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

[Malthus]

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 addressed that in my point (2).

(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.

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?

I addressed that as well in my point (1).

likewise, *increasing* funding incentivizes failure.

Seems to me that your system has lurched from one ('let's increase funding to poorly performing schools'), discovered that it "incentivized failure", and promptly lurched to the other ("Okay, that didn't work, let's CUT funding to poorly performing schools!") - only to, no doubt, discover that this CREATES a cycle of failure!

The solution, to my mind, is that the two issues must be kept seperate: (1) dealing with performance of administrators and teachers; and (2) funding decisions for schools. Linking the two just leads to one sort of problem or the other - the people who suffer will be the kids and the taxpayers.

[LaCroix]

i remember one standardized test i took in (iirc) 10th grade. the proctor informed us that questions would get harder with every correct answer. so, i wondered if the reverse was true. i decided to find out. i purposely answered every answer wrong until the system gave me hilariously simple questions. example- one question showed a picture of a quarter and a nickel and asked how much change that equaled. overall, i had a great time.

i finished thirty minutes early. naturally, the proctor was pissed. she told me the results would be on my transcript for colleges to see, etc.

[Admiral Yi]

Malthus: what is meant by "cut funding" in the context of NCLB is loss of the extra NCLB federal money.  So not really a cut in funding per se, more like a withdrawal of a prize.

[crazy canuck]

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.

I agree completely.

In terms of a nuanced and sophisticated approach people can take as a case study that some results from our schools in the poorest neighbourhoods of Vancouver are improving.  The number of kids who do not eat breakfast before school has dropped. The number of kids staying in school in that neighbourhood has increased. The number of kids graduating successfully from high school has increased. Those metrics don't meant much in the more affluent parts of the city where attendance and graduation rates are very high but it is a significant metric of success in areas where they are low.  Something that a standardized test would not detect very well.  In fact it may be that the standardized test scores might go down on average if more kids who would not otherwise be going to school start attending more regularly.

[Martinus]

How would you measure performance?

Are we playing 20 questions?

How would you measure performance?

You asked how would one "incentivise performance". Doesn't the answer to this question first require an answer how one would define performance?

[Martinus]

Malthus: what is meant by "cut funding" in the context of NCLB is loss of the extra NCLB federal money.  So not really a cut in funding per se, more like a withdrawal of a prize.

But what exactly is the "prize"? If the "prize" is spent on teachers' bonuses and holiday retreats then I suppose you would be fine (although there still is a point being made that a teacher teaching difficult kids from troubled backgrounds - and gets an average grade of C - is doing much more than a teacher teaching middle class kids who get an average grade of A) but if the "prize" is spent on outfitting a needed computer science class or hiring an extra science teacher, then whether you define it as a "standard funding" or a "prize" does not really change the point Malthus was making.

[Admiral Yi]

You asked how would one "incentivise performance". Doesn't the answer to this question first require an answer how one would define performance?

Not at the level of abstraction I and other posters are discussing.  But if it helps, you could assume it has something to do with kids learning stuff.

[Berkut]

(although there still is a point being made that a teacher teaching difficult kids from troubled backgrounds - and gets an average grade of C - is doing much more than a teacher teaching middle class kids who get an average grade of A)

I think we can, for the sake of discussion, assume that we all understand that any performance measure has to take external variable not under the school or teachers control into account.

[Berkut]

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.

I agree completely.

In terms of a nuanced and sophisticated approach people can take as a case study that some results from our schools in the poorest neighbourhoods of Vancouver are improving.  The number of kids who do not eat breakfast before school has dropped. The number of kids staying in school in that neighbourhood has increased. The number of kids graduating successfully from high school has increased. Those metrics don't meant much in the more affluent parts of the city where attendance and graduation rates are very high but it is a significant metric of success in areas where they are low.  Something that a standardized test would not detect very well.  In fact it may be that the standardized test scores might go down on average if more kids who would not otherwise be going to school start attending more regularly.

Well, with all the opposition to standardized testing and state control, the results for urban school districts like Rochester seem to be positive. Everyone hates the details, but overall performance in the gross metrics seems to be improving - certainly the incidents of outright corruption and gross mis-management seem to have declined incredibly, with the district seemingly being run much more professionally than it has been in the past.

So the complaints for poorly performing districts seem to be somewhat not aligned with the results, whereas previously where the state did NOT weild the club of threatened de-funding, it seemed impossible to get improvement. Correlation/causation, of course.

[crazy canuck]

It seems to me that a standardized test is a poor detector of corruption and gross mismanagement.  Those are management issues.  If the people in charge are claiming that a standardized test is the best way to detect and fix such things then that indicates a failure of ability to properly manage.

[Berkut]

It seems to me that a standardized test is a poor detector of corruption and gross mismanagement.  Those are management issues.  If the people in charge are claiming that a standardized test is the best way to detect and fix such things then that indicates a failure of ability to properly manage.

The people "in charge" of allocating funds are not making that claim - they are claiming that the gross results in many cases have been unacceptable, and if those results do not improve, funding will no longer be there at the same levels. So they've setup particular metrics like standardized tests to measure results. This has been because absent those measures, the resistance from local, less than competent political control has been that the metrics are unfair/inconsistent/unreasonable etc., etc.

Standardized tests are a means of creating an objective way to measure the schools ability to teach students. They are a result of historical gross mismanagement, and sometimes corruption.

There is in fact a failure to properly manage - and that failure is systemic in that the money in question is coming from a level that does not have direct management control of the schools themselves. That is both an issue at the state and federal levels. Fundamentally, we have a system where a large part of the funds for local schools come from state or federal governments, but the control is completely local.

I agree with you guys that cutting funding is not the optimal answer to observing poor results - the right answer is to fire the people involved, and replace them with people who are better trained. But that isn't an option a lot of times, because the people who would have to actually fire people are local, and in fact often it simply isn't possible for local political reasons. That is not ideal of course, but demanding that the state NOT cut funding is a demand to going back to the system that already failed, absent some other reform to resolve that problem.

So if they ditch standardized tests, what should the state or federal government use to measure schools instead?

There are private measures of course - lots of various groups "rate" schools, and mostly people seem to accept those results. However, there isn't any money tied to those measures, so there isn't a political element to them - if some group rates New York schools, and says that Penfield is #31 in the state, we all mostly accept those results, but if the state went and tried to use those exact same measures that those groups use, there would be a huge political stink over what those measures are, right? Hell, I don't even know what those measure are - how do groups rate schools?

[Admiral Yi]

My guess is ratings such as the one that gave Penfield 31st place are looking at Mono-type criteria, which are obviously going to hurt ghetto schools, and not really measure the net results generated by the staff.

They are however useful for white suburbanites deciding which neighborhood to buy a house in.

[Berkut]

My guess is ratings such as the one that gave Penfield 31st place are looking at Mono-type criteria, which are obviously going to hurt ghetto schools, and not really measure the net results generated by the staff.

They are however useful for white suburbanites deciding which neighborhood to buy a house in.

I probably agree - it is not really useful to compare to urban districts, since mostly people like me aren't considering those as potential places to live.

We care about how Penfield compares to Gananda compares to Webster.

[The Brain]

Teacher performance is very easy to measure: just do what other professions do. Problem solved. There's no great mystery about measuring performance.

[Eddie Teach]

Teacher performance is very easy to measure: just do what other professions do. Problem solved. There's no great mystery about measuring performance.

So teacher performance is based on who sucks up to the principal the most?