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?
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.
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.
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.
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
(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?
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 09:00:05 AM
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
(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.
I propose we skip this discussion and just adopt the Singaporean system.
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
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.
Quote from: Monoriu on April 16, 2015, 09:04:31 AM
I propose we skip this discussion and just adopt the Singaporean system.
Isn't this your canned response to any issue?
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 09:03:59 AM
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.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 09:00:05 AM
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
(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.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 09:00:05 AM
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
(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.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 09:32:08 AM
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 09:03:59 AM
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?
Quote from: Martinus on April 16, 2015, 09:35:42 AM
How would you measure performance?
Are we playing 20 questions?
How would you measure performance?
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 09:34:47 AM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 09:00:05 AM
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
(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. :P
Quote
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?
Quote from: Berkut on April 16, 2015, 09:57:26 AM
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. :P
I addressed that in my point (2).
Quote(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.
QuoteWell, 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).
Quotelikewise, *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.
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.
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.
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
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.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 09:50:41 AM
Quote from: Martinus on April 16, 2015, 09:35:42 AM
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?
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 10:13:45 AM
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.
Quote from: Martinus on April 16, 2015, 10:37:07 AM
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.
Quote from: Martinus on April 16, 2015, 10:41:41 AM
(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.
Quote from: crazy canuck on April 16, 2015, 10:31:02 AM
Quote from: Malthus on April 16, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
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.
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.
Quote from: crazy canuck on April 16, 2015, 11:14:54 AM
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?
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.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 11:32:14 AM
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.
Teacher performance is very easy to measure: just do what other professions do. Problem solved. There's no great mystery about measuring performance.
Quote from: The Brain on April 16, 2015, 12:34:35 PM
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? :hmm:
My solution would be a federal funding mechanism and a parental choice school model. No school districts with their bureaucratic overheads, just a healthy accreditation system like private schools have. Every school is private, every parent gets to send their kid to any school they want to (and can get their kid into and physically present at every school day), and the funding goes with the kid.
What makes a school successful? Getting enough parents to entrust their children's educations to it. Some schools could be college prep, some could be more vocationally oriented, some built around the arts or performing arts, some around sports.
Every parent and every student leaves an evaluation when they leave the school, and schools are required to have some system to track (even if very grossly) the success of their students for, say, five years after graduation. Parents have that data available when they choose schools (new schools will obviously be more of a crap shoot for parents than established schools). A "school" consists of a group of teachers sufficient to get accredited, organized around a principal and a mission for what they want their school to accomplish and offer parents. If the school wants to use standardized tests and their results as part of its self-assessment and/or sales pitch, it can do so. If it doesn't, it doesn't. In this model, teachers would be hired by schools on a yearly basis and could switch schools as often as desired between contracts. salaries could be negotiated, or there could be a set scale set by the federal government based on location, years of service, subjects taught, etc.
The problem with the current state-based "one size fits none" approach (or, Hod forbid, a federal version of the same) is that it measures success as defined by administrators, not parents or students. It isn't the administrators who the education system is supposed to serve, however.
The only lasting school system reform I have read about was conducted in Harlem in the 80s and involved total school choice and total school flexibility in organization. The teacher unions killed it when the superintendent who created it retired, though, because it offered no real job security.
Quote from: The Brain on April 16, 2015, 12:34:35 PM
... There's no great mystery about measuring performance.
I wonder why only the Brain knows this. There are a gazillion books on effective performance measurement, all of them useless if the brain shares the secret.
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 01:03:42 PM
Quote from: The Brain on April 16, 2015, 12:34:35 PM
... There's no great mystery about measuring performance.
I wonder why only the Brain knows this. There are a gazillion books on effective performance measurement, all of them useless if the brain shares the secret.
:huh: You seem confused.
I don't think we should waste any time or money trying to measure student and teacher performance. Let the SATs/ACTs do that like they always have.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 09:32:08 AM
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 09:03:59 AM
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.
You can't incentivize performance without being able to measure it. And if you can't measure it fully, ignoring it may be a better option. People are capable of doing a good job for reasons other than direct performance incentives. Incentives work best where they can work, but they can't work everywhere.
Quote from: Berkut on April 16, 2015, 10:58:06 AM
Quote from: Martinus on April 16, 2015, 10:41:41 AM
(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.
Only that, as DGuller points out, the external variable may be impossible to measure and/or may be so important that any inherent performance measure becomes impossible or irrelevant.
Quote from: The Brain on April 16, 2015, 12:34:35 PM
Teacher performance is very easy to measure: just do what other professions do. Problem solved. There's no great mystery about measuring performance.
I can't think of any other profession which is comparable to public teaching.
I grew up in Monroe County. I had elementary school in Brockport. Seriously, the place was ahead of everywhere else I've been. When we moved away, I felt like I was taken back in time a couple years.
Quote from: Martinus on April 16, 2015, 02:57:32 PM
Quote from: The Brain on April 16, 2015, 12:34:35 PM
Teacher performance is very easy to measure: just do what other professions do. Problem solved. There's no great mystery about measuring performance.
I can't think of any other profession which is comparable to public teaching.
:huh:
Quote from: Martinus on April 16, 2015, 02:57:32 PM
I can't think of any other profession which is comparable to public teaching.
Private teaching.
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 01:02:09 PM
My solution would be a federal funding mechanism and a parental choice school model. No school districts with their bureaucratic overheads, just a healthy accreditation system like private schools have. Every school is private, every parent gets to send their kid to any school they want to (and can get their kid into and physically present at every school day), and the funding goes with the kid.
What makes a school successful? Getting enough parents to entrust their children's educations to it. Some schools could be college prep, some could be more vocationally oriented, some built around the arts or performing arts, some around sports.
Every parent and every student leaves an evaluation when they leave the school, and schools are required to have some system to track (even if very grossly) the success of their students for, say, five years after graduation. Parents have that data available when they choose schools (new schools will obviously be more of a crap shoot for parents than established schools). A "school" consists of a group of teachers sufficient to get accredited, organized around a principal and a mission for what they want their school to accomplish and offer parents. If the school wants to use standardized tests and their results as part of its self-assessment and/or sales pitch, it can do so. If it doesn't, it doesn't. In this model, teachers would be hired by schools on a yearly basis and could switch schools as often as desired between contracts. salaries could be negotiated, or there could be a set scale set by the federal government based on location, years of service, subjects taught, etc.
The problem with the current state-based "one size fits none" approach (or, Hod forbid, a federal version of the same) is that it measures success as defined by administrators, not parents or students. It isn't the administrators who the education system is supposed to serve, however.
The only lasting school system reform I have read about was conducted in Harlem in the 80s and involved total school choice and total school flexibility in organization. The teacher unions killed it when the superintendent who created it retired, though, because it offered no real job security.
We have system loosely based on this concept. We have not abandoned public schools but they receive funding, in large part, based on the number of students attending the school. The notion is similar as the schools have an incentive to attract as many students as they can reasonably educate.
But it doesn't work as well as one might think. When it was introduced people made decisions based on bad information. People flocked to the schools in more affluent neighbourhoods from upper middle class neighbourhoods assuming the schools would be better. There is no objective data that they were but that was the assumption. As a result schools in affluent areas became over crowded. Schools didn't want to turn away students because of the funding formula. Schools in upper middle class areas emptied out and many were eventually closed because of the lack of demand. There is now very little room in the school system to offer a real choice. All desirable public schools are essentially packed.
The result? As one would expect the number of Private schools grew substantially over the same time but not enough to meet space requirements if cost was not an issue. But cost is an issue. Although private schools are also eligible for the per student payment the amount is nowhere near the private school cost and the current amount of private school spaces seems to be roughly equivalent to the number of students who's families can afford private school. At least judging from the fact that no new private schools of a significant size have opened in the last 5 years or so.
So we are still left with the basic problem. How can one judge what makes a good school and whether it has good teachers. Without that kind of information people make random or poor choices.
Quote from: Berkut on April 16, 2015, 11:28:50 AM
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.
Ok but how are they concluding that the gross results are unacceptable? What are the measuring and is what they are measuring validly related to the conclusions they have made. If what they are measuring is not valid then it makes no sense to withdraw funding based on the invalid measure.
Quote from: crazy canuck on April 16, 2015, 03:50:38 PM
But it doesn't work as well as one might think. When it was introduced people made decisions based on bad information. People flocked to the schools in more affluent neighbourhoods from upper middle class neighbourhoods assuming the schools would be better. There is no objective data that they were but that was the assumption. As a result schools in affluent areas became over crowded. Schools didn't want to turn away students because of the funding formula. Schools in upper middle class areas emptied out and many were eventually closed because of the lack of demand. There is now very little room in the school system to offer a real choice. All desirable public schools are essentially packed.
This sounds odd to me for a couple reasons. One, I've always considered the upper middle class as well as the rich to be "affluent". Also, why aren't the schools in lower or lower middle class areas funneling upward? You don't have to be affluent to be able to drive your kids to school.
Quote from: Peter Wiggin on April 16, 2015, 04:03:05 PM
Quote from: crazy canuck on April 16, 2015, 03:50:38 PM
But it doesn't work as well as one might think. When it was introduced people made decisions based on bad information. People flocked to the schools in more affluent neighbourhoods from upper middle class neighbourhoods assuming the schools would be better. There is no objective data that they were but that was the assumption. As a result schools in affluent areas became over crowded. Schools didn't want to turn away students because of the funding formula. Schools in upper middle class areas emptied out and many were eventually closed because of the lack of demand. There is now very little room in the school system to offer a real choice. All desirable public schools are essentially packed.
This sounds odd to me for a couple reasons. One, I've always considered the upper middle class as well as the rich to be "affluent". Also, why aren't the schools in lower or lower middle class areas funneling upward? You don't have to be affluent to be able to drive your kids to school.
It is a matter of perspective. I live in the affluent neighourhood of North Vancouver. But when the change occurred the even more affluent neighourhood schools in West Vancouver had a large spike of North Van students.
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 01:27:18 PM
You can't incentivize performance without being able to measure it. And if you can't measure it fully, ignoring it may be a better option. People are capable of doing a good job for reasons other than direct performance incentives. Incentives work best where they can work, but they can't work everywhere.
I don't think anyone has established that performance can't be measured.
You can measure how well students do on tests, as well as their post-graduation performance. The difficult part is separating other factors (income, environment, family, individual circumstance) from the school based ones to determine what contributes to the result.
Quote from: The Brain on April 16, 2015, 01:04:51 PM
:huh: You seem confused.
:huh: I did not. I was just amazed. Who'd have figured that the one guy in the world for whom there's "no great mystery about measuring [job] performance" would post to the same small discussion board I do?
Quote from: Caliga on April 16, 2015, 01:16:10 PM
I don't think we should waste any time or money trying to measure student and teacher performance. Let the SATs/ACTs do that like they always have.
The SATs and ACTs are poor indicators of success in vocational or artistic training. They measure success in preparation for college, and even then only in a gross fashion. They are a classic example of the "one size fits none" solution, and universities are increasingly ignoring them.
Quote from: crazy canuck on April 16, 2015, 03:50:38 PM
... So we are still left with the basic problem. How can one judge what makes a good school and whether it has good teachers. Without that kind of information people make random or poor choices.
The same way one judges which universities fit the student's ambitions and abilities. Information is key, but it's not like there are not models of how to get information out there.
In HK, we officially divide all schools into three categories (used to be 9 bands decades ago). Band 1, Band 2, Band 3. How well do they do in standardised tests. That categorisation is officially done. Band 1 are the best schools. Band 3 are the worst. Problem solved :contract:
Quote from: Monoriu on April 16, 2015, 05:40:56 PM
In HK, we officially divide all schools into three categories (used to be 9 bands decades ago). Band 1, Band 2, Band 3. How well do they do in standardised tests. That categorisation is officially done. Band 1 are the best schools. Band 3 are the worst. Problem solved :contract:
All that does is assign arbitrary labels to schools. Problem: Not Solved. :contract:
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 05:47:32 PM
Quote from: Monoriu on April 16, 2015, 05:40:56 PM
In HK, we officially divide all schools into three categories (used to be 9 bands decades ago). Band 1, Band 2, Band 3. How well do they do in standardised tests. That categorisation is officially done. Band 1 are the best schools. Band 3 are the worst. Problem solved :contract:
All that does is assign arbitrary labels to schools. Problem: Not Solved. :contract:
Well, it is not exactly arbitrary. The exam scores are very clear and objective, and the exam is administered by a central authority. If not, we'll be subject to judicial review. I see why a lot of people don't like it though. Starting from age 6, the kids are assigned a label that they are the worst students, they are hopeless and there is no point to do anything in their lifes.
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 05:36:12 PM
Quote from: crazy canuck on April 16, 2015, 03:50:38 PM
... So we are still left with the basic problem. How can one judge what makes a good school and whether it has good teachers. Without that kind of information people make random or poor choices.
The same way one judges which universities fit the student's ambitions and abilities. Information is key, but it's not like there are not models of how to get information out there.
I agree. I was just describing the downside of implementing a similar system without that sort of information.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 04:08:14 PM
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 01:27:18 PM
You can't incentivize performance without being able to measure it. And if you can't measure it fully, ignoring it may be a better option. People are capable of doing a good job for reasons other than direct performance incentives. Incentives work best where they can work, but they can't work everywhere.
I don't think anyone has established that performance can't be measured.
Well, given the existence of this thread, there is a bit of an uncertainty about that. Personally, I'm not even sure that you can measure individual student's performance all that well by statistical means. Sure, you can test their math skills, and I think that everyone should major in math, but there is more to education than math. So much more that focusing on the testable subjects can do too much damage to the untestable subjects.
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 06:53:32 PM
Well, given the existence of this thread, there is a bit of an uncertainty about that. Personally, I'm not even sure that you can measure individual student's performance all that well by statistical means. Sure, you can test their math skills, and I think that everyone should major in math, but there is more to education than math. So much more that focusing on the testable subjects can do too much damage to the untestable subjects.
The existence of cheating doesn't by itself invalidate the measure.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on April 16, 2015, 07:01:29 PM
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 06:53:32 PM
Well, given the existence of this thread, there is a bit of an uncertainty about that. Personally, I'm not even sure that you can measure individual student's performance all that well by statistical means. Sure, you can test their math skills, and I think that everyone should major in math, but there is more to education than math. So much more that focusing on the testable subjects can do too much damage to the untestable subjects.
The existence of cheating doesn't by itself invalidate the measure.
Where did I say anything about cheating?
In an ideal world, schools would be evaluated by having every student and every parent rate them on a scale of, say, 1-10 as to how well they think that the school prepared them (or their children) for success over the five years from "graduation." A pre-K though five school thus gets rated by 10th graders and their parents, etc. That's really the only measure I see as meaningful, and it isn't objective. If it turns out that a skill the school taught isn't subjectively useful, then even if it is well-taught it doesn't get the school any credit. A school could have the best bullwhip-cracking department in the country, and objectively score really well on the standardized tests for bullwhip-cracking, but that doesn't mean that it is a good school.
Now, maybe 5 years isn't enough to tell if skills are useful, maybe five years is too long because too much could have changed in the meantime, and maybe 10th graders aren't in a good position to evaluate how well they have been served by the skills and knowledge taught in their pre-K through 5 school, but you get the general idea. Let the customers evaluate the utility of a school.
Thoughts? Any way to make this doable in the real world?
Quote from: DGuller on April 16, 2015, 07:08:01 PM
Where did I say anything about cheating?
Oops, wrong thread.
I think my original point is still valid though, that no one has established that performance can't be measured.
Ultimately the purpose of schooling is to prepare the young to become productive workers. So the best measurements are what the users of the labour think, and whether they are really willing to put down something tangible, such as pay or university places. Hence, the best measurements are graduate pay and university admission rates.
No.
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 07:12:49 PM
In an ideal world, schools would be evaluated by having every student and every parent rate them on a scale of, say, 1-10 as to how well they think that the school prepared them (or their children) for success over the five years from "graduation." A pre-K though five school thus gets rated by 10th graders and their parents, etc. That's really the only measure I see as meaningful, and it isn't objective. If it turns out that a skill the school taught isn't subjectively useful, then even if it is well-taught it doesn't get the school any credit. A school could have the best bullwhip-cracking department in the country, and objectively score really well on the standardized tests for bullwhip-cracking, but that doesn't mean that it is a good school.
Now, maybe 5 years isn't enough to tell if skills are useful, maybe five years is too long because too much could have changed in the meantime, and maybe 10th graders aren't in a good position to evaluate how well they have been served by the skills and knowledge taught in their pre-K through 5 school, but you get the general idea. Let the customers evaluate the utility of a school.
Thoughts? Any way to make this doable in the real world?
I recently filled out a lengthy survey regarding these sorts of metrics for the private school my sons attend. One of the questions was how well I rated the school for preparing my boys for university. Well neither is in university so I have no idea. I think they are receiving an excellent education. My sense of it is that their teachers are exceptional. But I don't really have a meaningful point of reference. Are there teachers in other schools that are just as good. Anecdotal statements of other parents suggest that might be the case. Are there worse teachers. Stronger anecdotal evidence confirming that view. But I really have no way of making a valid judgment.
The best I can say is that my sons enjoy school very much. They come home with stories about how excellent Mr W is and how Ms. V's class was awesome etc; I compare that with the number of times they complain about things and conclude that based on the overwhelming positive vs negative comments the boys are being taught well.
I like your idea about asking some time in the future but then there is a problem of fading memories and the fact that whether a kid succeeds in University may be due to factors entirely unrelated to the quality of their high school education. In my time in university and anecdotal evidence from parents of recent university participants, managing to study while being away from home for the first time and exploring that freedom is a significant determinant of success. That may have little to do with the quality of the education they received in high school.
Quote from: Monoriu on April 16, 2015, 07:18:45 PM
Ultimately the purpose of schooling is to prepare the young to become productive workers. So the best measurements are what the users of the labour think, and whether they are really willing to put down something tangible, such as pay or university places. Hence, the best measurements are graduate pay and university admission rates.
drone on
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 05:23:17 PM
Quote from: The Brain on April 16, 2015, 01:04:51 PM
:huh: You seem confused.
:huh: I did not. I was just amazed. Who'd have figured that the one guy in the world for whom there's "no great mystery about measuring [job] performance" would post to the same small discussion board I do?
:D Come back when you're sober.
Quote from: The Brain on April 17, 2015, 01:23:26 AM
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 05:23:17 PM
:huh: I did not. I was just amazed. Who'd have figured that the one guy in the world for whom there's "no great mystery about measuring [job] performance" would post to the same small discussion board I do?
:D Come back when you're sober.
:huh: You seem confused.
Quote from: grumbler on April 16, 2015, 07:12:49 PM
In an ideal world, schools would be evaluated by having every student and every parent rate them on a scale of, say, 1-10 as to how well they think that the school prepared them (or their children) for success over the five years from "graduation." A pre-K though five school thus gets rated by 10th graders and their parents, etc. That's really the only measure I see as meaningful, and it isn't objective. If it turns out that a skill the school taught isn't subjectively useful, then even if it is well-taught it doesn't get the school any credit. A school could have the best bullwhip-cracking department in the country, and objectively score really well on the standardized tests for bullwhip-cracking, but that doesn't mean that it is a good school.
Now, maybe 5 years isn't enough to tell if skills are useful, maybe five years is too long because too much could have changed in the meantime, and maybe 10th graders aren't in a good position to evaluate how well they have been served by the skills and knowledge taught in their pre-K through 5 school, but you get the general idea. Let the customers evaluate the utility of a school.
Thoughts? Any way to make this doable in the real world?
I think the general idea of using the customers to evaluate teachers is a very good idea. I can't imagine it ever being possible for political reasons, at least not in places like New York with stupidly powerful teachers unions.
You would have to first change parents' mentality, though. It used to be that if a kid brought a D from school, parents would be mad with the kid. Now they are mad with the teacher.
Quote from: Martinus on April 17, 2015, 09:43:02 AM
You would have to first change parents' mentality, though. It used to be that if a kid brought a D from school, parents would be mad with the kid. Now they are mad with the teacher.
Most parents are still mad at the kid. But we live in an era where confidence in institutions is low and nutcases are empowered to see conspiracies and oppression everywhere. That goes far beyond just parents.
Quote from: Martinus on April 17, 2015, 09:43:02 AM
You would have to first change parents' mentality, though. It used to be that if a kid brought a D from school, parents would be mad with the kid. Now they are mad with the teacher.
We'd either have to change the mentality, or change the myth about the mentality of "parents now." Sure, there are parents today that refuse to accept that their kids are at fault, but there have always been such parents and always will be. There will, apparently, also always be people who believe that "parents now" or "kids these days" are significantly different from the way they've always been.
Quote from: grumbler on April 17, 2015, 09:46:36 AM
Quote from: Martinus on April 17, 2015, 09:43:02 AM
You would have to first change parents' mentality, though. It used to be that if a kid brought a D from school, parents would be mad with the kid. Now they are mad with the teacher.
We'd either have to change the mentality, or change the myth about the mentality of "parents now." Sure, there are parents today that refuse to accept that their kids are at fault, but there have always been such parents and always will be. There will, apparently, also always be people who believe that "parents now" or "kids these days" are significantly different from the way they've always been.
Well yeah there is that to.
Quote from: Martinus on April 17, 2015, 09:43:02 AM
You would have to first change parents' mentality, though. It used to be that if a kid brought a D from school, parents would be mad with the kid. Now they are mad with the teacher.
Yeah, the problem here is that you don't know what you are talking about.
This is trite and standard "Woe is society" bitching. I am sure it happens, but mostly people don't blame the school for their kids getting bad grades any more now than they have ever before - or rather, I've never seen any actual evidence other than whines like this from people like you.
I know lots of parents, we spend plenty of time bitching about schools and our kids, and we all well understand that the vast majority of the input into your kids grades comes from the kid, not the teacher.
Before we can solve any of this, people in today's society need to stop complaining about how kids or society these days are worse than they were in the past. Back in the days people knew better than that.
Quote from: DGuller on April 17, 2015, 11:35:16 AM
Back in the days people knew better than that.
:D