Report: Use student performance to rate teachers
blogs.ajc.com
blogs.ajc.com
Objective measures like the ones proposed are a siren song. They sound really good on the surface, but a deeper look reveals these problems:
* You only get what you measure. Whatever is not measured falls through the cracks. So this means that the teaching goals have to be really good. Historically, they are not, as they are driven more by politics than by people who are talented at teaching.
* Some of the value that teachers add is in intangibles which are harder to measure. These important intangibles will fall by the wayside.
Also, the administration has a large impact on student and teacher success. Imagine being a programmer and having your performance judged on a project that was mismanaged by an incompetent project manager.
I'm not saying we should have no objective measures; I'm just giving a word of caution that this is a complex issue that's not easily solved. Reductionist approaches like these are bound to fail; more holistic approaches that focus on the student-teacher-parent relationship are better.
Incentive pay: good. Reason we don't have a good incentive pay system to argue with the teachers unions about: because incentive systems for teachers are hard.
Parent of two school-age kids speaking now: teach-the-test pressure is already bad enough without paying teachers to ratchet it up.
After edit (and your initial reply to this post): My apologies, I forgot that the submitted link here was a news source, rather than the full report
http://www.policy2.org:85/images/stories/documents/policy2.0...
of the organization advocating this change in policy. The stakeholders consulted in preparing the report may not all enthusiastically support student testing programs (some of them surely do not), but the report claims that the trade-offs of linking teacher evaluation to student achievement are better than the trade-offs of not linking teacher evaluation to any criteria in particular. I think that is a reasonable view.
The only difference I see between the two instances of this "solution" are that the incentive comp schemes dev teams come up with are simply fodder for amusing DailyWTF posts, and the punitive "incentive" schemes on the table now for schools have already begun screwing over a whole generation of kids.
We all hope the next generation sees some improvement in education, don't we?
[ps: I took the time to actually read the "Policy 2.0" report that is the subject of the AJC article. It contains no data. It builds a case for formal teacher evaluation by using the same logic you do: "studies teachers are important, so it follows that a plan to segment teachers by performance would be beneficial". I'm particularly happy to report that almost none of the study's contributors are even named, nor is a methodology specified beyond "we have an internet site, we recruited volunteers, and we led discussion groups and documented the "results".]
http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-921/incompetent.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Incompetent-Teacher-Managerial-Respons...
http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach...
http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/papers_presentations/pre...
http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/how-to-fire-an-incompe...
http://www.maa.org/features/083104pointcallforaction.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_...
Also: one can simultaneously believe that incompetant teachers are too hard to fire and believe that "Race to the Top" and NCLB and charter schools are terrible, counterproductive ideas.
Two other comments about your links:
* None of them address the concern I raised, which is not a liberal one but a simple market/economics issue.
* The last link is particularly interesting because Joel Klein, the NYC superintendent who is its subject, is hugely controversial.
"Objective" measures are a pipe-dream that's decades old. It's constantly thrown up as a 'solution', almost always by people with little or no education experience.
Teachers have little control over the attitudes / motivations of students. You can bring a horse to water. Again, the evaluation of experienced professionals is worth something ... but good teaching is at least 50% art, and what works is a mystery that has to be solved one class at a time.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm
Also note that Kohn's ideas on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation are hardly original. Most people who work at startups should find them collegial, since they're one of the key ideas in books like _Peopleware_.
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/alfie-kohn-is-bad-fo...
But what about the point in the originally submitted link that in most states NOTHING in particular is done to evaluate teachers?
But that doesn't make him wrong. What he's saying about incentive pay harmonizes with what we as technology entrepreneuers already know about incentive comp, and with what we're already observing in school districts around the country. The teachers in Oak Park don't even get a pizza party for jacking up ISAT scores, but those scores are still a top-of-mind issue for them year round.
A reasonable person could argue that it's better not to do formal evaluations at all, rather than smothering the whole school system with meaningless standardized tests.
Subsidizing private schools hurts public schools in a vicious cycle. Private schools do not, as a rule, outperform public schools with students of similar backgrounds (even on bogus standardized tests). On balance, it's pure adverse selection: state-subsidized private schools that accept only students who are likely to maintain their artificially inflated performance metrics.
That might be a simplification on your part, if not it's naive. Customers don't have to like a product - they see an advert for it that tells them it's right for them, or their friend has one, or the guy in the shop sells it them because it's got the highest markup.
* I hope the school system begins valuing learners for their capacity to notice when a particular teacher isn't a good fit for a particular learner.*
So, a teacher is a poor performer - do you sack them and have no teacher or do you realise that poor education is better than no education? In order to get better teachers better candidate teachers need to come forward.
Finally, parents have a large part in education - parents that teach respect for teachers will make the job easier and make the classes learning benefit. Parents that help with learning outside of school will help their children learn better.
And with respect to the Education Week article, why the hell is he taking issue with a magazine article about the book instead of the book itself?
While I agree that some of Alfie Kohn's arguments are questionable, this article is pretty bad; although it's largely irrelevant since the research behind PbR is pretty solid regardless.