When there's no incentive for the teachers and schools to get kids to grade level, they aren't.
I've proposed before having a bonus to the teacher for every student that reaches grade level at the end of the year.
I've proposed before having a bonus to the teacher for every student that reaches grade level at the end of the year.
- 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)