Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

I worked as a teacher in, state funded, education for 15 years.

Value added measurements of student achievement will always fail.

In affluent areas, where student achievement is already high, schools can afford to hire the best teachers, but they will realistically only be able to boost achievement by a small fraction, given the child's prior attainment.

In deprived areas, where student achievement is lower, schools can only afford to hire less qualified teachers, and the boost to achievement will be a small fraction of previous attainment.

Either way, the measured effect that the teacher has will be marginal, while common standards and common testing are the only measured outcomes. This does not equate to the teachers not being invested in student outcomes, or trying their best for their students.

Value added measures were only introduced as a form of target setting, for teacher performance. I'd encourage everyone to watch Adam Curtis' The Trap[1] to see the effects of target setting.

Teachers in early years education set a target, then primary school teachers need to show value added so game the system to show improvement. This trickles up the system, and the net result is unrealistic targets for almost every child as they exit formal education.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)

The problems of students and schools in low SES areas go way beyond teacher quality and student educational achievement.

More explicitly, there are many excellent teachers in poor areas. Teaching privileged children in a well funded school is much easier.

In my city there a 5 high schools which perform remarkably differently despite having the same source of funding and teachers. The high performing school is probably in the 99 percentile in the state. If you look at the schools, that high performing one looks the most beaten down. I think it all comes down to the affluence level of the parents, their education levels and what they impart on their kids.

What do you think is the best way to evaluate teachers, if any?

I teach at the high school level. I don’t think we have figured it out yet; however, my personal belief is that it would require the crevasse between the high-volume/low-stakes instruction-focused assessment (which cannot be “trusted“ generally) with standardized assessment (which can be “trusted”)to be bridged in such a manner that the daily assessment that takes place all across the country, every single day, can be viewed as legitimate measures of student capability. Without being able to accurately measure student ability day to day, we will not be able to measure teacher effectiveness.

I would love to see a toolset like this come into being, but I have no ability to develop such tools.

Would you think measuring general alertness / focus would be a close proxy (or accurate derivative depending on how you frame it) to what you propose?

Alertness/focus isn't necessarily a good measure either, as it's heavily influenced by genetics, hormones and diet which the teacher doesn't control.

The school can try to influence the diet and exercise at the very least, even if not every teacher can.

While I think attention/engagement would be a useful data point during instruction - no, I don’t think it’s adequate.

To give a little more, attentiveness data would only tell me the student is, for instance, reading a text passage. It offers no insight into how they read the text or to what degree they are applying any instructional concepts to the text. This is useful for instructional purposes (if delivered to the teacher in such a way that they can quickly scan the room and grok what’s happening - but that’s getting into AR territory), but it doesn’t do much for the larger goal.

Assessment can give me that kind of information; hence, my belief that making instruction-based assessment more globally trustable is the key component.

Again, I would love to see something like this come to be. I’d love to jump ship and work on it full time. It would not only provide significant academic advantages, but also make increased teacher compensation politically palatable. If we can measure teacher effectiveness, then we can reward it. If we can’t, we use tenure.

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