To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It • Hacker News Board

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#31

Post by ylem » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

v0cab wrote: post #9

Shivetya wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

I think one has to look at the history of teacher's unions in the US. For example, unions were formed because women could be fired as soon as they got pregnant. The role of unions is to protect their members from arbitrary firing. In the current era, you have issues such as teaching evolution, etc. Unions can protect their members against arbitrary firing--what schools need to do is document truly atrocious behavior and then fire teachers that engage in it. However, one should consider that top scorers in PISA, such as Finland, have teacher unions--they also have well educated, well paid teachers, with a lot of autonomy.

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#32

Post by cynicalkane » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 1:46 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #23

cynicalkane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about measurable goals in teaching is that all of them are awful. Economic psychology teaches us that bad incentives are worse than no incentives. The incentives being promulgated are things like "higher test scores" or "more kids graduating" so the system aligns itself towards teaching the test while simultaneously lowering the bar for everything else. So let's talk about the software analogy. In software,…

"...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 goal-setting. I generally include these in 'non-formal' goals because you don't take them from the Central Bureaucracy, you make them up as you go.

For instance, say you proposed creating music according to micro-goals. Say we live in the late 1800s. You look at the classical music and you come up with goals regarding tempo, intonation, meter, and some higher goals regarding fit and feel of the music. Then your Central Bureaucracy says, ok, this is the goal for creating music. Congratulations, you just killed jazz, and rock and roll to follow. All musical producers will have their acceptance criteria for recording a track, but it will be different from producer to producer, from musical style to musical style, more formal or less formal, and in general musical innovation comes from moving the goalposts or tearing them down. And yet these are the "creative professionals" you talk about.

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#33

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 1:46 PM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #25

yummyfajitas wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#34

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 1:47 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #26

praxeologist wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where, specifically, does the article conflate what you are saying? Yes, it would be stupid to not give a teacher or programmer instructions, but we're talking about each individual school not being able to do this, right? Someone at the state level has already decided they want the federal funds tied to complying with whatever initiative and already passed down the order to each school.

Where, specifically, does the article conflate what you are saying? They explicitly list both work rules and the need to satisfy minimum test scores in the 6'th and 7'th paragraph. Yes, it would be stupid to not give a teacher or programmer instructions, but we're talking about each individual school not being able to do this, right? Right. Similarly, you don't hire a contractor, and ask him to write the spec for wha…

[deleted]

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#35

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 1:53 PM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #25

yummyfajitas wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

If you have a fixed amount of money to spend, you can either buy fewer items, or pay less per item. It's due primarily to union contracts that schools are buying fewer items.

If they reduced the compensation of teachers (i.e., reduce price in response to a demand decrease), there would be no need to reduce the number of teachers.

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#36

Post by jbooth » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 1:56 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

wisty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That many of the metrics the school system uses are terrible ones, which lead to pathological behavior.

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 had suspiciously high scores the year before, and is currently under investigation for cheating. She didn't maintain that high level of scores so she was fired.

Our police system is dominated by metrics and we got The Wire as a result. In education, you hear about cheating scandals in DC, good teachers being fired due to unfortunate statistical conflagrances.. if you're gonna advocate turning your brain off and delegating all decision-making to your metrics, they have to be good.

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#37

Post by ylem » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 2:01 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5

After 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…

Perhaps it might be worth examining one metric: IMPACT--championed by Rhee in Washington DC public schools and also used by the LA times to judge teachers publicly. Here's the basic idea--one should try to determine the "value added" of a teacher. It's not fair to look at a teacher teaching the gifted class and the teacher teaching a remedial class and look at their absolute results. However, one could look at the test scores of students before they come into a class and after they leave a class and compare. If the teacher adds value, then one would expect the scores to go up. Because an individual student may have a bad day, you average the incremental gains across multiple students.

What are the problems with this? It seems rather fair right? A few problems: 1) The teacher in the previous year cheated on the test results (or the test changed), so that the students scored unnaturally high in the previous years 2) Gains may be unevenly distributed--is it as easy to move a student from 90% to 95% as it is to move a student from 20% to 40%? 3) Stability of the measure--if you look at this metric over say 5-10 years, is it consistent for a given teacher, or does it fluctuate? 4) If you run the metric backwards in time, is it still predictive? That is, if we look at this year's results, can we predict what the student would have achieved in the past? 5) What about background issues? This in some sense assumes that the background of student achievement is flat in the absence of a teacher--but middle class parents will spend a lot of time working with their kids, that poorer parents (on average) do not. This means that even if the teacher does nothing, the middle class students will likely still perform better. If these students are not equally distributed (which they won't be), this will also effect the metric.

I could go on, but my point is that this is one of the more objective methods of valuing student performance and it fails--I think there are several problems with schools--I think that professionalizing the teaching profession would go a long way in predominately middle class districts--for example, requiring teachers to obtain a masters, offering higher salaries to recruit more talented teachers into the field, requiring subject matter competency (my family has a friend who's background is teaching middle school math who got drafted into teaching geography! With relatively little time given in advance to prep.), etc. I think setting curriculum standards and tests that reflect them and allowing the teachers autonomy in how they teach the required subjects would be useful. Generally, promoting more understanding and less drill and kill--but just saying, "throw the whole thing out" is not terribly useful. There's a fun read called "Surpassing Shanghai" which offers a brief review of education systems in other countries that is worth reading...

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#38

Post by paulhauggis » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 2:02 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

wisty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That many of the metrics the school system uses are terrible ones, which lead to pathological behavior.

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…

When you don't have metrics, you also can't decide if a teacher is good or bad. This allows bad teachers to continue to teach.

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#39

Post by wisty » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 2:02 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

wisty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That many of the metrics the school system uses are terrible ones, which lead to pathological behavior.

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…

Fixing the metrics rarely works. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html

OK, if you want a metric that might work ... testing a year after the teacher is gone.

If you test while the teacher is in charge, they will encourage the student to game the test. This has short-term gain and long-term pain. If you reward teachers for how well the student retains their knowledge (long term), it should work better.

That won't stop teachers pressuring their co-workers to teach to the test, or principals from telling teachers to teach the test, but it helps reduce it. You could rate schools on how well students do 1 year after leaving, to keep the principals in line. I'd guess teachers will just fob off their co-workers.

Re: To Fix America's Education Bureaucracy, We Need to Destroy It

#40

Post by v0cab » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 2:05 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

wisty wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That many of the metrics the school system uses are terrible ones, which lead to pathological behavior.

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…

I agree with your overall sentiment. I think most teachers are against these metrics just because they've only encountered bad ones. How to fix the metrics?

In the UK, governments have set up a system whereby schools can choose which exam board they want to have for each subject. Each exam board makes and marks its own exams.

Exam boards are motivated to be cheap, generous with the marks, and give workshops you have to pay to attend where they give you information about what will be on this year's exams.

The exam boards are not motivated to make decent exams. They are riddled with mistakes, and do not adequately test students' understanding of the subjects.

Look at some of the GCSE IS/IT/ICT exams; you can find them online. You'll see vaguely-phrased mini-essay questions, where students get marks based on how many of the required points they make, where the points are listed in the examiner's marking guide. If you make a point that wasn't anticipated by the people who set the exams, you're not getting any points.

Problem is, the questions are so open and vague that students will be fumbling around in the dark if they don't know specifically what examiners are looking for. It really is just a matter of teaching to the test. You need to have learned specifically what the examiners are looking for. It doesn't matter whether you know much about ICT or not.

So what's the point? It's supposed to be an ICT exam, not a jumping-through-examiners'-hoops exam.