State's bad teachers rarely get fired
startribune.com
startribune.com
The unions don't want mediocre teachers to be found out. It's really a crappy situation and really took us by surprise.
In the wartime Marine Corps he wasn't promoted quickly but he was still given the duties and responsibilities he was capable of as soon as he proved himself.
The private armies and so forth were mostly a 19th century phenomenon.
Sadly, this appears to be true in many walks of life.
I don't have any concrete facts on why unionized teachers are better, but they're paid more, have better benefits, legal protections... so maybe that makes them more motivated.
Also, rather than holding teachers to a standard "all students must perform as well as X", we can measure value added. Come up with a statistical predictor of how well a student will do. Then measure actual performance and evaluate teachers by (actual performance - predicted performance), averaged over all students.
I have no love for unions in general, especially those I've had the misfortune of dealing with in the tech sector. I do however appreciate some of what the teachers union my wife is a member of provides. All teachers in our state (and most others) are required to purchase and hold liability insurance at all times. The union has negotiated rates that are over 50% less than individual rates offered by these same insurers. The union has legal representatives available to protect teachers from many different types of actions, this includes the very real threat of false accusations made by students or their parents. The school districts don't provide any of those services, and in some cases are legally prohibited from doing so as teachers are state/county employees so they fall under various laws that limit the benefits that can be offered to state workers. Teachers unions also provide representatives to mediate disputes between fellow teachers, administrators, parents, and district staff. This service can be invaluable, especially when mediating disputes between staff members and principles. Having a run in with a principle can ruin a teachers career due to the nature of how many administrations work and the good old boy system at work during hiring at many schools.
While teachers unions do use collective bargaining to negotiate contracts which include salary schedules this only has a minimum effect on most teachers. Some stellar teachers don't make as much as they might, and some mediocre teachers make more than they should. The problem is that even without the teachers union state laws often limit compensation that can be offered anyway, and at least in my state, compensation packages are done in groups or packages regardless of whether or not those workers are unionized. This means that superstar teachers wouldn't be able to get higher salaries than they do now anyway. Given that almost all state workers here are payed based on time on the job and job classification there would be very little difference. It could actually be worse given that teachers currently get more money based on their continued education in addition to years of service. This provides incentive to teachers to continue to learn and, in theory, become better teachers.
As for mediocre teachers being defended by the union, that's an unfortunate consequence of what the union offers. There are several well publicized cases of horrible or mediocre teachers being protected zealously by out of control unions or union reps. Given the total number of teachers employed, the total number of cases the unions mediate, these are the exception and not the rule. You aren't going to read about a teacher being protected by a false student accusation unless it actually goes to court. As a member of the union if there is any type of a dispute you have the right to call on the union to defend you. In most cases this is still a problem with the mediocre teacher and not the union directly. By paying those union dues the teacher gets the right to have the union step in on their behalf. In some cases you'll notice that there's a problem with public service in general. The teachers union has negotiated for contracts and rules that are unbelievable, so have the police, tech and other unions. For whatever reason people love to single out teachers unions and teachers in general.
My experience since my wife has become a teacher and I've become much more aware of what goes on at schools is that most people arguing for changes in schools have no idea what they are talking about. They have not volunteered at schools, they have not actively participated in school board meetings, they have never seen a teachers contract, they don't understand the laws that are already in place, they don't read the legislation that's pending on the state or federal level, and they don't think about or understand the consequences of the legislation they do read. There's a lot of that in the discussions about education on HN too as well.
And you will make teachers teach to your performance criteria.
Besides how many programmers would like their value to be assessed by a piece of software?
I would assume you'd analyze based on the first and second derivatives of the students' results—good teachers leave kids better off than when they started, and great teachers teach kids how to learn faster and better. The important prerequisite to this, though, would be to test kids both before and after each lesson, with tests of equivalent questions and equal difficulty—otherwise, you have no idea how much of their learning was because of the class, and how much they already knew.
Rather than the current No Child Left Behind policy of regression to the mean, this would assign the most "learning-intensive" teachers to the students most in need of learning, and assign the students who self-study or are otherwise pre-informed to teachers who are more "lenient", likely diving further into interesting sidebars and tangents. Both groups would be better off for it.
The only way I can see to game derefr's system is to pack your class with students who used to have bad family situations, but who's family situations have recently improved. I rather doubt there are enough students in that situation to pack many classes.
You could normalize data to get relative values across teachers and classes. The intent was to find individual students or classes that needed more resources or attention. It was never to get people fired, but the unions fear that's how it will be used.
If I knew the criteria, I wouldn't mind, because then I could game the system.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://econ.ucsd.edu/~kam...
I think most programmers would be very happy if their performance was assessed by software, e.g. get paid for making unit tests pass. That's the holy grail of consulting: you get a spec, you build it, you get paid, no last minute changes or "this isn't what I meant".
One example given was of a 17-year teaching veteran- an English teacher that was illiterate! I'm not entirely sure how that happens, but anything is better than what is currently happening with our schooling system- and make no mistake, it's not an education system, but a schooling system as former NYState educator of the year John Taylor Gatto [2] argues [3-5].
[1] http://www.thecartelmovie.com/
[2] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Sch...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Mass-Instruction-Schoolteacher...
I am considering a startup in this space myself.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates_unplugged.html
In summary, currently teachers are not held accountable for the quality of their teaching due to the way their contracts are structured. Also, formulas for teacher's pay reward experience and extra education, even though both have been shown to be unrelated to teaching quality.
Simply throwing more money at the problem will not help, we need to rethink the current system.
In NSW, they recently introduced a website that displays the score of standardized tests, not at the student level but at the school level. There wass a huge uproar by teachers, suddenly everyone can see how well they do, they and their schools can be examined.
Due to this, they have come very close to striking at times, lots of complaints about not being able to teach properly, at having to "teach to the tests". There is some truth to this, but it is also a way out for the bad teachers.
There needs to be some mechanism for recognising and removing bad teachers. The system is setup at the moment almost as a teacher retirement plan, once you get in, you can't get out.
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/waiting...
Some of those scenes are from the lottery to get into the DC voucher program. DC is my hometown and the public schools are Cuisinarts for kids. Recently all future funding for the DC voucher program was pulled.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/H...
When the government grants monopoly licensing powers to a union they are virtually guaranteeing corruption, high prices, and methodological stagnation.
Regarding Bill Gates TED-talk, he compares US and Asia test scores. I don't see how having cheerleader style teachers can mitigate the challenges that many children from under-performing areas are faced with nationwide. These under-performing schools are often in poor areas, where the family educational expectations are low, and the home-life is not conducive to educational success. If US society placed as much emphasis on education as do Japan and other Asian countries, US performance would be much improved. Bill Gates' proposals are a band-aid over the more significant issue.
The popularity or lack thereof of something doesn't tell us whether it is wrong.
> In California, the teachers unions have been more prominent in recent years in state-wide political debates, and that seems to have had an impact on public opinion, which is unfortunate.
How so?
Feel free to explain how CA's teachers unions have been a net positive for society over then past 10 years.
That may be (or not), but we're talking about political activity in the open, which has little/no relationship with protecting teachers against administrative sanctions wrt false accusations of child abuse.
"Administrative sanctions" is key - criminal accusations ARE public.
> I can tell you that if it weren't for the legal protection offered by the union many good teachers would be out of jobs, and many others would never have become teachers as these services are often not affordable on an individual basis.
Interestingly enough, teachers aren't the only people accused of such activities. And when other people are so accused, it's public.
You brought up criminal actions, I did not as by default they would be public (except when they aren't). I also said absolutely nothing about administrative sanctions, you also added that. There are a significant number of issues in which the teachers union is involved between teachers and administrators that have absolutely nothing to do with "administrative sanctions" including handling disputes between administrators and teachers, parents and teachers, contract disputes, etc. None of those are public. Some of them have a net positive effect because they head off civil action against the school district which saves the district and tax payers money.
> Interestingly enough, teachers aren't the only people accused of such activities. And when other people are so accused, it's public.
This is actually not the case. This is true if the police are involved or an action ends up in the courts (family court for example). If CPS is involved with a family initially there may be zero law enforcement involvement. If that is the case the records are not public, and would only become public should legal action be taken against the accused or the family courts become involved for the purpose of separating children from the family or returning a child to a family, etc. Even in cases where legal action is taken, if no criminal charges are filed the details of the situation are often not public as records will be sealed to protect the minors involved.
As far as teachers being at risk, due to the amount of time that teachers are with children, and due to district policies teachers may be at greater risk than anyone else. An example of this is restrictions on how students can be placed in classes. While there are special education or alternate education facilities for some students, not all qualify or will be provided with those services. As such students with emotional disturbance, for example, may often end up in regular classes. In one case my wife had a student that was severely disturbed and through the course of a school year made outlandish claims not about my wife, but the other students and several other teachers at the school. None of these claims had any merit, and thankfully the school was aware of her situation. It took severe pressure from the union for the district to reconsider their policy on student placement in these cases. Their decision appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the risk these students or teachers may have been exposed to, but limiting the potential liability should the parents of one of the affected students choose to sue.
Now if you want to restrict the discussion to one: "political activity" and two "in the open" there are still things that can be pointed to as positives. I will bring up a current issue in my own community. For the current fiscal year the school district is short $30 million dollars. This is going to be handled via service cuts, the loss of about 100 teachers and some other things. For the most part it's manageable, though unpleasant. The next fiscal year however will be devastating to the budget and no one is talking about it _except_ for the teachers union. It is estimated that the budget for the next school year will be short at least $60 million and as much as $90 million. This means that the district will lose half of its teachers, all of its certified personnel and most or all of its aids. There will be many school closings, and class room sizes will increase from the current 25-30 at the primary level and 30-35 at the secondary level to as many as 45 in primary grades and 50 in the secondary grades.
The teachers union has been trying to make this issue public, address the state legislature, and find a solution for the last 90 days. Unfortunately since so many people seem to despise teachers unions there has been very little public following. Now the district has decided to admit that this is the a real issue, that the numbers are correct, and ask teachers to try to get the state legislature to do something about it. The school district is still not going before the public and explaining that their children are going to have severely diminished educational opportunities. Only the teachers union is discussing that this can negatively impact the growth of the local populace and the local economy. If this does actually occur (it most certainly will) the local education system which is already 49th in per pupil spending, and doing poorly in graduation rates will become even worse. Those are both incentives for families to not move to the area, and for businesses to not move or start here (lack of educated labor pool).
While teachers unions may be actively trying to do good things, for both teachers and their students. The press tends to only cover the negative.
Pay people 3 months salary to leave; don't pay new employees for the first 3 months.
It's much easier to identify an underperforming existing employee than to pick the best potential employee at interview. Not paying newbies filters out people who aren't motivated.