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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

#31
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…

My fear as well. Is there a better way to assess teacher quality, especially in challenging student environments?

Don't assess teacher quality. Eliminate poverty by eliminating capitalism, a system that literally depends on it.

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

#32
More people need to be encouraged to become teachers - full stop.

Its a valid concern that there are some teachers that are not good, and would be weeded out by performance based metrics. However - everyone else at the school knows who the bad teachers are. They're obvious. They're the ones leaving their class unattended. Doing the bare minimum.

These people can't be weeded out right now because there's a shortage of teachers. The need to keep a warm adult body in that room outweighs the need to discipline and then fire teachers that aren't doing their jobs.

As a thought experiment would we also suggest performance based police salaries? Or do we acknowledge that being a cop potentially sucks and that one aspect of making sure we don't only have bad cops is making the job attractive enough that we're not just picking from the bottom of the barrel.

/edit

To be clear - I'm suggesting we encourage more people to become teachers by paying them more and secondarily making them deal with less bullshit.

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

#33
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…

The sick idea that profit is the onlyway to motivate humans is historically idiotic. It is an outcome of pathetic efforts to legitimate capitalism, a system of exploitation.

[deleted]

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

#34
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…

>>and widespread cheating

It amazes me that teachers would be so unethical. They seem worse than the general population.

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

#35
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in the short term, this scheme might judt redistribute talent in ways that reinforce existing patterns of inequality. Aren't you assuming that rich districts with higher grades implement flexible pay? I think it would be the poor districts with worse grades that would be most likely to want to shake things up.

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.

Regardless of district the US spends more per student than most other countries.

The issue is that this gets eaten up by bureaucracy and teachers are left living in poverty, hence them clinging to unions like a drowning woman to a straw.

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

#36
post #5

I saw this discussed on Marginal Revolution today as well. My main question is whether the gains are fundamentally zero-sum, at least in the short term. Some districts implement flexible pay and some don’t, and then the best teachers move to get paid more. And the places that get left behind…? In the long-run, increased pay ought to lead to more high-quality teachers entering the profession. But in the short term, th…

This does definitely seem like a setting with a large risk for zero-sum outcomes, as the current state of the art seems to only be able to identify the bottom percentiles and then have them discarded. So current understanding hasn't identified why anyone became a good teacher, so we don't know how to make the bad ones better.

This is a problem because even a bad teacher is very likely better than no teacher, so we can't actually discard very many of the bottom teachers before making things worse.

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

#37
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…

My fear as well. Is there a better way to assess teacher quality, especially in challenging student environments?

None of those other ways can be done without effort and extra costs. And as nowadays everything has to be done cheaper and quicker, it will stay as that.

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

#38
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…

A secondary question is: is the pay increase high enough to induce more talented people to become a teacher?

If all it does is pull higher quality teachers from other places, it is zero sum and all you eventually end up with is the same quality schooling for a higher price.

I do think teachers as a whole should be paid well, but that is a separate discussion.

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

#39
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.

> As for teaching to the test, what's the real downfall of doing that?

This comment is a perfect encapsulation of AI hype.

Recitation is not competence. It doesn't matter if Bobby can say "4" when I say "What is 2 + 2?". What matters is if Bobby can add.

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