“Educators feel that their schools’ reputation, their livelihoods, their psychic meaning in life is at stake,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a nonprofit group critical of standardized testing. “That ends up pushing more and more of them over the line.”
There is a certain strain of teacher who never felt their reputation, livelihood, or psychic essence was at danger when they were merely failing to educate, for decades. After all, to the extent that anyone noticed, it was poor black kids. Who the heck cares what they think.
That strain of teacher is now motivated by fear of exposure. Which is as it should be.
While completely true, it also glosses over the bigger problem. Not All Kids Can Learn The Same.
Every single child is completely different, and has a different learning capacity and developmental time line.
A child who can barely read in 3rd grade may be left behind his peers for ever, OR, he may suddenly 'get it' in 4th grade, and rapidly catch up. K-3, however, he's going to fail those standardized tests, and there isn't a damn thing his teacher can do about it. Holding every child to the same standard at the same age arbitrarily is ridiculous, and ignores the way kids actually grow and develop. It also has completely eliminated 'teaching' for all of those teachers who WERE awesome teachers, and who cared and poured their heart and soul into their lessons and kids. EVERYBODY is now essentially forced to teach to an arbitrary test, developed by academics (and lawmakers) who don't actually deal with children (anymore).
Poor black kids are going to stay lower than everyone else, because poor black kids, statistically, have much less family involvement, and a (again, statistically), substantially less 'structured' home life. THIS is the number one problem with the low end of the socio-economic academic performance ladder. Rich white kids and poor black kids attending the same class, at the same school, will not perform the same, unless the parents are both involved to the same amount. Making everybody take tests to prove this out doesn't accomplish anything. Firing teachers because parents won't do anything to help their children also does not accomplish anything.
This issue is near and dear to me - I worked in one of the school districts cited in the NYT article for 7 years, and my wife is currently teaching there. It's a farce.
This is the classic practical book on brain development in children and adolescents. One of its main themes is that children mature in different areas at different rates, and that teaching them something before they're ready is fruitless, emotionally risky, and actually damages their later ability to reason naturally.
Every single child is completely different, and has a different learning capacity and developmental time line.
True, but most groups of 30-40 children are roughly the same. There will be a few smarties, a few morons, and a multitude of people in the middle. It's called the law of large numbers.
This presupposes that classrooms can be thought of as random samples of the child population. We know that they are actually geographically localized samples, so that presupposition is somewhat strained and needs a bit of defending, preferably by empirical means.
Obviously a given class is only a random sample from the population of a given school. So if you want to evaluate a teacher, all you need to do is compare his/her class to other classes from the same geographic region.
Or even better, you can compute a statistical predictor of his student's expected performance, and measure the deviation between predicted and actual performance.
The point is that individual variation in students is irrelevant. It is extremely unlikely that a teacher will get a class full of dumb kids.
The bigger problem is that Not All Teachers Are Competent, or ever will be. We've really shot ourselves in the foot here - being a teacher is an absolutely thankless job, both financially and otherwise. This greatly limits your talent pool to the following:
- people who can't do any better in life
- people who love teaching so much that they are willing to forgo much more lucrative careers
Not only is this pool rather small, it also selects poorly for talent. This places the poor black kids (as you put it) at an even greater disadvantage, since their teachers lack either the talent or the inclination to pull them forward.
Teaching is not remotely "thankless", they just trade wages for non-wage compensation (tenure, defined-benefit retirement at age 55), and work significantly less than most other professionals (for the 9 months/year when they actually work).
I know anecdote isn't the singular of data, but of the MANY teachers I know (I'm married to one, so I sort of meet a bunch of them), none of them work less than 50 hours per week. Not a single individual. Sure, they may be AT work for less than 50 hours, but everybody has to grade test/homework, write lesson plans, etc. outside of their normal classroom time. My wife works approx. 55-60 hours per week from late august to late june, for less than 45k/yr. While the long time off in the summer is great, it's not paid either (many people don't realize that).
Teachers also have to provide virtually everything in their classroom - educational posters/implements, paper, pens, pencils, etc.; the local schools provide books and desks, and that's it. Each teacher gets $200/yr stipend, which isn't even enough for paper and glue for an elementary school classroom for the year. Only $500 of that stuff is tax deductible for a year (we routinely spend close to $2k/yr).
tl;dr: it's not thankless, but it's not exactly an awesomely compensated profession either - there's lots of hidden shit teachers have to do/provide that should count against their compensation.
I'll second this. My wife is also a teacher and every time I hear people talk about how little teachers work I want to scream. I don't know a single teacher that puts in less than 50 hours per week. In many schools teachers don't have any prep time any more and all lesson planning and other activities must be completed on the teachers own time. Summers aren't paid. Money spent in the classroom or on the students isn't tax deductible unlike damn near every other profession and their tools. Our school district doesn't have stipends, instead teachers provide a supply list and the school administrator determines what will be bought based on the available budget. Different schools have different budgets in many cases as some schools will qualify for extra federal funding via Title I for example. We have spent an average of 10% of my wifes yearly income on her classroom in each of the last four years ($3600). We also spend additional funds every year for my wife to attend continuing education or other training programs that she needs to meet her licensing requirements.
I'm often asked how we can possibly spend that much money on her class and it's a little bit complicated. While maybe $500 goes towards supplies such as pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, recorders and other basic implements we also spend money directly on the students. My wife typically buys every student a book for Christmas, we supply everything to holiday parties etc. Each year my wife spends another $500 or so on new wall hangings, new books for her library, teaching aids, resource books and more. The majority of the money however is spent taking care of the students in the most need. 100% of the schools students are on the free and reduced lunch program and the school is classified as Title II which means a dinner program is also provided to the neighborhood. Each winter we end up buying a large number of warm jackets, boots, gloves etc. In a neighborhood with 85% of the families living at or below the poverty level you wouldn't believe how much of a difference small amounts of help like that mean to the students and their families. My wife once had a student break down in tears when he received a winter coat. He told her that now his mom didn't have to worry about it and could pay the power bill. At Christmas we buy gifts (clothes) for the students that aren't included in the district wide program for the "underprivileged".
We certainly don't have to spend any of that money however my wife is there for the children and not for the money.
Did you read my source? The American Time Use Survey measured both time spent working at home, as well as a number of other activities (e.g., sleeping, household labor). So your wife would appear to be exceptional as far as hours worked.
As for whether the summer is paid or not, so what? Your wife earns $54k/year, she just doesn't work all year.
Your quoted salary also completely ignores the fact that teachers in most states get benefits (e.g., defined benefit retirement at age 55, gold plated health care) which are vastly better than average. Teachers get more fringe benefits but less wages. Cry me a river.
I did read your source. Did you read my post? 45 not 54k, not paid during the summer, and EVERY teacher I know works more than 50 hours week (dozens of them). The Survey you linked doesn't seem like it should be statistically accurate - it's not a random sampling of teachers, it's a pre-picked group of people, which is then culled for 'teachers' who are randomly picked.
Every salary'd job that requires a degree that I'm aware of gets benefits, and the benefits most school systems have are NOT better than average anymore. I pay less for health care, and have better retirement options at my private employer than any of the local school districts. We don't have a pension/retirement benefit (other than 401k), but school districts around here are laying teachers off and not hiring new ones because they don't have the money to pay them in the first place.
On top of that, most other professions don't require you to provide your own work supplies (ie: you get a paper to print reports on, pens/pencils and notepads, etc.), while teachers must purchase all of their non-textbook, non-furniture educational materials. Library of books, reams and reams of paper for work packets, colored paper, art supplies, science project materials (we've spent hundreds on various plants, moths, butterflies, etc. for life sciences experiments). Buying even paper and pencils for 72 kids over the course of a full school year is a non-negligble expense, especially at the salary being paid.
The TUS is a random sampling of Americans, the report in particular is the same data restricted to teachers. But I'm sure you can do a better job of sampling by asking your wife and her friends than the BLS can by calling randomly selected people.
Regarding benefits, it varies from state to state. You may be unlucky and live in one of the few states where teachers can't retire at 55 (i.e., retirement benefits which are 2.8x better than those of normal employees, ignoring completely the costs of defined benefits). Most states, however, give ridiculously good fringe benefits to state employees at the cost of some wages.
Also, many professions involve purchasing various goods and services. Doctors often purchase medical supplies, consultants purchase equipment (laptop, etc), I purchase books, most people in banking purchase expensive signaling clothes (can't get promoted if you don't look the part). Really nothing unique here.
This is one place where cheaters can really ruin a system. Once cheaters invade, they can hurt everyone by raising expectations of what can be done. Worse, too often, the natural tendency is to raise the standards if some cheating is uncovered.
If you raise your standards high enough, those who were formerly honest will be forced into cheating while those who remain honest are forced out. If you raise standards high enough, you end up with only cheaters, because past some threshold, it's no longer possible to meet expectations honestly.
You don't need cheaters to reach a point where the expectations are so high they are unattainable. If you read the growth measures listed on the government education sites you'll see that states have proposed plans with ridiculous claims such as having ALL students passing their exams by 2014. While there are modified calculations for special education students this is still almost certainly unachievable in reality.
A perfect example would be the high school that I attended. This is a school in a small community (40k people when I attended, maybe 60k now) with a significant amount of wealth. The high school specifically has received massive amounts of donations for both academics and sports. Since the inception of NCLB the school has routinely made AYP however in 2008-2009 the school did not. The reason the school didn't is entirely due to students receiving "Individualized Education Plans" (IEP). With the mainstreaming of special needs and special education students this means that an entire school is being placed on the needs improvement list due to a small subset of the population receiving special education services.
I fully expect that in the next three to five years the vast majority of schools that have routinely made AYP will no longer be able to show adequate growth. When the children of upper middle class families start attending "failing" schools you'll start to hear a lot of complaints about NCLB.
I'm not claiming that it is what's happening in teaching right now, mind you. I'm just claiming that it's certainly possible. I've certainly seen the idea happen elsewhere (it's how I came to realize that).
I will say that the statement relies on the assumption that honest folks cannot get a perfect score consistently. Although, even then, if one person always gets a perfect and the other person goofs up rarely and the business has to lay one of the two off, guess what usually happens?
That statement as written is trivially true. The question is whether it is what is occurring, which isn't going to be possible to ascertain. I don't think anyone really has a firm grasp on what it is possible for an average child to learn, which would be a prerequisite to answering the question.
(There is some idea what an average child can learn in our current system but that's such a small part of the possible state space of educational systems I don't pay much attention to it.)
This is similar to the argument against allowing steroid use in various professional sports. If you can't compete unless you compete dishonestly (I'm not taking a side here on the question of whether steroids are actually bad, but if they're banned then their use is certainly cheating), eventually everyone cheats.
The obvious difference is that in the case of steroids in sports, it's an arbitrary system designed primarily to entertain people and make money; the outcomes are completely irrelevant to the success of the enterprise as such. In the case of child education, if everyone cheats, no one learns, and we've just raised a generation of dishonest, ignorant children.
Not so sure about your logic. Were they motivated by fear of exposure, or were they motivated by enhanced financial incentive to cheat? The answer to that question has implications.
The financial incentive to cheat seems to be a new issue and is certainly not even a valid issue at many schools. Nevada doesn't pay teachers bonuses. Teachers at Title I G schools will be eligible for bonuses in 2010-2011 but that is part of the Title I G grant. Of the only school I am aware of in Northern Nevada that is being investigated for cheating, the school is a charter school that also does not offer bonuses. My wifes very close friend taught there during the 2009-2010 school year (not the year causing the investigation) and the issue appears to be due to a breach in protocol during testing. An administrator had students from classes with young and inexperienced teachers that didn't know or weren't trained on the testing protocols called to his office. The claim is that these students tests weren't collected while they were out of the room, they were not escorted to the office, and the administrator coached them or provided them answers. There may be more schools under investigation in southern Nevada (Clark County/Las Vegas most likely). The other schools that I'm aware of being investigated are all charter schools. They are being investigated for misappropriation of funds or other abuses but not cheating.
That cheating occurs is no surprise and is closely related to the question of assessing a programmer's output. Every time you instigate a method of measurement, the programmer (or teacher) finds some way to increase the result without achieving the actual aim.
In the case of a programmer, the number of lines of code output, or the number of functions written, or the number of bugs detected and fixed, can all be achieved with less "true value output" (whatever that means). The measurement can be gamed.
Teachers in the UK have been accused of "teaching to the test" rather than "teaching for understanding" - but what more can be expected? When exams test for understanding rather than rote skills, only then will understanding be the aim of the teachers looking for the easy way out.
Let me add that I know many dedicated teachers who do the right thing regardless of the threats posed. They encourage and enthuse their students, ranging widely over their subject to get the students engaged and interested. They know that this serves them better, and will, mostly, improve the test scores, even if not as much as "teaching to the test" would. They know they're doing the right thing, but come under enormous pressure to work more obviously towards improving test scores.
I'm not surprised that many of them buckle under the strain and take less honorable courses.
That's part of the tragedy - the destruction of otherwise excellent teachers.
See I think that these sorts of tests are looking at the wrong sorts of things. What they should be looking for is relative improvement rather than reaching a particular level. Especially in underprivileged areas, where the kids might be doing much more poorly than more privileged areas.
Don't get me wrong, I think that if there are poor teachers then they should be dealt with, but I think that these standardised tests of kids across the board are not the way to go about it. I'm thinking maybe something like a "peer review" type system could be put in place that takes more into account than just the output of the kids on one test (the results of continuous assessment across the whole year, for example; teaching reviews, etc.). Of course this would come with its own issues, but it would certainly cut down on the pressure that comes from that one test!
Most teacher and school assessments in the UK are based exactly on that - achieved improvement versus expected improvement. Schools in underpriveleged areas and which perform poorly on standardised tests still themselves score well if the results are "good given the context and circumstances."
The tragedy is that teachers who don't teach to the test and provide an excellent education that is tailored to the children they have are starting to worry about the security of their jobs, whereas poor teachers who have no real ability except to regurgitate the texts and drill the kids on process and recitation are relatively safe.
The tragedy is that teachers who don't teach to the test and provide an excellent education that is tailored to the children they have are starting to worry about the security of their jobs, whereas poor teachers who have no real ability except to regurgitate the texts and drill the kids on process and recitation are relatively safe.
Evidence for this empirical statement? I have my doubts about this, because the best teachers I had in childhood (too few, but more than one) were able both to engage the pupils from the dullest to the brightest with deep, thoughtful questions and able to cover the fundamental facts of the lessons with efficiency.
I only have the information based on talking to perhaps 100 or 150 different teachers over the course of each and every year, and the conference I was just at raised this very question during a question and answer session.
Seems like there is a need for an independent third-party group to monitor the tests. Since that is likely prohibitively expensive, here's an idea:
1) Have schools partner with each other, where each school is matched to another school of similar size.
2) Extend the testing into twice as long periods (e.g., if it was a 1-day test, now the test period is 2 days).
3) Have partner schools test on opposite period halves.
4) Have partner schools give students the day(s) off on the non-test half.
5) Have schools send their teachers to their partner schools to monitor all the tests.
Now, this isn't fool-proof. It's possible that teachers across multiple schools could collude. It would be crucial to mix teacher pairs up so that if A monitors B then B does not monitor A, thus requiring a multi-way collusion that involves many participants.
Cheating is wrong - I don't see any justification otherwise. With that said, the NCLB and standardized tests are destroying school - the only focus now is to learn to answer those multiple choice questions at the end of the year.
In Norfolk (one of the cities in the NYT article), the 'SOL' annual standardized test is a sole determining factor in pupil promotion. If you come out of 4th grade with a 100% average, but you fail your SOL for whatever reason (you're nervous and didn't do well, you were sick that day, etc.) - YOU FAIL 4TH GRADE. That seems ridiculous.
In schools on the watch list in Nevada where the state has stepped in teachers are no longer really allowed to teach. In 4th grade students receive grades in Reading, Writing, Math, Art, Social Studies, Physical Education and a few other categories. At these schools the teachers are only allowed to teach reading, writing and math. Every lesson plan must be geared towards meeting a standard in one of those three categories. The teachers are required to give out grades in the areas they are not allowed to teach. When pressed on "what" grade the children should receive the answer is typically "whatever you feel is appropriate." These children aren't receiving an education, they are being taught how to memorize information for their CRT's then for their benchmarks, then for whatever test follows that.
This isn't what teachers want, this is what teachers are forced to do by their states in order to achieve the largest number of passing schools and keep federal funding levels high.
To clarify, MOST school districts are not giving financial or other rewards for passing the exams at an acceptable level, it's simply expected to occur.
Like embezzlement shouldn't be a surprise. I agree, this is predictable, and in a just world our response would be predictable, too: if you falsify test scores to get a $2,970 bonus, you get kicked out of the profession, just like if you took $2,970 out of the drawer as a bank teller and tried to pocket it. (n.b. While acknowledging that 95% of bank tellers are morally upright individuals, we devise our systems under the assumption that they need to be caught if they are attempting to cheat. That assumption is instructive.)
In the world we actually live in, you'll have a union rep testify as to how dedicated of a teacher you are, and you'll probably not miss a day of class.
There's an interesting difference between the situations.
If you're a bank teller, your whole job is to manage the flow of money and information to and from customers of the bank, the ultimate goal being to make more money for the bank. If you take $3k out of the drawer, then you have failed at your immediate task (money has gone to the wrong place) and worked against the overall purpose of your job (the bank has less money, rather than more).
If you're a teacher, the heart of your job is (or should be) teaching your pupils: enabling them to know more and think better and so forth. A secondary purpose (the real purpose, according to some cynics) is to keep them out of their parents' hair and off the streets for a few hours every day. Another (subsidiary to the first, in an ideal world) is enabling them to do as well as possible in whatever external examinations they take, in the hope that it'll help them in later life. Arranging for your pupils' standardized test scores not to be too high comes very low down that list -- and if you get away with it, it benefits your pupils and your school. (While harming other pupils and other schools and other people generally, by making the test results less useful. Tragedy of the commons.)
That's not to say that it's not very bad for teachers to cheat to get better test results for their pupils. But it's bad in a different way from a bank teller's embezzlement: peripheral to their job rather than central, and immediately beneficial rather than harmful to the people you're supposed to be working for.
A better analogy (though perhaps an overdramatic one, given recent economic events) would be a mortgage salesperson, working for a mortgage broker, who sells people mortgages they are too likely to default on. When that happens, the salesperson gets more commission; his employer, the broker, gets more commission; the person who buys the mortgage gets a mortgage they want and otherwise couldn't have had (and, let's say, does manage to keep up the payments in 90% of cases, fails to do so but not so badly that they lose their home in 5% of cases, and crashes hard in 5% of cases -- which is probably kinda parallel to the outcomes for pupils whose test scores are inflated); other people, less directly connected with the broker, are the ones who get screwed.
Anyone expect mortgage salespeople who sell a bit too enthusiastically to get kicked out of their profession en masse? ... No, nor me.
> In the world we actually live in ... you'll probably not miss a day of class.
That doesn't appear to be what happened in the cases in the NYT article.
There is a certain strain of teacher who never felt their reputation, livelihood, or psychic essence was at danger when they were merely failing to educate, for decades. After all, to the extent that anyone noticed, it was poor black kids. Who the heck cares what they think.
That strain of teacher is now motivated by fear of exposure. Which is as it should be.