

Report: Use student performance to rate teachers - tokenadult
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2009/10/26/report-use-student-performance-to-rate-teachers/?cxntfid=blogs_get_schooled_blog

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techiferous
I'm a programmer but I took a three-year hiatus from programming to be a
science and technology teacher. So I speak from having some teaching
experience.

Objective measures like the ones proposed are a siren song. They sound really
good on the surface, but a deeper look reveals these problems:

* You only get what you measure. Whatever is not measured falls through the cracks. So this means that the teaching goals have to be really good. Historically, they are not, as they are driven more by politics than by people who are talented at teaching.

* Some of the value that teachers add is in intangibles which are harder to measure. These important intangibles will fall by the wayside.

Also, the administration has a large impact on student and teacher success.
Imagine being a programmer and having your performance judged on a project
that was mismanaged by an incompetent project manager.

I'm not saying we should have no objective measures; I'm just giving a word of
caution that this is a complex issue that's not easily solved. Reductionist
approaches like these are bound to fail; more holistic approaches that focus
on the student-teacher-parent relationship are better.

------
tptacek
In other words, if you want to make more money as a teacher, make sure you're
not posted somewhere where they _really_ need good teachers; your best bet,
for maximum student payoff for each extra hour of teacher effort, is a rich
suburb.

~~~
tokenadult
What if what is looked at is IMPROVEMENT?

~~~
tptacek
What if improvement is much harder to achieve in poor inner city schools?
Wait. Take the "what if" out of that sentence. Replace the question mark with
a period.

Incentive pay: good. Reason we don't have a good incentive pay system to argue
with the teachers unions about: because incentive systems for teachers are
hard.

Parent of two school-age kids speaking now: teach-the-test pressure is already
bad enough without paying teachers to ratchet it up.

~~~
tokenadult
But are you saying that the reform proposed in the originally submitted link
would make things WORSE for children in poor inner city schools? Right now
their teachers are, for the most part, not evaluated for effectiveness by any
standard. And we all know that the kids in the suburbs are better off (not
least, because they live in suburban homes in suburban neighborhoods, but also
because of schooling quality) than the kids in poor inner city schools. I
haven't seen a proof here yet in your kind replies and Alex's that the reform
proposed in the submitted link would schools worse for any kind of student.
I'm a parent of four school-age children, and living in a whole neighborhood
full of children, and I do hope the next generation sees some improvement in
education.

After edit (and your initial reply to this post): My apologies, I forgot that
the submitted link here was a news source, rather than the full report

[http://www.policy2.org:85/images/stories/documents/policy2.0...](http://www.policy2.org:85/images/stories/documents/policy2.0policypaper.pdf)

of the organization advocating this change in policy. The stakeholders
consulted in preparing the report may not all enthusiastically support student
testing programs (some of them surely do not), but the report claims that the
trade-offs of linking teacher evaluation to student achievement are better
than the trade-offs of not linking teacher evaluation to any criteria in
particular. I think that is a reasonable view.

~~~
tptacek
Yes. That's what I'm saying. In the absence of any reasonable notion of what
teacher performance means and how to measure it, tying teacher comp to
arbitrary standardized performance metrics is a bad thing, for _exactly the
same reason_ as it's bad to comp developers based on number of bugs opened or
lines of code committed.

The only difference I see between the two instances of this "solution" are
that the incentive comp schemes dev teams come up with are simply fodder for
amusing DailyWTF posts, and the punitive "incentive" schemes on the table now
for schools have already begun screwing over a whole generation of kids.

We all hope the next generation sees some improvement in education, don't we?

[ps: I took the time to actually read the "Policy 2.0" report that is the
subject of the AJC article. It contains _no data_. It builds a case for formal
teacher evaluation by using the same logic you do: "studies teachers are
important, so it follows that a plan to segment teachers by performance would
be beneficial". I'm particularly happy to report that almost none of the
study's contributors are even named, nor is a methodology specified beyond "we
have an internet site, we recruited volunteers, and we led discussion groups
and documented the "results".]

------
teeja
Nonsense. You can't rate the countless dozens of things _good_ teachers do
with some phony metric. Any more than you can measure 'good' programming,
'good' science research, or any other human endeavor that requires creativity,
tailoring responses to the situation, etc.

"Objective" measures are a pipe-dream that's decades old. It's constantly
thrown up as a 'solution', almost always by people with little or no education
experience.

Teachers have little control over the attitudes / motivations of students. You
can bring a horse to water. Again, the evaluation of _experienced
professionals_ is worth something ... but good teaching is at least 50% art,
and what works is a mystery that has to be solved one class at a time.

------
Alex3917
What about all the evidence saying that when you pay teachers for students
performance, students learn less?

~~~
tokenadult
Citations, please?

~~~
Alex3917
Alfie Kohn cites a bunch of studies in Punished by Rewards.

~~~
tokenadult
I hope there is somebody besides Alfie Kohn writing about this.

[http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/alfie-kohn-is-bad-
fo...](http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/alfie-kohn-is-bad-for-you-and-
dangerous-for-your-children/)

But what about the point in the originally submitted link that in most states
NOTHING in particular is done to evaluate teachers?

~~~
tptacek
That's what you have to contribute here? A blog post taking Kohn to task for
his tone? It's definitely true: Kohn is an archetypical bleeding heart
liberal. I'm pretty liberal, and he makes my eyes roll.

But that doesn't make him wrong. What he's saying about incentive pay
harmonizes with what we as technology entrepreneuers already know about
incentive comp, and with what we're already observing in school districts
around the country. The teachers in Oak Park don't even get a pizza party for
jacking up ISAT scores, but those scores are still a top-of-mind issue for
them year round.

A reasonable person could argue that it's better not to do formal evaluations
at all, rather than smothering the whole school system with meaningless
standardized tests.

~~~
tokenadult
A reasonable person could argue as well that pupils (or their parents, their
legal representatives) may just as well be empowered to shop for schools
strictly on the basis of their own preference, just as customers shop for
technology products on the basis of whether they like the products or not.
Today, pupils are assigned to schools, and have very limited choice of
teachers within the schools to which they are assigned. Just as I agree with
you that workplaces are more pleasant when workers are honored and valued for
their capacity to make decisions, so I hope the school system begins valuing
learners for their capacity to notice when a particular teacher isn't a good
fit for a particular learner.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_just as customers shop for technology products on the basis of whether they
like the products or not._

That might be a simplification on your part, if not it's naive. Customers
don't have to like a product - they see an advert for it that tells them it's
right for them, or their friend has one, or the guy in the shop sells it them
because it's got the highest markup.

* I hope the school system begins valuing learners for their capacity to notice when a particular teacher isn't a good fit for a particular learner.*

So, a teacher is a poor performer - do you sack them and have no teacher or do
you realise that poor education is better than no education? In order to get
better teachers better candidate teachers need to come forward.

Finally, parents have a large part in education - parents that teach respect
for teachers will make the job easier and make the classes learning benefit.
Parents that help with learning outside of school will help their children
learn better.

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schindyguy
Wouldnt that just skew all grades higher? Why wouldnt I want to give out all
A's to my B and C students if it meant hire pay? Or am I missing something

~~~
tptacek
You're not missing something. You just spot it quickly because the idea of
metric-based performance pay has been such a disaster in the technology
industry (pay extra for devs not to "make bugs", and they simply stop filing
bugs in the bug database).

