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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

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Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#151

Post by anonymouz »

DanielStraight wrote: post #34
xaa wrote: post #9

TL;DR: The writer, a math teacher, is quitting (edit: his) job because of increased bureaucracy and standardized tests. Mostly, it seems, standardized tests. The problem is, math is the subject which is BEST served by standardized tests. There is really no fuzzy aspect to K-12 math: answers are right or wrong. And there are of course many benefits to standardized testing like teacher and school evaluation, providing…

Consider the last few real-world problems I've solved (or attempted to solve) with math: If you have a widget (roughly shaped like a cone with the tip chopped off) held at angle a and the widget is tapered at angle b and the tip of the widget has a diameter d , how far is it in x and y from the center of the tip of the widget to the theoretical tip were the taper continued to a point? If two 14" pizzas feed five peop…

The standardized tests I've seem often ask question similar to the ones you give, and are actually not all that bad.

The real world alternative to standardized tests is usually tests designed by the teachers themselves. There's little reason to believe that those are somehow better (or even close to the standardized ones, which are usually well thought out).

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#152

Post by Locke1689 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #148
yummyfajitas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr No evidence but I hate Bush SOOOO MUCH!

If you have kids, do you really want them to be educated in fill-in-the-bubble hell? Because that is how school is these days, teachers don't teach, they do test prep and then administer those tests, and the testing companies have gotten rich in basically a corrupt cycle. Read the linked article for crying out loud. Also, NCLB passed with bipartisan support at the beginning of Bush's term, it wasn't his fault, but it…

This is crazy. If you have another metric for student performance other than test scores, just say it.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#153

Post by bloaf »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #148
yummyfajitas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr No evidence but I hate Bush SOOOO MUCH!

If you have kids, do you really want them to be educated in fill-in-the-bubble hell? Because that is how school is these days, teachers don't teach, they do test prep and then administer those tests, and the testing companies have gotten rich in basically a corrupt cycle. Read the linked article for crying out loud. Also, NCLB passed with bipartisan support at the beginning of Bush's term, it wasn't his fault, but it…

"I still have no evidence, but I'm going to use more extreme appeals to emotion and stronger language to try to make you overlook this point"

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#154

Post by saraid216 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #59
kstenerud wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have." Are you sure about that? How do you know that a bad metric is better than no metric? It sounds a lot more like "We should be doing something. This is something. Therefore we should do it."

This is a question about the philosophy of science. How do you know clinical trials are better than observational methods? How do you know controlled experiments are better than post-hoc reasoning and logical deduction? Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here. But if you are asking for an empiric…

> Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here.

Sorry, what's the null hypothesis here, and where's the control group?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#155

Post by timjahn »

curt wrote: post #72
justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

"partly because of low pay" Teachers are actually some of the highest paid people in society. When you don't include benefits teachers make about $40/hr while engineers make $42/hr. If you do include benefits, a teachers compensation far exceeds that of an engineer due to their pensions. Source, BLS via Forbes.

I assume you're counting the hours spent in evenings and on weekends too?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#156

Post by Locke1689 »

wpietri wrote: post #117
justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

This seems roughly equivalent to the argument that we should measure software developer quality by lines of code written per day. Sure, we know it's not a perfect measurement, but it's the easy one to check, and it keeps people from doing nothing. Of course, we software developers, understanding the complexity of our profession, know that would be idiocy. "But hey," says the MBA, "Some metric is better than no metric…

Then you create a new metric, you don't just throw your hands up and say, "well, I guess this stuff just can't be measured!"

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#157

Post by saraid216 »

wpietri wrote: post #122
yummyfajitas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a question about the philosophy of science. How do you know clinical trials are better than observational methods? How do you know controlled experiments are better than post-hoc reasoning and logical deduction? Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here. But if you are asking for an empiric…

Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. That's not true in any way. The purpose of the education system is to create a well-informed citizenry prepared for a productive life and for the duty of running a country. The goal of standardized testing is to get some very rough metrics about superficial, easy-to-observe aspects of some basic parts of the apparatus. The two are ver…

> Heck, we could start by testing the hypothesis that getting everybody to focus lots of classroom time on standardized tests improves actual education.

It's been done.

A quick Google found me this: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/study-finds-standardize...

Which is from 1992. I'm sure if I put some effort into it, I could find more, or at least demonstrate that standardized testing has not meaningfully changed in the last 20 years.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#158

Post by lutorm »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #59
kstenerud wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have." Are you sure about that? How do you know that a bad metric is better than no metric? It sounds a lot more like "We should be doing something. This is something. Therefore we should do it."

This is a question about the philosophy of science. How do you know clinical trials are better than observational methods? How do you know controlled experiments are better than post-hoc reasoning and logical deduction? Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here. But if you are asking for an empiric…

Standardized testing has nothing to do with science. There are studies in teaching and learning that do attempt to gauge the effectiveness of different teaching approaches, etc, and they typically use randomized trials and carefully controlled situations to be able to measure the effect.

But more crucially, the subjects (both teachers and students) in those studies are not rewarded based on the outcome of the study. Even if there is a correlation between the test and what we want schools to achieve (whatever that is), making teachers jobs contingent on that outcome will select for teachers who are good at achieving those results, which increasingly will diverge from your desired outcome. It's an example of dangers of "optimization by proxy" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_...).

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#159

Post by bloaf »

primatology wrote: post #63
justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

There is a better alternative: surveying students. Standardized tests attempt to assign one number to teacher performance by quantifying student performance on one three-hour test. The survey examines dozens of metrics while allowing students to capture their over 100 hours of experience in the classroom watching their teacher. We're discarding some of our most valuable data. In most schools, student evaluations of t…

Student surveys could certainly contribute to the evaluation of teachers, but I doubt its a viable replacement for academic tests. We must also note that they are being compared to current test-based methods. They claim to get "good agreement" but without a real publication its hard to tell what that means. Does it mean that in most cases the students are honest? (i.e. that the disagreement is caused by dishonesty) Does it mean that in most cases students appreciate teachers that make them learn? (i.e. that the disagreement is caused by students who like their teachers even though the students themselves are not learning) Or is the disagreement inherent in the fact that one measure is better than the other at gauging teacher performance?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#160

Post by asveikau »

Locke1689 wrote: post #152
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have kids, do you really want them to be educated in fill-in-the-bubble hell? Because that is how school is these days, teachers don't teach, they do test prep and then administer those tests, and the testing companies have gotten rich in basically a corrupt cycle. Read the linked article for crying out loud. Also, NCLB passed with bipartisan support at the beginning of Bush's term, it wasn't his fault, but it…

This is crazy. If you have another metric for student performance other than test scores, just say it.

I'm not certain he had another metric in mind, but it seemed plausible that he may be suggesting that test score performance did not actually increase after No Child Left Behind, or that an increased emphasis on test scores in the last decade had not had a positive measurable impact, even on an imperfect measure like test scores. I don't know what the actual data say but it seems like that was the avenue he was going down.
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