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Teacher Impact

basketcase said:
Considering the average pay in the US is $56,000 it seems ridiculous that market rates would be below the poverty line.

Meanwhile, the article you posted discusses raises based on test performance, not 'market rates'.



p.sv. I said it before, pay isn't the issue with teachers unions, it is getting rid of teachers who are dead weight.
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Hence post #15
 
Those working with special needs children should make more than those without skills of working with special needs children, teachers that are boring and just read out of a book and just want to finish the assigned tasks that they must complete for the year and generally have no interest in the students that need extra help. Let's face it some children can be very moody, fidgety, stressed, depending on their lives at home. All children come from different homes, abused children, slow learners (we are all different) it is not always the fault of parenting and sometimes it is. There is richer and poorer parents. The bottom line is that we should do what is best for the children and not what will line the pockets of teachers. It is true that the children are the future. If pay is purely based on the grades of students that will come with its short comings for those that futures could be improved. It would take much less effort to pay attention to a student making B's and get thier grades up to an A than a special needs student making D's and get them up to a C and in many cases with a lot less hassle and effort, patience and repitition to make them understand the assignment. Children without confidence in themselves for whatever reason could be suicidal, neglect themselves and show outward signs of aggression and could be swept under the rug as uncontrollables and neglected. Foster children themselves could be very depressed and unsure of themselves, but nobody would question the care that they are receiving, figuring their lives are improved, but they are unsure of where they will be living later and unsure of thier future too and may give up on all hope. All children are in different situations and not enough people and society understand different situations and just blame parenting. Teachers do and should play a big role ins childrens lives and should not care so much about the pay, but be willing to assist the more unfortunate children that need assistance. If they are making more money merely by the grades that thier students acheive, less will care about the more unfortunate that could be turned around and helped earlier on in life. Obviously, the sooner a child is helped the more confidence they will have in acheiving better grades and in bettering themselves. It is sad that so many teachers do appear to only care about pay and not in the good feeling they can get by helping individuals.
 
JohnLarue said:
No
I did quite well in school and value education more than most

There is no logical rational to pay teachers $85K for 9 1/2 months work & fund a retirement package which is in excess of what the average taxpayer will receive
Such compensation is irresponsible and extremely inappropriate when the province is borrowing excessively, health Care costs are going to increase exponentially and their is an excess supply of teacher candidates
We can not afford the Ontario Teachers union. It is just that plain and simple

The "he hates teachers" argument is just as weak and self serving as " He is jealous"
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Yes!! As soon as I saw this thread, I knew JL would post the one 'fact' he knew.
 
onthebottom said:
Not at all, teachers could be paid twice market rates currently due to unions, that has nothing to do with making part of their compensation tied to performance.

John laurel thought increases were unwarranted not because performance was lacking in Ontario but because they were already paid above market rates.
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JohnLarue said:
I would welcome market rates and would accept higher costs if the market dictates it
However the union does not let markets forces determine a fair and competitive compensation & it never will
We can not afford the teachers union & their ongoing abuse of the taxpayer will lead to a lot pain in the future
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Having a market rate for teachers, would imply that there would be competition in the market place for teachers. Since education is government run in the vast majority of cases (public, catholic/separate shcool boards) there is no competition. So teachers end up being another government public sector union that is bleeding the tax payer dry.

However, if one is not going to measure teacher performance based on how well their students learn the curriculum (ie by testing in some fashion), then just what criteria are the performance of teachers evaluated on?

Cheers
 
onthebottom said:
I think the goal is accountability - you can't manage what you can't measure.
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True, but of course a big problem is now you measure. The only true measure of success is to see how students eventually turn out but that takes years of waiting. A couple of years ago, I was listening to someone presenting their research on the topic. They claimed that other measures (that you could observe earlier but you would hope are related to eventual student outcomes) turn out to be pretty poor. Apparently the only method that was much better than random chance involved evaluations by principals. However, even principals were only good at identifying the top and bottom 10% of teachers. The problem with standardized tests is that teachers can teach the test (if they don’t do things much less honest) rather than trying to impart a deeper understanding. Don’t get me wrong, my gut tells me standardized tests must be better than nothing. However, the evidence is that they are not that much better.
groggy said:
CBC has a good article on how universities have started using poorly paid part time staff to teach about half their courses.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/most-...w-taught-by-poorly-paid-part-timers-1.2756024

No wonder kids coming out of school are so useless, poor teachers and a sense of entitlement where kids say 'I paid for this degree I should get it regardless of my marks' have really devalued a university education.
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In addition, as university departments compete against each other to attract students, one of the most effective methods involves dumbing things down. One of the most effective ways to attract students away from other departments is to offer higher marks for less work. It also produces good course evaluations which instructors are rewarded for. The incentives all go against quality.
 
No need to perform

Quality assurance/control is a foreign process for civil servants, we have a union.

FAST
 
onthebottom said:
I think the goal is accountability - you can't manage what you can't measure.

Teachers are incredibly spoiled, they don't want to be subject to real measures, though questions, dismissals....
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As basket said, the real question is what are standardized tests measuring. It's by no means established they even measure student attributes and accomplishments, never mind the merits of their teachers.

In what way would you claim the medioocre test scores of a class of economically and socially disadvantaged kids in a poorly equipped and funded school reflect the quality of their teacher when compared with the high scores of well-to-do kids in a well equipped school with engaged, educated and affluent parents contributing to its after-school programs and fundraisers?

Equating kids' score with teacher ability is a bit like imagining the quality of Walmart products is a measure of the management ability of its executives. Except you're blaming the individual Store Manager because you don't like the stuff on the shelves.

You want to 'manage' teachers and teaching, measure teaching. The kid's' scores are measuring the whole system, from the school taxes that keep it goinmg to the unemployed grads it turns out. Kinda like the unsold Azteks were the measure of GM, not the folks who bolted on the fenders.
 
someone said:
True, but of course a big problem is now you measure. The only true measure of success is to see how students eventually turn out but that takes years of waiting. A couple of years ago, I was listening to someone presenting their research on the topic. They claimed that other measures (that you could observe earlier but you would hope are related to eventual student outcomes) turn out to be pretty poor. Apparently the only method that was much better than random chance involved evaluations by principals. However, even principals were only good at identifying the top and bottom 10% of teachers. The problem with standardized tests is that teachers can teach the test (if they don’t do things much less honest) rather than trying to impart a deeper understanding. Don’t get me wrong, my gut tells me standardized tests must be better than nothing. However, the evidence is that they are not that much better..
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I don't agree with this, if you take the article in post #1 that teachers only effect 14% of student school success it would seem they have even less impact on student life success. I don't want to reward/penalize teachers for the jobs their parents do, I want to judge them on how much learning they are able to accomplish. Testing is the only way to measure this.
 
onthebottom said:
I don't agree with this, if you take the article in post #1 that teachers only effect 14% of student school success it would seem they have even less impact on student life success. I don't want to reward/penalize teachers for the jobs their parents do, I want to judge them on how much learning they are able to accomplish. Testing is the only way to measure this.
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But the learning is accomplished by the students and that is what is being tested, not the teaching.

Rating teachers that way would be like declaring the winner at Le Mans by which carmaker had the biggest sales last year. There's likely some connection that we can attribute to the vehicles, but we'd be deluding ourselves to say we were picking the fast cars that way.

If you do want to test teachers based on 'product quality', then you have to control for and equalize non-teacher factors. You aren't really comparing individual race-drivers when they all driving different cars with different tires on different tracks in different weather, even if you do standardize the distance.

The real issue is the same one Socrates talked about: What's a good teacher? What is good teaching? If anyone actually knew, we wouldn't have this thread. Like politics and art, when we talk education we have to remember William Goldman: "The fundamental thing you must grasp is that no one knows anything".

It's always a work in progress and forever debatable. When someone proposes a test of teaching we'll have something new to debate.
 
oldjones said:
But the learning is accomplished by the students and that is what is being tested, not the teaching.

Rating teachers that way would be like declaring the winner at Le Mans by which carmaker had the biggest sales last year. There's likely some connection that we can attribute to the vehicles, but we'd be deluding ourselves to say we were picking the fast cars that way.

If you do want to test teachers based on 'product quality', then you have to control for and equalize non-teacher factors. You aren't really comparing individual race-drivers when they all driving different cars with different tires on different tracks in different weather, even if you do standardize the distance.

The real issue is the same one Socrates talked about: What's a good teacher? What is good teaching? If anyone actually knew, we wouldn't have this thread. Like politics and art, when we talk education we have to remember William Goldman: "The fundamental thing you must grasp is that no one knows anything".

It's always a work in progress and forever debatable. When someone proposes a test of teaching we'll have something new to debate.
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You don't pay people for input or effort, you pay them for results. In a teachers case, you pay them to have students learn. Give we have a robust tradition of measuring learning and mastery with tests (SAT, LSAT, MCAT...) it's not unreasonable to measure teaching with tests.
 
onthebottom said:
You don't pay people for input or effort, you pay them for results. In a teachers case, you pay them to have students learn. Give we have a robust tradition of measuring learning and mastery with tests (SAT, LSAT, MCAT...) it's not unreasonable to measure teaching with tests.
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Except you need to factor in other advantages, otherwise the teachers at schools in the richer neighbourhoods, where the kids have every advantage will outperform kids in poorer neighbourhoods based only on external stresses to the children.
 
oldjones said:
...
In what way would you claim the medioocre test scores of a class of economically and socially disadvantaged kids in a poorly equipped and funded school reflect the quality of their teacher when compared with the high scores of well-to-do kids in a well equipped school with engaged, educated and affluent parents contributing to its after-school programs and fundraisers?
....
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The other issue is student performance is also massively effected by what they learned in previous years. In Ontario, kids are tested in math and English in Gr. 3 and 6 and math again in gr. 9. I can see how an excellent grade 9 math teacher would be impacted if the kids grade 7 and 8 teachers were bad, especially since math builds on what they were supposed to have learned already. Add in the governmental decision that kids can not fail in elementary school and grade 9 teacher can have students that for a variety of reasons haven't passed a class for years. No matter how good that teacher is, the students will have poor performance.
 
onthebottom said:
You don't pay people for input or effort, you pay them for results. In a teachers case, you pay them to have students learn. Give we have a robust tradition of measuring learning and mastery with tests (SAT, LSAT, MCAT...) it's not unreasonable to measure teaching with tests.
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Actually the SAT (etc.) are tests for university admission, not a measure of learning. They attempt to predict if students will be successful in those programs. Of course studies routinely show a weak correlation between SATs and success in university so those standardized tests don't seem to be doing a good job. Then you consider that schools are not just to prepare students for university so preparedness for university is hardly a real measure. A quick googling shows that only 1/4 to 1/3 of 20-somethings go to university so education (and the rating of teachers) should be for more than just that small segment of society.
 
groggy said:
Except you need to factor in other advantages, otherwise the teachers at schools in the richer neighbourhoods, where the kids have every advantage will outperform kids in poorer neighbourhoods based only on external stresses to the children.
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Would be very easy to measure the same kids over time, and with their peer groups, peer stack ranking of teacher effectiveness wold be easy to do.
 
basketcase said:
Actually the SAT (etc.) are tests for university admission, not a measure of learning. They attempt to predict if students will be successful in those programs. Of course studies routinely show a weak correlation between SATs and success in university so those standardized tests don't seem to be doing a good job. Then you consider that schools are not just to prepare students for university so preparedness for university is hardly a real measure. A quick googling shows that only 1/4 to 1/3 of 20-somethings go to university so education (and the rating of teachers) should be for more than just that small segment of society.
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It's remarkable to me how hard it is for you to understand something your politics won't like. I'm simply saying that testing is used throughout the education system, why is it only teachers who's quality can't be tested?
 
onthebottom said:
It's remarkable to me how hard it is for you to understand something your politics won't like. I'm simply saying that testing is used throughout the education system, why is it only teachers who's quality can't be tested?
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It's not a politics thing, it is an effectiveness thing. My training is to look for effective solutions and rating teachers based on standardized tests are not it. As I said, the SATs are shown to be a poor measure of the very thing they are supposed to measure yet you want to use them to evaluate a ancillary concept.

Yes teachers can be tested but students writing standardized tests aren't an effective way to do it. I could see having teachers reviewed by 2 or 3 principals, supposedly experts in their field, as being more effective. All they need to do is make it easier to fire the ones who do poorly.
 
basketcase said:
It's not a politics thing, it is an effectiveness thing. My training is to look for effective solutions and rating teachers based on standardized tests are not it. As I said, the SATs are shown to be a poor measure of the very thing they are supposed to measure yet you want to use them to evaluate a ancillary concept.
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So we should let anyone go to UT because standardized testing (which would be entrance exams and every grade given) don't work... should we simply randomly select kids to go to medical school....

All measures are imperfect, but they are better than no measures, right now we have unionized civil servants working short days 8 months a year grasping at any straw to avoid being accountable. Why should we not measure, in a standard way, how well children are learning over time and look for the drivers of those who fall behind. I started this thread by saying that very little of it is teachers but clearly some of it is... and we should measure that as best we can.
 
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