5 ms·

> Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require essentially no new funds. Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding i

> Fake because it was not designed to work - it was designed to require essentially no new funds. Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding is an issue, why not increase it at state or local level? > Known solutions to school problems exist, You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!

biehl 12y ago
> Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding is an issue, why not increase it at state or local level? Yes, why not? However, as a federal intervention - it was not designed to work. > You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane! Evidence contradict your claim. Finland has strong teacher unions. And the measures I mentioned are largely orthogonal to teacher unions.
sien 12y ago
In reply to biehl. Finland has been falling on the PISA tests and on other rankings does not do that well. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-former-nordic-education-star-latest-pisa-tests-focusing-interest http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-fo... The answer is clear from the international results. If you want a high performing school have big classes, high stakes tests and loads of repetition like the high performing Asian schools do. Or you could ponder why with such great schools why developed Asian countries like Korea and Japan don't run rings around the US in, say, software development and if, in the end, average school rankings don't really matter that much.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  I love how they use Shanghai to represent the whole of China. A few rich cities don't make for very interesting data points. Education in most of Asia is even more dysfunctional than in the states and definitely europe. Even Japan and Korea have mostly horrible schools focused on high stakes testing, outdated teaching methods, and suppressing as much creative thinking as possible.
JupiterMoon 12y ago
> You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane! How about instead of beating people up mentally the whole time we instead focus on actually increasing their levels of job satisfaction and see if this doesn't lead to them improving at their jobs? Or maybe continuing training for teachers? Or instead we could just make everyone really easy to fire because this clearly leads to excellence and a real diligence in so many jobs. E.g. see the fast food industry or banking (where vast pay deals are needed to offset the essentially rubbish working environment).
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>getting rid of teacher unions // The answer to an educational poverty gap is to remove the ability for teachers to gain support for professional development and to find easy legal representation? Most teachers have a very strong moral underpin to their desire to teach - they want to help students to attain the best possible outcomes (not necessarily financial wealth); unionisation helps them to voice that desire, as well as avoid unfair employment practices and buy in to a system of professional development. http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/NEA_Vision_Mission_and_Values_2015_NEA_Handbook.pdf http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/NEA_Vision_Mission_and_Values... is the "Vision, Mission and Values" of the NEA, the largest labour union (if Wikipedia is right!) in the USA. If you look at the NEA's website you'll see one of their key issues being addressed is achievement gaps, http://www.nea.org/home/AchievementGaps.html http://www.nea.org/home/AchievementGaps.html. I fail to see how preventing professionals from working together helps the situation. Re tenure in particular; is preventing legislatures from firing teachers without a just cause really going to help? You can fire teachers for failing to perform efficiently in their role, for "action unbecoming" of their position; you just can't fire them and not provide sufficient grounds. That doesn't sound insane if you're wanting to provide a stable environment in which to build a professional workforce.
acdha 12y ago
> You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance First, if you think that teacher performance isn't evaluated, you're simply too uninformed to be participating in this discussion. Not only is there constant testing, in many districts pay is heavily linked to it. For example, where I live in DC the performance bonus for an exceptional teacher is nearly half of their annual salary! This has a number of problems: the most obvious being that there are many factors outside of the teacher's control – poverty, attendance problems, untreated medical conditions, etc. – and the most damaging being the fact that you're talking about small sample sizes which means that from one year to the next a teacher's performance will “change” entirely due to the fact that last year they were randomly given better prepared/motivated students than this year. Cathy O'Neill was looking into these numbers for NYC and concluded that nearly 600 teachers a year are likely to be unfairly punished for random variations: http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/03/how-many-nyc-are-arbitrarily-punished-by-the-vam-about-578-per-year/ http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/03/how-many-nyc-are-arbitrarily-... Moving on to the questions of unions, again you need to learn more about the field before evaluating anyone's claims for how to fix it. Too commonly people on HN assume that teaching should work just like our high-demand, high-pay programming jobs and that mistake steers everything else badly astray. Consider what happens in each scenario if you disagree with your boss, and ask yourself why there might be a stronger need for a union to protect workers’ rights in the second case: Programmer in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Call a friend / actually reply to a recruiter 3. Interview tomorrow, start a new job in a week or two unless you decide to take a break Teacher in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Since positions rarely open up during the school year, sit around for the next 6 months wondering how to pay your rent. 3. If you don't work in a major city, your former employer is probably the only employer in the same county so you either need to move or your commute just became much longer. Hope you don't have any family to make that complicated… 4. Be prepared to explain why you left, which is quite unusual and disruptive for the students, which is not your fault but will often be held against you. 5. If you do get an offer, remember that since turnover is low in good schools, unless you live an area with rapid population growth most of the positions which open any given year are probably going to be in the more stressful schools

biehl 12y ago

> Isn't this policy a federal intervention? If school funding is an issue, why not increase it at state or local level? Yes, why not? However, as a federal intervention - it was not designed to work. > You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane! Evidence contradict your claim. Finland has strong teacher unions. And the measures I mentioned are largely orthogonal to teacher unions.

sien 12y ago

In reply to biehl. Finland has been falling on the PISA tests and on other rankings does not do that well. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-former-nordic-education-star-latest-pisa-tests-focusing-interest http://www.economist.com/news/international/21591195-fall-fo... The answer is clear from the international results. If you want a high performing school have big classes, high stakes tests and loads of repetition like the high performing Asian schools do. Or you could ponder why with such great schools why developed Asian countries like Korea and Japan don't run rings around the US in, say, software development and if, in the end, average school rankings don't really matter that much.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
I love how they use Shanghai to represent the whole of China. A few rich cities don't make for very interesting data points. Education in most of Asia is even more dysfunctional than in the states and definitely europe. Even Japan and Korea have mostly horrible schools focused on high stakes testing, outdated teaching methods, and suppressing as much creative thinking as possible.

JupiterMoon 12y ago

> You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane! How about instead of beating people up mentally the whole time we instead focus on actually increasing their levels of job satisfaction and see if this doesn't lead to them improving at their jobs? Or maybe continuing training for teachers? Or instead we could just make everyone really easy to fire because this clearly leads to excellence and a real diligence in so many jobs. E.g. see the fast food industry or banking (where vast pay deals are needed to offset the essentially rubbish working environment).

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

>getting rid of teacher unions // The answer to an educational poverty gap is to remove the ability for teachers to gain support for professional development and to find easy legal representation? Most teachers have a very strong moral underpin to their desire to teach - they want to help students to attain the best possible outcomes (not necessarily financial wealth); unionisation helps them to voice that desire, as well as avoid unfair employment practices and buy in to a system of professional development. http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/NEA_Vision_Mission_and_Values_2015_NEA_Handbook.pdf http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/NEA_Vision_Mission_and_Values... is the "Vision, Mission and Values" of the NEA, the largest labour union (if Wikipedia is right!) in the USA. If you look at the NEA's website you'll see one of their key issues being addressed is achievement gaps, http://www.nea.org/home/AchievementGaps.html http://www.nea.org/home/AchievementGaps.html. I fail to see how preventing professionals from working together helps the situation. Re tenure in particular; is preventing legislatures from firing teachers without a just cause really going to help? You can fire teachers for failing to perform efficiently in their role, for "action unbecoming" of their position; you just can't fire them and not provide sufficient grounds. That doesn't sound insane if you're wanting to provide a stable environment in which to build a professional workforce.

acdha 12y ago

> You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance First, if you think that teacher performance isn't evaluated, you're simply too uninformed to be participating in this discussion. Not only is there constant testing, in many districts pay is heavily linked to it. For example, where I live in DC the performance bonus for an exceptional teacher is nearly half of their annual salary! This has a number of problems: the most obvious being that there are many factors outside of the teacher's control – poverty, attendance problems, untreated medical conditions, etc. – and the most damaging being the fact that you're talking about small sample sizes which means that from one year to the next a teacher's performance will “change” entirely due to the fact that last year they were randomly given better prepared/motivated students than this year. Cathy O'Neill was looking into these numbers for NYC and concluded that nearly 600 teachers a year are likely to be unfairly punished for random variations: http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/03/how-many-nyc-are-arbitrarily-punished-by-the-vam-about-578-per-year/ http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/03/how-many-nyc-are-arbitrarily-... Moving on to the questions of unions, again you need to learn more about the field before evaluating anyone's claims for how to fix it. Too commonly people on HN assume that teaching should work just like our high-demand, high-pay programming jobs and that mistake steers everything else badly astray. Consider what happens in each scenario if you disagree with your boss, and ask yourself why there might be a stronger need for a union to protect workers’ rights in the second case: Programmer in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Call a friend / actually reply to a recruiter 3. Interview tomorrow, start a new job in a week or two unless you decide to take a break Teacher in an at-will employment situation: 1. “We're not doing this right” / “You're fired” 2. Since positions rarely open up during the school year, sit around for the next 6 months wondering how to pay your rent. 3. If you don't work in a major city, your former employer is probably the only employer in the same county so you either need to move or your commute just became much longer. Hope you don't have any family to make that complicated… 4. Be prepared to explain why you left, which is quite unusual and disruptive for the students, which is not your fault but will often be held against you. 5. If you do get an offer, remember that since turnover is low in good schools, unless you live an area with rapid population growth most of the positions which open any given year are probably going to be in the more stressful schools