dajafi wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:

dajafi wrote:What makes a good lawyer, doctor or engineer? It's a mix of objective and subjective factors. Similarly, determining teacher quality is difficult but not impossible. Obviously no one standard gives the answer, so you use a bunch--academic performance, improvement over the course of a school year, the opinions of students, parents, peers and supervisors--and weight them accordingly.

there are so many things that could go wrong in that though.

academic performance= student chooses not to do work, student speaks spanish and struggles, student has learning disability

improvement of the course of the year= a student's mom dies and their performance drops off

student/parent opinion= student gets lazy and gets a D on a paper and that is the teachers fault so they hate the teacher

That's why you use a bunch of factors and measure it over 2-3 years, rather than one.

Have to say I'm not shocked to find you making excuses for mediocrity.

im not making excuses it is just reality. i dont think it is the best thing to base someone's livelihood off of many factors they may not have control over.

That's how it is for all of us, though

Woody wrote:What about the fact that the kind of people that aspire to teach generally overlap with the kinds of people that are kind of lazy and love summers off and 50 holidays a year and being done work by 4. If we make the school year longer, maybe we'll attract more folks that are a little more serious about making a difference

i feel like you are kidding around with this a bit but as i said before teachers are planning, coaching, grading, running clubs, answering parents emails, taking graduate classes, and a lot of other things outside of the 7-3 work day.

i know a lot of teachers that get other jobs over the summer too.

The Dude wrote:That's how it is for all of us, though

your job pay may fluctuate if a kids parents are getting divorced?

Woody wrote:What about the fact that the kind of people that aspire to teach generally overlap with the kinds of people that are kind of lazy and love summers off and 50 holidays a year and being done work by 4. If we make the school year longer, maybe we'll attract more folks that are a little more serious about making a difference

I'm all for making the school year longer. But in fact I would say the real problem is that those attracted to teaching tend to be mediocre students themselves, and see teaching as a profession where unlike medicine or even law you don't have to be especially smart.

Actually, I would say the problem isn't just unions, it's the entire education establishment--the university departments of education, the so-called education experts who come up with curricular ideas and implement them without doing basic research demonstrating its effectiveness, and the testing industry. Too many teachers lack basic content knowledge because they've spent most of their undergraduate careers in "education" courses.

CalvinBall wrote:

The Dude wrote:That's how it is for all of us, though

your job pay may fluctuate if a kids parents are getting divorced?

No, but I can be fired for factors out of my hands, laid off at any time for things out of my hands, etc

TenuredVulture wrote:

Woody wrote:What about the fact that the kind of people that aspire to teach generally overlap with the kinds of people that are kind of lazy and love summers off and 50 holidays a year and being done work by 4. If we make the school year longer, maybe we'll attract more folks that are a little more serious about making a difference

I'm all for making the school year longer. But in fact I would say the real problem is that those attracted to teaching tend to be mediocre students themselves, and see teaching as a profession where unlike medicine or even law you don't have to be especially smart.

I think this is a pretty bad generalization. I'm going to be trying to become a teacher in the next year or so, and i wasn't mediocre teacher. A lot of my friends are teachers, none of the were mediocre, either

So, Calvinball, are you really asserting that it's impossible to tell which teachers are committed and dedicated and which aren't? That sounds crazy. Are you saying some principles are willing to reward crappy teachers, even if we paid successful principles more than unsuccessful ones?

CalvinBall wrote:

The Dude wrote:That's how it is for all of us, though

your job pay may fluctuate if a kids parents are getting divorced?

You're a self-centered idiot if you don't think 95% of people are judged by factors that they're not in direct control of every day of the week in their jobs.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The system doesn't work right now, it must be fixed and Good teachers must be rewarded and Bad teachers must be let go. People are open to input from teachers on how to determine who is good and bad, and people acknowledge that it won't always be perfect. It doesn't have to be, it just has to be better than the current sucky situation.

CalvinBall wrote:im not making excuses it is just reality. i dont think it is the best thing to base someone's livelihood off of many factors they may not have control over.

There are many, many professions that have that problem without have the luxury of tenure. I used to work in sales for Verizon and I also was a mortgage originator at one time. Both companies were call center environments where calls were fed through to us in a random order. Every month, if you didn't hit your sales numbers, you were written up and fired if that happened 3 times.

I had no control over what phone calls I was receiving. At Verizon there were months where 99% of my calls were people complaining about their bill and at the mortgage company I had months where 99% of my calls were from people with failing credit. Not easy, and sometimes not possible, to sell to those people. Point is, I had no control over it and it affected my livelihood.

Thinking about this in relation to health care--don't we also want to move to a system where doctors are not paid on a fee for service basis, but helping people get better? I am sure we'll hear doctors complaining that they can't help it if a patient refuses to quit smoking or whatever.

TenuredVulture wrote:So, Calvinball, are you really asserting that it's impossible to tell which teachers are committed and dedicated and which aren't? That sounds crazy. Are you saying some principles are willing to reward crappy teachers, even if we paid successful principles more than unsuccessful ones?

not impossible. just more difficult and complicate then saying "lets make it merit pay," or even trying to mirror other professions like a lawyer or doctor where successes are much more tangible.

See, that's not true, either. Good doctors are so hampered by so many rules and regulations, patients can die despite a doc's best efforts and the family doesn't understand this.

I'd bet everyone on this board has been subject to or knows someone that lost a job or pay b/c of things out of their control. Pretty irresponsible to feel otherwise about that

CalvinBall wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:So, Calvinball, are you really asserting that it's impossible to tell which teachers are committed and dedicated and which aren't? That sounds crazy. Are you saying some principles are willing to reward crappy teachers, even if we paid successful principles more than unsuccessful ones?

not impossible. just more difficult and complicate then saying "lets make it merit pay," or even trying to mirror other professions like a lawyer or doctor where successes are much more tangible.

I actually think determining who is a good teacher is a lot easier than determining who is a good lawyer and especially who is a good doctor. I'll grade every teacher I've ever had, and I bet if my fellow students did the same, there'd be something close to consensus about which ones were good and which were not. Mrs. Chapman wasn't just my favorite teacher, she was lots of kids favorite teacher. And parents liked her too. Not because she was easy or fun--she managed to find a way to challenge everyone, regardless of their ability. She helped kids who were going through tough times and stayed in touch with them long after they finished first grade, even through college.

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/10/grand_ol_pagan.php

This guy won

What a country

Cool. I was hoping he would.

I was rooting for his opponent cause of the subtly anti-Asian xenophobic they're invading our living areas scare tactic campaign Halloran ran.

His own web site says so. http://www.electdanhalloran.com

"The election of 2009 is critical to having your ideas, your desires, and your voice represented by someone who is TRULY a member of YOUR community and a chance to make a real inroad in New York City Government."

(emphasis his, not mine)

but you are rational. a lot of students are not. the teacher who makes them do nothing could be their favorite teacher. or the hot female gym teacher could be their favorite. or the teacher that teaches their favorite subject.

lethal wrote:

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/10/grand_ol_pagan.php

This guy won

What a country

Cool. I was hoping he would.

I was rooting for his opponent cause of the subtly anti-Asian xenophobic they're invading our living areas scare tactic campaign Halloran ran.

Didn't know that. In fact, I knew nothing about this campaign other than that the Republican was a pagan, an idea I liked. (Also, I'd love to see a Republican revival in the city, provided it looked something like the Tory comeback in England... a friend and I were joking last night about re-registering as Republicans and trying to take over the Brooklyn party. So long as jh kept his mouth closed, it could work!)

To be fair, based on what I did read, it seems like his flavor of paganism might not be very far from some of the weirder, faintly Nazi-ish northern European cultish stuff. Which I guess would fit with the xenophobia, though I'm surprised at the idea this would play very well in NYC (at least outside of Staten Island).

CalvinBall wrote:

dajafi wrote:What makes a good lawyer, doctor or engineer? It's a mix of objective and subjective factors. Similarly, determining teacher quality is difficult but not impossible. Obviously no one standard gives the answer, so you use a bunch--academic performance, improvement over the course of a school year, the opinions of students, parents, peers and supervisors--and weight them accordingly.

there are so many things that could go wrong in that though.

academic performance= student chooses not to do work, student speaks spanish and struggles, student has learning disability

improvement of the course of the year= a student's mom dies and their performance drops off

student/parent opinion= student gets lazy and gets a D on a paper and that is the teachers fault so they hate the teacher

I sympathize with Calvin's point of view ( I was a teacher for a short period of time, although not a very good one) even though I generally agree with the benefits of merit pay for teachers. It is pretty easy to tell a very good teacher from a very poor one, the top ten percent from the bottom ten percent, and I think everyone would benefit if these top teachers were rewarded and used where they could do the most good, while the bottom ones were weeded out. But for the other eighty percent, no matter how scientific you might make it look, the standards for evaluation are going to have such a large margin of error that they are nearly useless, since they are affected by many things other than teacher performance and it would be like using RBI to judge baseball players. To pretend that we can make fine distinctions between teacher performance is arrogant and misguided, and it's no wonder teachers get riled up.

Any system put in place would have to recognize this and minimize the effect on serviceable teachers ( while encouraging them to reach for the highest levels. Anyone who has been in the private sector and been evaluated or been in charge of evaluating employees (I've done that too) knows how difficult and arbitrary that process can be, no matter how clearly the policy is spelled out. Let's not pretend it will be otherwise with teachers.

CalvinBall wrote:but you are rational. a lot of students are not. the teacher who makes them do nothing could be their favorite teacher. or the hot female gym teacher could be their favorite. or the teacher that teaches their favorite subject.

First, I don't think student evaluations are all that good a tool--I certainly wouldn't have 10 year olds determining who was a good teacher or not. And I understand the parental issue--but really, are there lots of cases of demanding but fair teachers receiving tons of complaints from parents? Obviously, there will be cultural issues--overcoming a sense of entitlement that might pervade some school districts can't be done by individual teachers. But we also have things like KIPP, intensely demanding magnet schools that have tons of kids whose families want to send them there. There are parents of "gifted" desperately begging for more demanding fare.

It just isn't all that difficult to tell who's doing a good job in the class room and who isn't. And you can really easily tell who's dedicated and who's not.

Finally, Mr. Koharski was considered by many students in my high school to be an easy a, and some took his class for that reason. No one thought he was a good teacher though.

CalvinBall wrote:merit pay would be alright, but how would it work? students need to take ownership too, if they dont the teacher should be punished for that? also, how do you determine what makes a good teacher? through testing? a lot standardized tests are horrible.

This is the typical union red herring. No evaluation or reward system is perfect, but an imperfect system is worse than none at all. After decades of being evaluated as an engineer working for a large corporation, I can tell you that there are a lot of inequities. But, the fact that there is an evaluation system does several positive things. First, the vast majority of engineers do strive to get a good evaluation. Standards and specific goals/objectives are set that at the minimum lets everyone know what is expected, in terms of both direction and acceptable minimum to great performance in moving toward the agreed goals. So there is both clarity of what you should do and how well you are expected to do it, plus skin in the game for everyone in getting it done. Second, despite the inequities around the edges, for the most part the bulk of the best performers are recognized and rewarded and the worst of the bad are either not rewarded or dismissed. Some bad actors still get there carrot and some good performers are ignored, but on the whole, the system has positive results.

It is really not that hard to evaluate teachers. Growing up in a family of teachers, observing as a student, and serving on a School Board for 20 years, it has been my observation that just about everybody (teachers, parents, students, administrators) agreed upon who were the great teachers and who were the terrible teachers in any school. The same with principals and central staff administrators. I've seen horrible teachers defended tooth and nail at tenure hearings, with the teacher's union lawyer and rep admitting the guy was a total disaster, but determined to make the process as painful and expensive as possible in order to eliminate future efforts to remove awful teachers. Ironically for the poor alcoholic jerk who ended up being fired at great expense to an urban district that could have spent the $ far better on the students, said jerk avoided the compassionate dismissal or possibly chance to remain through paid leave and paid treatment, or a severance settlement, because the point was to prove that there was no problem or if there was a problem than the best course was to do what the union was doing and sweep it under the rug. In the end, the guy was too out of it to appear at the defense portion of the hearing, and after months of hearings, the union was forced to throw in the towell. Union solidarity can be a great thing, but when it means 150 kids basically get zero education in a particular subject for a year or basically zero education at all in the case of an elementary school teacher, than that is too high a cost for society to bear. Throwing away the education of kids year in and year out to maintain the employment of someone, whom all concerned agree simply cannot or will not teach to even minimum standards of effectiveness, is really not acceptable. That is one reason parents are so down on teachers. Protection of the few rotten eggs tars the whole profession. They know 'the system' has chosen to sacrifice their kid, in order to sweep a problem under the rug.