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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately the effects of a single teacher are so noisy and indirect that it's basically impossible to measure their performance. The lack of firm data is why the debate about teacher compensation is so fraught.

The problem is not that it's hard to measure. The people is that teachers actually have very little ability to make a marginal impact on their students though their performance, except at the very tail ends of the distribution.

In other words, structural factors that teachers can't directly control, like family support or district curriculum standards, have a much larger impact on student performance than teaching quality does. (Except, of course, for the exceptionally bad teachers, but that's better addressed by firing them than by adjusting the compensation strategy).

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> The problem is not that it's hard to measure. The people is that teachers actually have very little ability to make a marginal impact on their students though their performance, except at the very tail ends of the distribution.

That's essentially true for most sales people and traders as well. There are VERY heavy tails -- that one guy at the car dealership who sells 3x as much as his peers, or the trader at Citadel whose trades made over $1bn in a year.

But imagine how the teaching profession would change if 1) the gains could be accurately measured and 2) we assigned payment or prestige to teachers based on (1).

> That's essentially true for most sales people and traders as well.

It's definitely not true in most sales positions, particularly the ones that are highly commissions-based.

> But imagine how the teaching profession would change if 1) the gains could be accurately measured and 2) we assigned payment or prestige to teachers based on (1).

We can, and we do. The fact is: the gains just aren't that large. If you want to improve student performance, the best place to spend the money isn't by raising teacher salaries.

> We can, and we do.

Unless you can provide a link, I'm pretty sure whatever you're measuring is very different than what OP was talking about.

And stories abound of the very successful engineer, entrepreneur or scientist whose entire life was changed by one teacher.

That's right, we need more administrative staff, and laptops and iPads for all children. That should fix the problems in education.

> Public education by state rankings show that New York spent the most per pupil at $20,610. The next top five are District of Columbia ($18,485), Alaska ($18,416), New Jersey ($17,907), Connecticut ($17,745) and Vermont ($16,988).

http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/pu... https://archive.fo/DeBGH

A teacher's salary in New York isn't good enough but you can at least afford rent if you're smart. The reason why I tolerate laptop and iPad spending is because I don't know if/how we can cut costs and still get better results. Thus, when I see something that lets students learn without a one on one with a teacher, I imagine it saves money.

From the same page, we see that total expense is 617B or about (617 billion/18 trillion) three percent of GDP. I'll be honest. I have no earthly idea whether this number is too big or too small or if that's even the right question.

> Thus, when I see something that lets students learn without a one on one with a teacher, I imagine it saves money.

There is growing evidence to suggest that having laptops and ipads in class decrease learning outcomes. So you could be paying more for worse results.

A documentary I watched claimed giving laptops or iPads to students is correlated with worse academic performance for those students.

Sorry, don't remember enough for a citation, but the suggested causal effect was students just spending even more time on social media, games, and web surfing instead of school work.

i'd oppose that. For one that's disingenious given the parent argument, that about scandinavian countries leading (by some measure) in school education and them using computers in class.

And on the other hand, what if the test subjects you mentioned just didn't learn to use the technology responsibly? I'd argue, teachers and professors need to be given computers, in a metaphorical sense, first.

Based on national test scores, what we know works in a small homogeneous country at least is professionalizing teaching - raising the standards to become a teacher. They didn't raise salaries to the same level as other professionals like lawyers and doctors, it's about the same pay as the USA, but Finland managed to go from worst to the top in Europe in one generation. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/the-cas...

It's also interesting to note that children in Finland got a shorter school day, and mostly no homework at all. The shortening of the school day was especially prominent in for the youngest children.

But as in the UK teachers would game the system eg by having "difficult" kids in this case those of only average intelligence excluded from the school to make their position in the league tables look good.

That's a myth. The real problem is that the average teacher (relative performance) is so far away from being close to maximally performant (as proved in studies which rigourously control teacher behaviour) that the impact of variation about that mean is swamped by environmental factors. People conclude that since swapping teachers doesn't make an appreciable difference, teacher performance can't make a difference. When in reality the problem is that teaching is uniformly bad (compared to maximal possible performance, which is very difficult. this is why the answer is not to look for better teachers but to look for better, uniformly implementable, curriculums)

If teaching is indeed universally bad (which I doubt but lets go with the idea as a thought experiment) - then surely the issue must lie with training/the accepted teaching methods?

I disagree with the parent post and do not dismiss your suggestion, but no, that needn't be the only cause. The profession itself may be disincentivized in a number of ways against bringing in capable people.

It's not necessarily training and methods. Any environmental issue would create the same situation (curriculum selection, normative bias into testable results, etc), as would a self reinforcing cycle of undervaluing the professionals and competent people running away from the undervalued profession.

Yes, I agree completely. Though I would emphasise that teaching universally bad only when compared to what is achieveable from tightly scripted presentations. I think the actual task of teaching flawlessly while "winging it" is extremely extremely difficult, and beyond at least 98% of the general population, even positing a good working environment.

I might become a teacher and I don't want to be a bad one. I want to be exceptionally good. Do you have any suggestions?

Pick an area with a strong union that will cover your ass when you have to use your experience, skill, and knowledge to do what has to be done when the admin bureaucrats not only don't help, but even become your chronic obstacle. Make sure you don't try to be too heroic before you get tenure, though.

Also, try to get a subbing or student teaching position that will put you with the same group of kids regularly for at least a month to be more sure you can handle the stress of the job.

I would reccommend looking into everything written by Siegfried Engelmann, particularly "Theory of Instruction". Honestly though, that might not be enough. Maybe you have the brains and drive to do it, for me the only unquestionab success has been using scripted presentations written by people who are smarter than I am.

Disagree. The tails of the distribution are where the teacher effect is probably the least, because there are significant obstacles on the low end that make focusing on learning impossible and immense innate talent at the high end where the kid would learn if you put him in a closet with the textbook and a flashlight. The real problem with teacher success metrics is that they are outcome-based. It is no more useful to measure the success of a world class surgeon by including the outcomes of people who completely ignore the post-op care directions and instructions for lifestyle changes.

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