ironic how education systems with "unions and bureaucracies" like Finland seem to do fine, and are best in the world.
To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, so fix the metrics. Something interesting that I've observed is that most of the people complaining about metrics are really complaining about the goals of the system. I.e., many people want the school to increase mean(student scores), and then complain when the school attempts to increase count(student score > CUTOFF). If you want the school to have different goals, say so. Don't blame the goals of the system on…
You fix the metrics. You can't argue that metrics should be the be-all and end-all of everything, and a teachers' intuition should count for nothing, when there are all these problems with the metrics we have. Here's a good story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/creative--moti... This teacher was by all accounts a phenomenal teacher, but she was fired because her batch of kids came from a school that ha…
The next time you hire a freelancer, why don't you use his intuition about his own performance rather than measuring whether he actually built what you wanted him to build?
...good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances..
How do you know they were good? Because they said so, and one of their cronies agreed?
This link is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem
I'll note that you want to scrap objective metrics because they have some problems, but you don't seem to realize "teachers' intuition" also has problems. One of the biggest is comparability - how I can compare the intuition of teacher A with the intuition of teacher B?
With standardized tests, the answer is simple arithmetic.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The claim is that there are or will be 280,000 unemployed teachers. Unemployment is surplus labor. The standard prescription for surplus labor is to reduce the cost.
A great many teachers have been laid off due to the funding crisis in local government. That crisis was caused by a decline in tax revenue, especially property taxes due to the housing bubble. It was delayed by funding from the Recovery Act but RA payments ended a long time ago. The result is that this country's local governments are spending much less on education than they were a few years ago, and therefore employ…
My sister was a special ed. teacher in San Diego--when she started, she was making somewhere between $30-40K/year. Teacher's salaries are public, so we could look up what the current salary scale is, but I doubt it will have changed significantly. During the summer, teachers often take classes towards their certification. Later, some may take a job somewhere like a bookstore or home depot, which offers seasonal work. Many pay for supplies for students out of their own pocket. Tell me, is that a princely salary? Is that over compensated? In the past, you had a trapped population (women), so even with modest salaries, you could attract good people--now, many teachers are not that strong academically (and yes, I know that you need to be skilled at teaching--but subject matter competence is part of that--I did some volunteering during grad. school with a local middle school and even among some very motivated teachers, their math skills were very poor--at even the basic algebra level. One had trouble going from distance=rate*time, to finding time given distance and rate). Sure, you'll get some good people who still will go into the field for love, but I doubt that you would argue that just because you can find some software developers who will work for 25K/year and there are some unemployed developers, that you're going to get GOOD developers living in LA working at that salary (and no equity).
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
While putting teachers in the same boat as waiters, programmers and CEOs does sound awful, I think children will still wind up being educated. Remember, the goal here is not to ensure teachers are never incorrectly fired, it's to educate children. If a few teachers are incorrectly fired, but student performance goes up, that's a win. This is what happens in many industries. For example, if a trader or hedge fund mana…
CEOs? Bad example there. I am very concerned about labour rights, as that will be very important in a world of ever-fewer jobs with more competition for those jobs, for the students when they grow up, and for now, when their parents need jobs to support their family. If students can get teachers fired with just an accusation, * The students will end up with a fragmented education from a chain of supply teachers and r…
I think you are unfairly describing the situation. My friend is a teacher who readily admits it would take them about two years to get fired. Two years of essentially not doing their job.
The teachers in Atlanta that were taking their students tests for them may not even end up being fired. We aren't talking about teachers not being able to be fired on a whim. We are talking about bad teachers with a history not being able to be fired.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...The thing about measurable goals in teaching is that all of them are awful..." I learned to fly people around in airplanes using various instructional techniques, including at times studying for the test. So do most airline pilots. Seems to work for them. The military has been training people for over 200 years with measurable teaching goals. In fact, some of the best teachers are ex-military. I could continue if…
You're not arguing against the point you think you are. You're talking about the setting of micro-incentives to meet a goal by someone interested in a domain. I'm talking about generalized goal-setting by bureaucrats. I'm talking about why the bureaucracy isn't necessary and why we need that individual touch to decide what our goals are or if any are needed. I even admitted that certain subdomains are conducive to go…
By his definition, musicians are artists. Their goal is to create unique products which satisfy unknown consumer desires.
In contrast, teachers are "artistic professionals" (except maybe at level of PhD advisers). Their goal is to use artistic techniques to create products which have achieved a fixed set of goals.
Bureaucratic goal setting is not desirable in all circumstances, but it is useful in some.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
unions certainly do nothing to protect the students from the teachers, if the NYC area is any example. They exaggerate the costs of educating students and usually exert too much influence over local elections thereby insuring their continued existence and near immunity to control. Unions operate to serve themselves, their political contacts next, then their members; they certainly could care less about the business.…
I thought public school teachers in the US were considered to be underpaid? Certainly compared to public school teachers in South Korea, they don't earn that much compared to the national average salary. I don't believe there are sufficient laws in the US to protect teachers. The US's employment laws are poorly-regarded in the rest of the Western world. And what about at-will employment states? Teachers would be fire…
You are probably referring to a New York Times article on teacher pay around the world. Korea is a clear outlier according to their data which makes one doubt the methodology used.
Teachers in US are paid a decent salary. For example, in New York City they earn $50k-100k per year with good health and retirement benefits. It is not easy to get that kind of job in private sector. In NYC suburbs teachers make even more, lots of them more than $100k. These jobs are very hard to get, and most require a MSc/PhD degree.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
You fix the metrics. You can't argue that metrics should be the be-all and end-all of everything, and a teachers' intuition should count for nothing, when there are all these problems with the metrics we have. Here's a good story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/creative--moti... This teacher was by all accounts a phenomenal teacher, but she was fired because her batch of kids came from a school that ha…
The next time you hire a freelancer, why don't you use his intuition about his own performance rather than measuring whether he actually built what you wanted him to build? ...good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances.. How do you know they were good? Because they said so, and one of their cronies agreed? This link is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem I'll no…
The teacher in question was given high marks on review by all her superiors, not just herself. On a freelancer's results, I'm not applying a standardized test to their results so yeah, I am in fact using my intuition an brain about what they built.
Metrics are fine, they just shouldn't be fetishized, and we shouldn't allow them to make us fire good teachers. They also shouldn't dominate what's taught to the extent they do. Nation of multiple choice test-takers? That's what we want out of our school system?
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
You fix the metrics. You can't argue that metrics should be the be-all and end-all of everything, and a teachers' intuition should count for nothing, when there are all these problems with the metrics we have. Here's a good story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/creative--moti... This teacher was by all accounts a phenomenal teacher, but she was fired because her batch of kids came from a school that ha…
The next time you hire a freelancer, why don't you use his intuition about his own performance rather than measuring whether he actually built what you wanted him to build? ...good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances.. How do you know they were good? Because they said so, and one of their cronies agreed? This link is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem I'll no…
Teaching is more akin to client-contractor-subcontractor analogy.
Client - parents Contractor - admin Sub - teacher
Now imagine that both the client and the sub contractor are influential in the final product (student ability). How do you isolate an incident like divorce from the overall performance measurement of the teacher?
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not arguing against the point you think you are. You're talking about the setting of micro-incentives to meet a goal by someone interested in a domain. I'm talking about generalized goal-setting by bureaucrats. I'm talking about why the bureaucracy isn't necessary and why we need that individual touch to decide what our goals are or if any are needed. I even admitted that certain subdomains are conducive to go…
By his definition, musicians are artists. Their goal is to create unique products which satisfy unknown consumer desires. In contrast, teachers are "artistic professionals" (except maybe at level of PhD advisers). Their goal is to use artistic techniques to create products which have achieved a fixed set of goals. Bureaucratic goal setting is not desirable in all circumstances, but it is useful in some.
Actually, I was talking about the producer-musician relationship. The producer's goal is more clearly defined than that of the teacher--"help us make money"--and yet you don't see the RIAA sending down standardized tests for musicians.
Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It
#50After reading yummyfajitas' comment, I wish I could take back my upvote, because he's right: it's one thing to say the structure of the process itself is so byzantine and brittle that schools suck, but it's quite another to say we should remove measurable goals as well. If I didn't know better, I'd call this a disinformation piece: deliberately conflating two concepts into one large rant in order to try to join the t…
If programming worked the way the education system worked, it would be more like this: As a customer, you pay a company to build software. Due to federal law the programmers must fill out paperwork for (arbitrarily) each class they build in Java (the universally mandated language accepted as the best compromise by the government, after no small amount of backdoor lobbying by Oracle). The resulting code must pass mand…
It's a nice story, but in reality (a) the code would never be delivered and (b) the criteria would be poorly designed so that something other than the desired result would pass the criteria, e.g. you're required to write unit tests and the program has to pass them but the unit tests don't actually need to exercise the features of the program in a meaningful way.