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.'"
RTFA before commenting (Score:5, Interesting)
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.
...
Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Interesting)
There are definitely problems in the U.S. educational system. This article was pretty cool, and they do state that their metrics aren't perfect, but lead to some valuable insight. I'd like to see further studies on this.
Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system. They are more concerned with teachers' benefits than they are about students. Of course, that is their job, but they give campaign contributions and students don't, they've become a bit too good at it.
I love it when teachers bitch about pay (although, sometimes warranted) and we get the following conversation:
"Haven't teachers always been underpaid?"
"Yes, and we need to fix that once and for all."
"Then why did you take the job?"
"Because I love it!"
"!??!!!?!!?"
I say test the teachers (Score:3, Interesting)
Test the teachers on the material they are teaching. Completely objective metric. If they know the material and yet their students do not and their peer (same grade, same school) classes are succeeding with the same criteria, then the teacher doesn't know how to teach. Either re-train them or let them go.
Re:I say test the teachers (Score:3, Interesting)
Test the teachers on the material they are teaching.
James Popham, a prof. ameritus at UCLA, wrote that if we want to know something about someone, we measure that something in that someone. To measure something in the students and then draw a conclusion about the teacher is "a second-step inference." He pointed out that current psychometric theory (see the AERa, APA, NCME 1999 Standards for psychological and educational testing) only deal with first-step inferences.
Note that the LA Time analysis used value-added methods, which have not been fully vetted in the psychometric literature. Especially, the degree to which measurement error (which is operationalized slightly differently in psychometrics than in other fields) interacted with value-added methods has not been established. Given that the false-result rate on New York State's tests are around 5% (which is probably close to CA's), I doubt you can rely on them as much as this analysis has.
Re:Bad Science (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
A caption from the article:
Over seven years, John Smith's fifth-graders have started out slightly ahead of those just down the hall but by year's end have been far behind. (Irfan Khan, Los Angeles Times)
Re:Educational Problems (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Depends who you thnk teachers work for (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice to hope that this was the first step in recognising that (indirectly) real people pay for and therefore employ teachers. These real people would like to think the primary role of teachers is to impart knowledge, skills and abilities to the children in their charge.
I'm a prof in a school of ed, but my background is in psych, not ed. I've noticed that many teachers (and those teachers who go on to become profs of education) do not feel that imparting "knowledge, skills and abilities" is their major goal. Rather, as I see it, they envision teachers as replacing the home, family, and parents as the conduit of social morals.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:0, Interesting)
Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system.
Oh yes. By all means. Teacher's Unions are massive forces for corruption and exploitation of the taxpayer. Their cloddish brute force has subjected the US educational system to all the abuses for which unions are justly reviled. Such as:
1. Grossly inflated salaries a la the UAW. Wait - you mean even detractors will usually admit teachers get low pay?
2. Working hours strictly by the clock. Um, you mean none of that taking homework home to grade it or assembling teaching materials after hours?
3. Strictly protected jobs, no matter how incompetent. Guess we didn't need that silly old tenure system after all.
4. Ability to strictly set working conditions. Like, maybe not taking any #@#$ from parents and administrators about handing out bad grades or disciplining students.
No question, unions can be stifling. Personally, I think being able to threaten to unionize is worth more than actually having to live with a union. But really, the teacher's unions seem to be pretty toothless except for when Democratic political candidates want votes.
Re:pay talent what talent deserves (Score:3, Interesting)
Your argument rests on free-market principles, forgetting the fact that public schools are a government monopoly. But, to your point... her students do the best of any foreign language students in the school. Parents are always trying to get their kids into her class. She has one of the highest percentages of students accepted to the Governor's School program in the state, and has had very many of her students go one to Ivy League schools.
C grads from JMU turn out C grads from JMU. A grads from Ivy League schools turn out the same. That's the difference, and I think a lot of it has to do with expectations. But its harder to get the better people in to fill the rolls unless they don't /need/ the money. And economics are fluid. My mother wouldn't have been able to afford to be a teacher if my dad wasn't making a boatload of money. She'd have had to stay on Wall Street, we'd be stuck in New York, and I probably would have died in a traffic accident trying to learn how to drive in the clusterfuck that is long island where I was born.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
In all of the examples of "bad unions" you cited, the unions are infact that least of their problems.
Each of those industries is dominated by dinosaurs that only linger on because they are kept on life support by government.
Each of those industries are in dire need of housecleaning and aren't getting it. Labor disputes are just the tip of the iceberg.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Interesting)
It's only "gunpoint" when people are prevented from negotiating other than as a group. Which is in fact the case with teacher's unions (and most surviving unions), but the problem isn't with group negotiation; the problem is with the force required to sustain it.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:0, Interesting)
I laugh at your 'really nice pension': my dad was a career state employee -- his 60% of 1988 salary hardly seems cushy, and cost-of-living adjustments don't even cover his health-insurance premium increases. He and mom have taken part-time jobs, which is less cool at age 80 than you'll probably imagine it is.
Don't look now but every perk you enjoy as a white-collar information worker is both due to unions. And those perks (hell, the jobs themselves) are up for renegotiation as information jobs become internationally transferrable.
Hating on unions is what got us where we are. Twenty years ago, my state passed 'Right to Work' (for less) legislation that promised that businesses would flock here to avoid more union-friendly states. The manufacturers that came paid career salaries 60%-80% (inflation adjusted) of market rate and salaries statewide suffered from the downward pressure. Mean income has underperformed and is now losing ground. Meanwhile, those same manufacturers are now migrating jobs to China and other low-wage countries thanks to international free trade. A friend with 15 years in IT at one of these was handed a horrible ultimatum: move to Tianjin, or take a 90-day trip to train your replacement and get a severance package, or quit without severance.
And whether you believe me or not really doesn't matter much -- most people have experienced it already and you likely will experience it soon enough. Chart your inflation-adjusted salary and watch for it to stagnate, if it hasn't already.
But you go ahead and believe it's those damn unions' fault. Only excellent people deserve pensions and job sec... oh, wait, almost nobody in the US offers anyone a fuckin' pension nowadays. And job security is g-gone!
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Just remember, it was management's idea to give those ridiculous retirement benefits, not the unions. The union requested a modest pay raise, and management thought they'd get away cheap by giving retirement bennies instead, thinking workers would only live to 68. In hindsight, the pay raise would have been much cheaper.
Re:pay talent what talent deserves (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Educational Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher.
I think you are badly and dangerously wrong. Correct facts are a prerequisite for a robust debate, and your facts are wrong.
According to a recent study, the true economic value of an outstanding kindergarten teacher is somewhere around $320,000 [nytimes.com] per year. As in, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars. A high school teacher is not worth anywhere near as much. That's because, by the time students get into high school, they are too old for a teacher to change them very much. In order to make a significant difference in a student's life outcome, you have to get to them while they're young.
If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way languages are taught in the English speaking world (the UK is just as bad, if not worse, than the US). The usual thing that's said is "[British|American] people can't learn different languages", and later in life, "Adults can't learn a new language". Neither is true.
British and American people can learn a language just as well as anyone else. The problem is partly the way languages are taught in schools (mostly, it's about as fun and interesting as watching paint dry) and the other part of the problem is people (especially the less dedicated students) thinking "I speak English, which is the dominant language, why should I bother learning another language?"
I started learning Spanish in May 2008 (well into my 30s). In six months I had learned more Spanish than I had French in *seven years* of compulsory French at school. At 16, I could not describe what I had done that morning in French. But after 1 year of Spanish, I actually gave a talk in Spanish at RetroEuskal in Bilbao (OK, so I planned pretty thoroughly what I was going to say, but the main thing is - in my 30s I was learning Spanish orders of magnitude more quickly than I was learning French at school).
The difference is, learning Spanish, I have never seen a teacher. It has all been from websites, podcasts, an online subscription to Rosetta Stone for a while, talking with people in Spain on internet forums, online language exchanges - social things and fun things. Not sitting and having to rote memorise verb conjugations, but actually using the language for real. Yes, I did sit down and go through the "boring bits" like learning grammar (because it means you can learn much faster). But even learning the grammar under my own steam from various websites was more fun than being taught at school.
So when I was a kid and should have been able to soak up French like a sponge, I didn't. Why? I admit I wasn't a great student, but the teaching methods were also terrible. People learned French at school in spite of the teaching not because of it. No one I know who studied French at school, even passing the GCSE at 16, can actually really speak any worthwhile French. Even the good students at school who wanted to do well can barely order a meal in French when they are in France on vacation.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:3, Interesting)
I laugh at your 'really nice pension': my dad was a career state employee
I laugh at his choice of employer. There's a guy down the block who retired at fifty from a teaching job, gets his salary plus full benefits for the rest of his life. That's pretty cushy. Hell, the garbage collectors in my area make $80,000 plus full bennies. Out of my pocket, I might add, and if that's an example of the wonderfulness of unions I'll take vanilla. I will also note that out of my real-estate taxes, 56 percent currently goes to "education". That overshadows all other local government expenditures, all of them ... police, fire department, hospitals, road repair, everything. That money is going somewhere, and a lot of it is going into pension funds. And for all that money we still have a third-rate education system: something's wrong and the Teachers Union is not going to fix it. They are, in fact, diametrically opposed to fixing it, because that would mean they would have to take a hit. And like most of us, like most union workers, they care more for themselves and their families than anyone else. Period. It's just human nature.
And I'm sorry, but your rosy view of unions is not borne out by the facts. Face it, people with power will tend to abuse that power if they are not held accountable for their use of it and union leaders are just as subject to that as corporate executives.
I agree, life is not bliss now that the "Global Economy" has reared its ugly head, however unions are not some saving grace. The reality is that if unions had not been so abusive, had not believed that the gravy train would last forever, it might have slowed the shift of our manufacturing base to China, and might have kept our remaining manufacturers competitive. Unions have done nothing but accelerate the loss of U.S. jobs in our Brave New World Order. And why is that? Because they refused to accept that they would have to take less back when it might have mattered... and now they have nothing.
So keep on believing that unions are bastions of light and goodness. There are well-managed, enlightened unions: but the Teachers Union and most industrial/manufacturing labor organizations are anything but. They're run by bloodsucking vampires that are just as corrupt and self-serving as any modern CEO, or any politician for that matter. And they are that way because their constituents, pardon me, members, want them to be. Yes, left to themselves corporations will tend to mistreat their workers, but unions are not blameless here. There is greed and selfishness on both sides of the equation.
Nobody in my family has ever had a pension: if we retired with anything it was because we took our money and planned for the future. You'll pardon me if I don't feel that people who spend themselves into oblivion and are unable to take care of themselves properly deserve to be coddled at my expense. There are plenty of ways to save for retirement, plenty of ways to invest. Use them, and don't depend upon my checkbook.
Re:RTFA before commenting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:like any other job? (Score:1, Interesting)
Whether you buy their arguments or not, the teachers' official point of view has been spelled out for the Times' readers.
I for one don't buy it. Certainly care needs to be taken with designing any evaluations of job effectiveness. The value-added approach tries to take such care. The union response was just the standard line that you cannot and should not evaluate them by standardized tests that would let you compare them against each other. And similarly disappointing rhetoric implying that only teachers can evaluate teacher effectiveness - as if mere mortals like parents or statisticians have no insight. You don't need to be a master chef to know whether the food was prepared by one, and you don't need to be a teacher to know whether a teachers's students are learning.
Of course, can you accurately evaluate two master chefs when neither is given the option of selecting their own ingredients (students) and where the ingredients may have been damaged by a previous chef (poor teaching a year prior)? Also, how do you control for differences (social, cultural, economic) across schools so you can compare teachers in a district?
How about we publish evaluations of parents? That would be far more effective...
Teaching is 25% the teacher, 50% the student, 25% the parents. If a student doesn't want to learn, no teacher will motivate them to learn. If a student has a horrible home life, learning in school will be the least of their concerns. Even an ambivalent home life makes teaching hard (the students that never do their home work).
I would object to publishing evaluations as well, considering that my performance as a teacher is not the dominant reason that kids learn. The school board is beholden to parents that complain, thus allowing the horrible parents to effectively shout me out of a job just because they are too lazy to make their kid respect the school system.
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Educational Problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Since Unions are such a big problem, I assume that than non-union Mississippi has better schools than unionized Massachusetts.
Re:GM's idea? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they didn't get pay raises. They got the bennies in place of the pay raises.
Sorry, the best I can do is this: When I was a kid, my grandfather, who lived in the same big house with my dad and mom and sister and grandma, worked at a GM supplier on the South Side that worked under the same contract that GM had in Detroit. I remember hearing about those negotiations every single night at the dinner table.
I come from a union family. Three generations before me, from railroad-workers unions to firefighters and policeman's union to Teamsters.
If it hadn't been for those unions, I would not have grown up in a middle-class family, and I'm betting neither would you, because those gains made by organized labor did things like create the 5-day workweek, and paid vacations, and sick leave. If it wasn't for those unions, and their influence on the political system, I would never have gone to university or grad school. If it wasn't for those unions, there would be no middle-class in the US. Just an ownership class, a merchant class and a bunch of workers who lived paycheck to paycheck and owned nothing. Just look at the decades before the organized labor movement to see what I'm talking about. Women dying in shirt factories, kids working in meat packing plants instead of going to school, company stores. Starting with the Reagan administration, we've been heading back in that direction, and combined with his (and his three successors) all rewarding companies that shipped jobs overseas, we will never again have a strong manufacturing sector in the US. That's gone for good, finished. US wages are headed for China levels.
And that's going to apply to tech workers, too. Already, there are places in the US where it's cheaper to have a call center than India, because of declining pay levels. Tech workers are working longer hours, having fewer benefits, and in more and more cases they're just contract workers so they get no benefits at all, not even vacation.
Don't believe that because you're a high-flying tech worker that you're immune from the decline of the middle class. During the period from 2000-2008, your real income went down by an average of $2000. If you're still middle-class, it's largely thanks to your credit card and huge mortgage, and even those are going to be going away. The US is down to about #11 among other countries in quality of life and dropping fast. And no, it's not due to the past 19 months.
Re:GM's idea? Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
You honestly believe it was unions that sent the manufacturing jobs overseas? Do you realize that those jobs moving overseas had everything to do with "free trade" policies begun under Nixon, expanded by Reagan and then put into overdrive by Clinton. It had nothing to do with unions, because no matter how much less American workers took, they'd never take the kind of wages that are paid in the developing world.
"Globalism" and "Free Trade" are the agenda of the corporatocracy that killed Detroit, and Pittsburgh. South Korea drives the cost of American manufactured goods through the roof, but we've got to let Hyundais and Kias in for nothing. This has never been about getting elected. It's been about our politicians doing what they're paid by corporations to do. And the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court has just taken the last gate off the hinges. Now it's a cakewalk for corporate power, driving America into the Third World.
It's so short-sighted to think it's labor's fault. You've got to think a little deeper than the Rush Limbaugh party line.
Did you know that a starting UAW autoworker today is making the exact same wage as a starting US auto worker in the 1970's? And by the way, back then the car companies were profitable and a new car didn't cost the equivalent of an average family's income.
If America has any hope, you've got to stop being so easily fooled by advertising and the corporate media. After half a century, they know exactly how to play you and the vast American "middle" is singing right along, unfortunately. If that keeps up, you might as well accept that the America you grew up is gone forever and our quality of life is heading straight into the toilet.