Hacker News Reader

Comment by wehadfun | Hacker News Reader

This "fire bad teachers" thing is stupid.

You can't compare a teacher that has a class of 15 native english speaking, upper middle class, 2 parent house holds kids to a teacher with a class of 32 english as a second langurage, poor, hungry, cold, kids that are children of drug addicts, drunks, refugees especially using test written in English.

Mark said something like poor comunities have a problem with bad teachers. WTF? How about poor students have a problem learning regardless of who the teacher is.

software could work for the motivated learner. But so would an abacus or a pen and paper.

View on HN

>>>You can't compare a teacher that has a class of 15 native english speaking, upper middle class, 2 parent house holds kids to a teacher with a class of 32 english as a second langurage, poor, hungry, cold, kids that are children of drug addicts, drunks, refugees especially using test written in English.

Nor should you, but hopefully no one is seriously suggesting comparing those two groups directly. What you can do is compare teachers to their peers in similar schools, and see whose students improve more over a given year. If an average student in Teacher A's class goes from reading at level x to x+2 in the course of a year, that's better than going from x to x+1.

This is making the assumption that a sample size of 30 kids in one school year doesn't have anomalies that will skew the average and that the testing for reading levels such as the DRAs are foolproof?

To your second point, I wouldn't test only reading levels - I'd test whatever we want/expect students to improve in. Reading, writing, math, social skills, happiness, physical fitness, whatever. And sure, we need good solid methods for testing these things, so let's get started on it.

To your first point...maybe 30 kids isn't a big enough sample. I'm not suggesting this be implemented tomorrow as the absolute standard on which to judge teachers. Maybe they need to be observed over 3-5 years, maybe we can try to control/adjust for other variables. What bothers me is the idea that because measuring teacher skill/success is difficult, we shouldn't try at all and just use seniority (or absolute test scores) as the single deciding factor.

There is a rather large contingent of people in America who suggest exactly that. Broadly, they are generally conservatives who believe that "government" and "evil" are the same thing.

I spent 9 years in some of the worst public schools in America until I was able to escape to a private school.

I think you completely underrate the very real problem of bad teachers in poor cities. This is not just teachers merely being unable to teach kids with all manner of problems - there are many teachers who are actively making things worse, in many cases being both verbally and physically abusive to the students.

The very real problem of teacher evaluation does not in anyway obviate the fact that many teachers in poor communities are more horrible than most would dare imagine.

The only solution to negligent teachers is visibility into these behaviors. This also seems like a way that the conditions could be improved: showing them off.

"poor students have a problem learning regardless of who the teacher is."

That just isn't true. Most school districts don't even get rid of the teachers who are so horrible they shouldn't be allowed near children not to mention the ones that just don't care and kick their feet up and let the kids run wild.

You should check out the documentary "Waiting for Superman". http://www.takepart.com/waiting-for-superman It is on Netflix.

As a former high school teacher in a low-income community, I think that movie only told a small portion of the issues of education. There are certainly teachers that aren't the greatest, but we're doing very little to entice the best teachers to teach in the most difficult places, and even less to make sure it's sustainable. Most of the teachers I knew did what they could at a pace that would allow themselves not to completely burn-out. And a most of the burnouts started as energetic young teachers.

Not dealing with problem employees and allowing them to just continue muddling along sends a strong signal to the best people that their work isn't valued and tends to push them to leave. It's a huge part of the problem; people don't like to talk about firing people because it is socially uncomfortable but in the end it's better for both the workplace and the worker instead of just ignoring it and institutionalizing incompetence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com