The threshold is extremely low already, and that only 50% of students are hitting that threshold is concerning to me. It isn't that they aren't capable. It's that the social support structures are not there.
The term grade level was picked to induce a sense of “not good,” because presumably the goal is 100%. But it was picked to be in the first sample less than 50%. We will never shift a metric on a presumably normal distribution that far to the right. So it’ll always look “not good.” The fact that it’s relatively stable over time means “it’s better than it was 8 years ago” and that’s about all you can really say. Given it’s seen improvement over time, albeit with slippage after the pandemic, that seems pretty excellent.
Kids on the bottom half of the bell curve, especially without parental support, are always going to struggle at school.
Ex: I went to Bronx Science, a specialized high school in NYC where 98% of the students are above grade level and go to college. The principal at the time was known to be an obvious subject of nepotism and generally made poor decisions often. The guidance department was a joke. Teachers were above average because schools full of smart kids attract smart teachers, but not so amazing that they'd make up for kids who started below grade level if there were any.
My wife actually went to the same high school and got depression, she dropped out of BX Science and went to a much lesser rated school. The teachers there were actually better in many ways (more organized, better processes, really useful classes work skills and stuff were available due to grants) but the students were still generally below grade level and less than 1/3 went to college according to the stats. She was effortlessly at the top of her class even though she was severely depressed and missed days all the time.
The reason I think that is Covid. With kids learning remote and going all digital, the facade was lifted from teaching. Parents can and did directly experience what our kids were going through.
Our kids’ lowest standardized State scores were with teachers who were terrible. A science teacher who hated kids in general (really). A general teacher near retirement phoning it in. A math teacher who said “read section 5.6 in your book and do the homework” - and that was class.
Our kids did well where the teachers were creative. Where they interacted with students. Where they gave direct feedback and corrections. Where they gave learning reinforcement extra credit to help them focus in areas they had trouble.
In good public schools and many private schools, these bad teachers are not tolerated. In poor ones, the bad teachers flourish, and the kids suffer.
You'd need to compare the performances of kids with varying levels of help at home in classes with good teachers vs bad teachers.
My own experience in school was that I tuned out bad teachers completely. If the teacher was good, I engaged more with the material in class. But in all subjects I had my parents' considerable expertise to fill in any gaps. And I did well in every subject, regardless of teacher quality.
Pushing this on parents and home life is naive, immoral and wrong.
A teacher's impact is diffuse and spread over 30 students. A parent might only have an free hour to help their kid with homework. But it's still more individual attention than any great teacher can give.
Parents can motivate and enforce standards on their children in ways that teachers just cannot do. No teacher can ground you for failing a quiz, or treat you to Disneyland for winning a science fair prize. Most people would rather make their parents proud than their teachers.
I've proposed before having a bonus to the teacher for every student that reaches grade level at the end of the year.
Not saying incentives are totally the wrong approach, but they're also easily gamed, especially in the hands of people who are already criminally underpaid and overworked.
(Let other teachers grade the students)
Also while this is a solution to the symptom of perverse incentives, it is still part of a bandaid approach. Low-performing schools are already spending weeks and weeks teaching to the test, which is fine for achievement but just a step above giving the answers out when it comes to rigorous teaching and learning.
If someone wants to try then go for it. But there are a lot of other well-researched interventions that are hard to implement in classrooms for similar pragmatic reasons. If we are going to ignore facts on the ground, then those would be the obvious ones to me.
> What’s there to lose?
Federal, state and local tax dollars that school principals probably have a better idea on how to spend.
A few seconds of thought: "don't give the teachers the test questions beforehand"
> It’s not pragmatic when principals, guidance counselors, other-subject teachers and permanent subs are shoring up massive shortages across the country.
It'll give the teachers a way to make more money, making teaching more attractive
> don’t give the teachers the test questions beforehand
This is already the case, except for all of the practice questions that students are drilled over weeks before the actual test. Teachers simply could apply the test-taking strategies in real-time more efficiently than students to arrive at and share the answer.
Honestly I believe most teachers have too much integrity and we are solving for edge cases (per earlier comment about Tennessee experiment). Nonetheless all of these tactics are too naive for fed/state/local systems chock full of perverse incentives.
> It’ll give the teachers a way to make more money, making teaching more attractive
A few seconds of thought: “give the proposed money to teachers upfront.”
Why should there be more hoops to jump through towards a sustainable career in one of the toughest jobs? Why give Big Publishers (assessment, implementation and rubric developers) even more influence over perceived teacher quality than say parents, or everyday taxpayers who would foot the bill?
No incentive, won't work.
Parents have zero influence over teacher quality, and neither do taxpayers.
> Why should there be more hoops to jump through towards a sustainable career in one of the toughest jobs?
Because the existing system doesn't produce results.
2. put a unique number on each test. Pass them out randomly to teachers in the district to grade. They won't know who the student is nor who his teacher is, nor will the teacher know who graded it. I.e. a double-blind system.
3. have administrators grade them, or an outside consultant, etc.
I'd propose to spin that and base it on deltas. Taking a student that was already achieving expectations and is still doing so earns $X. Taking a student that was not meeting expectations and now is is worth 4*$X or something like that.
It should be worth more to take underachieving students and get them up to expectations than it is to maintain students at an achieving level.
I feel like that's a problem we already have today. Parents who are motivated to get their child a good education will move to places with good educational outcomes. These parents are already invested in how well their child is doing educationally, so they have better support structures at home which is likely the largest difference in educational attainment. So parents who care and can afford to move their students to schools where the majority of other parents are also invested in the education of their children so these schools will perform well regardless of actual teacher efficacy.
So good schools end up having a much higher percentage of good parents which is really what is making these good schools in the first place. If we really want to change education to improve outcomes we need to figure out either how to get parents to take some responsibility for their children or how to improve low outcome schools to the point where they are an adequate substitute for a poor parent.
Yeah, well, it's a big jump going from free to $17,000/year
> how to improve low outcome schools to the point where they are an adequate substitute for a poor parent.
Give teachers a bonus for each student that achieves at grade level. Let the teachers figure out how to do it.
As someone has already pointed out to you, what the teachers will figure out how to do is game the system in order to produce the appearance of success. Not all of them, not even perhaps a substantial majority. But enough of them will do so that the system becomes warped around reinforcing their behavior rather than the behavior the incentive is supposed to optimize for. You're a crypto nut; surely you have heard of gresham's law before.
They will certainly try. However, bonus systems exist all over the place in the free market, and they work.
The current system is quite thoroughly gamed in the teachers' favor by the unions.
I do think this is an important part, I'm just not sure how to get there. I think it's at least partly wrapped up in socioeconomics. Good school districts tend to be expensive places to live. That in turn means the parents are more likely to be able to afford supplies, books, maybe a non-working parent, half-days off to see the school play, a stable work schedule, etc. Then compound that with being surrounded by children with similar parents, so peers are also likely pushed to excel.
Contrast that with a single parent (23% of kids live with a single parent) who works hourly on a schedule they don't control, and is floating around the poverty level. Even if they really wanted to, I don't think they could provide the same level of support.
I don't know how we fix that without dramatically changing society. Still, perfect is the enemy of good, and paying teachers bonuses for helping students achieve seems like a good step.
- Home life (food, safety, parent engagement, socioeconomic background)
- Classroom size (smaller is better)
Teacher incentivization might work if students spent more years with individual students but that has a different set of problems and requires a much larger reform of schools.
Your first item -- which is really many items -- does matter. Especially if we open about the fact that "socioeconomic background" is mainly a (poor) proxy for the students' IQ. We know this, because grades track the students' IQ better than their socioeconomic background or the IQ of their parents.
"Does the teacher understand the material?" is a low bar but one that many teachers don't clear. This is something that could actually realistically be fixed.
1. Easier classroom management
2. More individualized education
(1) is good and has some effect, but (2) is the meat and potatoes. I will grant the effects are not linear and so haggling about 16-24 kids may not be worth it but the difference between 20 kids and 10 is enormous.
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-eviden... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/class-size-and-ed...
I bet the teachers will find a way. Greed is funny that way :-)
I've paid for instruction for various things. You bet there's a big difference in ability to teach from person to person. The ones that are good get paid well because they are in demand. The ones who aren't good, well, they wind up trying another career.
Besides, if teachers don't matter, might as well hire a chimpanzee to run the class.
I think that maybe those who can't, well...
There are already extensive punishments for failure on this front, and it's a huge part of what schools' attention and focus go toward, especially post-NCLB.
(Well, they can be fired, but only for things that have nothing to do with teaching.)
> No, there isn't punishment.
Simply wrong.
> Achievement of their students has no affect on it. Teachers can't even be fired.
> (Well, they can be fired, but only for things that have nothing to do with teaching.)
Wrong, even with the modification.
> Teacher pay is entirely based on years of service and what degree they have. Achievement of their students has no affect on it.
This part's true as far as pay goes, short of firing (which, yes, happens). Student achievement, however, can absolutely have an effect on quality of work-life—which courses a teacher is assigned or allowed to choose (this is huge for a lot of teachers), grade- or subject-level leadership positions that can effectively afford greater freedom in the classroom, and on career and pay advancement opportunities. In teaching, career advancement means "leaving the classroom" in practically all cases, which is a real problem, but it doesn't necessarily mean shifting to admin—it can mean moving into curriculum design, subject-area coaching, or other specialist roles that still work closely with students and teachers.
> See "Waiting for Superman".
Yeah, I've seen it.
At extremely low rates compared to other professions. It's effectively "can't be fired", unless the teacher has an affair with a student or something like that.
> career advancement means "leaving the classroom" in practically all cases
Having the reward for good teaching being leaving teaching is not a good riposte for my proposal.
I expect that a cash bonus for meeting grade level will incentivize the more competent and confident teachers to want to teach classes with the harder cases in them, so they can collect more bonuses.
The core idea, obviously, is to pay for the results you want.
Like a salesman. They get a (low) base salary + commissions on sales. It's in common use because it works. For the good salesmen, it's the path to riches.
But, of course, the real wrinkle is that that system, with much of that extra nuance, is what's already in use. No bonuses to teachers for doing well but teachers and admin are definitely very concerned about meeting or exceeding those targets, because there are consequences if they don't. It's literally already how we evaluate schools and teachers, and it's very much on educators' and administrators' minds.
Meanwhile, the actual way for a capable teacher to earn a bonus is... to leave teaching for something that pays better. The more bullshit process and microscope-level evaluation we apply, the more will follow that incentive, and the worse the teacher labor pool gets. If this "bonus" isn't a solid $20k/yr or more, it's not gonna keep them around, especially if we make their jobs & work environment any more annoying and abusive than they already are.
That's not what I proposed, so "that system" is not already in use. The key feature is a monetary bonus.
People love to strongly assert that they are professionals, and a performance bonus does not change their performance. I've never seen a performance bonus yet that did not improve it.
(It's why, back in the Zortech days, we gave a cut of the monthly gross sales to each employee.)
This is not about the bell curve, it’s about a lot of US schools not actually teaching students successfully.
Some schools being above grade level has nothing to do with teaching methodology, and everything to do with student composition. Smart people who raise their kids to do well in school move to neighborhoods with better schools, which raises the grade levels.
Ex: I went to Bronx Science, a specialized high school in NYC where 98% of the students are above grade level and go to college. The principal at the time was known to be an obvious subject of nepotism and generally made poor decisions often. The guidance department was a joke. Teachers were above average because schools full of smart kids attract smart teachers, but not so amazing that they'd make up for kids who started below grade level if there were any.
My wife actually went to the same high school and got depression, she dropped out of BX Science and went to a much lesser rated school. The teachers there were actually better in many ways (more organized, better processes, really useful classes on work skills and stuff were available for seniors due to grants) but the students were still generally below grade level and less than 1/3 went to college according to the stats. She was effortlessly at the top of her class even though she was severely depressed and missed days all the time.
Of course tracking is a good idea.
While I mostly agree, we shouldn't underestimate the destruction that can be wrought by a bad teacher.
We can fix it. But we have to retool primary education significantly. And "retooling education" isn't something that is ever going to happen in the current setup.
But even with the great results in 2019 you can still say “49% of California students are less than grade level” and it looks really bad and people post about how bad public schooling is and hand wringing ensues. - again ultimately leading to more funding, when in fact it’s a real milestone achievement to have lifted such a huge number of students so far in so short a time.
It’s always fascinating to watch the click bait statistic name induce reliable and predictable behavior every time, even when the actual data tells the exact opposite story. Very clever whoever decided to make “grade level” greater than the median performance.
It's not just kids on the bottom half because those that need support are disruptive to the entire class. The way the system is setup, you not only need parental support but the parent drives the process and the administration is resistive because it imposes more work on already strained staff.
I volunteer in my child's class for 2-3 hours a week, as does my partner and a grand parent. There are a number of high needs kids in the class who need Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). These must be initiated by the parents and require outside services and assessments to be truly effective. The parents have largely been resistive to the teacher's appeals. Some point to their child's reading or math ability as proof that the child doesn't need support. Others just do not have the capacity or capability to take on the process.
The teacher is spending a disproportionate amount of time keeping children on task and as a result the entire class suffers. The teacher in this classroom has begged for support from the administration but they assert that it's the teacher's failing. The have taken her out of class to observe other classes at other schools but this was more punitive than beneficial. The only positive from that action was the substitute they got became an advocate for support. The administration has been slow walking the process to get someone to observe the classroom and at this point is just waiting out the school year.
> There are a number of high needs kids in the class who need Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). These must be initiated by the parents and require outside services and assessments to be truly effective. The parents have largely been resistive to the teacher's appeals.
The teacher is asking the parents to initiate the IEP process because of the teacher's observations of the student in class.
> Are you suggesting ... the parents should seek outside support for that?
Part of the IEP process is that the parents must justify to the administration that an IEP is necessary. "Because the teacher said so" isn't sufficient. Outside support can be doctors, counselors, therapists, psychologists, etc.
Sure, it is possible that there are very low outliers pulling the average down so that the median is well above average, but I doubt that is generally the case.
The description of a grade level standard is basically an average performance estimate. It may have been codified in the past when the average was different, and they may have chosen to set the grade-level standard lower than the mathematical average for various reasons.
So it's not necessarily the case that 50% being below grade level is just normal. But without knowing how it is calculated and what the grade-level means, the headline is not useful. The general idea that there is a expectation being met by slightly less than 50% of the population seems totally expected from a mathematical standpoint and does not indicate any deficiency on its own.
Lets say it were worded like this: "Less than 50% of students are not meeting minimum grade-level proficiency standards in math." That would tell me something much more concerning. Because Minimum standards should be something that a vast majority of students can achieve. But it will always be the case that if we have and estimate of the "normal" mathematics ability for a particular grade, about 50% will likely exceed it and about 50% will likely fall short.
So does on-grade-level mean minimum expectations, or an estimate of normal grade-level abilities? I don't know. Reading through the website I see that when their standard is that the student shows competency that is consistent with progress toward being ready to take college level courses after finishing 12th grade. So it seems that they have set milestones for certain skills and placed them along a track for each grade. However those tracks are still likely influenced by the average abilities of most students.
I would still expect that any given student is likely to have productive periods and less productive periods throughout their schooling and might fall-behind for a while and might catch up later when some focus is returned. As a result I would still expect that at any time a large portion of students are going to be in falling-behind mode, then catching up later. Only a small percentage will just spend their entire time being ahead of the curve in math ability. The ones who don't have a particular interest will do what it takes to meet minimum often enough, when pressured by parents or teachers or counselors.
If the standards are set so low that 70% of students stay ahead of them most of the time, the standards are probably too low and we are not ambitious enough in our expections. Likely we would not sufficiently motivate the schools to achieve maximally. If they are so high that 70% of students at any time are falling behind, then they are probably too high and would only be discouraging. ~50% seems ideal to me. If we had 55% of students meeting expectations at any time, I'd want to raise the expectations.
Why?
I gave it a quick look so perhaps I missed some stuff, but the worst performance was Grade 11 math, where about 55% of students did not meet standards. But as someone who was great a math, and went to do it in Uni etc, I do not think its concerning that 60% of people do not know how to do matrices, calculus, or logic formalism or any of the other topics we touched in AP Math.
Valuing education is important, and I think we are behind the curve in how we teach our kids, tools like Google make tons of memorization so silly to prioritise. But kids not being up to speed with 17-18 year old metaphor understanding in English in a state with tons of immigrants, or kids not mastering calculus at 17 and not needing integrals later in life is part of specialisation, we cannot all do everything.
This is more “what percentage 9th graders can read at a basic 9th grade level”, “what percentage of 3rd graders can multiply and do basic 3rd grade math”.
These numbers should be in the 80-90% range. But they are not. And note: the majority who are performing well below grade level are not failing. They are probably getting C’s and getting promoted to the next grade. Meaning every year they fall farther and farther behind.
Also historically the results seem to track, this is not some crash compared to previous years.
All of this combined makes me think this is a headline that scares people, but not one that we should be worried about.
Smaller classes, better teacher pay, and shorter school days and those numbers would skyrocket I am sure, but it is easier to blame the kids than to learn from countries that outperform us.
I have kids in elementary school and so far, I would say "grade level" expectations are a bit higher than what mine were 35 years ago. But maybe things change as they get older.