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."
Won't someone think of the children? (Score:1, Insightful)
There is nothing like the court of public opinion to prosecute bad teachers... Nothing like it at all. /sarcasm
Student performance is obviously important, but is the performance measurement metric just as transparent as these evals are going to be? Who is measuring the performance (and lack of bias) on the part of the evaluators and those who decide what tests to apply, when, and how much they will be weighted? There is a lot more to learning than passing a test.
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?
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:So, the teacher wants to hide the report card? (Score:5, Insightful)
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! ;)
boo frickin hoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Makes you wonder just how bad the results are if there's this much fuss from the union.
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.
How about we stop bitching about teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
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: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: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.
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: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: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: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:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:1, Insightful)
Did you just put bad family in quotes? Does this imply that there aren't families that devalue education? Or is it meant to simply imply that schools are not effected by the surrounding area?
Let me put this in words you'll understand, small ones
I sell pig meat. I live in Jew area. Jew no eat pig. My store close soon.
See the one-syllable words I used for you?
But insults aside, really. I whole-heatedly support performance based evaluations, I whole heatedly support performance bonuses. I do not support vouchers simply because it leads to racial segregation [aeaweb.org]. I also do not support performance based evaluations and merit pay in a vacuum. These two things can not exist in the forms currently being touted.
We have to find a way to evaluate teachers IN CONTEXT, and without BLAMING THEM FOR EVERYTHING BAD IN THE COUNTRY.
Stop it
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: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: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:Won't someone think of the children? (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, until you realize that the questions on "the test" are taken from the state curriccullum! - you know, the things the teachers are supposed to be teaching already. If they have to stop what they are doing to "teach to the test" they were most likely not advancing the students in the way they are supposed to.
Then explain charter schools where student success is either the same or better with a student population choosen by random chance and the schools have fewer resources than public schools?
A teacher put "at a fundamental disadvantage" that doesn't want to face the challenges they are presented with can do what every other employee can do - change jobs. When a school can't keep it's teachers, someone will decide to see what the problem is.
The guarantee of lifetime employment obliterates any incentive the community can offer the teacher to improve - especially if the teacher's union refuses to allow merit pay for excellent teachers (apparently because it makes bad teachers feel bad about themselves - not the kids that had to suffer them for the year)...
I wish we could start putting teacher's children in the classrooms of the lowest performing teachers - maybe that will drive home the idea all teachers aren't the same...
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't someone think of the children? (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: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: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:Won't someone think of the children? (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 on the test. Yes, scores will plummet. That's okay, curve them back up.
Seriously, you can't "teach the test" if all you know is "this test is about US history from the Civil War to WWII."
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: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:Won't someone think of the children? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not really sure where you get the idea that tenure = lifetime job security. All tenure does is ensure that due process is followed in the removal of a teacher. Believe me as a teacher we don't want the lazy, unqualified person around any more than you do. It is up to the administrators to do their job to get the ineffective persons out of the system. It is actually going to take longer to remove an ineffective teacher under the new system rather than the old system.
Your comment about charter schools. Were you aware that they send a number of the poorly performing students back to the public system before June to make themselves look good? Meanwhile they have taken valuable money away from the public school. Money that does not come back with the student.
Are you so naive that you believe that socioeconomic factors play no role in education? I'm sorry but a student who has only one parent at home that works 15 hours a day to put food on the table in a violent poverty stricken neighborhood is more likely to have little regard for school and no desire to perform well. Whereas the student from an upper middle class home with two parents in the home is typically going to perform much better and actually have a drive and desire to do well.
In what job is a persons performance and evaluations based upon someone else's desire to improve? I have no prolem being evaluated on MY WORK. I have no problem with that evaluation being made public, even though no other profession has to worry about that. Look to see what I am doing to get my students to pass not what is beyond my control. I have each of my students in class 4.3 hours each week out of 168 hours , that is 2.6% of the entire week. There is only so much I can do in that short amount of time to overcome what is done the other 97.3% of the week.