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Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

And at my job, there are many factors out of my control. I don't control the home life of my engineers. I don't control my customers' decision making processes. I don't control my competitors' actions in the market.

But yet I'm judged on the small slice of that overall pie that I can control.

What this study indicates is that there are teachers who can reproducibly create success levels given the control of the situation that they do have.

How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control?

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Here is some experience that I have had. In an inner city high school (math class), in each mid-thirty student sized class, there were about four students who made it their point to disrupt the classroom. Unless actual violence occurred, they were not to be kicked out. So the teacher could spend a large portion of the period trying to reign in a couple of students at the expense of the whole class. Add to that that the majority of the class had difficulty with, not just multiplication or division, but SUBTRACTION.

This was an Algebra class, and the students had to be graded on their Algebra skills and judged on their Algebra proficiency tests. No homework would be completed, and no recourse could be given for lack of homework. 50% of these 9th grade students will not make it graduation. 3% will make it to a four year institution. Less will graduate from there.

How is this different than working with professional engineers? Ones who could be fired or in some other way worked with? How is this different than working code where a solution exists? How is this different than working with other people who are looking for a solution as well?

A better comparison would be to how you judge a prison guard in relation to recidivism rate.

That's a very legitimate question. How can teachers do the best with the resources they're given and the the children they're working with, no matter how threadbare the resources are, and no matter how traumatized and disadvantaged their students are?

Whether standardized tests have a role in answering that question or in evaluating teacher performance is hotly debated right now.

But the purpose of my original post was to draw attention to a different question: How can society as a whole ensure that every child gets the best education possible?

In schools that have no problem attracting resources, great teachers, and children with mostly fortunate backgrounds, perhaps this second question can be answered by asking the first: how can we improve our teachers?

But in schools that lack resources, whose students live in abuse, poverty, and despair, what even an exceptional teacher can do will be radically limited, and society would probably be better off focusing on how to eradicate poverty -- the real cause behind the failure of too much education in this country.

Unfortunately, seriously tackling the issue of poverty is much harder (and even contrary to some dominant American ideologies) than simply demanding more standardized tests be given and blaming teachers and their unions.

How can society as a whole ensure that every child gets the best education possible?

Step one, define "best education possible". Step two, learn to measure whether or not a child is getting one (or the closest you can come to it). Step three, maximize some aggregate or regionalized version of your measurements through restructuring of school systems, rewards for good schools and teachers, etc.

The study in this article is just gets us to step two. It looks like you're wanting to discuss step three. That's a different can of worms.

It is not even clear if the article gets to step one. Some of the teachers who I feel had the greatest impact on my education taught classes that I did not necessarily score well in. If I am a statistical norm, those teachers would be consider poor teachers according to the metrics, contrary to reality.

This is where I have an issue with this discussion. You're throwing up anecdotal data in the face of an actual study. Why is that okay in a community like this that understands the Scientific Method and should have a basic understanding of statistics.

The only point I was trying to make is that test scores do not necessarily define the success of a teacher. I suggest, to be able to apply scientific method and get meaningful results will require far more data than is seemingly being collected.

What data do you feel is needed, but not there?

What about prenatal counselling and early childhood nutrition programs and parenting classes? What if those things in underprivileged areas has more affect on educational outcomes (however defined) than teacher selection?

I grew up in two very different places; Bethesda, MD and Winthrop, ME. The former is a fairly wealthy suburb of DC. The latter is an extremely rural mill-town in Maine.

I know that the funding the schools get is blamed for a lot of their problems, and I understand where people who talk about how hard it is to teach kids with behavioral issues and histories of abuse are coming from.

I sympathize, but I also think that's a cop-out. I had bad teachers in both places. In Winthrop, I had horrible teachers. They took away advanced classes because an outside contractor thought it created elitist attitudes and putting smart kids in the regular classes would boost overall performance.

I had science teachers that just had us play with legos all day and gave A's to all the basketball players. I had math teachers that would lose assignments and blame the students. These were not well-meaning teachers that just had it hard trying to teach these poor kids. These were people that shouldn't have been teaching at all, but could not be replaced.

My parents actually went up to the school a few times to try and talk to the administration and teachers about what was going on. A lot of people did. They got push-back and were asked not to meddle.

There were 2 great teachers there and that's why I didn't completely screw up my life at that point. I've spoken to a lot of people with similar experiences; 1 great teacher that pushed them to be successful. That's why it's so maddening to me when people say that it's not the teacher's fault, that they can't do anything about it. I know that's not entirely what your intent with your post was, but focusing on external environmental issues and bemoaning the poverty of the student body can come across that way.

While poverty is a major issue, and teaching is hard, I don't think you can solve the problems by just changing the student's home environment. You have to change the teachers as well.

Lots of jobs are hard. Doctors have to deal with unruly patients who refuse to change their diet or exercise. Don't they get blamed when their patients don't improve?

You may not control the home life of your engineers, but you presumably have at least some control over who you hire and fire. Even if you don't have the authority to fire someone directly you can still give your subordinates poor evaluations.

Imagine being a situation where not only did you not have any control over which engineers worked on your team - or even whether they were engineers at all, or even basically literate. Now imagine that your whole industry pretty much worked liked that and that changing from one company to another (which most likely worked the same way) always meant moving cities.

Incidentally, what they did in this study is to measure the value-addition of each teacher, not their raw test scores. Presumably you're not evaluated based on things you have absolutely no control over, as you said - you get judged based on the slice of the pie that you do control.

You make a valid point, and from the perspective of a teacher, or someone in charge of teachers, it is necessary to take your view. However, from public policy perspective, focusing strictly on teachers may be missing the mark.

As an aside, it occurs to me that those teachers who are most effective in underprivileged schools may be totally different than those in wealthier schools.

I think relativism does play a role on outcomes regardless of the parallels you are drawing here. However, you do make a point on a person's competence based on how well they can handle a situation but I don't think you can group one's role as a teacher being equal as one's role as a lead engineer.

I don't think you can group one's role as a teacher being equal as one's role as a lead engineer.

Why not? Government run education is pathetic. Incentives are all out of whack, there's no competition between teachers or schools that can affect the status quo.

Teachers could use a huge dose of whatever it is that the more competitive business world has to deal with.

Schools are the entity least run like a business out of anything else I can think of -- this is at the administrative level. When it comes to teacher competition, it is a different game than Company A winning a competitive contract over Company B. We want both companies to win here (read: both teachers -- or schools). Another problem with this idea is that you can fire obstinate clients. You can't do that with students.

Teacher competition, I think, would reduce collaboration. Why give your competitor your secrets to success?

Incentive pay? The problem under this idea is that new teachers are often given the most difficult and unruly of students while more experienced teachers get honors classes. I find this odd because the teachers will the best "tools" for dealing with difficult problems are moved away from those problems.

Then again, the problem is that with any idea for reform, there is a list of reasons why it should not or would not work.

I'm a fan of letting students who are not interested in the academics of school work towards trade school and let those who are academically inclined to work towards university. However, a retired college physics professor friend of mine does not like this solution because he would have been tracked towards trade school and never discovered his love for physics.

I recommend that you watch "Waiting for Superman". It focuses on the charter school initiatives across the country and shows that maybe we should be running schools much more like businesses. When you see how poor the options are for many of these inner city kids outside of the limited charter school options - it's heartbreaking.

Just like you'll see recommended on HN, if you're going to fail, fail early and get on with something that has a chance of working. Our government funded education system is a long painful failure that established forces prevent from being scrapped and reinvented.

You do however get to control who your engineers are. It's rather difficult for a teacher to "fire" a student.

I don't get to control the projects sent my way. I'm not allowed to "fire" customers with difficult expectations.

Hell, I've only ever fired one engineer in a 20+ year career, and that was because he was the equivalent of a violent student whom you would expel and send to juvi.

Why is it so hard to deal with the information as presented in the study. Fine, question the details or methods of the study. Offer counter evidence. The study presented evidence that good teachers can have a noticeable and measurable level of control on the output of their students. Why is dealing with evidence not the central part of this discussion?

I'm not sure why you're talking about "firing" customers. That might be the equivalent of teachers firing student's parents? Anyways, what I was trying to get at is that people working at a company choose to work there, MOST of the time they are doing something they are good at. Compare this to students, teachers do not get to choose their students from a set of applicants. Also oftentimes students do not see the benefit of being in school. I am not opposed to the study, I was only addressing the point you made about comparing a school to your company. I do not think it is a very good comparison.

> How is it any different than the rest of the working world where you can control some things and you can't control others yet your job is to do the best you can with what you can control?

So the argument is that since everyone sucks at measuring things that any arguments about how a particular system of measurement is ineffective should be discarded?

So the argument is that since everyone sucks at measuring things

You read something into my argument that I didn't put there, so I'm going to disregard it as a straw man.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to create a straw man, just trying to tease out a hidden premise, although I suppose I could have been less of a dick about it.

I think we can all agree that judging people based on things that they have no control over is not an effective way to evaluate them. This happens in education, as the parent comment outlined. This happens in engineering, as you outlined. It does not follow that teachers should be evaluated in this way, or that a discussion about the problems with this method should not take place.

I really appreciate the way you're saying it, but I still think you're reading things into my words ("everyone sucks at measuring things" was not even a hidden premise). Worse, you're not acknowledging the evidence mentioned in the study.

The study attempted to control for things the teacher's couldn't control. They're actually being differentially judged on the parts of education that they can control.

These lines from the article fly in the face of your entire argument: "They also ranked the teachers using a statistical model known as value-added modeling, which calculates how much an educator has helped students learn based on their academic performance over time".

You would need to address them directly in order to mount a credible counter-argument.

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