Union Boycotts LA Times Over Teacher Evaluation Disclosure 629
Atypical Geek writes "According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: 'Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.' According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was 'an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.'"
like any other job? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:like any other job? (Score:1, Insightful)
So where can I download your evaluation?
Re:like any other job? (Score:4, Insightful)
"I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged?"
Should you get outraged if your evaluation is printed in a major daily newspaper as an example? Without a reporter even as much as contacting you for a chance at filling in your side of the story?
Re:like any other job? (Score:2, Insightful)
He's probably not paid with public dollars taken forcibly from unwilling taxpayers. His evaluation is thus a private matter between him and his private-sector employer.
Bad Science (Score:0, Insightful)
Seems like poor science to me. There is a bias in the data as schools in less affluent parts of town with less funding generally have less involved parents and less teaching resources. Teachers are stretched thinner and given fewer resources and in, the end, probably seem less effective. On the other side of the token, in more affluent areas parents are involved in their child's educational experience, tutor and work with their kids after school, provide some levels of financial support to the school and generally demand smaller class sizes and "special treatment" for their future President of the World. Seems like an unfair comparison to me.
Perhaps it would make sense to compare teachers on a school by school level since the resources and affluence would be fairly consistent, but not the entire district.
Scrutiny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually no (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:like any other job? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if it's a bad evaluation that highlights my incompetence...
=Smidge=
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:1, Insightful)
I obviously don't know all the details of these two classrooms, and the data appears to show a real difference in the teaching abilities between these two teachers. However, let me throw out a few real scenarios that could provide other explanations...
If Teacher A's students get lower test scores and Teacher B's students get higher...
1) Teacher A specializes in working with lower level and learning disabled kids. He gets good results, although his students regularly don't make whatever the state deems "annual yearly progress" with his LD kids, so his results seem lower.
2) Teacher B is friends with the principal and is regularly assigned students who are already high performers. What, your boss never shows favoritism in your workplace?
3) Teacher A sees the standardized tests for the jokes they are, and concentrates on higher level skills that aren't measured well these tests - (processing, analysis, creativity, teamwork) all the while teaching the required reading, math, and science. Teacher B drills his students with the test prep books, the kids do ok on the tests, then forget everything. Teacher B's students do well as they continue on in middle school and high school because they have learned how to think, not just regurgitate. Teacher B's kids become part of the majority of High School students who can't really think, and whose scores and performance continually drop. Which class would you really like your child to be in?
Yes, I'm an elementary school teacher and no, I'm not just whining. Standardized tests are one measurement, but not the only or best one... just the cheapest and the easiest for politicians and lazy reporters to spout about. In evaluating teachers they should be considered by school administrators as one metric. The problem with what the LA Times has done is that while they say that there are other metrics for evaluating they present none.
Re:like any other job? (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when is a teacher solely responsible (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when is a teacher solely responsible for students grades. Can teachers kick unruly students out of class if they choose? Can teachers turn the TV or video games off until children have done their homework? Is there a report card for parents? Can any of you say that you've always tried your best in school? When you didn't, did you blame your teacher?
Judging teachers solely by students grades is unfair.
This is horrible! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Teacher Evaluations (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead of crushing a bunch of teachers and be forced to spend lots extra retraining/educating new teachers and having to increase wages. Why not use this as the starting point for a study? Find out what they are doing and retrain current teachers. It may be a bunch of small things you can teach in a month during the summer.
Survival of the fittest while cruel would be effective. BUT it would cost way more to do it that way.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it's OK for everyone else to negotiate the best price except workers. Is that what you're saying? Or are you saying it should be illegal for workers to organize and collectively bargain? Should it also be illegal for CEO's to negotiate their best salary and benefits package? Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices? Under what statute or legal principle would you make the right to organize illegal?
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
My mother is a public high school Spanish teacher. She has an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from an Ivy League, a Masters in Spanish from a well-known state school, and is currently working towards her PhD. She's been teaching at the school she's at for almost 15 years, I believe. She used to work for an import/export company, then an investment banker. She speaks 7 languages with a high degree of proficiency, 5 of which she's fluent in.
In addition to the class time, there is prep time, duty (being made to come in early to watch kids on and off the bus, hang out outside bathrooms looking for smokers, etc), all the time at home grading papers, etc. If teachers were paid by the hour, most would likely make less than a fast food worker when averaged out. The argument that they get paid in the summer for not doing anything is also fallacious, as the fact of the matter is teachers have the choice, at least here in VA, to take their pay only during the school year, or to have it averaged out over 12 months so that they get less per cheque but have income during the summer.
I make almost as much as my mother does with 1 undergrad degree and just a couple years of relevant experience. I also don't have to give up nearly all my evening time grading papers, having to go to meetings about other people's kids so as not to have time to pay attention to my own (although i haven't got any yet), etc.
With my dad retired from the airline where he was a pilot for over 20 years and occasionally substitute teaching, my mother has assumed the role of primary income for them, so the fact that with all her degrees and experience she's making less money than the typical sysadmin with that much experience (who are another group of people, who if you average out their salaries over the amount of time they're required to put in are grossly underpaid) by quite a wide margin is really sort of shameful.
Then there are the parents who don't or won't take responsibility for their own children, and the children who won't take responsibility for themselves. My mother only teaches upper-level Spanish (3,4,5 and the AP prep classes). Even in those classes, usually in Spanish 3 where you have kids just hanging on long enough for the advanced diploma requirement, you get jackass kids who aren't really concerned with learning. And if they would rather smoke dope and show up late, parents want to blame the schools and the teachers for the kids poor grades.
I'm sorry, but if 90 percent of the kids in a class have a B or better, it's likely not the teacher's fault that the other 10% aren't keeping up. If we had pay-for-performance bonus rules, then my mom would make out like a bandit because she's a great teacher, the vast majority of her students love her, and they do well. This isn't the case for all the teachers. And yes, there are bad teachers. I've seen and known many in my day.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that yes, teachers are underpaid. And if they were paid more, then better people would be able to afford to go into the profession. Most of the worst teachers are the young ones who go into it because they want their summers off and basically live with a case of Senioritis for the first 10 years of their careers. If you're willing to pay enough to make it feasible for an experienced engineer or scientist to come in and teach math and still be able to make their mortgage payments, then you're on the right track. I hate math teachers who know math but can't explain how it applies to anything real.
The teacher pay argument shouldn't be that all teachers automagically deserve more money, but that you need to be willing to pay talent what talent deserves. Of course unions won't like that, but I don't live in a Union state, and being a teacher isn't like being an autoworker -- it's not a blue-collar job, even though they by and large get blue collar pay.
Re: Absolute Lies (Score:3, Insightful)
Their are mentally challenged individuals who have such absurd notions that schools should be run like businesses and that teachers should be paid by performance.
The fact is that that is bullshit. We have absolute proof that the price of the home in which students live is the greatest determinant of success in schools. Schools that draw from rich areas have great students whereas schools that draw from poor areas tend to have very poorly performing students.
Are you suggesting that within this school they separated the two classes based upon where they lived?
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
To compete with wikileaks, they must become wikileaks. Things are looking up for the media. Amazing - maybe now they'll have to do their jobs and report on the government with brutal facts, instead of placating the party line.
Yes, however they'll only do that if they see that there's eyeballs (and hence greater sales) in it. In this particular case, the relevance of the information is obvious to most people: if you have kids, you want to know that they're being taught competently. So people will buy the paper to find out. There are many other issues of equal or greater importance that are more complex, and it is up to the journalists to help people understand the relevance to their own lives. If they can do that, both inform and, to a degree, educate, then they'll regain my respect.
... but this kind of report is exactly what journalists are supposed to be doing. That is, informing the public about what their government and its various organs are up to: it's why the Press has such standing in the Constitution. So the Teacher's Union might like to keep their performance (or lack of it) a secret, but as public employees they should not entitled to that. Fact is, such unaccountability is at the root of our school system's problems, and I'm glad this newspaper is giving it to them good. They deserve it, and frankly the fact that they're objecting so strongly indicates that they know there's a problem here, and are self-serving enough to want to continue the cover up.
The truth is that journalism in the U.S. today is not what it used to be
pay talent what talent deserves (Score:4, Insightful)
What does that mean, "pay talent what talent deserves"?
I have a real talent for jerking off, it took years to master, I should get paid for that wonderful talent. So who is interested in paying?
--
Your argument is absurd. In real world we don't pay people simply because they have talent. People get paid because someone is making money.
A talented basketball player makes money for the investors.
A talented software developer makes money for a company.
A talented thief controls High Frequency Trade transaction house.
Another talented thief controls money flow from many people to a small subset.
A talented plastic surgeon gets paid for his work and discretion.
etc.
--
The REAL talent in this case is the UNION, it gets a LOT of people paid for doing very very little, sure some do more, but most do very little, that's what a union does, that's what it is all about. Used to be that a union was really built by people dying on floors of factories, that's not what today's unions are about, especially GOVERNMENT unions!
If your mother is so talented yet she feels that she is financially unappreciated, she has a choice of working in a private school, isn't that so? In fact if her talents are in high DEMAND then she can tutor people for much MORE money than she'd be making in a school, and eventually with that money that she could save, she could open her own private school, why not?
It's not that I am questioning talent of your mother, I have no idea, but the entire point is that you can have the best talents but nobody cares, and nor SHOULD they! Can she apply her talents so that people would want to give her more money, that's the question.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it's OK for everyone else to negotiate the best price except workers. Is that what you're saying? Or are you saying it should be illegal for workers to organize and collectively bargain? Should it also be illegal for CEO's to negotiate their best salary and benefits package? Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices? Under what statute or legal principle would you make the right to organize illegal?
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
Actually, it is illegal for corporations to get together to fix prices. And, yeah, it should be.
Look, I don't have anything against unions until they get so powerful that they either take the company down (auto industry), endanger safety (airline industry), or cause the industry they represent to fail (teachers' union). When they look out for the safety and fair treatment of the actual employees, (fire union, police union), I don't have a problem with them.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
No I will admit that teachers and administrators could be wrong, but parents have got to go into this with the assumption that the child is probably wrong until proven otherwise. Assuming that the children are always right hasn't and won't work. They are children after all. While there may be times when the child is right, it is extremely important that they learn to work within the power structure that exists. The real world just isn't going to change to accommodate them even if they are right, they must find a way to adapt or we are setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment. The workplace is just not going to put up with the lack of discipline that teachers are forced to endure today and it is the children that are in for a rude awakening.
In return for this support, parents should expect teachers to be accountable. Asking teachers to be accountable for their student's proficiency without discipline or any ability to modify the student's behavior can't work.
exactly the point (Score:5, Insightful)
You do get what you pay for, and the teacher's union (NEA) are the single largest [opensecrets.org] campaign contributors in the United States. They pay for politicians, and they get them. That is not the sole problem, but its intertwined with the rest of it. Schools have trouble telling good teachers from bad ones, and there aren't enough good ones to go around anyway, so they pay them all the same as if it were unskilled labor, and pay the administrators more in the hopes that overcompensated administrators can manage away incompetence in those actually doing the teaching. These incompetent teachers and overcompensated administrators like the NEA because it is job security. The really good teachers either go along knowing that most schools can't tell they are worth extra, don't care about the money anyway, and don't really have the ability to make a change. They are gifted teachers after all, not gifted politicians. I don't know if there is a way to tell a very good newly graduated teacher from a very poor one in the time allotted for an interview, or if there is any hint on a resume. The ability to terminate the employment of a teacher as soon as they show themselves to be sub par without worrying about lawsuits would be a less efficient, but more feasible solution to mind reading employment candidates. Paying more won't create a greater number of good teachers either, because they are almost never money motivated people. Using poor or untested teachers as little more than TAs and proctors while the better compensated, proven teachers instruct large numbers of students via live or recorded media would provide more students with access to good teachers, and a testing ground for new teachers to earn their credentials in a less pivotal role in the child's life.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even close. The biggest problem in the US educational system is shitty parenting.
By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?
There is no law that says a school system must sign a contract with the teachers' unions. There is no law that says they must agree to contracts that say shitty teachers can't be fired, just as there's no law that says CEO's can't negotiate multi-million dollar golden parachutes so when they destroy a company they get a fat benefits package (like Carly Fiorina and her successor). There was also no law that said big car companies had to give their unions ridiculous pensions and post-retirement health care packages. They did so because they didn't want to agree to the modest raise that was being requested back in the '70s. The CEOs thought they were being clever, thinking that their retirees would continue to die at age 68 and they'd pull a fast one, but when people started living a decade longer, they were fucked and cried "the unions made us do it!" And the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth and other anti-middle class organizations spent millions of dollars spreading FUD about unions so now knuckleheads spout crap like "Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system" when they ought to goddamn-well know better.
You want to improve schools? Do what I did and run for the school board. I ran as a parent when my daughter was in school, and I ran as a citizen-at-large after she graduated. I've been on and off the school board for 16 years and even in a city where there's a very powerful teachers' union, like Chicago, you'd be surprised at what can be done both to get rid of bad teachers and to improve kids' educations. The problem is that management is unwilling to assert itself, not that teachers have done what anybody could do, which is negotiate the most favorable pay package they could. It's not their fault that they're negotiating with cowards and imbeciles who themselves are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (and they are NOT in the union). The head of a school system in a medium to large size Chicago suburb is making several timesthat school district is performing below average. Who's fault is that?
The second biggest problem with the US educational system is that people think they should just send their kids to school and hope for the best. The third biggest problem is that public schools are forced to serve every single child, regardless of disability or behavioral problem, which is something so-called "private" schools don't have to deal with. One severely handicapped student can take up as much teacher time and school resources as two classrooms full of normally-abled students.
And that list of problems doesn't even include the fact that we've got growing numbers of people who are requiring public schools to teach nonsense, like is being done in South Carolina and Texas. This crap about "unions are the problem" is just a denial of the history of the US, which if you're from Texas, is to be expected because that's what the textbooks do now.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a free market unless union membership isn't required, and harrassment of non-union workers by union members is not permitted.
Meet those requirements, and then you can talk about a free market.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need three advanced degrees (And the debt load that comes with it) to each ANY high school class. Period.
Home schooling is becoming more and more popular, and one of the reasons is how completely disconnected from reality Public schools are.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a software developer: I'm not a member of any "Union", and I survive simply because there's a demand for my services, and I negotiate the best price I can with my employer. Furthermore, how much I can demand is tied pretty directly with my overall competence. I'm motivated to remain good at my job because otherwise I won't have one. Explain to me why a teacher should be treated any differently than any other worker. Are they so special that they can do a crappy job, get tenure, and then retire on a really really nice pension?
Worse yet, unions have, in many cases, gone from protecting workers from exploitation to becoming the very thing they decry, and often do more damage than they're worth. All those "think of the children!" types ought to be up in arms about this.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Teachers Unions are worried because true evaluation of teacher performance would create two classes of teachers for them: those that were good at their job and didn't need the union to help them, and those who were bad at their job and the union could not save. That would make the union ineffective, threatening the pay of those who run the union. It's an institution and center of power, and it has a will of its own. This shouldn't be, unions were intended to prevent employer abuse, not to stop employers from hiring the best people for the job.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
They are kept on life support by government at the behest of the unions. GM wasn't bailed out for our benefit - it was bailed out for the benefit of the UAW.
Re:like any other job? (Score:3, Insightful)
> That has nothing to do with it. They are employees of the school district not, of the public.
No matter how much you try to wiggle and squirm and throw bad rhetoric at the situation: Teachers are civil servants.
End of argument.
The fact that there is a shell game going on with who signs the paychecks is utterly irrelevant.
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly no meaningful job, like teaching or engineering - can be boiled down to only one metric. But certain metrics are very important and should be a significant part of the evaluation.
For example, I'm a software engineer. My employer places a lot of weight on ability to perform development efforts according to a budget and schedule. These are not the whole picture - it doesn't measure quality, for example. And every development effort is unique, so setting the budget is an error-prone process. Often as a developer you need to deal with an inadequate budget or schedule. Sometimes you get a particularly tough assignment. You do the best you can. Managers realize these constraints are there, and you are not judged entirely on budget performance. But if you consistently fail to come close to budget, while your peers don't consistently have the same problem... that will be noticed.
Teaching seems like a similar set of constraints to me. Every student may be different, and standardized tests scores may not be the whole picture. But like a development budget, standardized tests do capture an important piece of information. It's not unreasonable for the customer - parents and taxpayers - to consider such things. Especially when taken over a few years' time where you can really start to see trends.
The value-added tests do also attempt to remove biases such as student selection, as the metric compares those particular students' scores against their scores from the previous year. So the metric measures just the kids in your class, and measures not where they started but how much they improved.
If the union were advocating that we measure additional metrics and publish those too, I'd be totally behind them. That way we could all debate how much we value the various elements of teaching, and see which teachers provide which advantages.
The problem I see is that rather than try to improve the objective measures available, they're trying to sink the use of such measures. There will never be a perfect metric of teaching effectiveness, just as there isn't one for programming performance. But the lack of a perfect solution shouldn't prevent us from seeking a solution at all. The status quo lack of any solution has not been serving teachers or students well.
Ugh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Have any of her students who didn't already know Spanish learned to speak Spanish in her classes?
I know a lot of people who have taken high school language classes (including myself). I know exactly 0 who learned a language that way. They're a checkbox in the "well-rounded education" checklist, nothing more.
If a minimum wage fast-food worker were to work for 12 hours a day every day for 10 months a year, he or she would make about $26,500/yr. You going to tell me that most teachers work more and make less? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes... it's all the little proles.
The fact that the Robber Barons were going to lose their shirts had nothing to do with it.
Wasn't it the anti-labor party that did the last Detroit bailout? And the one before?
Re:I say test the teachers (Score:3, Insightful)
He was wrong. For instance, if we want to know how well a football coach is doing, we often measure something about the team he's coaching. It's the same when measuring many managerial and executive positions. Teaching seems to me to be another area where that makes perfect sense.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
The teacher's union is the largest problem with education in this country. It is virtually impossible to fire a bad educator. Almost all school jobs are union, so it's actually almost impossible to fire a bad systems administrator. I know of at least one whose job I would have as I have on two occasions been hired as a contractor to do things he should have known how to do, in fact things covered by his job description.
Unions are leeches sucking the lifeblood out of this nation. Before the invention of labor laws, they were a necessary evil. Now they are an unnecessary evil often run by the mafia or other organized criminal organizations (yes, even today) and they exist to secure special rights for some individuals when what is truly needed is labor laws which cover all employees.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
That's actually something I've been wondering about - we pay the CEOs and other executives of large companies millions of dollars a year, but we don't think it's worthwhile to pay teachers an equivalent amount? (divided by how many more teachers there are, of course) I mean, apparently the reason why we pay executives so much is that if they screw up, the company fails; if teachers screw up, on the other hand, entire generations of the workforce come out apathetic and worthless.
Teachers have a far greater impact on the economy and on the workforce than any number of CEOs, yet their pay doesn't reflect that.
Re:Scrutiny (Score:3, Insightful)
Teachers though, are entirely working with outside entities, which does make a scrutiny of them quite difficult.
What outside entities? Let's look at the teacher versus plumber argument. Teachers for the most part work in a controlled environment. They typically have a classroom, equipment provided by the school, and students who are required to be there. All are internal entities aside from the occasional intrusion by a parent, bureaucrat, or local newspaper. In comparison, plumbers almost never work in a controlled environment. They go to someone's house or office and deal with whatever is there. They don't get to take the plumbing to a controlled place and work on it there.
My take is that scrutiny is not that difficult, especially given that the primary goal of public school education is the education of students in a limited group of subjects. You have measures such as student performance on standardized tests, discipline actions, and the future success of past students.
Re:Teacher Evaluations (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure how standardised testing works in the USA, but in the UK schools are assessed on the 'value added' measure. Children are given a test when they arrive and another one when they leave, and the league tables are based on the difference between their initial and final scores. The school where my mother taught was consistently ranked high up - they accepted anyone (a lot of their children had already been excluded from one or more other schools) and got them up to a reasonable standard. They scored a lot better than schools that accepted the top students and didn't do much to improve them.
The unfortunate side effect is of this is that it encourages teachers to focus on the students in the middle. Those who are going to do well will do well anyway. Those who are going to fail will fail anyway. You get the biggest return on investment by giving time to students on the boundaries. If you can push them from a D to a C, or a C to a B, it looks great.
Re:exactly the point (Score:1, Insightful)
Most of the discussions on this thread are missing a major point: It is very difficult to define what makes an effective teacher. The LA Times released data based on standardized tests only, but the only place in life that standardized tests are applicable is in school. Granted it is the only objective data we have, but tests have been repeated found to be full of bias. I am a teacher and I die a little bit every time I see these tests because the questions are so indirect, and inconsistent in the language they use. The biggest problems in education that I see are:
1. The text book publishers have far too much say in education policy. hopefully non-profits creating open source text books will solve this problem. After all most of the material hasn't changed in 30-100 years. With the publishers out of the way, hopefully we can focus more on life skills.
2. The lack of good educational data. No Child Left Behind started to create lots of data, which is the first step, but the data is poor, because it is based on multiple choice tests, not open ended questions. A real discussion needs to continually happen about what is most important for students to learn. Businesses want employees who are creative risk takers, not cautious bubble fillers. Let's align education with business!
3. The battle between districts and teachers unions. States don't seem to be able to balance a budget, which forces districts to try to make drastic cuts occasionally, which in turn puts the unions into a reactionary position. The only thing governments should be able to borrow money for is education. Anything else is taxing our children without their representation.
Paying teachers better would definitely get better teachers. I make less than 50k with a BS in Physics and a Masters in Education. How much do you think I could make with a masters in any engineering field instead? Better pay would also show that society has a higher value on education. Low pay indicates a low value of education.
Mark
markgalen@mac.com
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason we pay CEO's so much is another kind of collusion.
Wealthy people can buy their way on to the boards of various companies, and they elect other wealthy people to the executive positions of the companies they're board-members on. And of course it's a quid-pro-quo: being an executive of one company doesn't preclude you from "serving" on the board of one or more other companies.
Do you really think that you need salaries in the millions, with benefits of even greater value to attract enough people capable of running a large company? Is the labor pool really as small as they'd like you to believe?
Speaking as a teacher (Score:4, Insightful)
(though at NYC colleges, not LA K-12), release the metrics. I'd have nothing to hide, and I'd suspect any teacher that doesn't want such things made public. As far as I'm concerned, prospective students have a right to know how other students have fared in my classes, what other students thought of my teaching, and how both have changed over time. If that makes a lot of people want to avoid my classes, maybe--just maybe--I'm in the wrong field of work.
Re:I teach in LA... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but you're not the only one that teaches in LA. Presumably if the numbers were released, you also wouldn't be at the bottom of the list and separated from the pack by an order of magnitude in performance.
It's not a witch hunt if all teachers are placed along a large spectrum of performance in which they can be compared against averages and their deviation in performance from said averages measured. And if you did happen to come up as somehow measurably worse than the vast majority of the other thousands of teachers, then you probably should be put on some sort of notice and evaluated very closely going forward.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
In hindsight, the original deals might have been valid: the first workers to get those bennies did only live to 68. The problem is that as health care and nutritional improvements increased the lifespan, they were unable to re-negotiate. With a union, everything gets ratcheted up. Things very, very, rarely get negotiated down.*
*partially because people don't seem to know that there is a good answer to the typical objection of "but what about all the people who were counting on those benefits." and that answer is, "pro rata." There's no reason why new people should get the benefits you can't afford just because you're committed to people who've spent their whole careers working for you.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't need three advanced degrees (And the debt load that comes with it) to each ANY high school class.
Except maybe the proofreading part of English courses. (FRAGMENT)
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that the Robber Barons were going to lose their shirts had nothing to do with it.
Read that other reply to your post carefully. The "robber barons" lost more than they would have under a real GM bankruptcy.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
FUCK UNIONS.
They may have been useful when corporations owned the government but it is just as bad when the unions own them.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Dear people who pay my salary. PAY ME WHAT I AM WORTH! Please though do not judge me on how well I am doing. Do not look at the results I produce. Just give me more and we will call it paying me what I am worth.
Re:Teacher Evaluations (Score:4, Insightful)
That calculation has already been accounted for. If you are trending one class year-to-year for the level of improvement, then the level of the students should not matter because the pool of students is the same for each sample. What they are comparing is the level of the same class at the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So yes, you will see the advanced kids getting higher scores than the special-needs kids the entire year, but if those same advanced students get a lower score at the end of the year, relative to the beginning of the year, they have regressed, despite the fact that they are still far ahead of the special-needs classes.
Mr. Jones (advanced) start year score 95 -> end year score 92 Mr. Jones' kids are high scoring, but have regressed. He might be considered a low performing teacher even though his kids are all high performing.
Ms. James (special-needs) start year score 75 -> end year score 79 Ms. James' kids are definitely below the advanced kids on average, but they have improved on their performance over the year. Ms. James might be considered a higher performing teacher, even if her students may never see the honor roll in their whole career.
That's how they worked out their ratings. They are not trying to pretend that a high performing teacher will turn special-needs kids in to advanced placement kids, they are only rating the ability of the teachers to drive improvement of any sort for the children.
Of course, if special needs kids keep getting teachers like Ms. James from elementary all the way to the end of high school, one might actually see that (statistically) a special needs kid might be able to progress to being advanced through steady progression by way of a chain of superior teachers for their entire school career. There are probably barriers to that sort of rosy kid of outcome, but we need to remember that what we learn in school, even in the more advanced classes, is not exactly esoteric knowledge. It is knowledge that is commonly known and fairly widely used. There is no reason that a student with superior instruction could not learn all of that, even if they have a rather average (or even below average) intelligence.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
That so-called "true economic value" has the units right, but not much else. The market value for a kindergarten teacher is not in any way related to the present value of the additional income earned by the students of a good kindergarten teacher compared to a bad one. Market value is generally about supply and demand, and if the OP is correct, supply of high school physics teachers is far less than kindergarten teachers.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:1, Insightful)
By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? [...] Don't you trust free markets?
To make a free market act as a free market, you need to break up monopolies when they arise, whether they're monopolising a product (like carrots) or a service (like teaching). Unions, by their nature, establish a monopoly on a particular kind of labour.
Of course, the schools (who buy that service and sell it on to their customers) have a rather monopolistic position themselves...
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Golly gosh it is so awful when the owners of a corporation have to actually keep their contractual promises to their employees. Boodeehoodeehooo. I'm crying so many tears for those owners that ran the company into the ground.
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:1, Insightful)
Software Engineer here, not a teacher, but no, that is not how the real world works.
When you're on an assembly line, employee A is working with the same materials as employee B, under substantially the same conditions.
When your "material" is PEOPLE, you get a huge range of variability. Some of the kids are eager to learn, and smart. Some are dumb and lazy. Some are smart and lazy. And so on.
In engineering, the smart guy usually gets the hardest problems to work on. If he's really good at his job, he may do only half the "quantity" of work of the dumb engineer who always gets tossed the easy stuff. If you're measuring only how many projects they each complete in a year, then the dumb engineer wins. Just like the really good teacher who ends up with all of the losers - he may only get 20% of them to pass the standardized test, but that's more than the less-skilled teacher who got the easy kids would have gotten through- and the less-skilled teacher could have a 100% pass rate. Use the standardized test to fire the teacher, and it's the effective ones who would get canned.
And that's the problem. We don't know how to objectively quantify the output of any job that involves dealing with actual people.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that the companies were very stupid and shortsighted, but nobody forced them to sign those contracts. Instead of trying to dick around the workers, they could have negotiated in good faith.
If by "re-negotiate" you mean, re-neg on a contract, well, if I buy a car from one of those companies, and my income goes down so I can't make the full payments, will they "renegotiate" the contract with me and accept less than the original terms of the contract? Maybe I borrowed $20k on the car, but now I want to pay them $12k. Are they going to go for that you think?
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
The system you describe sounds interesting, but is ripe for abuse in its own way. How, for example, does the "university application center" know how one school varies from another, and how do they judge it? Does it somehow mean that my 4.0 GPA is worth less to them if they think my school wasn't as good as somebody else's?
I would much prefer to have everyone take the same test and be judged on standardized criteria - that leaves it up to every student to show their knowledge on a level playing field. Sure, SATs are imperfect tests, and can easily fail to capture a student's depth or breadth of knowledge. But that's why high school transcripts, AP tests and activities play a significant role in US college admissions as well.
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not a teacher, but I do know some, and they seem demoralized by this emphasis on student test scores because they know that many, if not most, of the factors involved in how well a student does on those tests are out of control. The result is quite likely to be the opposite of what is intended, with good teachers becoming apathetic because it doesn't matter how good they are if the metrics they are judged by are out of their control.
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:1, Insightful)
You're an idiot. I could easily give you a test that you would fail. "Yep, bad teacher, fire 'em".
I could also easily give you a test that you would pass. "Yep, great teacher. Keep 'em!".
Tests simple give a 'snapshot' of the current grasp of some material by a very, very wide range of people at a current place and time. Almost meaningless, are most tests. They are little more than 'motivators'.
So, I guess if I want to fire you, I just need to give you a very difficult test that you will fail, then point at it, and say, 'oh, guess you have to go.' Yep, the facts that perhaps you weren't present when the material was taught, or that you didn't focus, or that you went drinking with friends instead of studying, or stayed up on night chatting (on a phone, computer, whatever), or you are ADHD, or any other innumerable factors are irrelevant. It must be that you had a 'bad' teacher.
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:2, Insightful)
No he won't. As long as A is reasonably effective he will get to keep his job. Are you the best employee at the place you work at? No? Why do you still have a job?
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Insightful)
I think your argument would hold up a lot better if there banks weren't doing exactly that with credit card debt.
Further, that wasn't what I was suggesting at all. What I was suggesting was that someone at the end of their career, you give them the benefit you contraced with them. After all, they performed their end of the deal.
But your agreement with them shouldn't bind you to making the same deal with a new hire.
And further, for those in their mid-career, you ought to be able to pro-rate the benefit to the amount of service they've given and/or buy-out the benefit.
Of course, you might think it's better to just keep the bennies for everybody, until the entity that made the promises no longer exists to pay them, and no one gets anything. It's a helluva way to treat you constituents, though.