What kind of objective measuring of student/teacher performance SHOULD we have?

[Berkut]

Everyone bitches (and I do mean everyone) about NCLB and in New York we all bitch about the state mandated testing. It is going on right now in fact.


And I even largely agree that how it is applied in New York is kind of fucked up - high performing districts have to jump through the hoops setup for low performing districts, and that is actually harming their ability to deliver high quality education.


But the problem I have with all the complaining is that I don't hear anyone proposing alternatives. Teachers don't want to be rated on how their students perform on standardized tests...but what should they be rated on? Schools don't want to have to teach to standardized tests, yet if they don't, how do we deal with many school districts that have terrible performance and don't educate well?


The local school boards bitch about oversight from Albany, but also bitch that Albany doesn't want to give them more money. Well, I hate to be the dick, but if you take the money, you are nuts to think that the people giving it to you aren't going to want to be able to evaluate how you are spending it.


Prior to all this testing, the bitch was that local school performance was wildly inconsistent, and there was no way to objectively measure much of anything. State or federal funding sources were just expected to pony up cash and not ask any questions about how it was spent. That resulted (grossly) in situations where incredibly poorly performing school districts were spending incredible amounts of money, but not actually teaching with it - Rochester City School District, as an example, spent more per student than any district in the Rochester area, yet had fewer teachers per student, largest class sizes, and terrible results, even adjusting for the fact that they are dealing with a difficult student population. They spent a huge amount of money terribly - the corruption and waste was incredible.


Examples of ridiculous administrative overhead, waste, corruption, etc., etc. because of no effective oversight or way of checking to see if they massive additional funds they were given was actually being spent on educating, rather than administrating.


So while I understand the complaints, I don't really see a better alternative being proposed. And I would very much like to see one - something that is flexible (so that my kids shcool district, which is top-30 in the state, is pretty much left alone as long as they keep having outstanding results) while at the same time capable of forcing all districts to meet some rational standards for performance and actually educating, instead of creating a nice bureaucracy to consume public funding.


Education is  a huge business, and it consumes incredible amounts of public funding. Teachers should be accountable, and their performance should be measured, as well as school administrators, of course. How should we do that given the current funding model where a given district is reliant on local, state, and federal funds?

[Malthus]

I'm not a teacher, but it strikes me that any measuring system should have two basic features:

(1) School funding should not be dependent on performance. The goal is to educate children, not to punish or reward schools. If a school is failing, cutting funding seems likely to ensure further failure; likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure. Funding should be used where needed, not depend on performance.

(2) Teacher and administrator perfomance should be measured in terms of improvement or otherwise year to year, and should be based on some sort of reasonably sophisticated statistical analysis that takes into account such factors as the background of the students. Otherwise, what you will get is well-rewarded teachers in areas with high socio-economic status, and poorly rewarded teachers in areas with low socio-economic status - as socio-economic status tends to be better correlated with student ability on tests than teacher ability is.

[Monoriu]

Performance in national standardised tests, % of students who are admitted into university, % of students admitted into Ivy League universities, salaries of graduates, have students take standardised tests when they enter and exit the schools, then compare the results.

[DGuller]

To answer that question, I would first look to see what other countries do, especially ones we want to emulate.  Forget all the Asian tigers, their educational systems look impressive but in reality are counter-productive when it comes to real education. 

What about countries like Finland?  How do they evaluate their teachers?  Is teacher evaluation key to their success?  Maybe we won't get good answers from them, they may just happen to be a national equivalent of a rich suburb that will have to work hard to screw up its education system no matter what they do, but maybe there is something to be learned there.

[Admiral Yi]

(1) School funding should not be dependent on performance. The goal is to educate children, not to punish or reward schools. If a school is failing, cutting funding seems likely to ensure further failure; likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure. Funding should be used where needed, not depend on performance.

Then how do you incentivize performance?

[DGuller]

(1) School funding should not be dependent on performance. The goal is to educate children, not to punish or reward schools. If a school is failing, cutting funding seems likely to ensure further failure; likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure. Funding should be used where needed, not depend on performance.

Then how do you incentivize performance?

Let's start questioning basic assumptions.  Should performance even be incentivized?  Is that really the only motivator out there?  I get incentives, but incentives can always backfire unless designed very carefully.  They work when the objective is quantifiable, but they can be worse than useless when it is not fully or largely quantifiable.

[Monoriu]

I propose we skip this discussion and just adopt the Singaporean system. 

[Martinus]

I'm not a teacher, but it strikes me that any measuring system should have two basic features:

(1) School funding should not be dependent on performance. The goal is to educate children, not to punish or reward schools. If a school is failing, cutting funding seems likely to ensure further failure; likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure. Funding should be used where needed, not depend on performance.

(2) Teacher and administrator perfomance should be measured in terms of improvement or otherwise year to year, and should be based on some sort of reasonably sophisticated statistical analysis that takes into account such factors as the background of the students. Otherwise, what you will get is well-rewarded teachers in areas with high socio-economic status, and poorly rewarded teachers in areas with low socio-economic status - as socio-economic status tends to be better correlated with student ability on tests than teacher ability is.

This.

[Martinus]

I propose we skip this discussion and just adopt the Singaporean system.

Isn't this your canned response to any issue?

[Admiral Yi]

Let's start questioning basic assumptions.  Should performance even be incentivized?  Is that really the only motivator out there?  I get incentives, but incentives can always backfire unless designed very carefully.  They work when the objective is quantifiable, but they can be worse than useless when it is not fully or largely quantifiable.

Of course performance should be incentivized.  The only other options are to disincentivize performance or ignore it.

[Martinus]

(1) School funding should not be dependent on performance. The goal is to educate children, not to punish or reward schools. If a school is failing, cutting funding seems likely to ensure further failure; likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure. Funding should be used where needed, not depend on performance.

Then how do you incentivize performance?

Ever since I was a kid, I was told that "group responsibility" is a key feature of communism. So I don't think it makes sense to incentivise schools on a group basis - rather you should incentivise teachers. Malthus has already said how.

[Malthus]

(1) School funding should not be dependent on performance. The goal is to educate children, not to punish or reward schools. If a school is failing, cutting funding seems likely to ensure further failure; likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure. Funding should be used where needed, not depend on performance.

Then how do you incentivize performance?

Reward/punish individual administrators and teachers, not schools as a whole.

I do not understand why making decisions about funding at the school level incetivizes performance. Who is that supposed to incentivize? Also, what happens if school performance is crappy and funding is cut? Presumably, students who are already doing poorly will not do better with less money for education. Seems to me certain to set up a cycle of failure.

[Martinus]

Let's start questioning basic assumptions.  Should performance even be incentivized?  Is that really the only motivator out there?  I get incentives, but incentives can always backfire unless designed very carefully.  They work when the objective is quantifiable, but they can be worse than useless when it is not fully or largely quantifiable.

Of course performance should be incentivized.  The only other options are to disincentivize performance or ignore it.

How would you measure performance?

[Admiral Yi]

How would you measure performance?

Are we playing 20 questions?

How would you measure performance?

[Berkut]

(1) School funding should not be dependent on performance. The goal is to educate children, not to punish or reward schools. If a school is failing, cutting funding seems likely to ensure further failure; likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure. Funding should be used where needed, not depend on performance.

Then how do you incentivize performance?

Reward/punish individual administrators and teachers, not schools as a whole.

Well, that is kind of a separate issue, of course, but I don't disagree. The question is HOW do you evaluate them? Standardized tests are apparently not acceptable - nor is evaulation by school administration, and feedback from students and parents is not acceptable either.

I do not understand why making decisions about funding at the school level incetivizes performance. Who is that supposed to incentivize? Also, what happens if school performance is crappy and funding is cut? Presumably, students who are already doing poorly will not do better with less money for education. Seems to me certain to set up a cycle of failure.

Well, I certainly don't disagree in theory, but you have to understand the history here as well. In the past, this was pretty much how it worked - you can't punish poor performing schools, that will just make them perform even more poorly!

In fact, what you need to do is to send poor performing schools MORE money, since they are clearly operating at a disadvantage!

And that is what happened, and that is why in Rochester the poorest performing school district spent the most money per student, while delivering poor results and by any measurable standard a crappy education.

So the thing to realize is that this isn't happening in a theoretical vaccum, it is happening where the people who provide the funds eventually got sick and tired of shoveling money at districts that turned around and wasted it because there was no way to STOP them from doing so - the local political will did not exist, or was never adequately applied, and eventually what DID work is Albany instituting this rather harsh rules that basically amount to "If you don't spend the money we send on improving education, then we are going to stop sending it". Granted that is a theoretically poor level to pull, but if it is the only lever available, then of course it is the one that gets pulled.

Now, this of course simply leads to the observation that the funding model sucks. And it does. You have funding coming from a critical source, but that source only has very gross controls over how it is spent - "Do as we demand, or we cut off the funds". So we get what we have now, which we all know kind of sucks, but is probably actually better than the alternative, which sucked even more. Shitty accountability is better than no accountability.

So how do we go from shitty accountability to decent, more nuanced accountability? While, of course, making day to day operations and control of the school districts remaining in local hands, as the political reality absolutely demands?