This article in the NY Times describes a study of reactions (or lack thereof) to high-quality teachers.

Excerpt:

As things stand now, according to a study by the New Teacher Project, a Brooklyn-based policy group, many school managers make no distinction between high-performing and low-performing teachers. The result is that poor teachers stick around while good teachers go elsewhere or leave the profession, frustrated because they are not promoted, rewarded with better pay, or even simply acknowledged.

The study covered four large urban school districts consisting of more than 2,100 schools and nearly a million and half students. It measured about 20,000 teachers by how much academic growth students showed in a given year. On average, the highest-performing teachers — about one-fifth of those studied — helped students learn two to three additional months’ worth of math and reading, compared with the average teacher, and five to six months more compared with low-performing teachers.

The students clearly noticed the difference. In surveys, they were more likely to report that the better teachers cared about them, made learning enjoyable, and did not let them give up on difficult problems. Even so, high-performing teachers said that administrators were often indifferent to their performance, neither rewarding nor praising them. Only about a quarter of the high performers were offered leadership roles in the schools. Many said they were not even encouraged to stay another year. And schools were nearly as likely to offer leadership opportunities to low performers.

In short, most school cultures do not seem to value excellence in teaching or appreciate how difficult it is to achieve. The costs are great: an estimated 10,000 high-performing teachers leave the nation’s 50 largest districts in a year, either for other districts or to exit the profession. That is a heavy loss, but it is especially costly to low-performing school systems that should be strengthening the teacher corps year upon year.

Unions oppose "merit pay" and demand that pay and continued employment be based on seniority. In our district and many others, teachers get "professional status" (lifetime tenure) after three years.

Government workers, including public school teachers, should not be unionized. Sending more money to unionized quasi-monopolies will primarily benefit the union members.

The problem with trying to identify "high performing" and "low performing" teachers is that so much of the rating process is subjective. We've all heard the comment that, if a teacher has a classroom of kids without family support, enough sleep, or a safe place to do homework they're considerably less likely to have a classroom that excels on standardized tests than a teacher in a school where those things are de rigeur...but the converse is also true. A teacher who refuses to individuate teaching for gifted kids, who doesn't follow the deaf kid's IEP, who relies on endless worksheets instead of making class interesting can still be considered "highly effective" simply because she has a preponderance of bright kids who test well in her class.
Likewise, one could rely on student (or parent) evaluations of the teacher, but that has its limits, too, given the politics of the average third grade classroom.
I won't get sucked into a discussion of the usefulness of unions, because that's a polarizing discussion with only very tangential bearing on gifted education. But I'd love to know what others think is a good method (at least in part observable, measurable, and not subject to circumstances) to define "highly effective".

The teaching profession is under assault from a number of different forces, so it's no wonder that talented people take their talents elsewhere. Demands are up (and often unrealistic), hours are up, pay is flat or declining (and was always far below market value for its level of qualifications), benefits quickly disappearing, etc. Who with a brain would stand for it?

I won't say anything more about unions except that the idea that they're the problem is hilarious.

As a teacher (who did get out to raise/teach my own kids a while), I love you, Dude

Tenured mediocre teachers are a problem (oh, the whining I've listened to!) but there are admins going to the extreme with data that's incomplete (and I love data). There are highly effective teachers like my dad who do amazing stuff and whose kids (from the ghetto) ace the tests, but his admins nix class pets and all field trips for more test prep. Education is complex but data and masterful teaching can find each other I feel. I have hope for a rational and effective middle course winning out.

Ditto!

polarbear

Me, apparently.

[sigh]

Me, too, Beckee!

The idea that a teacher who doesn't do any form of research needs tenure is actually hilarious.

Yup. Great teaching is like...


well, it's like porn. (No-- really, stay with me on this one... LOL)

You know it when you see it.

Unfortunately, however, there's not a good quantitative series of tests to tease apart those things from mediocre teaching... or art.

Tenure is intended to protect teachers IN classrooms from administrators who've never set foot in one. Administrators love to 'implement' new ideas. Even if what has been happening isn't broken, they like to do this. Teachers who won't go along with every crazy notion are labeled "uncooperative" by such administrators when they continue doing things the way that they KNOW in their hearts is right and good for students.

Trust me on this one-- I've been that teacher (yes, post-secondary, but my mom was that teacher in elementary). Administrators are frequently out of touch with reality to a fairly stunning degree. In their desperation to do "something" to "improve" things, they'll try pretty much anything; but seldom long enough for it to make a real difference either way.

Teaching is probably best judged by alumni several years later, because that is what separates mediocre from excellent, not test scores or student satisfaction, or parent comments or even peer observations.

It's rather like parenting that way.

Out of touch administration is certainly not unique to the profession of teaching. In fact, I'd say it borders on being ubiquitous, yet no other industry comes to mind in which the ability of an administrator to fire a subordinate proves to be so problematic. You seem concerned that the wrong teachers would lose their jobs, while I'm concerned that hopefully many of the right teachers (finally) would.

So what makes teaching (without research) so different?

Add me to the list of teachers not leaving the profession too - I'm not going anywhere either, other than into 2 new courses I've never taught before this fall (I'm excited about teaching them)

What leads you to believe the supervisors would get it right? The article at the top of this thread clearly indicates they don't.

The article indicates that school supervisors make no distinction between high performing and low performing teachers, and the result is that high performing teachers leave (on their own... which is different from being let go, despite what your re-telling of the article implies). Of course, I know that teacher's unions typically fight evaluations every step of the way, and force pay to be based on objective measures like years of experience and education level, which have little to do with effectiveness. Basically the supervisors do what their teachers' contracts require them to do... and that's the problem.

In principle, tenure protects researchers whose results or studies are unpopular or not aligned with current political orthodoxy. So, say a conservative researcher works at a liberal school (or vice versa) and publishes something the administration doesn't like. Tenure protects him: they can't fire him because they don't like his ideas.

Tenure doesn't protect people who act fraudulently: that same researcher has to have proof to back up his claims.

The assumption behind tenure is that we expect that unpopular-but-true results will happen. As a society, we recognize that squelching research projects because some people just don't like them is counterproductive.

This situation doesn't apply (or applies very rarely) to primary and secondary school teachers. Even if it does apply, they aren't employed to do research: they're employed to teach a curriculum approved by a school board or other body. If they want to teach and do research, they should go to a tertiary-level institution.

Sure, tenure may protect teachers from dimwitted or clueless administrators. But by that logic, everyone else in the world should have tenure, too. So I don't see this argument as a valid justification for granting tenure to teachers. In fact, using this idea for granting tenure just trades one problem for another. Sure, tenure protects good teachers, but it also makes it impossible or nearly so to sack the bad ones. The good ones have an easier time getting a job somewhere else, and the bad ones stay. Why would a less-talented person leave a secure job? Too much protection creates a tendency to mediocrity.

"Many said they were not even encouraged to stay another year."

Hmmmm.

How many is "many"? What constitutes encouragement? What did the administrators report when they were asked?

Basing pay on performance as it relates to GT education is often even more misleading. The vast majority of incentive / performance pay is based on standard performance tests, many of which the material is focusing on a standard range of age appropriate questions. This of course works poorly when testing GT students who aren't so standard, their improvement is often in areas / subjects not yet approached by "standard" students.

Incentive pay by improvement alone is even more tricky. Teachers then want the student groups with the greatest potential for improvement on standardized tests, leaving those students with the least potential for improvement on standardized tests with what is remaining for teachers.

With mass public school budget problems, it's pretty typical that the best person for the job isn't the one hired. Most public schools when looking for new administration are hiring those fresh out of college with little or no actual teaching experience....they're a lot easier on the budget than the teacher with 10-20 years of experience who went back to school to get their Masters in educational administration.

Contrary to popular belief, tenured teachers can be let go, there is just a specific process that needs to happen including consultation and observing the teacher for progress / lack of progress over a period of 1-2 years. Most administration though fails to do proper observation and is unwilling to put forth the effort or time to follow the process and instead just look the other way.

The best and worst teachers become well-known to the parents. I think an eye-opening tool for administrators would be to survey the parents to pick their child's teacher(s). It would become clear who was doing their job effectively, amazingly, and abhorrently.

Physicians, therapists, coaches, dentists, et al create successful businesses through their reputation of quality work . I am compelled to serve my client (ie: customer) to the best of my ability because A - it's my job AND B - it's my future jobs.

I have a real issue with the firing process. It just shouldn't be this hard to get rid of an employee. We had personal experience with this process at our school. It was dreadful. We had bad apple teacher who had been a source of concern for years. At a minimum the administration needed three different families to file complaints in the same year. It also took an administrator and a school psychologist who both were retiring and didn't care about ongoing relationships with the union reps. In the meantime, the school counselor was advising parents not to allow their children to loop with this woman because she thought it would be psychologically damaging. Even then, this teacher did not get fired, just shuffled to another school. Disgusting.

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.

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.)

I have a lot of respect for teachers who work hard and know their subject matter. I wish that more people with graduate-level degrees in physics or math or whatever (outside of education degrees) went into teaching.

I can see some of the points that people make here. I also accept that kids may like teachers who go easy on them. I totally understand how frustrating the Christmas tree thing could be.

At the same time, though, I can't fully accept complaints about the unfairness being judged on student performance. The whole point of teaching is to impart knowledge --- usually to kids. This fact makes it perfectly reasonable to judge a teacher by how much her students have learned. Maybe it shouldn't be 100% of a performance evaluation, but learning should count for a lot. Employees EVERYWHERE are judged on how well they perform the duties of their jobs. For a teacher, the single most important duty is to impart knowledge, again, making it not just reasonable, but essential to judge on what the kids have learned. Try to see this from the taxpayer's and the employer's point of view: when teachers resist being evaluated on what they're paid to do, it's reasonable to start wondering why --- especially when (public school) teachers as a group do so poorly on the SAT, the GRE, and state certification exams. If some people here are tired of lack of respect for teachers, I'm tired of this critically important fact being ignored or explained away.

And honestly, by denying that cognitive ability differs and forcing lockstep pacing, the education establishment has made part of this mess itself. If slower learners were allowed to work at a pace that suited them and take appropriate tests, they'd probably end up doing a lot better on the tests. Yes, I know NCLB is a disaster in that regard. But NCLB exacerbated a lot of these problems. It didn't create them.

Oh, and managers are judged on the performance of the people they manage. Being a line manager means that you accept responsibility for leading people and ensuring that they get stuff done on time. Yes, some people just won't work, just like some students will Christmas-tree a Scantron form. But it's not like this is a completely either-or situation. Creativity could help a bit. For example, we could cut out a certain percentage of the bottom performers and a certain percentage of the top performers on high-stakes tests (if the Christmas trees go, so should the HG+ kids who learned that stuff themselves three years ago). This would be akin to scoring at event like Olympic skating.