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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

#101

Post by hdctambien »

forkandwait wrote: post #57
jdietrich wrote: post #55

If we really cared, we could increase the quality of teaching beyond all recognition. It wouldn't be remotely difficult. Massively increase pay for teachers, tripling or quadrupling pay at every level. Mandate a specific postgraduate qualification and a statutory minimum of continuing professional development. Recruit only the best and the brightest, specifically seeking out graduates from the best universities. Adve…

We don't revolutionize teaching because TENURE AND SENIORITY RULES ARE LOCKED DOWN BY THE UNIONS. Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year. (Edit: we really DO care about teaching, and spend enormous amounts of tax payers dollars and collective worry on it.)

You don't really have to worry about firing the worst 10% ... how about keeping the good teachers?

http://www.ncsu.edu/mentorjunction/text_files/teacher_retent...

"In 1999, for example, our schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before (i.e., new teachers hired who were not simply moving from one school to another). But the schools lost more than 287,000 teachers who left for other occupations that year—55,000 more than they hired"

If we have/discover the ability to tell the good teachers from the bad, then we should just start hiring only the good teachers. Eventually the good will out number the bad and maybe even teach the bad teachers a thing or two)

Maybe instead of firing the bottom 10%, we should "improve" them. It's either that or replace them. Of course, you could very well be replacing them with someone just as bad or worse.

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

#102

Post by hdctambien »

gruseom wrote: post #83
tptacek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not obvious we'd be worse off if we just made public schools be like private schools in this respect. (That's a Jerry Weinberg use of the j-word, "just". It would be a lot of trouble to do.)

I remember reading an article (linked from HN I believe) that was a response to the "Waiting for Superman" movie which cited numbers showing that private schools didn't perform any better than public schools. That would suggest that either the ability to fire teachers subjectively doesn't have an impact on student performance, or that private schools don't fire enough teachers or the metrics the private schools use to fire teachers are not in line with what would improve student achievement.

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

#103

Post by mattmcknight »

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.

Actually, percentiles are not such a great way to measure progress, it's just relative. What we should measure is something more like earned value- did he progress more or less than one year of material forward? That way, kids who are two years behind and two years ahead all get measured on how fast they are moving, not where they started.

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

#104

Post by Natsu »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #88
Natsu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your solution to fix education is to do things the way Haliburton & the DOD do? Yes, independent ratings can help, but at some point, if you can't trust anyone inside the system, you're screwed. And your results are exactly as good (or bad) as your ability to do ratings. Fancy math won't fixed a flawed premise, for example. We've been going for complex systems and simple people. Having good people and relatively simp…

Your solution to fix education is to do things the way Haliburton & the DOD do? Would you prefer to do things the way the educational system does? Throw money at Halliburton and hope for the best? No outside auditors or performance measurements?

I thought I just said that I would prefer to hire highly competent teachers to do the evaluations. Not third parties, not politicians, and certainly not Haliburton or the DOD.

Those who are competent ought to be able to recognize each other.

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

#105

Post by hdctambien »

forkandwait wrote: post #96
Natsu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year. That only works if you're good at recognizing the bottom 10% and have tight anti-cheating controls. Otherwise, things will go straight to hell. Also, you're neglecting the fact that it'll destroy cooperation among the teachers, because it turns things into a "it's either h…

Hehe... I just thought of this: I bet there is easily a consensus between parents and peers on the suckiest 5% for most schools in the US today. When it actually becomes hard to all agree on the suckiest 1 out of 20, we probably would be a long way toward better schools.

A woman I work with's daughter just started school this year. She decided to send her to a private school because if she went to the public school she would be one of only a handful of white children. She didn't want her daughter to "grow up feeling like a minority".

We live in Boston, there are plenty of white people here. She lives in the same neighborhood as the mayor of Boston. There are plenty of white people there. Why are there so few white people in that public school? She had no opinion about the actual education provided by either school. Just that all the white kids go to the private school, and all the not-white kids go to the public school.

I wonder if that public school would rank as one of the "suckiest" schools. It seems like (white) people are voting that way with their pocketbooks.

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

#106

Post by 3am »

jdietrich wrote: post #64
forkandwait wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't revolutionize teaching because TENURE AND SENIORITY RULES ARE LOCKED DOWN BY THE UNIONS. Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year. (Edit: we really DO care about teaching, and spend enormous amounts of tax payers dollars and collective worry on it.)

Why haven't the unions been broken? Nobody would tolerate unions that protected incompetent lawyers or doctors. Union-breaking is practically a science these days, it's neither expensive nor difficult, especially against a workforce with no ability to mount a meaningfully disruptive strike. It appears to me that there simply isn't the political will to do it. The teaching unions make more noise than parents and stude…

The answer is completely obvious - because the teachers unions are not actually the problem with the US education system. They are just a convenient scapegoat for some people to demonize.

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

#107

Post by Legion »

jseliger wrote: post #47
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…

No, what I'm talking about is absolutely not Head Start.

The students of Head Start are preschool children.

The students of Baby College are parents. It's about teaching people how to be parents.

When the problem is that bad parenting sabotages structured education, the answer isn't to start the education earlier. The answer (well, at least part of it) is to improve the parents.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #46
jseliger wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by aik »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #95
hdctambien wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

37 Hour weeks plus time spend prepping for classes, and time spend correcting homework, and time spend helping students after school, plus time spent giving makeup exams ... I was a teacher. I worked way more than the 7-4 that class was in session. That's like saying professional football players only work for 3 hours a week.

37 hours total, averaged over all full time teachers. Sorry, should have been more clear. This includes work done at home (e.g., grading). http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf You might have done more work, but you were above average.

1. Those stats are from 2003. New programs (especially No Child Left Behind) have caused a lot of teachers to have to put in a lot more hours (of pointless work).

2. Any truly dedicated and correctly-focused teacher I would imagine would have to spend more hours per week, talking to parents, spending extra time with students, research, etc.

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

#110

Post by aik »

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 has been proven to not work (or work very poorly). Can supply references if you'd like.
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