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

Yes, but ideology became a part of the conversation the moment a conservative "think tank" was introduced as evidence.


Fair points, but none of this makes the degrees any cheaper. Also, I'm not sure why we're talking about GRE scores here, since grad school is not a requirement for the overwhelming majority of teaching positions.

Now, if you want to talk about why a 5-year degree (bachelor's plus additional teaching credentials) is necessary to teach 3rd graders to multiply and divide, there's a conversation to be had there.


Okay, I can boil your post to two questions:

1) Why do we need teacher protections?

A: Because they sit at the nexus of four competing, and often idiotic, forces. In addition to the challenges of dealing with their own students, the other forces are legislative, bureaucratic, and parental. Their position puts them at a high risk of false accusations, blame taking, etc.

Also, they do a critical job for low pay. It takes two to negotiate a contract, and in this case the teachers' unions have given ground on compensation in exchange for things like job protection. Now they're being attacked for their job protections, retirement pay, etc., as if nobody believes in contract law anymore.

2) Why can't teachers in the US be evaluated, when schools around the world do it?

A: Straw man, because we already evaluate teachers. The question is whether we should use objective testing mechanisms as the primary basis for ranking teachers and making firing decisions, to which I would say that any mechanism that ignores crucial data is bound to be flawed. Also, pitting teachers against each other is a lose-lose proposition, because some will naturally be dealt a weaker hand, and that's in the hands of the principals that the thread consensus established earlier cannot be trusted to make sensible decisions.

Consider my daughter's elementary school, which groups children based on behavior. The disruptive students get concentrated in one class. Is there value in having a teacher who can successfully discipline unruly students? Yep. Is there value in allowing the more disciplined students to flourish in a more disciplined environment? Yep.

Is it fair to penalize this teacher because her charges will naturally fare less well on objective testing standards? Nope.

Two ideologies don't make a right. And I never argue from an ideological standpoint. Any similarity between my views and someone's ideology is coincidental.


I'm not sure how the cost of a degree is relevant. People make college and job decisions knowing likely pay. If future teachers want to earn six figures or more, they should learn how to write code, work with statistics, write bestsellers, etc.

Re: GRE scores. Fine, we'll go to the SAT. The college board consistently reports that future teachers score below average on the SAT. Their group average score is in the 470s/480s, depending on the subtest. As percentile scores, these numbers are down in the mid-40s and high 30s --- in other words, LOW. And for every future teacher who scores over a relatively modest 530, there are future teachers scoring...really low.


In math class, elementary school teachers appear to rely heavily on memorized algorithms and lightly on the concepts behind them. The textbooks are generally no better. This is, I believe, a huge reason for why so many American students do so poorly with algebra. Primary-level teachers need to understand high school mathematics so that they can ensure that their students understand foundational ideas that are critically important in future math classes. When the kids just memorize a bunch of algorithms, how can they start applying concepts in algebra class? Answer: most of them can't. And can someone who managed even an average or slightly higher than average SAT math or reading score honestly be able to be]teach the finer points of high school math or literature? Answer: it's unlikely.

Your answer actually hits a major frustration that a lot of people I know have the teaching establishment: low expectations. If we lower our expectations for educators, why should we be surprised when the educational establishment advocates lowering expectations for students? For example, see the Is Algebra necessary? thread. If teacher got a professional job with SAT scores of 470, why should s/he worry about how fractions and division are related or how they'll feed into algebra and geometry? None of this was necessary to get a professional job as a teacher, right?

Nothing will change in this country's education system until we finally admit out loud that a large portion of our public teaching corps is unqualified for the job, and that this situation is not okay. No one arguing that we need to pay our teachers more or protect them better will ever have credibility outside of edumacation circles without also admitting that 1) schools of education need to raise their standards a lot and 2) teacher pay should be based on more than just your years of experience and highest degree obtained (regardless of subject). Change this stuff in a meaningful way and I'll start shouting to pay them more, too.

I know that a chaotic home environment and many other non-school factors affect student performance profoundly. But none of these problems justify a teacher with an SAT math score of 470.

I agree. I can't believe anyone would go into that profession these days given the administrators, parents and politicians with whom they will have to deal these days.

I would also add to another's point about subjectivity that what constitutes a good teacher for one child may not translate to another. My son had the most beloved teacher at his school in kindergarten, and I have no doubt that she is a good teacher. She was not a good teacher for my son, however, and it was a miserable year for him. Doesn't mean her career should be over given how many other students she'd nurtured.

And for Bostonian- Texas teachers are not unionized and not protected by tenure, so surely we should be tops in the nation, right?

Yes, you might have bad managers in a profession other than teaching. However, are you as a middle manager given a poor curriculum based on national standards which might have little to do with your actual work to supervise your subordinates/co-workers and then judged based on THEIR performance? Keep in mind that you can not fire any of your co-workers, they have more protections and job security than you, they have little to no incentive other than intrinsic motivation and perhaps parental support/expectations to actually perform. Nothing will happen to them if they perform poorly, yet your job evaluation depends entirely on THEIR performance.

And don't try to tell me that great managers would find a way- great managers succeed by getitng rid of poor workers and replacing them with more productive ones. Teachers do NOT have that option.

Also, it's not really that hard to fire bad teachers, even in unionized states. Due process might be required in order to ensure that a teacher is not being fired for teaching evolution in some backwater East Texas town, but it is doable despite what the media would have you believe.

Seriously? As though no one else in the world has to deal with difficult people at work? Often for minimum wage or scarcely better and no benefits? And sometimes without even paid time off (e.g. contractors and day laborers and lots of hourly employees)? Please tell me you're being facetious and I completely missed the point.

Are those people judged based on their own performance or on the performance of their untouchable co-workers? That is what is being proposed when politicians of all stripes discuss merit pay and linking evaluations to testing. It's absolutely assinine to think that is a legitimate manner of evaluation when the student faces little to no repercussions for their own failures, but their teachers do.

We already evaluate teachers in this country, with usual policy being that they are evaluated 2-4 times per year depending on the district. Sometimes those evaluations are done well, by administrators who take their jobs seriously and want to ensure quality people remain in all positions on their campuses. Sometimes those evaluations are done by an administrator who is relatively clueless and is only interested in promotion through the system even if by false means, and sometimes they are done by administrators who are friends with the teacher, who go to the same church, their kids are in the same Boy Scout troop, or who has been a mortal enemy of the teacher since they each were 7. Just as in every profession, human resource management in education is hit and miss, but that's not necessarily the fault of the teachers.


On edit- By the way, I am not a teacher, though I have represented both teachers and administrators and I agree with some of the points you and others have made here. I would like a year long school calendar, more stringent requirements for secondary educators, higher pay to attract more candidates to the field. I've seen a teacher who didn't know the difference between its and it's, while I had a math teacher who could have worked at NASA.

Which one of those is going to reach the students and inspire them to greatness? We're talking about humans, in a highly subjective field in which so many variables intersect. Your guess is as good as mine, but the correct answer is probably both- different students, for different reasons at different times. Education is not a business, not a science and can't be reduced to numbers like the production of widgets. I agree with the poster who likened it to porn, because great or even good teaching is also not subject to identification by some formula or matrix.

This is one of the best posts in this entire thread, IMHO.

This is precisely the reason why teachers are 'hard to fire' (they aren't really, as I think we've since seen), why they claim via union representation (rightly? wrongly?) that teaching can't be evaluated fairly using any existing tools, and that therefore, pay-for-performance is ultimately a losing proposition.

Teachers themselves could, completely anonymously, identify the "good" teachers in any school building in about five minutes. They all know what it looks like. Can it be taught/mentored/encouraged? Sure. But innate ability plays a much larger role than most of that, in my own experience. Good teachers can be made. Great ones, though, not-so-much. No amount of training can produce a great one. They're born.

The problem is retaining those great teachers in the profession that currently rewards the trained, 'good' teachers. (The ones that do professional development annually, serve on committees, can show all of the administrators a great lesson plan, do the most to 'boost' all-important test scores, etc. etc. etc.)

Maybe you'll notice that I wasn't arguing from an ideology so much as attacking his?

Nah.


Honestly, I can't be bothered to care about how a teacher did on a specific test they took when they were still in high school. You might as well make hiring and firing decisions based on 3rd-grade report cards. "Well, it says here you're a really fast learner, but I'm sorry, we don't have a role for someone who needs more work on penmanship and doesn't raise their hand before speaking."

Primary school teachers should understand high school mathematics, on account of they went there, and got the framed paper. If they don't, then I agree, that's a problem. But at this point I'm forced to point out the contradiction, because on one hand the argument is that we need more talented teachers, and on the other hand, the argument is that we're overcompensating them.

You get what you pay for.

You're right. I forgot that you argue to wind up others as a way of amusing yourself. I won't give you the pleasure again....

Reading through these posts irritates me on a number of levels. But, if I look at it as objectively as possible (keeping in mind that I spend 7 hours a day with a 12-18 year olds every day, plus another 3-5 hours a night doing prep work as well as correcting, all while I try to balance my 2 girls and their unique educational needs as being PG and an unknown quantity at this point due to age and for a pay which just barely keeps me above the level allowed to qualify for free or reduced lunch, while I sit here looking at my MS physics diploma.) I can see both sides of this entire thread.

However, I think that the psychi (sp?) of the teenage mind needs to be brought up. Yes, there are bad teachers at every school, just like there are bad employees at every business around. However, as someone brought up these employees are not being evaluated by the teenage mind. At my school at the end of each school year the students are required to fill out evaluations of all of their teachers. To ensure confidentiality the teachers switch rooms with each other and administer their colleague's evaluation to their students. It is not until the following school year, if we ask, that we are allowed to see these papers. While doing this, the students will talk about what they are going to write, or have just written. Their conversations usually go something like this:
"I just Christmas treed it - I hate doing these things they don't mean anything anyways." (Christmas treed it meaning they made pictures with their answers on the scan tron part of the eval.)
"I decided she would be the one I gave all zeros to this year - I love to pick out the teacher who gave me the lowest grade and really zing them on these - let them see how it feels to fail."
"Hey that's a good idea, I'm going to change mine."

Or, when there are state exams that really have no bearing on their future education, but count towards our evaluation it is common for them to again decide that they don't like the teacher(s) they have had in that subject so they are going to do poorly on the test so they aren't helping someone they don't like. When asked why they don't like the teacher, it is most often NOT that they are bad at their job, but rather that they were not the "easy" teacher who let the kids get away with doing nothing in their class.

No, these are not the minority of students, these are the majority of kids - both those society would label "good kids" and those they would not.

I do not argue that any service job has to deal with annoying customers, however, the challenges that teachers are faced with are many times greater than simply having someone yell at you because they don't like your product. How many of you have been physically threatened by a "customer" and known that if you are attacked and try to defend yourself that not only will you lose your job, but you will lose your license and never be able to get another job in your profession again? I know many teachers who have, including myself. Or, what about being in a situation where a student doesn't like how you graded her exam so she decides to accuse you of all sorts of inappropriate things that never actually happened to "get back at you", and no matter what the result of the investigation - which will occur in a very public way, your reputation is shot and you can again never work in your profession?

Until more people take an objective look at what teachers actually do with what little supplies they are given and the results they are getting - not on some state written exam, but on actual learning and development of the students in their charge, there will be no fair treatment of teachers.

Why do other countries not have the problems the US does with evaluating their teachers - some do, some have had as hard a time as the US is, others don't because there is still a respect for people in this profession, which has long since been lost in this country.

I am proud of the job I do - I wouldn't change professions for all of the gold in the world (although some would be nice ) because I get to see something that no other profession gets to - a kid find something that ignited a fire inside and send him/her off into the future knowing that I did my best to prepare him/her to go after their dream. The only thing I wish is that people would have more respect for the vast majority of teachers in this country - the ones like me who work our butts off so that every kid we come in contact with leaves our room better educated, more mature, and wiser than when they entered. (Not to mention the amount of food, clothing and supplies we hand out each year to kids in need.)