jeff2sf wrote:Ya know what else doesn't work, monkeyboy? Leaving things well enough alone as you and the unions want to do. Merit pay can work, there's not enough evidence in as of yet nor has "the best system" been devised yet. But when we all agree that merit pay is the only path forward (and make no mistake, you're not going to get to free ride off the better teachers at your school forever, I mean that metaphorically since you're no longer a relevant stakeholder as you've left to teach rich kids in Switzerland), then all that's left to do is to figure out the best way to determine merit.

But what we know, what we KNOW, is that the current way by the unions has been tried and has failed. Unions need to get out of the fucking way.

come on, jeff. I repeatedly said that I agree that the way unions are functioning now is sometimes pretty bad. But most of what the unions do is good, so I don't want to lose collective bargaining when that isn't the problem. I could give you multiple examples and ways merit pay has been tried in schools, but none of them have worked over time. I don't know what else to say about that. Is it possible there's a merit pay system that might work? Yes, but I haven't seen it. I'm not suggesting we stop doing pilot programs, but let's be realistic about outcomes until we see something positive somewhere. I also agree that higher pay may attract better teachers. In fact, putting aside whether or not I'm a good teacher, I would probably still be in the US right now if I could make enough money to retire reasonably well. I'm getting a late start.

And your last sentence is kinda bizarre. The purpose of merit pay would be to increase achievement (it fails), but that is not the purpose of unions. So unions haven't been tried and failed as a way of increasing that achievement. The purpose of the union is to bargain on behalf of its members. I'm all for reigning in unions when they do things that stand in the way of education, as I've said several times in my posts that you obviously didn't read. I could cite you numerous examples (cincinnati, Iowa, Chicago) of places where unions have agreed to large pilot programs, so it's not like unions are the problem in some blanket way. We need more good educators, not less unions.

I really don't think you appreciate how hard it is to evaluate teachers who are teaching different kids in different settings, even within the same school. For example, the one teacher in our grade never got any of the kids with learning disabilities. Her numbers looked good next to other people in the district when they really shouldn't have been. All she did is give worksheets every day. The obvious answer is some type of qualitative evaluation to supplement the scores, but then you are back to the days of salaries being determined by nepotism and principal favorites (a very real thing in schools based on what I've heard from teachers in my program --- we were spread out among many schools). For the record, I think my principal was fair.

Anyway, until someone provides some evidence of a pilot program for merit pay working somewhere, I will remain dubious. Heck, I would have been happy with the extra pay, so it's not like I'm against more pay.

td11 wrote:Great read there, jerz, and I couldn't agree with dajafi more on this. Kids should be the #1 priority, not entrenched teachers' careers. It's amazing how teachers are treated like rock stars in countries like south Korea. They literally have their own tv shows. Politicizing this and making it a partisan issue means the kids are ultimately the losers

This goes to my theory that it's largely cultural. Americans used to value education a lot more than they do now. You have several generations stuck in poverty that have been left down by the system and another large group of people who think education makes you an evil elite and think we should get rid of the dept of education. Science is attacked at every turn. We just don't value education as much as southeast asia or europe.

That doesn't mean we give up, of course, but we do need to realize that pointing fingers at parents or kids or teachers or unions won't fix the issue. We need to press on all fronts.

Monkeyboy wrote:

td11 wrote:Great read there, jerz, and I couldn't agree with dajafi more on this. Kids should be the #1 priority, not entrenched teachers' careers. It's amazing how teachers are treated like rock stars in countries like south Korea. They literally have their own tv shows. Politicizing this and making it a partisan issue means the kids are ultimately the losers

This goes to my theory that it's largely cultural. Americans used to value education a lot more than they do now. You have several generations stuck in poverty that have been left down by the system and another large group of people who think education makes you an evil elite and think we should get rid of the dept of education. Science is attacked at every turn. We just don't value education as much as southeast asia or europe.

That doesn't mean we give up, of course, but we do need to realize that pointing fingers at parents or kids or teachers or unions won't fix the issue. We need to press on all fronts.

http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2 ... -countries

America has the 4th highest population percentage of college graduates. Only Canada, Israel and Japan are higher. Not to mention more foreigners come to America to study than anywhere else, and we have the most adults with graduate degrees. (Although to be fair we have had the lowest increase of college graduates in the last 10 years.)

Americans don't value education. They value Diplomas.

we like swag

The Nightman Cometh wrote:I'm in the process of writing my term paper, so if anyone can point me in the direction of a succinct summary of the PPACA or of the Supreme Court challenge and possible ramifications of it being struck down I would love you forever.

well, there's the health reform thread here. This article recently posted in it is a short semi-summary of the Sup Ct proceedings, which leans in favor of upholding but might help you sort out where the arguments fell

if, as your subsequent posts suggest, health care and state and local governments is what you're really supposed to be focused on, zero in on the Medicaid portion of the oral arguments - which happened Wednesday afternoon.

Medicaid's history is long, sordid, complicated, confusing, expensive and frequently depressing. Have fun with it!

redacted

MoBettle wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:

td11 wrote:Great read there, jerz, and I couldn't agree with dajafi more on this. Kids should be the #1 priority, not entrenched teachers' careers. It's amazing how teachers are treated like rock stars in countries like south Korea. They literally have their own tv shows. Politicizing this and making it a partisan issue means the kids are ultimately the losers

This goes to my theory that it's largely cultural. Americans used to value education a lot more than they do now. You have several generations stuck in poverty that have been left down by the system and another large group of people who think education makes you an evil elite and think we should get rid of the dept of education. Science is attacked at every turn. We just don't value education as much as southeast asia or europe.

That doesn't mean we give up, of course, but we do need to realize that pointing fingers at parents or kids or teachers or unions won't fix the issue. We need to press on all fronts.

http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2 ... -countries

America has the 4th highest population percentage of college graduates. Only Canada, Israel and Japan are higher. Not to mention more foreigners come to America to study than anywhere else, and we have the most adults with graduate degrees. (Although to be fair we have had the lowest increase of college graduates in the last 10 years.)

higher education in america is leagues ahead of secondary education.

Europe's Real Crisis - Decent, if not entirely unique look at the effect of Europe's demographic trends on debt, economic growth, etc.

Damn baby boomers are going to bring down the west

Where Romney rips Biden, calls him "the gift who keeps on giving" regarding Joe's puzzling Global Minimum Tax quip, I have to wonder two things:

1) Which one is the pot and which is the kettle

2) When did Romney start running against Biden?

td11 wrote:

MoBettle wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:

td11 wrote:Great read there, jerz, and I couldn't agree with dajafi more on this. Kids should be the #1 priority, not entrenched teachers' careers. It's amazing how teachers are treated like rock stars in countries like south Korea. They literally have their own tv shows. Politicizing this and making it a partisan issue means the kids are ultimately the losers

This goes to my theory that it's largely cultural. Americans used to value education a lot more than they do now. You have several generations stuck in poverty that have been left down by the system and another large group of people who think education makes you an evil elite and think we should get rid of the dept of education. Science is attacked at every turn. We just don't value education as much as southeast asia or europe.

That doesn't mean we give up, of course, but we do need to realize that pointing fingers at parents or kids or teachers or unions won't fix the issue. We need to press on all fronts.

http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2 ... -countries

America has the 4th highest population percentage of college graduates. Only Canada, Israel and Japan are higher. Not to mention more foreigners come to America to study than anywhere else, and we have the most adults with graduate degrees. (Although to be fair we have had the lowest increase of college graduates in the last 10 years.)

higher education in america is leagues ahead of secondary education.

Ironically, what many conservatives propose as education reform--an array of institutions competing for students and a system of vouchers--is pretty much what we have in higher education today.

In classic DC politics there is the Medical Weed plan. DC is licensing 6 grow houses, and at least one of them is is in a neighborhood that has been long tormented by drug problems from street dealing to gang wars -- which is just how DC rolls. Perhaps it is putting the work where the knowledge workers are. I am not sure is legal grow houses are routinely published, but the placement and the address listings seem interesting in a strive for transparency, but the district seems to be bungling this, per usual. Oh, the neighborhoods found out real time with the rest of us.

Another announcement is that weGrow is putting in a DC location, which actually makes some sense as they should have 6 locations that are eager customers.

Monkeyboy wrote:The obvious answer is some type of qualitative evaluation to supplement the scores, but then you are back to the days of salaries being determined by nepotism and principal favorites (a very real thing in schools based on what I've heard from teachers in my program --- we were spread out among many schools). For the record, I think my principal was fair.

I think this is something of a red herring, especially if those doing the evaluation were also held accountable for the overall performance of a school. I suspect you'd go a long way towards eliminating these hypothetical problems if principals and superintendents had skin in the game--I'd imagine you'd be a lot less likely to hire your cousin if your own job was on the line. It's not like every other business (including higher education) doesn't have the challenge as far as evaluation goes.

At least on the extremes, teacher evaluation isn't too tough--go back over your education--Mrs. Chapman was awesome, so was Mr. Z (though unconventional and his eraser throwing would probably get him in trouble today). Mr. Koharski was good if you wanted an A for no work and so on. I guess it's the ones in the middle that pose problems.

Would it really be that hard to create a "Value Over Replacement Teacher" metric?

Ok, it probably would. But someone should try anyway.

Again, I think the emphasis on individual teacher performance is really where things go wrong. While you need great teachers for a great, a great school probably has as much to do with teacher quality than the individual qualities of a teacher. In our district, the kindergarten is widely regarded as outstanding, a place where many people believe with justification where there are no bad teachers. No one says that about any of the other schools here. Why is that? Why can't that be replicated in the higher grades?

Finally, my understanding is that US Education K-5 or so is actually pretty good--it's really the high school where things get bad. Also, we do a decent job with reading, it's math where we really fall short. I suspect that has more to do with the dumb ass ways the education establishment tries to make math "fun" or "intuitive". The reality is that drill (often referred to as "drill and kill") is really the only way humans can learn basic math facts.

we say numbers wrong. asian populations teach numbers in a completely different way than we do. pretty sure its been brought up before.

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don't. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the "decade" first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don't reach forty until they're five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

Color me skeptical if that's the real reason why the US lags in math.

dajafi wrote:Would it really be that hard to create a "Value Over Replacement Teacher" metric?

Ok, it probably would. But someone should try anyway.

I think, I hope, I've said this before with respect for "merit" pay - it's bunk. It''s like paying CEOs based on merit. CEOs do shitworth. The CEO of Costco, sensibly, earns under $1 million base annual compensation (he collects another couple million in equity rewards annually). The job just isn't that hard. It's time-consuming, sure, and there's a lot of "responsibility", whatever that means (a job attribute I feel is over-rewarded at the top), but lives don't hang in the balance of decisions about whether to stock more coke or more pepsi; plenty of other people can do it, and jobs like it, pretty much as well. Paying people jillions mostly because they've been aggressive, ambitious pricks all their lives is stupid.

Finding the causal roots of teacher "performance", like the "individual reward-worthy" attributes of most people involved in most activities, is maddeningly difficult. And the return on the resources consumed in the effort is probably seldom "profitable".

What is the merit to society or to the typical consumer of determining fine gradations above "satisfactory" teacher (or waiter, or accountant) performance? Precious little, is my belief. So don't waste time or resources on it. Let the neurotic bluebloods sign up their kids for preschool before conception. They're fooling themselves, and it's their dough to waste.

Teach kids to read, write, add, subtract, multiply, divide. Then teach them how to seek out ways to learn stuff beyond that, and provide a supporting infrastructure for doing so - for learning, & establishing proof of the stuff learned.

TenuredVulture wrote:Finally, my understanding is that US Education K-5 or so is actually pretty good--it's really the high school where things get bad.

... because they're frikkin' teenagers.

TenuredVulture wrote:I suspect that has more to do with the dumb ass ways the education establishment tries to make math "fun" or "intuitive".

...which are futile attempts to engage them... because they're frikkin' teenagers.

I propose, for all students in their age 14 school year, hard labor camps (salt mines, sweatshops, Foxconn). Those that survive the year will have a better opinion regarding the value of education