NYC To Release Teacher Evaluation Data Over Union Protests 557
langelgjm writes "Bringing a lengthy legal battle to a close, New York City's Department of Education will today release detailed evaluation reports on individual English and math teachers as a result of a request under public information laws. The city's teachers union has responded with full page ads (PDF) decrying the methodology used in the evaluations. The court's decision attempts to balance the public interest in this data against the rights of individual teachers. Across the country, a large number of states are moving to evaluate teachers based on student performance in an attempt to raise student achievement in the U.S."
Frist Psot! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Frist Psot! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Frist Psot! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
So, the teacher wants to hide the report card? (Score:3, Informative)
I've taught in the military, public schools, and private industry. As a teacher, I know that evaluations of my technique can help me hone my skills and become more effective. The public teachers in NYC should take the critique and act upon it to make them better at their jobs.
Re:So, the teacher wants to hide the report card? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:So, the teacher wants to hide the report card? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, except that parents of elementary and secondary students are notoriously overbearing and bloodthirsty, and school boards are notoriously spineless and completely unwilling to stand up to oversensitive parents. If the parents have a reason to try to get a teacher fired, that teacher will get fired.
I see this causing more harm than good. With the way they get treated, it's a wonder we have any teachers at all.
Re:So, the teacher wants to hide the report card? (Score:5, Interesting)
RIght now, in New York, it is so difficult to fire teachers, that even after demonstrable problems, (multiple DUIs, etc) the process can take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here is a chart that demonstrates the point [google.com]. I agree this is not the best way to handle this, and some good teachers will be harmed as a result, but it is a natural attempt to get around a system that makes it extremely difficult to get rid of bad teachers.
Ultimately, any system for evaluating teachers is going to be somewhat unfair. But we need to remember that schools are there for kids, not for teachers, and there needs to be a way to get rid of the bad ones. Hopefully this will lead to reforms that achieve that goal.
The thin point of the spear (Score:3)
That is exactly what a certain school of political thought desires. They already have most of the simple-minded, marching in lockstep and voting against their own interests; destroy effective and honest public education and you easily swell those ranks for generations to come.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You make a fine point on the purpose of evaluations but did you look at the formula being used to evaluate the teachers? This is not a simple case of Teacher X's students averaged 95% on this years test and last year they averaged 93%. The final score in the NYC equation is influenced by factors such as "True Total School Effect" and "District Participation Indicator." The misinterpretation of proper statistics is difficult enough without introducing "magic math" into the equation. Many of the factors used
Re:So, the teacher wants to hide the report card? (Score:5, Insightful)
The public teachers in NYC should take the critique and act upon it to make them better at their jobs.
You really expect us to believe these evaluations are accurate and unbiased enough to be taken as constructive criticism? Can it be guaranteed that nobody "fudged" the evaluations just because they had a personal problem with someone? As soon as someone's livelihood is trashed by way of false data, it's too late to undo it.
If it must happen, the data should be anonymized an only be as granular as school district or school itself, not individuals. If a school/district is a problem let the local governing bodies figure out how to bring their scores up.
Re: (Score:3)
You really expect us to believe
No, I don't expect you to believe that. Further, I don't believe there are evaluations that are 'unbiased enough' for you to accept, because I don't believe your objections have anything to do with bias, or integrity, or any other legitimate rationale.
Our edu-crats never hesitate to expound upon the importance of their role in our world. If we accept this argument as justification for sucking down 50% [ca.gov] of our state budgets then we have more than reason enough to scrutinize their performance. Indulging u
Reviews are biased, get over it. (Score:3)
I don't expect public sector reviews to be any less unbiased than they are in the private sector. If your boss doesn't like you / writes a bad review, it is in your best interested to find a boss that does. Public sector employees are not exempt from this workplace reality.
Re: (Score:3)
As a teacher, I know that evaluations of my technique can help me hone my skills and become more effective. The public teachers in NYC should take the critique and act upon it to make them better at their jobs.
Yes, good evaluations can do that, but these aren't it. In this case the Union is right. These "evaluations" aren't evaluations, they are results of multiple choice tests run through a regression. Anyone with two bits of understanding of statistics knows to take a regression result with a block of salt, and when you start with bad data that compounds the problem. It is widely considered among education researchers that multiple choice tests do not measure well what a student knows.
If the NYC school system
This will only encourage cheating (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than focus on actual learning, teachers will be tempted to just focus on getting their students pass various tests, going as far as actively cheating or encouraging/enabling students to do so.
And here I thought everyone read Freakonomics...
Public Employees (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the job performance of any public employee should be public information as long as it doesn't included protected information such as health (which it shouldn't). The union has every right to protest evaluation methods, but then they should work on changing the methods - not hiding the information.
Re:Public Employees (Score:5, Insightful)
How would that work? I took over a dysfunctional engineering department at a public utility a year ago. In the year I've been here, our time to design a project has ballooned by a factor of 3, we have added a person, we have gone tens of thousands of dollars over budget, our vehicle fleet has gone from 1 to 4. By every metric I am an utter failure and would be perceived as such in any court of public opinion.
The fact is that because we now spend the time to do engineering right, our crews have cut on average 10-20% off the construction time, we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in production due to just-in-time delivery and accurate estimating of raw materials, but those metrics are for other departments and they would be seen as great successes - even though they had little to do with their own success.
So how do you evaluate a single person that's part of a team? I take big hits to my department because overall we are a success as a company. How do you measure success?
Re: (Score:3)
My husband once took over a warehouse that had been used by an unscrupulous manager to steal thousands of dollars of inventory. Needless to say, none of the records were accurate. My husband assessed the situation, contacted the central distribution group, and returned several months of the worst metrics they'd ever seen. But at the end, everything was fixed—and he got a promotion out of the deal.
Numbers aren't everything. His bosses knew the story behind those terrible numbers, but just imagine if hi
Re: (Score:3)
By every metric I am an utter failure and would be perceived as such in any court of public opinion.
Actually, not true - and the rebuttal comes from your own post:
...our crews have cut on average 10-20% off the construction time, we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in production due to just-in-time delivery and accurate estimating of raw materials...
You tried to play it off as those metrics applying to other departments, but no department is an island. You only need to point to the success of your 'customers' (the other departments) as a metric showing your own.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Job performance?
How is evaluating how students perform akin to how well a teacher taught their subjects?
Using a standard car analogy, i guess we can relate car accidents to how well the road repair crews are doing their job, correct?
You can't force students to learn. Until they devise a methodology for injecting knowledge directly into their brains the best teacher in the world cannot teach students who do not want to learn.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what's so fru
Re: (Score:3)
Ohh, that's interesting. So you think student classes aren't stacked? Problem children are identified and if the higher ups have it out for a teacher, they get lumped with all the problem children. I know for a fact this happens.
Besides, teachers no longer have control over how they teach and their curriculum. It's been watered down to teach these lessons or else, stray from what is handed down and you get tossed out.
Pass or fail criteria is also used, not student history. If the student is always faili
Re: (Score:3)
I think the job performance of any public employee should be public information
Why not make the job performance of every private employee public information? Or, at the least, accessible to shareholders - which for publically traded companies is basically the same thing.
I suspect many people here would not like their performance being evaluated by a metric and published for everyone to see. Lines Of Code, anyone? Of course, when it's your job in question, then there's always a reason why evaluating performance is more complex than a simple metric.
Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
As with the story about Australia pruning academics who didn't push papers fast enough that we discussed yesterday, there are a lot of bad ways to measure teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, these include many of the easy ones and many of the popular ones.
Teachers aren't mystically unquantifiable flowers; but in a world where people can, with a straight face, propose 'Hey, just tot up their students' scores on the standardized test! Now you know which teachers are good!' without any sort of correction for such minor matters as 'student demographics' it is hard to be uniformly optimistic about teacher evaluations...
The other, broader, consideration is whether the teachers should feel justified in complaining about the level of public scrutiny that they are being subjected to relative to other state functionaries in positions of trust and authority... While there is a good argument to be made that teachers' job performance is a matter of public importance, I wonder if you could get a detailed evaluation of a NYC cop's record as easily as you could an NYC English teacher?
Before the rants start... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before the rants start about over-entitled public employees I think it's worth thinking this situation through. How many people in the IT field would want their performance, as measured by some random measurement (such as the ever popular Lines-of-Code-per-Hour), published by their employer? For their clients and future employers and clients to see?
There are major problems with this approach. It gives even stronger incentives for the teachers to try to game the system, which is generally detrimental to the quality of teaching. It frequently punishes teachers working in badly run schools, while it rewards teachers for working in well run schools (as their performance will in most cases be better when they work in a well functioning school). In addition to this the statistics are rather jiffy...
There are much better ways to improve the educational system than this... Such as for example paying teachers a decent salary. The day an average teacher earns as much an average engineer you will start to huge improvements in your educational system. Of course it will take 20 years before that approach starts to really pay off, in having a better educated workforce.
On the other hand, who am I to offer advice on the American educational system? It offers us engineers in northern Europe a great competitive advantage. Please keep destroying it! ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Before the rants start... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but chronically underpaying while at the same time heaping disdain on the profession and on the individual, and expecting them to perform miracles with snotty Johnny is not a recipe for success.
Show me a profession that has as high a threshold to entry while at the same time being as low-paid and held in such public disdain, and I'll show you a profession where smart entry level people are leaving after a few years, leaving only the deadwood. You get what you pay for.
I resemble that remark (Score:2)
I went so far as to get a provisional teaching certificate in my local high school district; my starting salary, full-time, even in a "high demand" STEM field, was $26K/year, less than half of what I was making as a software engineer at the time. (And I wouldn't be working full-time initially -- only way in the door is subbing, and hoping something opens up). To put that in perspective, my mortgage plus utilities (in central Florida) run me about $18K/yr, leaving $6K for taxes, food, transportation, cloth
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Michelle Rhee tried to give teachers six figure salaries in DC if they would give up tenure. The union wouldn't even let it get to a vote. With the unions the crappy teachers get more invested in the union (it helps them be lazy, do nothing awful teachers) because they really enjoy working the system. They then reinforce the policies that keep the bad teachers in place. (You know, the kind that show up drunk on the job, etc). Good teachers are good teachers, and measurable systems will demonstrate that
Re:Before the rants start... (Score:5, Informative)
WHAT? [nytimes.com]
ABOUT THIS? [thedailybeast.com]
No, seriously. The people that claim that unions only protect lazy teachers have no idea what the current system of education in the USA looks like, except through what the major news organizations feed them. If your job required not just you to perform, but also to raise 30-40 humans because their parents won't, pay for your supplies out of pocket, and require 10-12 hour days 6 days a week, would you be willing to go with 'the next big movement'?
The problem is that teachers are jaded. Everything 'good' that comes along is usually just a rehash of what has been done to them in the past, or an excuse to privatize education
Oh, and Michelle Rhea was, in my opinion, just a shill for privatization, so her buddies could get their hands on that sweet, sweet Department of Education money. But, that's just my opinion
Re: (Score:2)
If you picked a better analogy... you might have had a point... evaluation based on LOC/hour is like evaluating a teacher on how many homework assignments they g
Re: (Score:2)
There are much better ways to improve the educational system than this... Such as for example paying teachers a decent salary. The day an average teacher earns as much an average engineer you will start to huge improvements in your educational system.
I am assuming it is easier to be a teacher than an engineer, based on the supply and demand for both.
Re:Before the rants start... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, who am I to offer advice on the American educational system? It offers us engineers in northern Europe a great competitive advantage. Please keep destroying it! ;)
I'm not sure precisely which country OP is in, but if it's Finland, he knows what he's talking about: Their education system is one of the best in the world, and way better than the US system. Most notable things the government does differently:
- Provides information to parents about raising newborns as soon as the child is born.
- Provides comprehensive day care / early childhood education starting at 8 months and going until 5 years. Alternately, the parents can choose to care for the child at home and receive periodic visits to ensure child safety.
- At about age 16, students choose between an academic upper school or a vocational school, which will focus on college prep or occupational training.
- Tuition is basically free at university / polytechnic. The difference is that university is more for theoretical and academic work, whily polytechnic is more for advanced practical skills.
- Teachers are highly paid, highly respected, highly competitive, and always have the equivalent of a master's degree.
boo frickin hoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:boo frickin hoo (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, wait, no they're not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So, your idea is to export shitty, unrepresentative quantitative measures to other fields even though you admit they suck? That's brilliant.
How about we stop bitching about teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
How do you propose we "hold parents accountable"?
It's not correct, it's just easy (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, those are mostly rhetorical questions. The answer to all of them is because, "then people won't vote for me". If you want to improve student achievement in school, start with the parents. A teacher sees a high school student an average of 1 hour a day, or 5 hours a week. A parent (theoretically) sees their child 16 hours a day, or 80 hours Monday-Friday.
Want to improve student achievement on tests? Critique the parents instead.
How do you evaluate teachers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Full disclosure - I am a teacher at a public middle school in an area with a 90% free and reduced lunch rate, high unemployment and 85% poor minority.
The problem is really how you evaluate teachers and schools, there are so many ways to take data and interpret that data. Do you give a standardized test and grade every student exactly the same and base a teacher’s performance off of the pass/fail ratio? If so, those teachers in buildings like mine which have traditionally low performing students will look bad. The cynics will say that it shouldn’t matter but I have many students who come to me from foreign countries who have had little to no formal education and do not speak English. Even after a few years in the United States their English is many time not proficient enough to pass a formal exam. The teachers in my building do a great job but I see more and more good teachers leaving our building for “better” students because the pressure is so high teaching traditionally low performing students and they don’t like being called a bad teacher when in fact they work their tails off to get the results they do.
Do you base a teacher’s performance off of the progress made by students while in that teacher’s classroom? Take a baseline score and see how they progress through the year. Critics of this method will argue that a failing grade is a failing grade no matter how much progress the students have made.
We have created a system in the US in which every child is treated exactly the same, assumed to be that same and assumed to be able to meet the exact same “high” standards. The realist among us realizes that this is far from the case. Because of this attitude that everyone is the same our high achieving students are being cheated because we teachers spend the majority of our time trying desperately to bring the low end up and ignore the high end while those in the middle are coasting along. We refuse as a nation to serve each student in the way they should be served. The trend in education today is to mix all students together in a classroom and this creates a nearly impossible scenario for a teacher who may have over thirty kids in a classroom (I know physics instructors in our district with over 40) in which they have to serve all levels of students at once.
I will step off my soapbox now.
Re:How do you evaluate teachers? (Score:5, Informative)
Is that perfect? No. Is that a good indicator? Yeah, especially when you have teachers that literally did nothing all year vs some that raised -all- of their students by several grade levels, in the same school with similar starting students.
The study addresses all these points, and is very clear about saying that they are not trying for an absolute rank, they were trying to just use the data to identify teachers that were working vs those that were not.
Yes, "teaching the test" is bad, but looking at the data, it is clear that some teachers werent even doing that, their students literally learned close to nothing in that year.
Progress is all that matters. In your example of a "bad" district, it still matters that we teach the highschool dropouts as much as we can while we have them. -No- one is blaming teachers for failing students, especially this study. We (they) are blaming them when they fail to teach.
Better than student grades (Score:2)
Rating teachers based on student performance is probably more accurate than rating students. The statistical base is larger.
Multiple Issues (Score:2)
Re:Correction (Score:2)
Learning disabilities (Score:2)
If teachers are [there] to teach, then their Key Results Area is getting students to learn.
Would would a rewards-only work environment do for teachers who end up getting stuck with students with learning disabilities?
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tough rocks. A few shitty teachers made life a living hell for one of my kids so pardon me if I'm not on the worship-the-teacher bandwagon.
Why *shouldn't* they live under the same thumb they so firmly implant on their students?
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the teacher's union would have more credibility if teachers were ever fired for poor performance. If there appeared to be any kind of performance-based accountability, the public might not care about this.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the teacher's union would have more credibility if teachers were ever fired for poor performance. If there appeared to be any kind of performance-based accountability, the public might not care about this.
That's the core of the argument, but the part the union is fighting. This is the kind of fight which erodes the union's credibility.
Back when I lived in Michigan the auto workers unions were busy blaming the car companies for their eroding market share, quality of cars, etc. Then an amazing magazine, as part of the Detroit Free Press, was published containing several accounts by former auto workers, who seemed to be lacking a lot of guile or simply felt there was nothing to lose, confessing how overstaffed the assembly lines where - because the union would never back down. At the least little action by companies the workers would go on strike, so they hamstrung the automakers. Now it's a different generation of auto workers and a leaner, more competitive several auto companies. The excesses forced upon the manufacturers have taken decades to undo, nearly bringing GM and Chrysler to the end in 2008, because they were still saddled with retirement and benefit plans, negotiated decades before, which were crushing the companies.
The teachers unions should take a page from this: Don't ruin the education or the credibility of all teachers for the sake of a few - embrase performance review and become a part of it.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that most of the proposed merit-based evaluation systems that are going into place are as bad as, if not worse than, the existing system.
Evaluating teachers based on student performance results in:
1) Teachers that "teach the test" - as a result we have mediocre educational performance getting rewarded.
2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
However the current seniority-based system is also shit - once a teacher receives tenure there is no incentive to continue performance.
We need to move away from the current system - that much is clear. The problem is that so far, all of the "merit" based proposals don't have any metrics for "merit" that are worth jack shit, and will make our educational system even worse than it already is.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:4, Interesting)
No shit.
Friend of mine worked in public education in Dallas. Was a great teacher, repeated teacher of the month and a couple teacher of the year ratings by the district, ESL certified, the works - but they were under the gun to hire more "native spanish speaking ESL teachers."
Their solution? Stick all the troublemaker kids in his class, and REFUSE to give him a second adult to back him up for classroom discipline. We're talking the ones whose dads were in jail for gang violence, who would regularly start fights, who it was known their relatives were members of antagonistic gangs. Sure enough, one day, two of them went at it - one (black) kid trying to stab one (latino) kid in the eye over a fight between their older sibs' gangs. He got the class up, separated the kids, marched them down the hall to the principal's office, holding each by the arm so that they couldn't try to go at each other again.
He gets put "on leave" and let go at the end of the year for - wait for it - "touching a student against policy" by breaking up the fight. And they would have run him off the other way if he'd let a kid get stabbed in his classroom.
Teacher evaluations based on student performance or incidents? Fucking bullshit, there are a dozen ways administrators with an axe to grind or who decide they just don't like someone in an office-politics way can screw with the numbers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's not what unions are anymore. They are political activists and spend union dues attempting to inflate salaries in order to further inflate union dues and enrich a very small group of thugs who bully and abuse both the employers and the employees they "represent". The unions have become little more than accepted crime families.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post is a bit short on specifics. What do the jobs entail? If "what unions do" involves forcing the rest of society to pay $67/hour for a monkey with a torque wrench, I think we'll be fine without them, thanks.
Time will tell if that kind of bullshit is any more sustainable in Germany than it was in Detroit. I'm guessing not.
Re: (Score:3)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/ [forbes.com]
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011 @ 5:42PM |60,178 views
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
Re: (Score:3)
Non-union workers in the equally profitable VW and BMJ plants in the non-union American south get $17 an hour.
By your own statement (assuming it has any validity whatsoever), the manufacturers are EQUALLY PROFITABLE. By that very statement you must conceed that in the absence of unions, American workers are still making exactly the same percentage of overall profit after other operating costs are considered as their German counterparts. You must also conceed that if the American workers were earning more money than they are, the American manufacturer would be LESS
Re: (Score:3)
I've worked in Worldwide Operations Strategy for a major unionized manufacturing company. I've done colossal projects looking at whether to shift capacity to Germany, the Northern USA, the Southern USA, India, Mexico, etc. There's a reason why Germans get the wages they do and Southern Americans get the wages they do.
German line workers generally have years of technical training on and outside the job before they get those wages. To make a comparison, German Technician to German Engineer is a bit like Nu
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're talking about racial hiring.
One of the reasons tenure is so important to teachers is that without tenure, they would get fired and the school board, or whomever is responsible for hiring, would put in their friends, based on race, religion, politics, or whatever.
One of the most dramatic cases was in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, NY (where I grew up) several years ago. Under Mayor Lindsay, the local school boards had more control. This board came up with a plan that had the result of firing most of the white (mostly Jewish) teachers and replacing them with local teachers who were black. This was one of the most disruptive things that ever happened to New York politics. There are people who have hated each other ever since.
Before tenure, teaching was part of the spoils system. When Democrats won the elections, the they would fire all the teachers and replace them with Democrats. When Republicans got in, they would fire all the teachers and replace them with Republicans. You think it's hard getting rid of an incompetent teacher? Try getting rid of an incompetent brother-in-law of a city councilman. Try getting rid of Mayor Giuliani's girlfriend.
Tenured teachers can be fired in New York City. It's difficult and it *should* be difficult. Principals and administrators *do* play favorites. Do you want it to be easy to destroy a teacher's life with accusations that may or may not be justified?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I probably forgot to mention the weapon the kid was trying to use was a sharpened pencil. Not that I suppose it makes much difference.
The point I am making is: IT DID NOT MATTER WHAT HE DID. If he'd allowed a kid to be stabbed, the question would be "why didn't you stop it" and they were planning to railroad him out for that. If he did what he did, they were going to railroad him out for "touching a kid." They set him up, they put kids into his classroom with a history of gang contact and being involved in
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's this weak-minded insanity that contributes to our decline. You get sued/fired/condemned if you try to stop a stabbing? Guess what, you get sued/fired/condemned for doing nothing and letting a kid get killed while you stand there watching and waiting for cops to show up to mop up the aftermath too. You are exactly the kind of polically correct hands-off nutjob that puts a teacher in a hostile environment in a no win situation. Why the hell would any good and honest human being put themself in a situation in which they are nearly gauranteed to be eventually burned to the ground?
You are actually telling people to not do the right thing and try to stop violence and crime. It's no wonder this world is so fucked up.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't stand people who oversimplify shit like that. It's not my/your job, so let the situation get much worse, have the kid locked up, because them be the rules... It is also not my job to put out that fire in the waste basket either, but if a throw my water on it now, problem is solved. If I call the fire department and leave, the whole place burns to the ground before they get there. Punishing people for seeing a problem they can solve and solving it; simply because it wasn't their job is Bull. Also, I highly doubt that a typical police officer is as well qualified to deal with students as your typical teacher is anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
YES! Because, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away!
For FUCK'S SAKE, man, the teacher was supposed to stand around dialing 911 on his cellphone, while he witnessed an eyeball being gouged out? If we ever consider going anywhere together, remind me of your asinine fucking post here.
Allow me to define "irresponsible" for you. It's failing to take responsibility for an action, an inaction, a condition, or a situation. In this case, the teacher obviously TOOK responsibility for a dangerous si
Re: (Score:3)
His legal options were to find a labor lawyer and give him a $5,000 retainer. If he had a union, they would take care of that for him.
Those union dues look pretty small when you have to hire a lawyer to do the same thing.
In a non-teaching union job, the union looks out for your rights too.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:4, Insightful)
Teaching the test is what most teachers do to some extent. That doesn't change the end goal that they get students to pass the tests. If the teach the test method also transfers the necessary skills to solve the test questions then the result is desirable. No Child Left Behind is a good example of this. Although very flawed in many respects, it has shown a marked improvement in reading, math, at least in the lower grades. Unfortunately those skills don't translate well into higher grades where more complex problem solving skills are required. I do think they need to address this at both the teacher level, and at the course level. If the courses as they are being taught don't teach the necessary skills, then they should also look at different methods to help students acquire those skills. I find it odd that with all of the advancements in psychology, human studies, and in computer science, that we haven't invented a better method to teach students. Other than the introduction of computer equipment in most schools, they all use the same basic method to teach, which unfortunately seems to leave a fairly large group out that requires extra hand holding.
As to the privacy issue, these teachers, working for a public school system, need to understand that the people who pay for their jobs need to be able to see what they are getting for their pay. Whether or not they need the level of detail down to a per-teacher review is questionable, but I think a more general review of the data, possibly averaged would alleviate some of those concerns. I agree about seniority. No job should be guaranteed. It rarely works that way in any other field. You perform well or you are fired. This is a no brainer.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What, prey tell, is the "existing system" - the ability to turn oxygen into CO2 year after year appears to be the only system in place once a teacher makes tenure.
Wow, that sounds really bad, un
It's actually a self selection problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not that bad teachers would feel bad about themselves.
It's that most teachers are bad.
If we compensated teachers based on performance, we would have better teachers.
But since we don't, the people who will work hard for better compensation choose a different career path, creating a bias for those who DON'T want to perform better for better performance in the teaching profession.
Thus, even though pay for performance would attract better teachers to the teaching profession, CURRENT teachers don't want pay for performance, because the existing system is attractive primarily to those who don't want to perform.
Put another way, for most current teachers, supporting pay-for-performance doesn't mean more pay for current teachers, it means more pay for individuals who have avoided teaching as a profession due to poor pay who take the jobs from the current teachers.
(That's not to say all teachers are bad - I certainly had some great teachers who chose that profession despite the poor compensation because it's just what they wanted to do, and they were going to do it well no matter what. But I've had plenty of people who just showed up for the paycheck too.)
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Informative)
One of the fundamental mistakes you make is not realizing that the one factor that predicts test scores most significantly is the child's family income. Everything else, including the teacher, has a smaller predictive value.
Teachers with high test scores are being rewarded for teaching rich kids.
Oh, yeah, so you say correct the test scores for family income. That's the problem. The NYC evaluation system is trying to do that. That's what that complicated formula is trying to do. The problem is that, when they tried to validate it, they found it doesn't work.
They're trying to calculate where teachers rank on a 100-point scale. The ranking has a range of error of over 50 points. You might as well rank teachers with a pair of dice.
Re: (Score:3)
I feel like you've already made up your mind about this issue, and I'm just wasting time typing. Still, I guess it doesn't hurt to try.
It's really not that easy. Criteria for "continuing contract" vary from state to state and district to district, but it is usually some combination of
1) Years experience in total and in the district
2) Level of educ
Re: (Score:3)
You're wrong. That's the problem. The tests can't measure performance above expectations because there is no way to figure out what the expectations should be. The evaluations are scientifically invalid.
The UFT ad in TFA makes that argument. If you want to be fair to the teachers before you fire them, you ought to at least read what they say in their defense.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/ [nybooks.com]
No Student Left Untested
Diane Ravitch
New York’s education officials are
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
The teachers unions should take a page from this: Don't ruin the education or the credibility of all teachers for the sake of a few - embrase performance review and become a part of it
And the problem comparing autoworker unions and teacher unions is the lack of competition public education faces. If unions bring down an auto company, the company fails, or at least it is supposed to if it does not get federal funding. Education is going to get public money no matter what. For that matter, the worse they do, the more money they get. How many times have we heard, "The schools are failing. We must increase funding and pay teachers more!"?
The answer is to increase competition. Stop sending kids to schools based on where they live, but actually give parents a choice as to where the students go and fund the schools accordingly. The voucher program was an attempt to do this and has worked very well where it has been tried. It even leveled the playing field for kids who could never afford to go a private school. Of course, the teacher's unions rapidly opposed this and pulled out all the stops. The main argument was that it would cut funding to public schools. To which I answer, So? It may cut funding to PUBLIC schools, but it also cut the number of students. It did not cut funding to education, however, and all the kids still received an education. Not just any education, but the education the parents wanted them to receive while still meeting guidelines.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Stop sending kids to schools based on where they live
A big problem is that many are not sent to school based on where they live. They get bussed to other parts of the city to make up a politically correct ethnic mixture in all the schools across the district. When your child attends a school that isn't in the local neighborhood it's a lot harder for some parents to be involved, get to know the teachers, etc.
Re: (Score:3)
You do know that the majority of teachers "unions" are barred from striking, and about half are barred from collective bargaining.
You see, this is the big problem with all the people who want to blame teachers. They use terminology but have no idea what it means.
Teachers Union: Often just a rough union-like organization that offers group rates on legal counsel and representation to the local school boards. Most unions cannot strike, cannot take part in salary bargaining, and have no right to intervene
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest secret about the teacher's union is that their role is the protection of the teacher, not the students. The Teacher's Union has as it's number one priority increasing compensation & benefits, and protecting the employment of teachers. It makes sense - it is what a union is supposed to do.
Think how much different schools would be if it were the students that were unionized, not the teachers...
Re: (Score:3)
The Teacher's Union has as it's number one priority increasing compensation & benefits...
Exactly. The problem is that this is NOT what a union is SUPPOSED to prioritize. They are supposed to act in the best interests of the employees, and bankrupting the employer does not accomplish that.
A union's function is to protect the rights of the employees and act as a representative of them to the employers in case of disputes. Increasing compensations can be a part of that, but not the the only part and not without limit. More and more money and compensations are not rights. It is counterproductive
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is in evaluation. It is very difficult to define good metrics for teachers. We've tried a lot of things.
We tried judging on test scores, but this just made teachers coach their students for the test, rather than provide them with a good education.
We've tried judging them on test score deltas, but this just makes teachers concentrate on students who are close to grade boundaries - getting someone from a high C to just scraping a B, but ignoring the ones that could go from a low B to a high B
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think there are any easy metrics because it's a hard problem. Of the ones you mentioned, student evaluation is the worst because there's no way to safeguard that. Test score deltas seems like a good idea, and your criticism of it is incredibly easy to solve - the delta should be on the numerical score, not the grade letter. But of course since it's a test, it also shares the "teaching the test" problem of the first idea. I think that's also easy to solve -- don't tell the teachers details of what's
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue is that it's not entirely the responsibility of the teacher.
If the kid has a bad home life and their peers and family do not value education it's likly they will not either, and thus perform more poorly.
Ever notice how schools in low income areas perform worse, even when they bring in special teachers who have done well in other schools to try and bring up the performance?
I have a friend who is a teacher, she was have a parent teacher conference about the poor performance of the child. The parent basically concentrated on their phone the whole time, all the while being told about how the student was not turning in their home work and thus getting a zero. Parent then looked up and asked "Well what are you going to do about it?"
As though they had no part in their child's education.
There are bad teachers, and there needs to scrap the current system, but blaming it all on the teachers is not going to help, since that's what we have currently.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the ratings for individual teachers do matter, taken in the context of how other teachers in that school (and area) are doing. You're right that it's much more complex than just having good teachers/bad teachers. If one or two teachers in a whole school are having poor evaluations, that probably points to lousy teachers. If all the teachers have poor evaluations, you're looking at a broken school. If the pattern is consistent across multiple schools in a particular area, you know it's an even bigger problem than just one bad school.
Individual teacher ratings are just one part of a much larger puzzle, I just wonder who is going to take the time to put the puzzle together and figure out which problems are caused by bad teachers, bad administrators, bad parents, or even bigger socioeconomic issues. Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents. But there would certainly be times when there's an obviously bad teacher whose poor performance is downplayed or covered up by the administration (or the union.)
While I'm in favor of teachers' unions, the job of a union should not be to protect crappy employees, but to look out for the interests of the employees as a whole. You can't tell me the union is served by protecting shitty teachers!
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that there should be ratings, but perhaps more generalized for the whole school and leave the individual teachers as an internal matter.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be fine with that, or only making the individual teacher ratings accessible to the parents of children in that teacher's class. I think that information is more relevant to those parents than it would be to anyone else. And if the students in a particular class are doing worse than the rest of the school, the parents would have the right to demand answers.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Interesting)
Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents.
Exactly. The next logical step is therefore to allow teachers to fire students. If teachers are liable for students performance, then they need to have the power to remove failing students. And if that isn't possible due to social reasons, then it is difficult to assign blame to the teacher for having a poor performing class.
Imagine being the boss of a company, where the employees are unpaid, and often not motivated or interested in the work that you want them to do. Add to that the fact that you can't select the employees, and you can't fire them, but you *personally* will be judged on their performance. Oh, and all the employees are teenagers and many just plain don't want to be there... Does that sound like an appealing prospect?
I like metrics, and I support the idea of improving teaching, but I don't trust that the government will implement either the correct metrics or the correct system to deal with the results of those metrics. For example, everyone is gungho about firing teachers, but the most effective solution may well be to spend more money and train the teachers better in the first place. More research is needed - for example, how come countries like Finland have the shortest hours per week spent on school teaching in the Western world, but also manage to get the best performing students? Do they have teacher metrics? Do they fire teachers who perform badly on those metrics? We should learn from the best in the world, instead of assuming that adopting some unproven system is going to magically make things better. Maybe firing poor metric teachers will put off people from joining the profession, and education as a whole will suffer? These things need to be considered before changing systems wholesale.
What teachers make [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
You are talking about noise in a trend. The trend is the teacher's fault, the noise is not.
Re: (Score:2)
By that reasoning, should the student not improve once that teacher is out of the picture?
Why then do students continue to do poorly when they introduce a new, well regarded teacher from another school?
The evaluations take this into consideration (Score:2)
Yes, overall education is VERY dependent on homelife, but in the same school you can easily see which teachers are making a difference and which are not, even if overall the students are good or bad.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's true. But there are ways to adjust for it. If you have three teachers in the same school (or teaching comparable students in similar schools) and they all teach the same subject, and the students of one of the three consistently do worse than the students of the other two--well then it's pretty safe to say that this is a bad teacher. Either she's lazy, incompetent, or both. And, in any case, that's who you need to fire.
Of course, no one can ever be fired for laziness or incompetence in a union school
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, let's teach these inner city kids and expect them to do as well as the children of millionaires!
Daddy wear's his pants down around his knees, he's fathered six kids, he's twenty five years old, he can't read at a second grade level, he's unemployable and has a record. Momma has had three kids, in on public assistance, lives in public housing uses drugs and alcohol is twenty six years old and bipolar, she is a felon and is functionally illiterate!
The kids live in a poisonous environment, constant fear, noise, violence, unstable parents who (might) speak English well enough to understand what is being said to them and kids who struggle to understand the lessons.
Gee, do you think that Bloomberg's Park Avenue, spoiled, billionaire, candyassed mind can even begin to grasp what most of these teachers deal with!
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:4, Interesting)
I got one for ya. I was subbing for a 7th grade class. Kid squeezes behind my desk and the wall - no reason to be behind me, anyway - and takes a mock swing at my head; I felt the breeze from his hand. I haul him down to the principal's office for punishment, restraining myself from knocking in his teeth. Later, momma shows up demanding to know why I'm bringing her precious child down to the office. Principal throws me under the bus. Last day I subbed, there.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Why is racial segregation assumed a priori something to be avoided?
If you implement a voucher system, parents who care more about education will be more inclined to take advantage of those vouchers to move their children to better schools. This is a good thing, right? Parents can move their kids out of a bad school to a good one.
How does anything change if the kids who leave tend to be white and the kids who stay tend to be black? Nobody is discriminating on the basis of race (hell, the abstract of that stu
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't accept that those schools are going to be bad, but what you have to accept is that they are bad, and all the social experimentation in the world are not going to make them better for the kids that are trapped there right now.
So the way out may be to bring in more opportunity for the youngest generation in those areas. Vouchers can provide that ticket to opportunity for many in that community, and that raises the prospects for the entire area. That doesn't mean we're throwing away the culture - it just means we're bringing in the good parts of a nearby culture (a quality education). It almost sound like you're conflating ignorance and poor education as a cultural component that needs to be preserved. It's not - and neither is any cultural influence that denigrates knowledge and academic abilities.
As a side-note, I would contend that letting students run is more of a social indoctrination, because it leads to ignorance of others, and maintains the current status quo.
I really don't know how you arrive at that conclusion. The current status quo is that there are a lot of schools that simply do not serve their community or students in any positive way, and the administration, the school system, and sometimes even the teachers want to keep the students trapped in that negative environment with no other options. As long as we accept that these schools must be preserved, we will not be able to provide the impetus for improvement.
Re: (Score:2)
Tough rocks. A few shitty teachers made life a living hell for one of my kids so pardon me if I'm not on the worship-the-teacher bandwagon.
Why *shouldn't* they live under the same thumb they so firmly implant on their students?
In other words, let the good teachers be unfairly judged along with the bad ones. That surely creates the incentive needed to ensure the quality of educators children deserve.
Re: (Score:2)
Tough rocks. A few shitty teachers made life a living hell for one of my kids so pardon me if I'm not on the worship-the-teacher bandwagon.
Why *shouldn't* they live under the same thumb they so firmly implant on their students?
In other words, let the good teachers be unfairly judged along with the bad ones. That surely creates the incentive needed to ensure the quality of educators children deserve.
No! You letting the good teachers show they are good teachers so that they may get rid of the crappy ones.
Re: (Score:2)
Teachers in my state at least(Utah) just are not paid enough in the first place(25-35k per year), if people want to implement merit pay based on some "report card" developed by a bunch of ideologi
Re: (Score:2)
We tried letting the school administrators evaluate the teachers, that didn't work and that gave us tenure (remember, it's to protect "helpless teachers" from over-bearing principals and administrators), then we evaluated teachers on attendence (if you show up, you keep your job, with very few exceptions), and that lead to a complete flat line in overall academic achievement in this country (ironcally, performance has stalled since the creation of the U.S. Dept. of Education by Jimmy Carter), and now we're