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Comment by JacobJans | Hacker News Reader

Any teacher worth half their salt will know how well the kids are doing.

It takes literally 30 seconds of looking at a piece of student writing, for example, to have a pretty accurate assessment of their writing ability.

The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers.

If teaching is the problem, why are we testing students?

We don't blame bad code on the users, do we?

The second problem with your statement, is the unanswered question of who is doing the testing, and who is fiddling with the knobs. Not an easy question, but one that can't be ignored.

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>The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers.

>If teaching is the problem, why are we testing students?

And, err, how do you propose to test teachers?

Well, that should be the job of the principle in charge of the school. One of the big problems is that it is very difficult to fire bad teachers, even if it is obvious they are not performing well. Right now, union rules make it very difficult for a school principle to properly do their job.

This isn't 'automated' accountability. But it is a real answer, not the short-cut that many people are looking for with standardized testing.

Ok, that makes more sense, but isn't how you phrased it initially. (No one would call that "testing teachers").

There seems to be a common temptation to chalk student performance solely up to teachers. This despite the fact that there are plenty of things that are out of teacher's control that strongly affect how well a student performs. Here in Maryland, there have been a bunch of recent articles about an alarmingly high percentage of students coming to school without getting adequate nutrition outside of school hours. This has a huge effect on concentration acquisition of new material. In general, socioeconomic and cultural differences between communities have very strong effects on schools; teaching in a school district with highly involved parents gives a huge boost to test scores vs. districts with largely uninvolved parents. Same for rich vs. poor districts, rural vs. suburban districts, etc.

Also, what makes you think school administrators have some answers that teachers don't when it comes to how to do the job, or have any idea, really, how to fairly and correctly evaluate teacher performance. Similarly, why do the same people who routinely call for teachers to be fired for poor performing classrooms never seem to want to hold administrators and school boards to account for their poor performance? Why do state and local governments who cut education funding year after year get a pass?

I think it's a comforting world view to think that if we could just bust the teacher's unions and start firing people, we'd get real results. But it ignores the fact that the system is broken in may more ways—and in many worse ways—than just the teachers.

If you randomly assign students to teachers (which is already more or less the case) and each teacher has a large enough sample size of students (which is already more or less the case), aggregating the performance of all of a teacher's students will say more about the teacher than about these confounding variables, since all the other factors would be shared between all teachers at the school.

Of course there are other problems to be solved. But the fact that there are no effective controls whatsoever on teacher performance, and that teaching is not a highly selective profession, is still a problem.

I address this further down thread, but in a nutshell: there are effective, fair ways of evaluating teacher performance [1]. And I'm all for them. Standardized test performance is not on of those ways. Furthermore, in a lot of the schemes currently being put into place, teachers are not evaluated by test scores at the school level, but at the district or state level. Teacher evaluation is necessary, but it's not easy. Trying to shortcut things by asking standardized test score to do more than they are capable of (which is not much) is exactly the kind of thing that drives good people out of teaching.

[1] See: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/ and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/meet-a...

That sounds fine for intra-school comparisons, but as far as I know, the teacher comparisons are inter-school, which is a whole lot less random in student assignments.

Are you assuming I'm chalking student performance solely up to teachers?

Are you saying that a teacher's supervisor (the principle) shouldn't be in charge of evaluating their performance?

Are you assuming that I think administrators and school boards shouldn't be held accountable as well?

Are you assuming that I'm saying firing people will fix the system?

If we can't overcome a problem as simple as firing bad teachers, how can we address so many of the other issues that face the school system? Does the fact that other problems exist mean we should ignore this problem?

Well, in your parent comment you say "The problem is that we assume we need to test students, and not teachers." So, that does seem to be what you were saying.

Of course a teacher's supervisor should be in charge of evaluating them. But they must be competent to do so and they should do so through evaluation of individual lesson plans and classroom observation, not the performance of the teacher's students on a standardized test. That's not a straw man by the way, there are a lot of people in this debate who think that's an acceptable metric for making decisions on compensation and hiring and firing [1]. Whether you are one of them, I have no idea. But the argument you make above is one I have encountered many times, and typically its adherents are quite myopic about the culpability of everyone else in the system.

Of course there should be a way to evaluate teachers and hold them accountable. And there should be a way fire them if it's called for. But it has to be equitable. And it shouldn't hold teachers hostage to factors they don't control. But even granting you that, I haven't seen any evidence that this is going to lead to much an improvement in the educational system. There are much bigger problems here than "bad teachers".

[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/

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