea of a test to find the people that are best a doing something. It doesn't really matter how much preparation goes into it. So maybe someone that works really hard to be better than others at something is more valuable than someone who is naturally bright? For example - a naturally bright lawyer isn't as good as a 'good' lawyer that tries really hard to be the best. Being good at a test shows that you'll be good at whatever the test is trying to find - no matter how this is achieved.
- cma 13y ago
  Expensive "test prep" also involves learning about scamming your way into a good score: "Nationwide, only 2 percent of students who have taken the SAT over the past 10 years have done so untimed. Most of these students' diagnoses are presumably genuine. But in places like Greenwich, Conn., and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent. " http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2006/05/flag_on_the_field.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
  - earh 13y ago
    Of course the whole concept of the diagnosis makes no sense; that one person has a disease that makes them take more time to solve problems, while another person is healthy but supposedly stupider. The test should simply be untimed. (Which I thought it was, with the switch to computer-based real-time adaptive tests?)
- YokoZar 13y ago
  If I remember my days as a test-prep teacher, I believe one of the largest predictors of SAT score was simply the age of the student. In other words, if you give a thousand students a free practice test, then sign them up for a course that summer, by the time they actually finish the course six months later they're already expected to have improved regardless of whether you teach them anything at all.
  - rlanday 13y ago
    I hadn’t thought of this effect, but it’s kind of an ingenious way to market test prep. I think at some point, students’ scores stop improving, from a combination of having been exposed to all the background material necessary for the test to be accurate, and their brains finishing development (after which intelligence is largely stable), but up until then, students’ scores improve with age. You can still use a test like the SAT to compare younger students, but you have to norm it against students of the same age (I think it’s actually better to test students at a younger age because a test of the same difficulty has more ceiling room).
- rlanday 13y ago
  “Such tests are blind to a student’s high school record—instead, they are intended as an independent, objective measure of college “readiness”.” Claiming that the SAT measures “college readiness” is complete and utter bullshit. The SAT measures intelligence and the College Board knows it. “College readiness” is a liberal euphemism. It actually turns out that if you try to test specific skills (I think the writing section kind of falls in this category) instead of overall intelligence, the results are less predictive for whatever purposes the test is being used for, since specific skills can be learned, whereas overall intelligence is largely stable and has broad effects. The fact that scores cannot be significantly improved by coaching is evidence that the SAT does in fact largely measure intelligence.
yummyfajitas 13y ago
Another criticism (c) is that test prep doesn't do very much. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html
muzz 13y ago
Not-even a test-prep guru, more like someone who makes a $4M/year selling online videos for $4/hr Here, Khan Academy gives away their video for free. The subject of the article is more like The Video Professor, rather than what is commonly called a "teacher"
cabalamat 13y ago
> (b) Damaging the test integrity which is designed to find bright kids, not just "well prepared for this one day" kids. Either a test is important, or it is not important. If it is not important, it is a waste of everyone's time and money, and ought to be scrapped. If it is important, people will obviously try to game it.Therefore all tests should be resistant to gaming: the only way to do well at the test should be to actually be good at whatever the test is trying to measure. If a test doesn't have this proprty, it should also be scrapped, for the reasons you state and also because it is a waste of time and money. I don't blame Princeton review for bad tests, I blame the people setting the tests.
- sillysaurus 13y ago
  Actually, a test falls along a continuum of importances. Some tests are better than others, not merely useless/useful.
- mathattack 13y ago
  This is actually very hard, because a test can seem to be unpreparable, but then over time people find a way to prepare. It's very much a moving target.
dba7dba 13y ago
It's unfortunate the wsj article's main topic/pic was of a rock star teacher. The lesson US needs to learn is that 'teachers' just in general in S Korea are RESPECTED (like honest-lawyer/doctor) and not viewed as someone who just wasn't smart/achieving enough for some other career (which is the impression in US). This just translates into a situation where becoming a teacher in a public school in S Korea is just about one of the hardest careers to achieve in S Korea, especially if you want to teach in a major city. I know of someone (Korean American) whose cousin back in S Korea just couldn't get a job as a teacher near Seoul, capital S Korea. And the cousin had always been considered a good/model student while a student herself. She was smart/motivated but just not good enough, due to the fierce competition. This fierce competition leads to a situation where you end up with highly qualified/motivated teachers. Not always but most of the time. This whole hagwon story is just a result of the respect parents place on education/teacher. Don't pay too much attention to hagwon story. It's just a by product of the real lesson we need to learn, that parents value education for their kids. In US, there's the general impression that one becomes a public school teacher because he/she didn't have the grade for much else.
fsck--off 13y ago
Not having a free market (because of gender inequality) was actually very beneficial for education. Until the mid 20th century, one of the only available professions to half of world's brilliant minds was teaching. Privileged kids often had live-in tutors, called governesses. Governesses would teach children foreign languages, musical instruments, and poetry, and other subjects. For a time, being a governess was one of the only ways a middle class single woman could support herself, no matter how brilliant she was. One such governess was named Marie Curie. In the U.S there was a "brain drain" to other professions. The U.S does not recruit top students to become teachers in the same way that other European countries do, nor does it pay them as well or provide as many benefits. This is one of the reasons that the U.S has fallen in the international rankings.
- briandear 13y ago
  TL;DR: Teacher pay isn't the problem, eliminating bad teachers is. When I was preparing to run for the Jersey City Board of Education, I spent a lot of time studying that district, specifically, the pay scales, promotion criteria and other structural issues relating to teacher benefits and recruitment, including the union contracts. The single biggest problem that public schools typically face (especially in large urban districts) is that any attempt to reward based on merit (regardless of criteria) is met with fierce, almost violent opposition by the teacher's unions. I know this first hand because a big part of my platform was eliminating seniority pay entirely. I received death threats, but I also received some strong support, mostly from frustrated parents. The opposition to my position on seniority pay was under the guise that "experienced teachers are an asset to schools and we should pay them accordingly." However, under a pure merit pay system, the more experienced, senior teachers should theoretically be the most meritorious, so they would make more if they were, in fact "better." Obviously, that isn't the case, hence the impassioned opposition. The opposition to merit pay is not based specifically on the system by which merit is determined, but simply the overall concept of merit pay. The reason is simple, most urban school districts are staffed with a high percentage of people that have no business anywhere close to a classroom, let alone actually teaching in it. During the public comments portion of the Jersey City school board meetings, I would hear teachers complaining about some policy or another and the grammar, body language and word choices used by these "teachers" is not unlike one would expect to find in a prison yard. A teacher ought to be able to, at minimum conjugate "to be" correctly, especially when addressing a public meeting! A complete embarrassment. I'm not saying all teachers in Jersey City are like that, but the many of the highly vocal ones that attempt to pull the political strings in that city certainly are. So any thought of merit pay to them is a direct assault on their cushy position. In the Jersey City teachers union contract, teachers must arrive no later than 8am and can leave at 3pm. They work no more than 183 days per year, with all holidays off, plus the summers. The average salary is $68,000, for a 7 hour work day, which, discounting lunch is more like 6 hours. The get very nice health plans, pensions, 10 sick days, 3 (or maybe 5, I can't remember) personal days among other benefits. Teachers are hardly underpaid. When I taught at a nice private school in China, I had 9 hour days, making less than half the money with no summers off -- and the students there far outperformed any students I ever taught in the US. Teacher pay has nothing to do with it. Parents in the US aren't as involved and even when they are involved, the machinery of the school bureaucracy make change almost glacial. In China (and when i was in Korea before that,) if a school gets parent complaints, that teacher would likely be fired. In the US, schools never fire teachers over parent complaints. So as a parent, what's the point? It takes an act of Congress to even get your kid transferred to another classroom. Parents in the US are powerless because there is no school choice and there's no market-incentives for schools. The problem isn't that we don't pay teachers enough -- we pay them what the market will support, the problem is that bad or mediocre teachers are almost impossible to fire. It costs New York city an AVERAGE of $250,000 to fire a teacher. So unless a bad teacher quits or unless there is an obvious dereliction (i.e. criminal activity,) a teacher is pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment.
hkmurakami 13y ago
This is test prep but the tests are not in the same category of the college entrance exams we have in the states (all our standardized tests are jokes). The East Asian countries' entrance exams are orders of magnitude more difficult than US exams and actually cover real subjects in a critical manner. Think of it as AP exams on many many doses of Horse Steroids, where the exams last for hours for multiple subjects over the course of one day. I also believe that the exams are not multiple choice unlike the US. The exams tend to be a bit on the "cram" style of things from what I've heard, but they are far more rigorous than the SATs ever have or ever will b.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  >The East Asian countries' entrance exams are orders of magnitude more difficult than US exams and actually cover real subjects in a critical manner. Critical? Seriously? These are mostly pure and simple regurgitation tests...at least the gaokao is. The shoe east Asia education system is driven around memorization and regurgitation, which is why so many still "escape" to the American system around university to actually learn something. The definitely are multiple choice scantron affairs, though I don't know much a both Japan's system, but they haven't been don't so hot lately either. People in china look at the American education system in envy, people in America look at china in envy. All this envy is based on ignorance and a "grass is greener" over there mentality.

by aresant 13y ago

jessriedel 13y ago

Concurring with yummyfajita, test prep courses don't have too much impact: > On average students with private tutors improve their math scores by 19 points more than those students without private tutors. The effect is less on the verbal section, where having a private tutor only improves scores on average by seven points. Taking a commercial course has a similarly large effect on math scores, improving them on average by 17 points, and has the largest effect on verbal scores, improving them on average by 13 points. http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst... These differences (~15 points on a test with a standard deviation of 100 points) are rather small compared to the huge gaps between different socio-economic and racial backgrounds (~100 points between rich and poor). Probably worth the boost if you have the money, though.

cynicalkane 13y ago
The way you get better at something is with deliberate, difficult practice, and deep inquiry. When I was in high school preparing for the SAT I found this was the opposite of how most test prep worked. I found one book--called something like SAT 1600, which was the max at the time--that talked about how test makers try to assess you, and how questions are constructed. The drill questions were very hard and came with an explanation of how the questions worked. Taking a practice test before and after the book my score went up by over 100 points. It got to the point where I could usually answer a math problem by guessing what the answer "should" be, based on how the question was built, and then just work backwards to verify the answer. But most test prep was boring drills together with strategies like "use the process of elimination." Yeah, duh. That sort of brain-switched-off busywork is the common pattern in test prep and, more broadly, American education.
- mopedDreams 13y ago
  I agree. And isn't the idea of a test to find the people that are best a doing something. It doesn't really matter how much preparation goes into it. So maybe someone that works really hard to be better than others at something is more valuable than someone who is naturally bright? For example - a naturally bright lawyer isn't as good as a 'good' lawyer that tries really hard to be the best. Being good at a test shows that you'll be good at whatever the test is trying to find - no matter how this is achieved.
cma 13y ago
Expensive "test prep" also involves learning about scamming your way into a good score: "Nationwide, only 2 percent of students who have taken the SAT over the past 10 years have done so untimed. Most of these students' diagnoses are presumably genuine. But in places like Greenwich, Conn., and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent. " http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2006/05/flag_on_the_field.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
- earh 13y ago
  Of course the whole concept of the diagnosis makes no sense; that one person has a disease that makes them take more time to solve problems, while another person is healthy but supposedly stupider. The test should simply be untimed. (Which I thought it was, with the switch to computer-based real-time adaptive tests?)
YokoZar 13y ago
If I remember my days as a test-prep teacher, I believe one of the largest predictors of SAT score was simply the age of the student. In other words, if you give a thousand students a free practice test, then sign them up for a course that summer, by the time they actually finish the course six months later they're already expected to have improved regardless of whether you teach them anything at all.
- rlanday 13y ago
  I hadn’t thought of this effect, but it’s kind of an ingenious way to market test prep. I think at some point, students’ scores stop improving, from a combination of having been exposed to all the background material necessary for the test to be accurate, and their brains finishing development (after which intelligence is largely stable), but up until then, students’ scores improve with age. You can still use a test like the SAT to compare younger students, but you have to norm it against students of the same age (I think it’s actually better to test students at a younger age because a test of the same difficulty has more ceiling room).
rlanday 13y ago
“Such tests are blind to a student’s high school record—instead, they are intended as an independent, objective measure of college “readiness”.” Claiming that the SAT measures “college readiness” is complete and utter bullshit. The SAT measures intelligence and the College Board knows it. “College readiness” is a liberal euphemism. It actually turns out that if you try to test specific skills (I think the writing section kind of falls in this category) instead of overall intelligence, the results are less predictive for whatever purposes the test is being used for, since specific skills can be learned, whereas overall intelligence is largely stable and has broad effects. The fact that scores cannot be significantly improved by coaching is evidence that the SAT does in fact largely measure intelligence.

yummyfajitas 13y ago

Another criticism (c) is that test prep doesn't do very much. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html

muzz 13y ago

Not-even a test-prep guru, more like someone who makes a $4M/year selling online videos for $4/hr Here, Khan Academy gives away their video for free. The subject of the article is more like The Video Professor, rather than what is commonly called a "teacher"

cabalamat 13y ago

> (b) Damaging the test integrity which is designed to find bright kids, not just "well prepared for this one day" kids. Either a test is important, or it is not important. If it is not important, it is a waste of everyone's time and money, and ought to be scrapped. If it is important, people will obviously try to game it.Therefore all tests should be resistant to gaming: the only way to do well at the test should be to actually be good at whatever the test is trying to measure. If a test doesn't have this proprty, it should also be scrapped, for the reasons you state and also because it is a waste of time and money. I don't blame Princeton review for bad tests, I blame the people setting the tests.

sillysaurus 13y ago
Actually, a test falls along a continuum of importances. Some tests are better than others, not merely useless/useful.
mathattack 13y ago
This is actually very hard, because a test can seem to be unpreparable, but then over time people find a way to prepare. It's very much a moving target.

dba7dba 13y ago

It's unfortunate the wsj article's main topic/pic was of a rock star teacher. The lesson US needs to learn is that 'teachers' just in general in S Korea are RESPECTED (like honest-lawyer/doctor) and not viewed as someone who just wasn't smart/achieving enough for some other career (which is the impression in US). This just translates into a situation where becoming a teacher in a public school in S Korea is just about one of the hardest careers to achieve in S Korea, especially if you want to teach in a major city. I know of someone (Korean American) whose cousin back in S Korea just couldn't get a job as a teacher near Seoul, capital S Korea. And the cousin had always been considered a good/model student while a student herself. She was smart/motivated but just not good enough, due to the fierce competition. This fierce competition leads to a situation where you end up with highly qualified/motivated teachers. Not always but most of the time. This whole hagwon story is just a result of the respect parents place on education/teacher. Don't pay too much attention to hagwon story. It's just a by product of the real lesson we need to learn, that parents value education for their kids. In US, there's the general impression that one becomes a public school teacher because he/she didn't have the grade for much else.

fsck--off 13y ago

Not having a free market (because of gender inequality) was actually very beneficial for education. Until the mid 20th century, one of the only available professions to half of world's brilliant minds was teaching. Privileged kids often had live-in tutors, called governesses. Governesses would teach children foreign languages, musical instruments, and poetry, and other subjects. For a time, being a governess was one of the only ways a middle class single woman could support herself, no matter how brilliant she was. One such governess was named Marie Curie. In the U.S there was a "brain drain" to other professions. The U.S does not recruit top students to become teachers in the same way that other European countries do, nor does it pay them as well or provide as many benefits. This is one of the reasons that the U.S has fallen in the international rankings.

briandear 13y ago
TL;DR: Teacher pay isn't the problem, eliminating bad teachers is. When I was preparing to run for the Jersey City Board of Education, I spent a lot of time studying that district, specifically, the pay scales, promotion criteria and other structural issues relating to teacher benefits and recruitment, including the union contracts. The single biggest problem that public schools typically face (especially in large urban districts) is that any attempt to reward based on merit (regardless of criteria) is met with fierce, almost violent opposition by the teacher's unions. I know this first hand because a big part of my platform was eliminating seniority pay entirely. I received death threats, but I also received some strong support, mostly from frustrated parents. The opposition to my position on seniority pay was under the guise that "experienced teachers are an asset to schools and we should pay them accordingly." However, under a pure merit pay system, the more experienced, senior teachers should theoretically be the most meritorious, so they would make more if they were, in fact "better." Obviously, that isn't the case, hence the impassioned opposition. The opposition to merit pay is not based specifically on the system by which merit is determined, but simply the overall concept of merit pay. The reason is simple, most urban school districts are staffed with a high percentage of people that have no business anywhere close to a classroom, let alone actually teaching in it. During the public comments portion of the Jersey City school board meetings, I would hear teachers complaining about some policy or another and the grammar, body language and word choices used by these "teachers" is not unlike one would expect to find in a prison yard. A teacher ought to be able to, at minimum conjugate "to be" correctly, especially when addressing a public meeting! A complete embarrassment. I'm not saying all teachers in Jersey City are like that, but the many of the highly vocal ones that attempt to pull the political strings in that city certainly are. So any thought of merit pay to them is a direct assault on their cushy position. In the Jersey City teachers union contract, teachers must arrive no later than 8am and can leave at 3pm. They work no more than 183 days per year, with all holidays off, plus the summers. The average salary is $68,000, for a 7 hour work day, which, discounting lunch is more like 6 hours. The get very nice health plans, pensions, 10 sick days, 3 (or maybe 5, I can't remember) personal days among other benefits. Teachers are hardly underpaid. When I taught at a nice private school in China, I had 9 hour days, making less than half the money with no summers off -- and the students there far outperformed any students I ever taught in the US. Teacher pay has nothing to do with it. Parents in the US aren't as involved and even when they are involved, the machinery of the school bureaucracy make change almost glacial. In China (and when i was in Korea before that,) if a school gets parent complaints, that teacher would likely be fired. In the US, schools never fire teachers over parent complaints. So as a parent, what's the point? It takes an act of Congress to even get your kid transferred to another classroom. Parents in the US are powerless because there is no school choice and there's no market-incentives for schools. The problem isn't that we don't pay teachers enough -- we pay them what the market will support, the problem is that bad or mediocre teachers are almost impossible to fire. It costs New York city an AVERAGE of $250,000 to fire a teacher. So unless a bad teacher quits or unless there is an obvious dereliction (i.e. criminal activity,) a teacher is pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment.

hkmurakami 13y ago

This is test prep but the tests are not in the same category of the college entrance exams we have in the states (all our standardized tests are jokes). The East Asian countries' entrance exams are orders of magnitude more difficult than US exams and actually cover real subjects in a critical manner. Think of it as AP exams on many many doses of Horse Steroids, where the exams last for hours for multiple subjects over the course of one day. I also believe that the exams are not multiple choice unlike the US. The exams tend to be a bit on the "cram" style of things from what I've heard, but they are far more rigorous than the SATs ever have or ever will b.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
>The East Asian countries' entrance exams are orders of magnitude more difficult than US exams and actually cover real subjects in a critical manner. Critical? Seriously? These are mostly pure and simple regurgitation tests...at least the gaokao is. The shoe east Asia education system is driven around memorization and regurgitation, which is why so many still "escape" to the American system around university to actually learn something. The definitely are multiple choice scantron affairs, though I don't know much a both Japan's system, but they haven't been don't so hot lately either. People in china look at the American education system in envy, people in America look at china in envy. All this envy is based on ignorance and a "grass is greener" over there mentality.