Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Interesting article about high-quality teachers

Teacher evaluation (and unions for that matter) are kind of my life's work right now.

The real issue is that the value-added measures that are typically used to measure teacher effectiveness have significant statistical problems. When you add to that the issue that current evaluation systems do not really measure the variables that have been proven to be necessary for high quality teaching and learning, it becomes a serious mess. And, when you add in the fact that administrators in schools do not have the time or expertise to put toward meaningful evaluation, you find us where we are right now.

Until the money is invested in a good evaluation system with sufficient time and training for administrators to use it properly, unions are going to fight against changes to tenure, evaluation and seniority rights. The current climate is one where most of the dismissals (except for ones related to obvious misconduct) are political and retaliatory and not based on sound evidence of ability to do one's job.

What we find is that it is a failure of will on the part of the adminstration, not a failure of ability to fire. Most administrators prefer to avoid the difficult conversations and hate to hurt anyone, so they let the weak teacher stay. They use something called "harassing supervision" to try and bully the teacher out of the building, but they rarely take the steps afforded them to actually fire someone. Typically, part of the reason for this is because they know the evaluation system is so subjective and the teacher has had years of good evaluations prior to this because other administrators also dropped the ball.

In reading through these recent comments, I wonder why private schools don't have these problems. You never seem to hear about difficulties in assessing teachers at private schools. How is it that something can be so difficult as to inspire national debate in some schools, yet be a non-issue in others?

You're comparing apples and oranges, really.

1) Private school teachers are non-union, so teachers can be fired at will.

2) Private school parents are far more involved, because they are literally and figuratively more heavily invested in their child's education. Parents know their principals and teachers by first name. The feedback stream about teacher performance is extremely active.

One doesn't work without the other. You can't remove teacher protections without having highly-active parents, because otherwise, the only time you get any feedback, it's negative, and you have no idea if an individual complaint is an outlier or an indicator. And you can't be a highly-active parent if you're a two-income family or a single parent working crazy hours to scrape by. In the absence of reliable feedback and reasonable employment protections, principals will make hiring/firing decisions as badly as they typically make other decisions.

Only some states have unions. In the non-union states, public school teachers certainly can be fired at will.

Why do teachers need "protection?" What are they being protected from? Everyone has to answer to someone. And why the implicit assumption that no one but teachers needs this "protection?" What about protecting students from bad teachers? Your statement implies that the desires of teachers have to come first, always, and that administrators are incompetent and out to get teachers, always.

Why do teachers even need tenure? They aren't doing original research (see my earlier post).

Why are teachers so special that they can't be fired or can only be fired after a Herculean effort?

Your reasons for not being able to evaluate public school teachers don't hold water. Parents aren't the only people who can evaluate teachers and private school parents aren't the only people who get involved with schools. Schools around the world manage to evaluate teachers. Why is this problem unique to American public schools?

Teachers should have to hold degrees in the areas they teach, and they should be required to pass rigorous tests proving that they know their subject matter.

There are new programs that will require prospective teachers to submit lesson plans and videos of themselves teaching. This information will be assessed by disinterested parties, and will be required for licensing. Yet many teachers are vehemently opposed to these systems, basically claiming that "we can evaluate ourselves, thank you very much." The example I've cited is only one of many showing resistance to assessment.

Everyone else in the world, literally, has to be assessed at work. Yet US K-12 public school teachers resist the idea. This entitlement attitude is, I believe, a large part of our education problem. People who want to teach should have to prove --- every year --- that they 1) know the subject matter they teach and 2) can actually impart that information to students on a schedule.

I think teachers are overcompensated relative to their abilities and hours worked, as explained in a report

http://www.heritage.org/research/re...e-compensation-of-public-school-teachers
Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers
By Jason Richwine, Ph.D. and Andrew G. Biggs, Ph.D.
November 1, 2011

Executive Summary
The teaching profession is crucial to America’s society and economy, but public-school teachers should receive compensation that is neither higher nor lower than market rates. Do teachers currently receive the proper level of compensation? Standard analytical approaches to this question compare teacher salaries to the salaries of similarly educated and experienced private-sector workers, and then add the value of employer contributions toward fringe benefits. These simple comparisons would indicate that public-school teachers are undercompensated. However, comparing teachers to non-teachers presents special challenges not accounted for in the existing literature.

First, formal educational attainment, such as a degree acquired or years of education completed, is not a good proxy for the earnings potential of school teachers. Public-school teachers earn less in wages on average than non-teachers with the same level of education, but teacher skills generally lag behind those of other workers with similar “paper” qualifications. We show that:

The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.

Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private-school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curriculums.

Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

Second, several of the most generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers often go unrecognized:
Pension programs for public-school teachers are significantly more generous than the typical private-sector retirement plan, but this generosity is hidden by public-sector accounting practices that allow lower employer contributions than a private-sector plan promising the same retirement benefits.
Most teachers accrue generous retiree health benefits as they work, but retiree health care is excluded from Bureau of Labor Statistics benefits data and thus frequently overlooked. While rarely offered in the private sector, retiree health coverage for teachers is worth roughly an additional 10 percent of wages.

Job security for teachers is considerably greater than in comparable professions. Using a model to calculate the welfare value of job security, we find that job security for typical teachers is worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits.

We conclude that public-school-teacher salaries are comparable to those paid to similarly skilled private-sector workers, but that more generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers, including greater job security, make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year. Teacher compensation could therefore be reduced with only minor effects on recruitment and retention. Alternatively, teachers who are more effective at raising student achievement might be hired at comparable cost.

**************************************************

The authors respond to the critics of their report in

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/01/critical-issues-in-assessing-teacher-compensation
Critical Issues in Assessing Teacher Compensation
By Jason Richwine, Ph.D. and Andrew G. Biggs, Ph.D.
January 10, 2012

The problems I mentioned are being addressed:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/bruni-teachers-on-the-defensive.html
Teachers on the Defensive
By FRANK BRUNI
New York Times
August 18, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/n...-teachers-are-denied-tenure-in-2012.html
Many New York City Teachers Denied Tenure in Policy Shift
By AL BAKER
New York Times
August 17, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/nyregion/christie-signs-bill-overhauling-teacher-tenure.html
Christie Signs Bill Overhauling Job Guarantees for Teachers
New York Times
August 6, 2012

LOLHeritage.org.

"First, formal educational attainment, such as a degree acquired or years of education completed, is not a good proxy for the earnings potential of school teachers (because these facts are inconvenient to our wealthy, elitist donors)."

"The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability (which costs nothing) rather than on years of education (which are outrageously expensive)."

"Using a model (that we made up out of thin air) to calculate the welfare value of job security, we find that job security for typical teachers is worth about an extra 1 percent of wages, rising to 8.6 percent when considering that extra job security protects a premium paid in terms of salaries and benefits."

"Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private-school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curriculums (although private-school credential requirements are typically lower than public schools, we're not going to mention this, because of aforementioned convenience issues)."

"Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid, (although it would be the expected outcome if massive teacher layoffs were underway in a down economy that is producing few jobs outside the minimum-wage sector, mostly because government has been implementing too many ideas sponsored by the Heritage Foundation)."

Dude:

Respectfully, your ideology is showing a bit in your last message.

Education degrees are well-known to be lacking in substance. They simply don't transfer to fields outside education. Public school teachers tend to have very low GRE scores. In fact, they're consistently at the bottom of the pile. ETS documents this fact annually in its reports on scores by intended grad school major. Private school teachers tend to have higher GRE scores and have degrees in the subjects they teach more often.

I would be interested in seeing your thoughts on the questions I asked on August 10 in reply to your message.