Report: Use student performance to rate teachers

http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2009/10/26/report-use-student-performance-to-rate-teachers/?cxntfid=blogs_get_schooled_blog

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

7 22 17 years ago

blogs.ajc.com

tptacek8• 17 years ago

In other words, if you want to make more money as a teacher, make sure you're not posted somewhere where they really need good teachers; your best bet, for maximum student payoff for each extra hour of teacher effort, is a rich suburb.

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

What if what is looked at is IMPROVEMENT?

tptacek8• 17 years ago

What if improvement is much harder to achieve in poor inner city schools? Wait. Take the "what if" out of that sentence. Replace the question mark with a period.

Incentive pay: good. Reason we don't have a good incentive pay system to argue with the teachers unions about: because incentive systems for teachers are hard.

Parent of two school-age kids speaking now: teach-the-test pressure is already bad enough without paying teachers to ratchet it up.

Alex39173• 17 years ago

What about all the evidence saying that when you pay teachers for students performance, students learn less?

tokenadult6• 17 years ago

Citations, please?

Alex39173• 17 years ago

Alfie Kohn cites a bunch of studies in Punished by Rewards.

schindyguy• 17 years ago

Wouldnt that just skew all grades higher? Why wouldnt I want to give out all A's to my B and C students if it meant hire pay? Or am I missing something

tptacek8• 17 years ago

You're not missing something. You just spot it quickly because the idea of metric-based performance pay has been such a disaster in the technology industry (pay extra for devs not to "make bugs", and they simply stop filing bugs in the bug database).

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

You don't have to do that, just assess them at a lower level at the start of the course!

techiferous• 17 years ago

I'm a programmer but I took a three-year hiatus from programming to be a science and technology teacher. So I speak from having some teaching experience.

Objective measures like the ones proposed are a siren song. They sound really good on the surface, but a deeper look reveals these problems:

* You only get what you measure. Whatever is not measured falls through the cracks. So this means that the teaching goals have to be really good. Historically, they are not, as they are driven more by politics than by people who are talented at teaching.

* Some of the value that teachers add is in intangibles which are harder to measure. These important intangibles will fall by the wayside.

Also, the administration has a large impact on student and teacher success. Imagine being a programmer and having your performance judged on a project that was mismanaged by an incompetent project manager.

I'm not saying we should have no objective measures; I'm just giving a word of caution that this is a complex issue that's not easily solved. Reductionist approaches like these are bound to fail; more holistic approaches that focus on the student-teacher-parent relationship are better.

teeja• 17 years ago

Nonsense. You can't rate the countless dozens of things good teachers do with some phony metric. Any more than you can measure 'good' programming, 'good' science research, or any other human endeavor that requires creativity, tailoring responses to the situation, etc.

"Objective" measures are a pipe-dream that's decades old. It's constantly thrown up as a 'solution', almost always by people with little or no education experience.

Teachers have little control over the attitudes / motivations of students. You can bring a horse to water. Again, the evaluation of experienced professionals is worth something ... but good teaching is at least 50% art, and what works is a mystery that has to be solved one class at a time.

Report: Use student performance to rate teachers

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