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What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

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Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#121

Post by kspacewalk2 »

dwater wrote: post #67
masklinn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main characteristic of poor districts is that they’re poor , which means they don’t have the means to implement high pay schemes. Rich districts do.

The school district I worked in had impoverished students but high per pupil funding, which is pretty common. What reinforced the inequality in that district was that teachers who were able to, self-selected to have the best behaved students, who were most likely to see improvements in test scores. The teachers who ended up with 90% of their students starting the year multiple grade levels behind and with severe beha…

You think of it in terms of inequality, which is one perspective. However, if seen from the perspective of the best behaved students, the ones who want a positive learning environment that will maximize their talents and success, this situation seems greatly preferable to the alternative, which is a sprinkling of problematic students disrupting the learning equally in all classrooms and making overall outcomes more mediocre. This is Ontario's public school system lately, in a nutshell.

Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#122

Post by ryathal »

Hizonner wrote: post #106
ryathal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test questions are written to test varying levels of competence from basic recall to true mastery. It's partially why so many people hate word problems, they don't actually understand the concepts. Many others just can't read.

Test questions can be written to assess true mastery, although it's not so easy as you're trying to make it sound... especially if you want the test to take a sane amount of time, be consistently gradable by different graders, and have any kind of reasonable signal to noise ratio. But sure, you can get there, or at least go a long way toward it. If you try to actually create tests that way, you will discover that the…

Standardized tests spend the money and time to get those quality questions that are consistently graded. It's not some random folks making minimum wage coming up with questions.

Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#123

Post by somethingsome »

brodouevencode wrote: post #27
dwater wrote: post #12

I was a public school teacher that worked in a district that attempted to measure teacher value add. There was limited pay for performance based on that metric. And the district I worked in was majority racial minority and majority living in poverty. "Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of…

What if the standardized tests aren't administered by the teacher? That seems like it would be an easy solution to get around the cheating problem. As for teaching to the test, what's the real downfall of doing that? Colleges use standardized test scores as the biggest or one of the biggest criteria in admission.

One of the problem is that you can train the students to overfit any test, and that's worse than cheating which represent only a small number of students usually.

So by incentiving the teachers to make the students perform well in some tests, why teach real lessons when you can just throw at them cheat codes for the test.

Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#124

Post by goda90 »

sparrish wrote: post #117
dwater wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers do not expel students, administrators or districts do. Teachers have very little recourse for dealing with "really bad kids (or parents)".

Are you saying Teachers have no input into the process at all?

While they can have input, the goals of the administration and district don't always aline with the goals of the teachers. Teachers want good outcomes for their students. Administration wants to avoid issues that negatively impact budgets, like getting sued by parents.

Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#125

Post by readthenotes1 »

IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #107
readthenotes1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once taught a class for teachers and after so many failed to be able to apply the quadratic equation, I told him that it would be the bonus question for the next test. After so many then failed I told them that just writing the formula would be the bonus question on the next test. Very few people got the bonus question. In order to drill students to memorize, that students have to be present enough and interested e…

It may be that the manner in which you are teaching that topic is itself failing. Your students don’t understand, investigate how to improve your approach in explaining which results in them understanding. Decompose the steps to see where that understanding is not happening.

It was decades ago so the advice is too late. As I taught other students successfully at the time (in that most seemed to grasp the material), there may be some other problems.

I boiled it down to "just write the equation down" to see if it were my teaching or their desire.

The inability for many to successfully replicate the formula indicated to me that they weren't putting the time in to memorize.

Since these were more adult learners going for their teaching degree, and many repeating the class having failed to pass it the first time, my observations beyond "I wasn't capable" are: - the course material was difficult (a rapid survey of math foundation, including some group theory) - they couldn't make the time because of other life commitments, exacerbated by being a summer course where we met every day.

I had one student, who had never scored higher than 50 on a test, show up after the final to ask if there was anything she could do to pass the class as it was required and she had flunked now 3 times and couldn't repeat it. "All I want to do is teach 3rd grade, I don't need any of this" she explained. There was nothing i could do...

Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#126

Post by readthenotes1 »

dwater wrote: post #89
readthenotes1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once taught a class for teachers and after so many failed to be able to apply the quadratic equation, I told him that it would be the bonus question for the next test. After so many then failed I told them that just writing the formula would be the bonus question on the next test. Very few people got the bonus question. In order to drill students to memorize, that students have to be present enough and interested e…

When I was in my teaching Masters program, we talked a lot about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when you want to do something for yourself, e.g. you enjoy the satisfaction of solving a problem. Extrinsic motivation is when your reason for doing it comes from outside yourself, e.g. your parents tell you they'll give you $20 for every A you get on your report card. The district I worked in…

_Punished by Rewards_ is a great book on the topic. For your experiment, I curious how you controlled for suppressing counter motivations (e.g., peer pressure, pride, etc.)

The class was a required class for teachers to get their education degree. Back then, they had to have that degree in order to teach in the schools.

I doubt that many of them were thrilled for math, especially the more foundational topics we were going through so yes, their intrinsic motivation was mostly not high.

However their extrinsic motivation should have been off the charts. They literally couldn't get their degree without passing the course. Many were repeating the course having failed it before, so their chances were running out.

I do not recall any of the students being the normal 18 to 21 college students - - they were all older. They better understood why they were choosing their degree (looking back, based on demographics, I suspect many were divorcees prepping for a career or moms whose children had started school).

I gave the memorization question as a way to see how much of it was the work they were putting in and much was my inability to explain the difficult material in a way they could understand.

Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#127

Post by whywhywhywhy »

goda90 wrote: post #61
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #30

Hard to think of an argument why they shouldn’t be. You can argue the raw materials are something they can’t control but plenty of other industries have the same issue, real estate, hiring, and we still pay them on performance. Think we’d see accepting poor behavior, teachers writing off or actively bullying students tank if this were implemented properly.

A real estate agent or a hiring manager can still walk away from a really bad property, candidate, etc. A teacher can't walk away from a really bad kid (or really bad parents!) without leaving the profession entirely.

>A teacher can't walk away from a really bad kid

They do every single day

Re: What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

#128

Post by whywhywhywhy »

sparrish wrote: post #117
dwater wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teachers do not expel students, administrators or districts do. Teachers have very little recourse for dealing with "really bad kids (or parents)".

Are you saying Teachers have no input into the process at all?

They have input when it’s a success, when it’s not a success it’s everyone’s fault but theirs.

Funny how that happens.

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