
Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority - ilamont
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html
======
gxs
I went to an inner city Los Angeles high school. You wouldn't believe some of
the individuals that can pass as qualified teachers. People that they
themselves were never taught correctly, and went straight into teaching after
college. This of course is the double whammy - poorly academically prepared
people, with little real world experience - so they fail students on both
counts.

And yet...the most annoying part of this experience was the attitude of the
other students. I despised my high school mostly because absolutely nobody
cared. I think it's hard for people from better areas grasp this. People
really do tell the teacher to fuck off. People really do just talk amongst
each other, listening to music, while the teacher tries to talk over them. And
because no one puts in any level of effort whatsoever, you can get an A by
simply just showing up.

I don't doubt we need better teachers. I don't doubt it at all. All I'm saying
is we need better teachers at the youngest grade school levels to reach
children while they are still, I guess reachable. And more importantly, we
need a better way of educating parents to get their kids to care.

Then, we can really start holding teachers accountable.

~~~
chipsy
For the most needy inner city kids, I think boarding schools might be
appropriate even at an early age. Their home environment and neighborhood is
so shattered that what they need most is a stable day-to-day existence
shielded from drugs, gangs, and criminal behavior. If they don't get that, by
the teen years, they're stuck in feudalistic "ghetto thinking," start getting
into increasingly serious trouble, and just aren't able to take school and its
discipline games seriously anymore.

Of course, fixing the quality of instruction should probably come first.

~~~
gf44
"Their home environment and neighborhood is so shattered that what they need
most is a stable day-to-day existence shielded from drugs, gangs, and criminal
behavior."

You do realize you're talking out of your ass right? 99% of inner-city youths
don't do drugs, aren't in gangs, and aren't involved in criminal behavior.
Nice way to stereotype them though.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_99% of inner-city youths don't do drugs..._

If true, this means inner city youth do drugs about 50x less than youth in
general. (Not asserting any precision in the numbers, just throwing out orders
of magnitude.)

<http://www.teendrugabuse.us/teendrugstatistics.html>

------
wheaties
This is easy to say but hard to do. "Based on excellence" is the mantra I've
heard from software development circles for years and yet...

1\. How many of us have lost productivity because some other developer ran
rough-shod through code caring not for maintainability, readability, or even
extensibility? Which one was praised and which one rewarded? Doesn't apply to
teachers? Ever have a dud who couldn't do simple math in charge of the algebra
class? Guess what the next teacher has to deal with.

2\. How do "normal" people in managerial roles judge competency between two
people in such roles? When looking at our own industry we see how difficult it
is for "normal" people to make those sorts of judgement calls. Some schools
require only 2 years teaching experience before moving on to superintendent
roles. Some states more. With such divergence what can we expect?

3\. How will we measure such excellence? What metric? What new system will
evolve to capitalize on this metric despite the spirit of the metric?
Unintended consequences?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Regarding 2), you do it via Value Added Modeling. You build a statistical
predictor of student performance (based on standardized test scores) then
measure Performance = Avg(Actual - predicted).

~~~
Natsu
> You build a statistical predictor of student performance (based on
> standardized test scores) then measure Performance = Avg(Actual -
> predicted).

And then you watch student performance get gamed by the teachers. There are
all kinds of ways: turn a blind eye to cheating, move poor performers to
others schools (including by getting them to graduate when they shouldn't),
alter their tests (this is already being done under NCLB according to several
news reports), ...

You're better off by having skilled teachers rate the other teachers. People
aren't as easily gamed as systems of rules are.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Easy solutions to your problems: _"turn a blind eye to cheating"_ _"alter
their tests"_

Tests are given by independent proctors and designed by an independent agency.
In much the same way, the DOD rates Halliburton's performance - it's not
great, but it's better than Halliburton doing their own performance ratings.

 _move poor performers to others schools (including by getting them to
graduate when they shouldn't)_

Won't help with VAM. If you get rid of the poor performers, the _predicted_
value of the people remaining will increase. Thus, you just made your job
higher - the bar has been raised.

 _People aren't as easily gamed as systems of rules are._

I don't even know how to respond to this.

~~~
Natsu
Your solution to fix education is to do things the way Haliburton & the DOD
do?

Yes, independent ratings can help, but at some point, if you can't trust
anyone inside the system, you're screwed. And your results are exactly as good
(or bad) as your ability to do ratings. Fancy math won't fixed a flawed
premise, for example.

We've been going for complex systems and simple people. Having good people and
relatively simple systems, however, is the optimum from what I can see.

I'm not opposed to the idea that accountability is needed, but the idea that
you can go up to a troubled institution, make everyone's job harder, and then
expect improvement is unrealistic in any industry. I'm not a teacher, but I've
seen the effects of management like that first hand.

Always taking the easy solution when managing something is not effective.

>> People aren't as easily gamed as systems of rules are. > I don't even know
how to respond to this.

Obviously, I thought it implicit that I was talking about competent and
experienced folks. Yes, if you get people who know nothing and put them in
charge, you will have terrible results. They won't improve even if you give
them a long list of rules to follow, which is how bureaucracy usually ends up.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Your solution to fix education is to do things the way Haliburton & the DOD
do?_

Would you prefer to do things the way the educational system does? Throw money
at Halliburton and hope for the best? No outside auditors or performance
measurements?

~~~
Natsu
I thought I just said that I would prefer to hire highly competent teachers to
do the evaluations. Not third parties, not politicians, and certainly not
Haliburton or the DOD.

Those who are competent ought to be able to recognize each other.

------
jdietrich
If we really cared, we could increase the quality of teaching beyond all
recognition. It wouldn't be remotely difficult.

Massively increase pay for teachers, tripling or quadrupling pay at every
level. Mandate a specific postgraduate qualification and a statutory minimum
of continuing professional development. Recruit only the best and the
brightest, specifically seeking out graduates from the best universities.
Advertise teaching as a career on prime-time television. Put Obama on The
Daily Show and Oprah to talk about the importance of teaching. In short, a
concerted effort to make teaching every bit as prestigious as law or medicine.
After a few years, require every teacher in the country to reapply for their
own job. Relative to the Military or Social Security budgets, the cost would
barely even register on the balance sheet.

We could quite easily live in a world where Asian parents push their kids into
teaching, where Yale and Harvard vie to be the best school of education, where
teaching is seen as a first choice rather than a last resort.

We don't, because we don't really care. We pretend that education matters, but
really it's one of those things that you're supposed to care about but most
people don't, like the environment or human rights. We don't care whether
college students learn anything, only that they get a suitably prestigious
certificate. We don't care whether high school graduates can meaningfully
participate in society, only that they can pass the standardised tests,
whatever they might be.

It is practically self-evident that we don't care about teaching. We all know
that the current system is failing, but we aren't prepared to do the obvious
things that would actually rescue it. For as long as we see education in the
abstract as high status but teaching in practice as low status, we are doomed
to watch our school system circle the drain.

~~~
forkandwait
We don't revolutionize teaching because TENURE AND SENIORITY RULES ARE LOCKED
DOWN BY THE UNIONS.

Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and
fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year.

(Edit: we really DO care about teaching, and spend enormous amounts of tax
payers dollars and collective worry on it.)

~~~
jdietrich
Why haven't the unions been broken? Nobody would tolerate unions that
protected incompetent lawyers or doctors. Union-breaking is practically a
science these days, it's neither expensive nor difficult, especially against a
workforce with no ability to mount a meaningfully disruptive strike. It
appears to me that there simply isn't the political will to do it. The
teaching unions make more noise than parents and students, so they win. We
return to my basic thesis, that we don't care as much about education as we'd
like to think.

If you just fire the worst 10% every year, you just make teaching less
attractive. As it stands, teaching is sufficiently low-status, poorly paid and
unpleasant that the only people who go into it are a rare few who really want
to teach and a majority who aren't competent enough to do anything else. You
can't just fire bad teachers, you need to recruit good ones. For the moment,
only a martyr or an idiot would decide to teach.

~~~
brg
Who has an incentive to work against public unions? Public unions operate in a
monopoly for which one business can not be undercut. And after all, public
unions vote.

~~~
forkandwait
The 85% of us who don't belong to the teachers unions should vote against
them. Unfortunately, the teachers unions have the democratic party in their
pocket, and I am _sure as hell_ never going to vote for today's republican
party (yuck!).

~~~
brg
Your estimate got me wondering what the true number is. I would guess it is a
little low for non-teacher's union employees. But considering that government
unions generally cooperate to form an oligarchy; from a few searches I find
there are 25 million Americans directly employed by federal, state, and local
governments. There are 15 million Americans who's is directly paid by
government contracts. There are about 140 million Americans in the labor
force, so we have 2/7 ~ 28% of the labor force directly dependent upon
government.

~~~
forkandwait
I just meant for teachers unions, not all unions.

I am a government employee, btw, and I would happily vote against teachers
unions (if I could vote issue-by-issue, not representative-by-representative)

------
Legion
I wish there was less focus on teachers, and more focus on fixing the problem
of how badly kids fall behind before they ever get to school.

The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach
1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important.

Even when kids do reach school age, the work of teachers is either amplified
or underminded by parents.

My wife teaches 2nd grade (in a poor, needy school district), and frankly, the
hours a day she has them can't undo the failure of parents in the kid's early
development, nor overcome the constant sabotage of parents undoing much of the
day's progress.

Yes, there are bad teachers. But good teachers can badly struggle due to no
fault of their own. One teacher may go from superstar metrics to really poor
numbers, based on the luck of the draw.

The point is, if you really want to improve education, you have to start in
the home, in early childhood.

~~~
jseliger
_The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach
1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so
important._

Head Start was designed precisely to solve this problem. It has existed for 40
years and hasn't solved it, for the kinds of reasons that are described here:
<http://epa.sagepub.com/content/17/1/62.abstract> and here:
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=226111> . People have been
trying to show that Head Start leads to longitudinal improvements for the
entirety of Head Start's existence, and they've failed. I work in my family's
business as a grant writing consultant, and we've had a bunch of clients
running Head Start programs and Head Start clones. They don't work.

In short, you're advocating for an approach here that has already (mostly)
failed. Gates is at least saying that we shouldn't keep rewarding teachers for
things (seniority, degrees) that don't actually impact student achievement.

~~~
Legion
No, what I'm talking about is absolutely not Head Start.

The students of Head Start are preschool children.

The students of Baby College are _parents_. It's about teaching people how to
be parents.

When the problem is that bad parenting sabotages structured education, the
answer isn't to start the education earlier. The answer (well, at least part
of it) is to _improve_ _the_ _parents_.

------
dpatru
Our "education" model is fundamentally broken. It's based on the idea that we
need to warehouse kids in institutions modeled on 18th century factories so
that they can do well on "standardized" tests. Certainly Bill Gates did not
obtain his education this way. He basically educated himself by following his
passion from an early age. He working in his field of choice at the age of 15.
By 20 he had founded Microsoft.

"School" for Bill Gates was his educated home environment, the block of
computer time he could use in 8th grade, the Computer Center Corporation where
he worked while in high school, and his projects with Paul Allen as a
teenager. It was the unstructured resources that were around him.

Not every kid is a Bill Gates. Most probably need less formal instruction
because they do not need as much abstract knowledge.

Schools as they exist today should be abolished and the teachers and other
staff that work in them should be taken off the public payrolls and allowed to
take useful jobs in the private sector.

Schools, to the extent that they exist at all, should be more like graduate
study where an advisor suggests resources for further study. These advisors
could be unpaid volunteers. People with successful careers in areas of that
the student is interested in who interact with the student intermittently
perhaps over the internet.

The bulk of kids' time should be spent in projects or actual work, apprentice-
style, in an area of their interest. Instead of being grouped together in
dysfunctional groups of their own kind, young people should be distributed in
the economy, working with and under the supervision of competent adults in the
various fields.

~~~
jseliger
_Schools as they exist today should be abolished and the teachers and other
staff that work in them should be taken off the public payrolls and allowed to
take useful jobs in the private sector._

Have you worked as a teacher or in front of a classroom? I ask because I
might've been sympathetic to these kinds of views before I started grad school
at the University of Arizona. Most students in grades K - 16 are not going to
do intensive projects or actual work; many of them simply aren't ready to do
so. Most students in most subjects are there because they need the spur and
structure school provides.

This is true even at very high levels; how many people would _actually_ write
a dissertation if not for the fact that they'd already spent several years in
grad school, that their professional lives depend on it, and they'll look like
a fool if they don't? Hell, even _with_ those constraints, there are a
shockingly high number of ABDs floating around out there.

 _Schools, to the extent that they exist at all, should be more like graduate
study where an advisor suggests resources for further study. These advisors
could be unpaid volunteers._

This is insane. It does not scale. If volunteers did a better job of educating
than the system we have now, no one would send their kids to mediocre public
schools.

All of your ideas are wildly utopian, and I don't mean that in a good way.
There is no practical way to implement them.

------
forkandwait
My favorite recent quote:

We all know that successful teaching beyond the infant class involves (a) wide
and detailed knowledge of a difficult subject, (b) an enthusiasm for the
subject which communicates itself to the class, and (c) a few simple tricks of
the trade, learnt by anyone from a single volume and from about three weeks of
experience. The art of the Educationalizer is to expand (c) into a mass of
pretentious nonsense, fogged by technical terms and psychological twaddle. To
do research in Educationalization is to forget about (a) and (b) and make the
mastery of (c) seem practically impossible. Those who can, do (it has been
said), and those who cannot will teach teachers how to teach other teachers
the art of teaching. This is the brotherhood of the Ed.D. and it forms a sort
of campus with the campus; an enclave, as it were, of people committed to the
study of nothing.

Peter's Predicament, Chapter 7, The Fur-Lined Mousetrap, C. Northcote
Parkinson, Leviathan House Ltd, London & New York, ISBN 0 900537 05 I, no date
(really!).

(If you ask me, eliminate tenure, break the teacher's unions, and fire the
least performing 5% each year measured by before and after tests each year;
with 5% yearly "mortality" we could use turnover to retain the good ones. And
yes, eliminate pay raises based on continuing education and seniority, neither
of which measure teacher effectiveness.

I think knowing how to _make_ a teacher good is an impossible problem, but
knowing whether a teacher _is_ good or not is not very difficult, using a
combination of peer and parent review plus before-and-after test scores.

But first ... break the unions and eliminate tenure and any special protection
for teachers. I am totally pro-union when it comes to janitors and factory
workers, but not managerial level staff; at best, it reinforces consistent
mediocrity...)

~~~
jws
So if a class if students decides to throw the exam they can get the teacher
fired? Sort of a middle school cousin of jury nullification.

~~~
brg
There is little possibility of an entire class jeopardizing their entire
future and graduation prospects in order to make one of their educators look
bad. Also, you are suggesting that such malicious act would not be detected,
and there would be no safe-guards against such an act?

------
JshWright
It would suck for the folks who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the
privilege to teach in states like New York where a graduate degree is
mandatory for public school teachers.

It's going to take almost two decades for the master's "bonus" to cover the
cost of my wife's graduate degree.

~~~
alphaoverlord
If a graduate degree is mandatory, why is there a bonus? Can't they raise the
base?

~~~
JshWright
Beats me. There is definitely a column on the pay scale for a graduate degree
though.

------
andrewce
This response comes via the Washington Post, and offers sourced
rebuttals/refinements:

[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-
bloggers...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/why-
teaching-experience-really.html)

Also: while I've got a world of respect for Bill Gates and his philanthropic
efforts, I'm not sure that he's the most qualified to discuss education
reform.

I'm certainly down with schools restructuring their budgets, but there's
wasted money all over the place, and even if we got rid of seniority and
degrees as a means of determining salary, it's unreasonable to think that that
$59 billion would be spent only on the students, or that it would be trimmed
entirely.

Even if we switch to a system of merit pay, that money has to come from
somewhere.

Again, loads of respect for Mr. Gates, and full agreement that budgets should
be overhauled, but it's gonna take more than just cutting out seniority-based
pay.

~~~
ezy
Seems like the post article just wants to belabor a point Bill Gates did not
actually make.

The points he did make, actually agree with the article's sources, but he does
not reach the same overall conclusion. He did explicitly say that seniority
matters and that the difference peters out mostly after ~5 years (he put a
graph on the screen with sources). He mentioned other metrics should be
applied _as well_ , but did not specify exactly what the metrics should be
(whereas this article concentrates on test scores as if he presented that as
the only valid metric).

Gates minor conclusion is the reasonable one... seniority does matter, but not
as much after a certain period of time, therefore it cannot be used as the
_only_ method of assessment. Furthermore, seniority is a rather indirect
measure of competence. I don't see the opposing view as being arguable with a
clear conscience, frankly.

And, in fact, if you listen to the speech, he does _not_ state budgets as a
priority -- yes, an obstacle to be overcome, but not the focus. The focus is
in better outcomes.

------
panacea
End capitalist bonuses based on currency accumulation and seniority.

------
gruseom
This is all just fantasy sports of course, but here's my plan.

I would require new teachers to work as apprentices for quite some time
(several years) and not pay them very much during this period. After that, if
they accede to full status, I would pay them a great deal more. The reasons
for this structure: (1) to weed out people who aren't intrinsically motivated
by working with children, i.e. the ones who probably shouldn't have permanent
teaching jobs; (2) it takes years to become a master teacher and mentorship is
the most valuable asset (after aptitude, perhaps) on that path. An
apprenticeship system seems suitable for fostering this.

As for determining who makes it and who doesn't, I'd rely mostly on peer
evaluation. Standardized tests are ok too (or could be, if we had good ones)
but I'd weight them second. This problem isn't algorithmic.

~~~
forkandwait
Why don't pay them decently to start with, pay them better if they deserve it,
and FIRE THEM if they don't?

~~~
gruseom
Because "deserve?" and "fire" are hard functions to write. It seems easier to
allow for a natural process of attrition.

Edit: I think society should ask one to _earn_ the privilege of being a
teacher (what more important asset could we entrust someone with than
children?) and to compensate those who have earned it well enough to make it
well worth earning.

What's a natural way to earn the right to be a teacher? By assisting those who
have already earned it.

(This does raise a bootstrapping question, but that's hardly the crux of the
matter.)

~~~
forkandwait
Is "earn" any harder to write than "deserve"? "Fire" is really easy...

~~~
gruseom
If you think "fire" is easy, watch the lemon dance scene in Waiting for
Superman.

You're missing my point about "earn", which is you don't have to write
individual-testing logic if the general requirement is onerous enough. Those
who really want to work with children will then have a natural advantage over
those who are in it for other reasons. The latter will by definition find
something easier to do, and it is greatly in society's interest that they do
so.

Another advantage of this plan is that the degree of onerousness (how many
years you have to put in, what you get paid, and so on) could be tested
empirically.

ps: I like several of your other comments in this thread. Are you a teacher?

~~~
forkandwait
> If you think "fire" is easy, watch the lemon dance scene in Waiting for
> Superman.

That is my point. If fire never becomes easy we are just plain screwed.

Thanks for the comment about my posts. I would have liked to be a high school
math teacher -- probably not forever, but for 5-10 years -- but the
credentialing system and the crappiness of the schools in California dissuaded
me. (If you have a BA in math, you can get a decent job besides teaching,
unlike English.) I have tutored off and on since then, and if someone called
me and offered a job at a charter school for my current 72K a year I would
probably weep with joy and take it.

------
panthera
WalterBright is right.

How about eliminating taxpayer funding for schools altogether? We spend $68B
on the DoE.

That is ~$900 per child in the US, according to
<http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp>.

Then, entrepreneurs will be motivated to build schools because they can earn a
profit based on enrollment. As with all private enterprises, they will be
forced to compete on quality of service.

These schools will also be judged on the performance and caliber of their
eventual alumni classes.

I am willing to wager that at least 30% of this board went to a private
college. Why do we need the government running our schools, as well? To
standardize a curriculum?

Electronics companies use the Underwriters's Lab to certify their products.
I'm sure schools can have something similar.

------
zootar
In addition to the difficulty of rating teachers in a way that can be fairly
coupled to pay, the fraction of teachers able to substantially increase their
performance might be small. Identifying specific sources of confusion,
inventing ways of explaining things to alleviate confusion, etc are non-
trivial challenges.

What I think might be more effective than attempting to pay teachers for their
teaching performance is paying teachers to produce very high-quality teaching
material that other teachers can easily use themselves: detailed lesson plans,
visual aids, interesting labs, textbooks, maybe even tables of sources of
confusion and how to alleviate them.

------
Bertrood
Mr. Gates has identified the 50 state school superintendents as critical
stakeholders in his plan. With this identified audience, he's turned what
seems an impossible task into a more manageable one.

Now he has an identifiable audience, with identifiable needs. He will be able
to eliminate some of the noise that surrounds such a large issue because of
this.

Ultimately, the goal is to build the best possible performance based system,
but Mr. Gates saves the time and effort associated with re-crafting rejected
ideas, by identifying and including necessary input from his crucial
stakeholders (state superintendents) on the front end.

------
ig1
Malcom Gladwell wrote an article with a similar viewpoint in the New Yorker a
few years ago:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all)

------
lists
I personally think Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics should somehow be
incorporated into whatever educational reforms as a platform/canonical text.
It's not just so much an ethical treatise (since he doesn't it tell you what
to do) as a brochure on parenting.

------
forkandwait
Google "waiting for superman".

~~~
aik
and then read the criticism of the movie and ponder it for a while to get a
more balanced perspective.

------
mkramlich
and while we're at it, let's put a cap on CEO compensation at $300k/year for
all non-founding CEO's and non-founding executives.

