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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

#121

Post by arethuza »

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…

You might be interested in this UK charity that was covered on BBC Radio 4 last week:

http://www.teachfirst.org.uk/TFHome/index.aspx

They take high flying graduates from top Universities and "fast tracks" them into teaching jobs in "challenging" schools. The idea being that the graduates teach for at least two years and then go on to other things with the support of the charity.

I guess just exposing young kids to people who have the drive to succeed at a top university gives them a completely different perspective on what is possible.

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

#122

Post by JshWright »

alphaoverlord wrote: post #17
JshWright wrote: post #4

It would suck for the folks who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege to teach in states like New York where a graduate degree is mandatory for public school teachers. It's going to take almost two decades for the master's "bonus" to cover the cost of my wife's graduate degree.

If a graduate degree is mandatory, why is there a bonus? Can't they raise the base?

Beats me. There is definitely a column on the pay scale for a graduate degree though.

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

#123

Post by JshWright »

jonknee wrote: post #35
JshWright wrote: post #4

It would suck for the folks who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege to teach in states like New York where a graduate degree is mandatory for public school teachers. It's going to take almost two decades for the master's "bonus" to cover the cost of my wife's graduate degree.

Well if the degree was worthwhile, they will get the bonuses for doing well and still be OK. Otherwise what are we paying for?

Bonuses for doing well? That's crazy... (and not an option under the current system)

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

#124

Post by timepilot »

3am wrote: post #106
jdietrich wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Several teachers in my family - none of them would agree with you.

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

#125

Post by baldercrash »

WalterBright wrote: post #18
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…

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…

Overall I would agree that free market bureaucracies are more efficient and better run than goverernment bureaucracies.

However, the fact that a bureaucracy is not run by the government does not mean that it knows what level of contribution individual employees are making.

Calculating such contributions is infeasible for all but the smallest groups (like startups, as PG has written about).

The people who are best at selecting good teachers are pupils. If classes were optional we would quickly find out which were worth attending by watching children vote with their feet.

However, children will never be allowed to do this in schools. A school that took children seriously and respected them as humans (or even just as customers), would quickly cease to resemble anything that we would recognise as a school.

Despite all this, education is in the process of being reformed. This is possible because reform is happening outside schools, for example in the unschooling movement.

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

#126

Post by larrywright »

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…

They did have some success with getting the unions to make these kinds of concessions in D.C. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230336240457558..., allowing the schools to cut under-performing teachers instead of having to make cuts solely based on seniority.

Unfortunately, it looks like those efforts are stalled at the moment due to the mayor losing his re-election bid.

I agree with you though, the unions are a huge part of the problem with the education system in the U.S.

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

#127

Post by jbooth »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #71
jbooth wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The VAM metric (which is not very complicated) measures teacher performance by excluding student quality as a causative factor. If you have low quality students, who are only expected to score at the 25% level, and you boost them up to 35%, you win. If you have high quality students expected to reach 75%, but the only achieve 65%, you lose. Do you believe it's really that hard to predict that Asian kids in 2 parent $…

Well, I'm pretty sure they're already doing something similar to that. And you consistently hear the best teachers complaining that by teaching to the test they're doing a worse job of teaching.

Developer productivity is really hard to measure with universal statistics -- every attempt to do so has failed miserably and usually made things worse. Does that mean that nobody should spend money on development?

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

#128

Post by lists »

mkramlich wrote: post #116
hdctambien wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Though it's not popular to talk about it, there are cultural differences between races, as a general rule -- especially regarding attitudes towards education, ambition, work and success.

You mean differences between socio-economic strata. It's not popular to talk about so-called 'cultural differences' between races because it's the wrong way to talk about it.

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

#129

Post by nerfhammer »

tptacek wrote: post #42
_delirium wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People are emotionally averse to firing others they may have been working with for years, and there's not a good enough reason to fire someone in a private organization unless they affect the bottom line, and outside of exceptional cases I don't see how the bottom line changes much based on individual teachers. You're probably not going to quit private school based on any one single teacher.

You need a strong economic incentive for the organization in order for the "fire more easily" idea to work. For instance, if a private school got paid according to the competitiveness of the college the student is accepted into.

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

#130

Post by lists »

I personally think Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics should somehow be incorporated into whatever educational reforms as a platform/canonical text. It's not just so much an ethical treatise (since he doesn't it tell you what to do) as a brochure on parenting.
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