Study says standardized testing is overwhelming nation’s public schools

I didn't claim that teachers take their stress out on students. I simply claimed that if they did, they are horrible and unprofessional. My claim is conditional on smelendez being right. Again, scroll up.

If you want to dispute that characterization, and argue that it's professional behavior to let your emotions get in the way of work have at it.

I don't know how you think teachers have the least agency. Their choice sets include a) doing their job, b) not doing their job and c) quitting and finding a job they don't suck at. (I did the last one, although emotional leakage was not what made me a bad teacher.) In contrast, the students usually don't have the choice of finding a teacher who does their job.

That's the linkage I'm talking about: that ignores the possibility that the job has unreasonable expectations. One person, sure, maybe they have problems but when a high percentage of the field reports low job satisfaction and cites things like long hours and poor support as reasons for leaving, it's irresponsible not to ask whether the system is setup correctly.

Here in DC, hitting the right numbers gets a bonus which is close to 50% of your salary – or nothing if you're slightly low, and the school administrators both track things closely and are prone to saying the only reason for not hitting your numbers is that you don't care enough, weren't willing to put in the effort, don't believe disadvantaged kids deserve quality education, etc. That produces a cycle where you get very enthusiastic, motivated teachers fresh out of college who are basically in crunch mode for the entire school year before eventually realizing that random chance makes it very hard to hit the targets consistently and their efforts won't be appreciated otherwise.

> I don't know how you think teachers have the least agency. Their choice sets include a) doing their job, b) not doing their job and c) quitting and finding a job they don't suck at. (I did the last one, although emotional leakage was not what made me a bad teacher.) In contrast, the students usually don't have the choice of finding a teacher who does their job.

I said one of the parties with the least agency because they don't have control over the students coming in, the curriculum or the expectations (e.g. one school near here puts second-year ESL students in AP English based on age, even if the teacher knows they would learn more with more basic coverage first), and don't have the ability to get the school or parents to provide support. The students were the reason I said “one of” since they do have even less control.

I'm glad that you were able to take the option of going somewhere else but that's hard for many people to do unless they happen to have skills which are in demand in industry. Unlike many other jobs, there are only a few employers in most areas and they hire at set times of year. If you're the CS teacher and have picked up some PHP, that's probably manageable but if you're an English teacher you're probably looking at a career reset or either taking a much longer commute or moving.

> I'm not saying there aren't any valid reasons for doing it.

> I'm just saying the there's a "meta-lesson" there that has to be corrected.

And I'm saying that your meta-lesson is not a good idea as it will tend to teach underconfidence. The real world does not always let you off with a "I don't know"; you may not know to some high degree of certainty whether a cancer treatment is a good idea, but nevertheless you must decide whether or not to do it.

On the contrary, I addressed it entirely. mschuster91 seems to be under the impression that the teacher evaluation schemes boil down to nothing but the simplest possible before-after comparison of grades of students, ignoring all issues of demographics, differing student quality, differing school circumstances, etc. Such a scheme is indeed absurd, as his counterexample proves, but it is not what has been proposed by pretty much everyone! The actual proposals are well aware of what he thinks is the fatal problem, and go to often elaborate lengths to model and adjust for these sorts of heterogeneities in order to quantify the value-added of a particular teacher. The problem is recognized, included, and mostly dealt with. Whether the solution works entirely or is worthwhile is unclear, but he's arguing against a strawman.

> One estimate has ~12% of NYC public school teachers being punished by the flawed VAM in use there:

So I've looked at http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/02/the-arbitrary-punishment-of-n... and I have zero idea what she is trying to show. She assumes independence and treats it as a coin flip. Ummm.... what? With that sort of logic, you could show no one could expect to score a 1600 on the SAT. When criticized she links to a real analysis†, which shows considerable non-independence which means her numbers are wrong and will overstate how many will be denied tenure based on the VAMs. By the way, why are you phrasing it as 'punished'? That sounds like you're assuming your conclusion. If VAM doesn't affect hiring decisions, there's no point to bothering with it in the first place is there, but if it does affect hiring decisions, that means teachers are being 'punished'...?

† not that I think too much of it either, since it relies mostly on an argument from incredulity and pointing angrily at some scatterplots, and tries to ignore the r=.35 correlation of ratings from two subjects; to put an r=.35 in perspective, the correlation between years of education and intelligence is only ~r=.55! Even the best IQ tests won't correlate with Gf more than r=.7 or so. r=.35 is pretty good for a single pair. I don't know why he thinks a .24 is 'minuscule' when that means you're predicting half of variance... (I wonder if this is a graphing problem? He doesn't seem to jitter the datapoints, which for a large amount of discrete data will hide a lot of the density; a plot of r=.35 of n=6k should look much more striking, like this: http://imgur.com/KcwmJJH ) For implications, look at the first graph and think about classification rates. Look at the datapoints at 100 along one axis, then look across to see how many correspond to <10 on the other; hardly any do, and the 100s are almost all mapped onto 80+ on the other axis. Or look at the 0s. In terms of identifying the bottom decile, it's doing a good job.