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Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

nytimes.com

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Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#41

Post by tptacek »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #28
wheaties wrote: post #3

This is easy to say but hard to do. "Based on excellence" is the mantra I've heard from software development circles for years and yet... 1. How many of us have lost productivity because some other developer ran rough-shod through code caring not for maintainability, readability, or even extensibility? Which one was praised and which one rewarded? Doesn't apply to teachers? Ever have a dud who couldn't do simple math…

Regarding 2), you do it via Value Added Modeling. You build a statistical predictor of student performance (based on standardized test scores) then measure Performance = Avg(Actual - predicted).

This makes sense but suggests that we need to simultaneously invest in better standardized tests. The most common standardized tests we have today make for poor year-round curricula.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#42

Post by tptacek »

_delirium wrote: post #19
WalterBright wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no bureaucratic rule that can be devised that can separate good teachers from bad ones. Every such rule can and will be gamed. It's like the difference between art and porn - the difference is obvious by inspection, but impossible to codify. With a free market school system, people will know who the good teachers are and will pay for them (supply and demand). With a government school system, this simply will…

Unless the teachers are going to be individually contracted by parents, don't private-sector schools have the same evaluation problem? They still have to separate good and bad teachers via some sort of process, probably overseen by management (aka bureaucracy). The similarity of the agency problems is one reason corporations internally often look so much like governments.

Private schools can fire teachers subjectively. A good private school principal can use gut feel to evaluate a teacher. But that doesn't scale, unless we find a way to identify and recruit very smart, very trustworthy principals on a large scale.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#43

Post by forkandwait »

My favorite recent quote:

We all know that successful teaching beyond the infant class involves (a) wide and detailed knowledge of a difficult subject, (b) an enthusiasm for the subject which communicates itself to the class, and (c) a few simple tricks of the trade, learnt by anyone from a single volume and from about three weeks of experience. The art of the Educationalizer is to expand (c) into a mass of pretentious nonsense, fogged by technical terms and psychological twaddle. To do research in Educationalization is to forget about (a) and (b) and make the mastery of (c) seem practically impossible. Those who can, do (it has been said), and those who cannot will teach teachers how to teach other teachers the art of teaching. This is the brotherhood of the Ed.D. and it forms a sort of campus with the campus; an enclave, as it were, of people committed to the study of nothing.

Peter's Predicament, Chapter 7, The Fur-Lined Mousetrap, C. Northcote Parkinson, Leviathan House Ltd, London & New York, ISBN 0 900537 05 I, no date (really!).

(If you ask me, eliminate tenure, break the teacher's unions, and fire the least performing 5% each year measured by before and after tests each year; with 5% yearly "mortality" we could use turnover to retain the good ones. And yes, eliminate pay raises based on continuing education and seniority, neither of which measure teacher effectiveness.

I think knowing how to make a teacher good is an impossible problem, but knowing whether a teacher is good or not is not very difficult, using a combination of peer and parent review plus before-and-after test scores.

But first ... break the unions and eliminate tenure and any special protection for teachers. I am totally pro-union when it comes to janitors and factory workers, but not managerial level staff; at best, it reinforces consistent mediocrity...)

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#44

Post by jws »

forkandwait wrote: post #43

My favorite recent quote: We all know that successful teaching beyond the infant class involves (a) wide and detailed knowledge of a difficult subject, (b) an enthusiasm for the subject which communicates itself to the class, and (c) a few simple tricks of the trade, learnt by anyone from a single volume and from about three weeks of experience. The art of the Educationalizer is to expand (c) into a mass of pretentio…

So if a class if students decides to throw the exam they can get the teacher fired? Sort of a middle school cousin of jury nullification.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#45

Post by jseliger »

tptacek wrote: post #41
yummyfajitas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 2), you do it via Value Added Modeling. You build a statistical predictor of student performance (based on standardized test scores) then measure Performance = Avg(Actual - predicted).

This makes sense but suggests that we need to simultaneously invest in better standardized tests. The most common standardized tests we have today make for poor year-round curricula.

I'm always in favor of better standardized tests -- who isn't? -- but one handy thing about value-added modeling is that if you use the same flawed tests, you should get similar outcomes: if a kid is in the 10th percentile of his class when he starts his sophomore year and the 20th when he ends, as measured by similar tests, then he's progressed.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#46

Post by tptacek »

jseliger wrote: post #45
tptacek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense but suggests that we need to simultaneously invest in better standardized tests. The most common standardized tests we have today make for poor year-round curricula.

I'm always in favor of better standardized tests -- who isn't? -- but one handy thing about value-added modeling is that if you use the same flawed tests, you should get similar outcomes: if a kid is in the 10th percentile of his class when he starts his sophomore year and the 20th when he ends, as measured by similar tests, then he's progressed.

Objection. The kid may have improved specifically in his ability to score well on a specific standardized test, and in no other way. And meanwhile, the process that delivered that superficial improvement could have immeasurably harmed other students who might have otherwise genuinely excelled.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#47

Post by jseliger »

Legion wrote: post #38

I wish there was less focus on teachers, and more focus on fixing the problem of how badly kids fall behind before they ever get to school. The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach 1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important. Even when kids do reach school age, the work of teachers is either amplified or underminded by parents. My wife teaches 2nd g…

The battle is IMO largely won and lost in years 0-5, before kids even reach 1st grade. That's why programs like "Baby College" in Harlem are so important.

Head Start was designed precisely to solve this problem. It has existed for 40 years and hasn't solved it, for the kinds of reasons that are described here: http://epa.sagepub.com/content/17/1/62.abstract and here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=226111 . People have been trying to show that Head Start leads to longitudinal improvements for the entirety of Head Start's existence, and they've failed. I work in my family's business as a grant writing consultant, and we've had a bunch of clients running Head Start programs and Head Start clones. They don't work.

In short, you're advocating for an approach here that has already (mostly) failed. Gates is at least saying that we shouldn't keep rewarding teachers for things (seniority, degrees) that don't actually impact student achievement.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#48

Post by jbooth »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #28
wheaties wrote: post #3

This is easy to say but hard to do. "Based on excellence" is the mantra I've heard from software development circles for years and yet... 1. How many of us have lost productivity because some other developer ran rough-shod through code caring not for maintainability, readability, or even extensibility? Which one was praised and which one rewarded? Doesn't apply to teachers? Ever have a dud who couldn't do simple math…

Regarding 2), you do it via Value Added Modeling. You build a statistical predictor of student performance (based on standardized test scores) then measure Performance = Avg(Actual - predicted).

Statistical forward looking models proposed by a guy who works in finance?

How could that ever go wrong :)

EDIT: More seriously, if it's already impossible to measure, I fail to see how more complicated metrics would do anything but do an even worse job of measuring. There might be exceptions to this rule in a few cases but it's generally the way things work.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#49

Post by ig1 »

tptacek wrote: post #40
ig1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally people seem to support either performance improvement measured by exams (i.e. how much students improved over the course of the term) or some sort of peer-review system. Both have their own problems, but both seem to be much better than the arbitrary system of seniority. There is evidence to show teachers get better with experience, but almost all of that improvement happens within the first few years of a…

It's actually not obvious that a testing-based teacher measurement regime would be better than the seniority system. The seniority system does lock in mediocre teachers, but it has minimal knock-on effects to the actual curriculum. Test-based measurement has already made some curricula toxic to students, and those test results have minimal impact to the teachers themselves. How much worse would it be if the teach-to-…

I'm guessing less worse than the incentive to do the minimum amount possible knowing you're going to get a pay raise regardless.

We can change the test if it's not measuring the right thing (we should do that anyway regardless of it's use for teacher measurement). Test scores are what parents, universities, etc. measure the performance of children by, we shouldn't have a double standard of having one metric for children and another for those who teach them.

Re: Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

#50

Post by gruseom »

This is all just fantasy sports of course, but here's my plan.

I would require new teachers to work as apprentices for quite some time (several years) and not pay them very much during this period. After that, if they accede to full status, I would pay them a great deal more. The reasons for this structure: (1) to weed out people who aren't intrinsically motivated by working with children, i.e. the ones who probably shouldn't have permanent teaching jobs; (2) it takes years to become a master teacher and mentorship is the most valuable asset (after aptitude, perhaps) on that path. An apprenticeship system seems suitable for fostering this.

As for determining who makes it and who doesn't, I'd rely mostly on peer evaluation. Standardized tests are ok too (or could be, if we had good ones) but I'd weight them second. This problem isn't algorithmic.

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