

How to Overhaul US education system - khuyi
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303362404575580221511231074.html

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gruseom
This isn't just another education policy article. This is a manifesto by Rhee
and Fenty, the (only?) people who managed to _do_ something about this
disease.

Here's something I didn't know. If you've seen _Waiting for Superman_ you'll
recall that when Rhee proposed contract changes to pay teachers more as long
as they would allow bad teachers to be fired, the teachers' union blocked the
proposal from even coming to a vote. (How evil is that?) But they did
eventually get one, and here is what I learned:

 _In truth, when the union finally allowed them to vote, the teachers passed
it overwhelmingly, by 80% to 20%_

That's a really good sign.

~~~
tome
So if the union members wanted it passed, how come the union members stalled
it in coming to a vote?

~~~
nestlequ1k
There's often differences between benefits for individuals vs benefits for the
organization as a whole. If more people got fired so the remaining teachers
could get paid more, the organization would be weaker while many of the
individuals would benefit. Teachers (like everyone) tend to think of
themselves as "above average" so no one thinks they'll be the one to be
getting fired.

Union officials place priority on the organization, and not the individual.

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BCM43
The thing that bugs me about articles arguing for performance based pay is
that it fails to address two critical points.

The first is why the teachers that are bad are actually bad. I would be
interested in what would happen if the lowest paying teachers were forced to
addend additional training. Perhaps all they need is a refresher. It is also
possible that they have become disillusioned with what they once thought was a
great way to make an effect on children's lives. I could very well imagine
this happening to me were I to become a teacher.

The other is how they are measuring teacher performance. The only way I have
seen this happen is though standardized tests. I do not believe that these
actually measure much. The best teachers I have had have not taught me based
on what was on the test, which would have meant spoon-feeding me facts and
telling me to memorize them, but rather what they felt was important, which
often included explaining how I could find the information on my own if I even
needed.

~~~
niels_olson
Your physician was identified for medical school, residency, and fellowship
based in large part on standardized test scores. And the schools and residency
programs are tyrannized by their students and residents scores. I gotta say,
it doesn't take long to identify the docs who did well on those tests: they're
generally the best docs. They're the most articulate, ask the most insightful
questions during their patient interviews, develop the best diagnostic and
management plans, and accomplish the most difficult research.

I suspect the same goes for lawyers, law programs, and their bar exams,
engineers, engineering programs, and their EIT exams, etc. Why shouldn't kids
learn to play by the same rules their parents do? Indeed, isn't that what kids
want to do?

~~~
andrewce
Except that the MCAT measures at least some of the core competencies necessary
for being a doctor, and includes a lot of vital information which, if you
don't have, make it pretty tough to be a physician.

Even then, there are plenty of people whose MCAT scores were high enough to
get them into medical school who ended up being terrible doctors, just as
there are plenty of people who barely got into med school who ended up being
terrific doctors. I can't cite any studies, but I imagine that just like
anything else the variability within a score band is just as much as the
variability between score bands.

(Similarly: plenty of bad lawyers have passed the bar, just as plenty of good
lawyers failed it before they passed. There's enough variability between the
Bar exams of different states to make this possible. I suspect the same is
true about engineering programs as well).

It may just be that the MCAT is a good indicator of one's ability to become a
doctor. Med school admissions are so competitive right now that these schools
are able to be pretty selective about who they admit.

It may be that these tests were designed at least in part by the professionals
in those respective fields to measure knowledge and competencies that
_directly relate_ to the domains in question.

More to the point, this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite
are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career
path/domain.

There's no such vocational test that will adequately cover every child, nor do
we even have philosophical agreement about the skills necessary to live a good
life, much less the relative importance of such skills, and even if we did,
there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy
manifest that it'd be downright impossible to construct a test that can even
come close to measuring it.

The tests you cite are tests that limit who can practice in a given
profession, and while they're not perfect, I'll concede their usefulness. More
importantly, they're on an individual basis. There'll definitely be some
false-positives (people who are good at taking tests but poor at performing
the basic skills necessary for competency) and false-negatives, but those can
be corrected.

It's a whole different ball-game when you're talking about a non-vocational
test, particularly one aimed at people who are not yet adults and who have not
yet chosen a particular career path.

~~~
niels_olson
>MCAT arguement

The USMLE exams (Step I: basic science, Step IICK: clinical knowledge, Step
IICS: clinical skills, and Step III: clinical problem solving) are more like
the bar exams.

> this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional
> vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain.

Well, you're throwing in the MCAT, which is an aptitude test based on Bloom's
Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, more like the GRE than the USMLE or bar
exams.

> there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy
> manifest

Literacy and numeracy can't be measured? You sure you want to hang your hat on
that?

Look, to quote Allah, I mean, pg, himself,
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>)

> To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things,
> measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your
> performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing
> more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you
> make have a big effect.

We can easily modify this paragraph to most if not all domains and industries.
I leave as an exercise to the reader to modify it for "improving education".

------
niels_olson
Vote with your feet. When you move, look at <http://psk12.com> for stats on
the local schools (originally developed by a couple of parents in the DC metro
area).

Unfortunately, I also have to say that our kids got their best years of
education thus far in New Orleans private schools, and the private schools
aren't ranked in psk12.com stats. The best indicators I've found for private
schools in cities have been word of mouth. Anyone have a more systematic
resource?

------
bryanwb
tl;dr

American education system won't improve until American kids get off their
asses and study hard.

All these movies and articles about fighting w/ teachers unions aren't the
real issue. Many of those "bad" teachers would be more motivated if they
didn't have to babysit lazy brats all day and if they earned a decent wage.

Charter schools mostly work because they siphon off the most motivated kids
and teachers. I am skeptical that they help the system as a whole. Maybe they
raise test scores but mostly by helping the most enthusiastic kids get higher
scores, not helping the average non-charter kid get higher scores.

btw, i am an american who has spent 6 years living in both(South Asia and East
Asia), where kids do get off their asses and they don't have complex
charter/teacher motivation/reorganization schemes. Why do kids study so hard
there? Because there parents beat it into their skulls that they will be dirt-
poor farmers unless they get an education.

~~~
MichaelSalib
_Wait, that last sentence also applies to a lot of universities._

Not really. At least in the university programs I know about, the biggest
problem is that teaching sucks because the administration doesn't care about
instructional quality at all. That's why you end up with professors who
literally can't teach: their value to the organization comes from the grant
money they pull in, not their ability or interest in teaching.

Given how wrong you are about the problems of university level instruction,
I'm not sure whether to trust your claims about primary and secondary
education.

~~~
bryanwb
my comment only applies to universities, esp. those that function more like
country clubs, and doesn't really apply to big reseach-centric schools like
Berkeley or UCLA. You are correct that teaching quality there is a reflection
of university administration priorities

