
Teaching Is Not a Business - aaronharnly
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/opinion/sunday/teaching-is-not-a-business.html
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MarkMc
I don't think it's necessarily true that "Merit pay invites rivalries among
teachers, when what’s needed is collaboration."

If my pay is only affected by my performance then I'm quite happy to
collaborate with other staff members to help them improve.

Personally I like Warren Buffett's approach to merit pay: 80% of your salary
is due to your performance, while 20% is due to the performance of your other
team members [1]. This gives an incentive improve your performance and to be a
team player.

[1] Page 19 of Buffett's 2010 letter to shareholders:
[http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2010ltr.pdf](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2010ltr.pdf)

~~~
jonnathanson
Well, there's the theory of merit pay, and then there's the practice. I have
no idea how merit pay works in the schools trying it out, but my hypothesis is
that the overall bonus pool is finite and small. After a few cycles of the
game, so to speak, teachers realize that only N merit bonuses can ever be
given out in any year. Under such conditions, striving for a merit bonus _is_
directly competitive with your peers, and the pursuit (and awarding) of that
bonus can get very political very quickly. Anyone who's ever worked at a large
company with stack ranking, department-wide quotas on performance tiers, etc.,
will know all too well how this sort of system can produce adverse outcomes if
not implemented _very_ carefully.

Buffet's system seems like an improvement on that scheme, but it, too, can be
perverted under the wrong evaluation and management systems. If the group
bonuses are team or unit-based (which seems likely, given the way such systems
are usually implemented in order to manage at the local/proximate level), then
team leaders compete for political favor. What results is that the savviest
team leaders secure the rewards for their teams, whether by currying favor
with the higher-ups, or by inflating their performance evaluations. (There are
ways around this, however, and they rely on the artful management of access
and information symmetry.)

I'm not opposed whatsoever to the idea of giving teachers bonus pay, or hell,
higher pay in general. We should be trying to make the profession more
prestigious and attractive, and accordingly, raising the bar on whom we accept
into the field. There seems to be something working in the Scandinavian model,
which regards (and rewards) teachers sort of like how the US regards and
rewards lawyers, consultants, and other professionals. Perhaps the US is just
too big and too heterogeneous to make something like that work. And there is
something to be said about being unable to fire underperformers (though I do
think that's putting the cart before the horse). Today's reformers are
focusing on culling the dead weight, or on opening up more charter schools.
The problem is that _most_ of the weight is dead weight right now. We've had
decades of adverse selection into public school teaching, which has become a
profession of last resort. Culling dead weight is fine, but we need to rethink
the way we treat and compensate the profession if we want to attract
professionals to the field.

~~~
Retric
You just need to have a much wider pool than just one school. If the state has
100 high schools then you helping out at your local school has a net positive
effect.

Possible downside is losing schools will have an even harder time competing.
As a counter for that you might want some sort of built in correction factor
based on the schools population.

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DanielBMarkham
The public policy discussion around public education would be a comedy if it
wasn't so damned tragic.

Let's review a few commonly-understood facts.

1) Public education continues to take more taxpayer money while providing
little to no improvement in "outcomes" for kids, whatever that means [insert
your own definition]

2) For those kids lucky enough to learn enough to be employable, businesses
are now picking up the slack, with on-the-job mentoring and training. Business
does a _lot_ of training in the U.S.

3) Blaming one group or another isn't useful. It's not the parents, or the
taxpayers, or the teacher's unions, or the administrators. What we have here
is a _systemic_ problem. The system is structured such that it sucks the life
out of the teachers and continues to consume more and more resources. It's a
bad system.

4) Making the system worse is the fact that it's full of consultants and
external experts -- all of whom have some different idea of just what the hell
the education system is supposed to accomplish. This article was a good
example of that. Great ideas -- I love the idea of emphasizing relationships
-- but markedly different from "Teach Johnny to read and write" or "Educate
Sue enough so that she can get a job" or "Amit needs to be prepared for
college". We all have different goals here.

So the problem is clear: there is no defined problem the education system is
trying to solve. Therefore there is no strategy that can be "best", there is
no expense that is either productive or non-productive, and there is no advice
that is more or less useful than any other.

Until this issue of definitions is solved, no further progress can be made. In
fact, no further progress is possible. Yes, you can come to the table with
some great ideas, and you can make little snide political attacks against
those who have different worldviews. Maybe even the other professors will pat
you on the back. But you're not helping things.

So we're left with the problem Socrates gave us: the definition of terms.
Without that, I am not optimistic that progress can be made. And guess what?
Once we have a common definition of what the schools are supposed to be doing,
we have a test. And so we are back to where we started. No matter what you do,
you're going to have to measure it if you want to have some meaningful
discussion about how it's done. That's an epistemological conclusion, not a
political one.

~~~
aridiculous
But it's a political problem!

I agree that the _debate_ over education is crippled by a lack of clear
teleological goals that everyone can agree on before discussing. But that's
expected in a big discussion.

Most Big Social Issues have this same problem because they are political by
nature, not technological or epistemological. Our society hasn't reached
consensus on what an 'education' is, just like how it hasn't decided what a
good life is (work/life balance debate), what 'freedom' is (drug criminality
debate), or what a just war is.

But ESPECIALLY with education, I wouldn't expect a 'defined problem' or a set
of agreed upon terms to come about by consensus. Why? Like tax policy,
education policy has a very intimate relationship to politics and social
classes because it affects everyone closely. The issue of definitions is
'solved' when one group's ideas win by force of influence.

The point you may be missing is that this has already happened. For the
wealthy, the system isn't broken at all. The current system of standardization
(test scores, bean-counting admissions processes) for everyone with a side of
elite tutoring and private schools for themselves isn't failing. It's doing
quite well: Pay extra disposable income for Mary to have better 'aptitude'
\--> secure acceptance into the next stage of life. The wealthy don't want to
make the masses dumb, that would be too dangerous and gut their workforce .
They'd rather make them predictably average so their children can beat their
peers, reliably, with extra financial firepower.

They may not think these details out consciously, but it's the game being
played.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Sure it's a political problem. So -- people who want to change the system are
required to define what the system is to them. We all don't have to have
agreement. Petitioners for change simply have to clearly define their terms.
That way we can judge them on whether our definitions are similar, whether
those goals are worth meeting, whether the strategies employed might meet
them, and whether or not their argument is self-consistent. None of that
guarantees a "best" outcome, after all it is political, but it guarantees a
reasonable framework for public discourse.

~~~
aridiculous
OK, so the _reformers_ need to define their terms. Yes, I agree.

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JDDunn9
I remember reading a study for early education that found that simply touching
each student (high-five, hug, etc) every day significantly improved their
performance. I imagine the need for a personal connection to the teacher
diminishes gradually as we mature.

The problem I see is how do you scale personal connections and foster more
social bonds?

~~~
DonnyV
You need more teachers. I think you should only have 10 or 12 kids per teacher
max.

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j2kun
Why haven't schools adopted the business model of "hiring great people and
letting them do what they do best"? Pay them well, give them support,
infrastructure, and enough oversight to help them resolve their issues quickly
and effectively...and then just trust them to be productive and successful.

Is it a lack of funding that stops this from being a reality? A lack of
qualified applicants? Is there a good reason this model wouldn't work?

~~~
kaitai
It works quite well in other countries (for instance, Finland). We have a few
problems in the US:

\-- no profit in it (as observed above) \-- we don't really respect teachers
or education in the US \-- school boards and local politicians want control
over curricula and political agendas. Can you imagine some bright amazing
young teacher teaching unadulterated evolution in some counties in Texas?

Kids are seen as a cost, not an asset or an investment, and we like to cut
costs. And I do think there are broad swathes of the political establishment
that are really invested in keeping America dumb.

~~~
xorcist
> we don't really respect teachers or education in the US

That's probably the most important answer right there. If teachers had the
same, or even higher, status in society as doctors and lawyers (had just as
many tv-series where they were superstars etc.) we wouldn't be having this
discussion at all.

The same issues with measuring performance exists in those other jobs as well,
but the perspective on teaching is always from the top. Everone's an expert in
a way that's not true for law and medicine (to carry on the metaphor above).

~~~
aetherson
There are tons of bad doctors and lawyers out there.

------
aaronharnly
Interesting claim: The creation of strong social bonds, possibly in
conjunction with Deming's “plan, do, check, act” cycle, is essential to
successful change in schools. (And more successful than extrinsic methods like
vouchers or charter, or technological approaches.)

[Disclaimer: I work for an ed-tech company. This reflects my views, not
theirs.]

------
wyager
I'm not sure exactly how the article of the title is reflected in the content
of the article. It just sounds like the author complaining about perceived
depersonalization of schooling.

------
mariodiana
Every classroom in America would improve if we simply removed the few
pathologically disruptive students that rob the others of their education.

~~~
mjklin
If I could have done this when I was a teacher, I would probably still be one.

~~~
harry8
Wow. I'm sorry, that's really awful.

------
WalterBright
Charter and voucher schools are not free market schools, since the government
is paying the bill.

------
iopq
Teaching should be a business. Then the best models of teaching will get the
best customers. When you have schooling as a government service, there is
little incentive to provide good education.

Going to school is probably the most miserable experience of my life. It's up
there with having a job that started at 7:30 AM.

~~~
kaonashi
There are plenty of for-profit colleges, and by and large they are complete
scams. Color me highly skeptical.

In the real world most education is government subsidized, and the
counterexamples that do well seem to run on a non-profit model.

~~~
snitko
That's because of the twisted market government has created. In the real
world, most roads are built on taxpayers money and police is paid for using
tax money of the very same people they beat up. But is this real world a place
you want to live in? If I don't like how I myself or my children are being
educated (protected, treated), I should be able to stop paying and go buy
someone else's services immediately. Without that, the feedback loop is broken
and the system stops working properly.

~~~
kaonashi
That's a fine bit of moralizing, but the reality is you have to illuminate a
sane path from here to there. Most the paths I've seen proposed do not seem in
the least bit viable.

~~~
snitko
What paths were proposed and which ones didn't seem viable to you and why?

~~~
kaonashi
The ones I've seen are things like vouchers and charter schools. They are
solutions that don't compose.

------
xname
"But charter students do about the same, over all, as their public school
counterparts" \-- what a pathetic liar. There are redundant empirical evidence
supports that charter students perform better.

This author is totally progressive ideology-minded.

~~~
jshen
Links please

~~~
jshen
I looked this up myself.

"But for each of the CREDO studies, two questions need to be asked: What are
the findings? and How strong are the data and analyses? The 2009 findings were
somewhat favorable to conventional public schools—although not as favorable as
some skeptics argued. The 2013 findings appear to show some improvement for
charters, with great variation between schools and between states—and with an
overall national estimate of students in charter schools scoring approximately
0.01 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.005 standard deviations
lower on math tests than their peers in conventional public schools (the
former being statistically significant; the latter not). That is, the
‘findings’ question can be answered as follows: small differences shown in
2009 are even smaller in 2013. The CREDO findings are highly consistent with
an overall body of research concluding that the test-score outcomes of the
sectors are almost identical."

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-
sheet/wp/2013/09/...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-
sheet/wp/2013/09/24/the-bottom-line-on-charter-school-studies/)

~~~
altcognito
And charter schools in Michigan have been pretty disastrous:

[http://www.freep.com/article/20140811/NEWS06/308110130/chart...](http://www.freep.com/article/20140811/NEWS06/308110130/charter-
schools-Michigan-suspension)

"The move follows state schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan’s assertions —
after an 8-day series about charters published by the Free Press — that he
would crack down on poor-performing authorizers. The “State of Charter
Schools” series showed that Michigan charters receive nearly $1 billion per
year in taxpayer money from the state, often with little accountability,
transparency or academic achievement."

And the in-depth (all articles may not be online done of charter school
misspending:
[http://www.freep.com/article/20140623/NEWS06/306230027/chart...](http://www.freep.com/article/20140623/NEWS06/306230027/charter-
school-law)

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jorgecastillo
I hope I don't get down voted, but unless you're being schooled in a hovel
and/or lack decent living conditions, it's up to you. No one is a self-made
man, every successful man has been supported in some way by society, but there
is a certain threshold at which you can't blame circumstances. I support
public education from kindergarten to PhD level, but I don't think everyone
needs to have the best education possible. Everyone should have access to
proper conditions for learning, then it's up to the students to learn or not
to learn.

~~~
capex
Every one might not "need" the best education possible, but every one damn
well has a right to have access to the best education possible.

~~~
aurelian
This statement cannot possibly be true. If everyone had access to the best
education, it would not be the best education.

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lnanek2
> All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in > the future, a
> goal worth striving for, if they’re going to > make it in school. They need
> a champion, someone who > believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter
> the > picture.

The author then goes on to throw out all attempts to measure and improve
education and say it needs a personal touch everywhere. When I was a student I
hated all my teachers because I just read the books, aced all the tests, and
ignored the the homework. I skipped class as much as I could without violating
official graduation policy and read books under a tree or at a rest stop.
Teachers just got in the way. Any personal touch by the teachers would have
just slowed me down more than they already were and made me hate them more.

Let's stop with this touchy feely nonsense and measure and improve. If you go
out and run every day you may feel good about yourself, but you'll never turn
in good times unless you measure your time and work on improving it each time.
You'll do even better if you compete with teammates and rivals during
practices and meets. I think this article is what happens when you let an
English major or similar comment on process, something they really didn't need
to get their near worthless degree.

