Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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"It's not just being able to fire/reward teachers (depending on quality)."

Consider it a necessary, but not sufficient, start. Right now, getting rid of a teacher that is committing actual crimes is a challenge in many places, getting rid of a teacher who merely objectively doesn't teach to any standard you care to name is a challenge everywhere. You can play with all the other knobs on the system you like, but until you change this you've already lost.

I would argue that exactly because of this fact, the blundering around the rest of the system has done is the expected result. No matter what the system does, this means the problem just gets worse every year as more dead wood is accumulated. Therefore, the system never gets any feedback about the value of what the changes were. When everything uniformly produces the same negative result, you can't get any information from the results. (At least human systems are less prone than individual humans to learned helplessness and things are still being tried.) Until you fix this problem, the question of what changes actually work can not even be properly asked, in a way that can actually obtain useful and actionable answers.

(I have simplified this for internet-debate purposes; in fact some schools sometimes manage to improve, there's always variations, etc. But I don't think I need to go too far in defending the premise that the system as a whole has been sinking for decades now.)

Is it actually that hard to fire teachers? The numbers I can find indicate that, depending on the state, around 3-5% of "tenured" teachers are fired every year. That's definitely a higher for-cause termination rate than anywhere I've worked. It's also higher than in many of the countries that have good school systems.

I'm not exactly sure what the solution is, but I don't think simply firing teachers will do much. Even firing teachers and raising pay, while both are probably necessary (if you're offering $30k/year, don't be surprised that you get $30k/year types of applicants), doesn't solve the worst problems. Some schools are just a mess of poor discipline that's hard to get a handle on; you could have strict performance reviews and pay $70k/year and I think there are schools that will still be difficult to fix.

One particular problem with giving administrators more authority to fire people is that I have this sneaking suspicion that they'll actually fire the best teachers! The best teachers I had in high school were mostly not very popular with the administration, because they deviated a bit from the official line and were actually effective at teaching, instead of treating the entire class as year-long prep for a multiple-choice test, Kaplan-style. Principals and superintendents are by and large like a less competent version of your stereotypical corporate middle-management, rotating in and out of schools and districts in 2-4 years, changing policies arbitrarily to leave their mark on things and not staying around to see them through, all aimed at moving up the ranks. Anything that gives them more power without first greatly reforming that system is bad imo.

Here's an illustrated guide to firing an incompetent teacher in New York City:

http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf

Wow. Compared to any job in the private sector, the process is more like an impeachment than a firing. No wonder it's so difficult to remove teachers.

Wow... just wow.

Looking at something like that it's pretty easy to believe the premise of the documentary.

I have no experience with the US HS education system (or any part of the US education system for that matter) but two things strike me as odd:

1. How high school is portrayed in the media (film, TV, etc). It is portrayed as difficult but how does the syllabus compare to other countries? I've seen anecdotal evidence that maths, physics and chemistry that I learnt in HS (in Australia) aren't taught until college but this proves nothing; and

2. The GPA system. So many students seem to get GPAs of 3.8+ and an A is what? 90+? My experience with education was that marks that high were highly unusual (eg in a group of 80 you might get 2-5) and if you got 75 you were doing pretty well. My understanding is that the US education system relies heavily on scaling (bell curve) of marks. The UK does this too, leading to grade inflation (eg in the UK GCSE they now have an A* grade above an A because everyone was getting As). How does grade inflation compare between the US and elsewhere?

When I was living in the UK I saw a reality show where they subjected 16 year olds to the education system of the 50s including exams from that periods. Students that were getting 11 GCSEs As struggled to pass 4 of the old O-levels.

What particularly shocked me was students who had gotten an A in GCSE French couldn't conjugate the verb "avoir" ("to have" in English). Oh and since grammar isn't really taught in English speaking countries is almost anachronistic, that means:

- I have: j'ai

- We have: nous avons

- Thou hast (deprecated): tu as

- You have: vous avez

- He/She/It has: il/elle a, c'est

- They have: ils/elles ont

(if memory serves)

It's times like this where the old Republican (conservative) philosophy makes sense: that education is a state not Federal issue (as it isn't specifically enumerated in the Constitution). The Federal Department of Education is just a much bigger bureaucracy. Sadly, that philosophy is now dead in the Bush ("No child gets ahead")/neocon era.

Things are finally changing but slowly:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html

"Under the agreement, teachers the city is trying to fire will no longer be sent to the rubber rooms, known as reassignment centers, where the teachers show up every school day, sometimes for years, doing no work and drawing full salaries. Instead, these teachers will be assigned to administrative work or nonclassroom duties in their schools while their cases are pending."

It should be noted that 30-50% of teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years.

Principals started as the Principal Teacher. In some cases, this is still true. In others, it's not. In yet others, principals are so far removed from being teachers that they don't always remember what it's like to be in front of the classroom.

The numbers I can find indicate that, depending on the state, around 3-5% of "tenured" teachers are fired every year.

I hate to ask for links, but -- got a link for that? I'm hearing anecdotally that inner city schools have an almost 0% firing rate. Perhaps the suburban and rural areas make up for that.

If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to see that data. Would be handy to study a bit.

Here's one source of data: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_2009320_d1s_...

One thing it's missing is what proportion of teachers in each state are tenured--- it gives a total number of teachers, total "dismissed ... or did not have their contracts renewed based on poor performance", and then breaks down the dismissed numbers by tenured/untenured, but doesn't break the total number down by tenured/untenured. That information might be available elsewhere though.

I'll gladly concede that getting rid of incompetent teachers (or otherwise having some ability with which to help those who want to improve improve), or at least securing the ability to do so, is an extremely necessary start.

Particularly with teachers who are committing actual crimes, though in fairness, I think that difficulty is overstated (point of note: I'm in the midwest, where the unions are not as strong, so that colours my perceptions a bit).

That said, though, I don't think we have any way of determing who is/isn't a good teacher if we haven't yet determined what good teaching looks like (in turn, we can't determine that until we figure out what we actually want out of school).

As a teacher, I've been on all sides of this; while working in a large public school, I've had lots of freedom and leeway (so long as I could justify it to my administrators, who were either down with it or completely and totally indifferent).

I've also worked in a small school where the "system" I was expected to carry out was complete and utter rubbish ("Students should not write at all until at least their junior year. They should spend the time prior to this diagramming sentences and memorizing the parts of speech, so that they understand what good sentences look like. They may only begin writing AFTER they have mastered identifying these patterns.")

When you couple that with an authoritarian administration, I was a "bad teacher" in the latter system, and had I not resigned I'd have likely been the first to go when budget cuts rolled around the summer after I left (as it was, my successor was let go instead).

I agree that incompentent teachers are a problem, but there's more to it than just that. Frankly, so many things have been screwy for so long (William Pinar, out of the U of British Columbia, places it at about 4 decades) that I'm amazed that anything gets done.

The first comment in the OP also tries to make the point that it's impossible to tell just how good a teacher is. I claim this is all crap.

The same problem exists in almost any non-manufacturing job; certainly in the field of software development. We've got piles of bad metrics, like KLOCs (about which, the less said the better). We could count bugs, but different systems are prone to different levels of bugginess, and when we're all teaming up, it's not necessarily practical (let alone advisable) to "blame" someone. Yet by and large, we do a pretty good job of determining who are really good, and who aren't.

You mention that the standards themselves are, in some cases, bad. That may be true, but you should be trying to get out of such a district ASAP. The fact that they can't get good teachers, and the fact that the parents are hammering on the door because the kids aren't learning, should force change -- but for the fact that the system now gives parents no alternative.

It seems like the teachers' unions are hanging onto a fig leaf of rationalizating, but it's really a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. We could do a lot better than we are, but we're not allowed to go that far because it may fall somewhat short of perfect.

But look at the bigger picture. What's a more serious failure: (a) not giving a teach a raise quite commensurate with what he/she deserves; or (b) not educating a whole classroom full of kids because they're stuck with a lousy teacher?

The feedback cycle in software is much shorter. A bad coder will be obvious after a couple of weeks because his code doesn't perform its function correctly. With a teacher it might be years beofre they have noticeable effect on their student's and even then noone can agree what the students should have learnt and how to test them.

I can tell when someone knows how to teach me something and if they care. I can't believe somehow most parents aren't just as able to determine when someone is capable of teaching their kids. They just aren't given a chance.

You may not be able to tell whether someone is a good mechanic but you may know bs when you hear it. And you may recognize very smart people who care about their kids whose opinion's you respect.

And we have all kinds of ways of rating things and we tell which ones work well over the long haul.

We make these murky decions all the time. Its the fact that we do not use these resources when our decisions are turned over to the state that is the problem.

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