Teacher Impact

[groggy]

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.

I don't think its as easy as you say.
And on top of that, its as if the goal is a cookie cutter approach to teachers. The best teachers I've had all had different approaches and appealed to some students but not all. It was the fact that they all had different approaches that helped keep students learning and engaged. Trying to standardize them into the same model of success is like trying to make all students come out equal, its not going to happen or help.

 

[FAST]

Needs to be fixed

All this really is about,...is the big problem of a select group continually getting raises simply based on seniority.

Unlike the real world, were raises are based on performance/achievements,...NOT something that unions have blackmailed the general public for.

FAST

 

[JohnLarue]

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.

No way you are all about effectiveness & still an advocate for continued abuse of the taxpayer by teachers
The educational system in Ontario has to be one of the most ineffective organizations one could dream of

There are many ways to improve the system for the benefit of the students & taxpayers, however the teachers union perverts that goal for their own enrichment

 

[basketcase]

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.......

As usual you refuse to address the actual issues.

SATs and the like are used as admission tests for the small fraction of Americans who go to university and they are poor at that. Studies show that GPAs are better at predicting success.

Discussion and Conclusion

This research examined the relative utility of various predictors of college success as measured by students’ sophomore and senior-year college GPAs. The variables used in this prediction study included HSGPA, SAT, and CLA scores. As expected, HSGPA was found to be the best single predictor of college success (Atkinson & Geiser, 2009), accounting for 21.4% of the variance in sophomore-year GPA and 20.0% of the variance in senior-year GPA
http://cae.org/images/uploads/pdf/Comparing_Alternatives_in_the_Prediction_of_College_Success.pdf

And in case you missed it GPA (or grades as far as Canadian admissions go) are based on how teachers assess their students meaning the teachers themselves are better at predicting success than standardized tests. So standardized tests fail at their main goal of predicting future success (the purpose of education as I see it) and you now want to use it to evaluate something other than what the tests were designed for. Simply put, if the opinions of trained teachers are the best indicator of student success, it seems to me that the opinions of trained principals would be the best indicator of successful teaching. As I suggested before, have a couple principals the teacher doesn't know take part in the evaluation to remove accusations of bias.

It's pretty sad that despite me stating what I see as the best evaluation, you continue to claim there are no measures.

 

[basketcase]

No way you are all about effectiveness & still an advocate for continued abuse of the taxpayer by teachers
The educational system in Ontario has to be one of the most ineffective organizations one could dream of

There are many ways to improve the system for the benefit of the students & taxpayers, however the teachers union perverts that goal for their own enrichment

I was told in a productive discussion it is useful to paraphrase what people say so let me try.

What you are saying is 'I don't like teachers but don't want to actually discuss the topic of the thread'. Does that sum it up?

 

[JohnLarue]

I was told in a productive discussion it is useful to paraphrase what people say so let me try.

What you are saying is 'I don't like teachers but don't want to actually discuss the topic of the thread'. Does that sum it up?

No it does not
How can you possibly use effectiveness and teachers in the same breath?

 

[oldjones]

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.

Fine. Test teachers. But so far all I'm hearing is about testing the products of highly flawed and vastly variable education systems of which teachers are but a part.

Like evaluating house builders' product according to the numbers of people walking away from their mortgages.

Does that mean all MD's are failures because we all die of something? Or only the MDs who don't stop us from smoking, drinking, eating badly, not exercising, and stopping our parents from being born of races prone to shoot each other? We measure all those 'products'? And surely we pay doctors to make patients healthy, and interfere far less with how they do their job, than we do with teachers. Please explain why only teachers are to be held to account and not everyone?

 

[oldjones]

No it does not
How can you possibly use effectiveness and teachers in the same breath?

Let me try a better paraphrase of Larue's position, basket: No one can say in any way that teachers are effective.

The futility of that as a debating position does suggest the unwisdom of 'self-taught' as an educational strategy.

 

[AdamH]

I'm sure this has already been covered, but I can't be bothered to go through the last page and a half.. I can tell you that if I were a teacher whose pay was directly linked to my student's results in standardized testing, I wouldn't teach fuck all other than how to pass the test..

 

[oldjones]

Which would be no problem, as we all know the tests are superbly excellent—although not yet quite perfect—tools for assessing absorption of an entire curriculum and the rational thought processes for utilizing it in life and the world. A high test mark is therefore a concrete assurance there can be little or nothing lacking in the student's knowledge or readiness and ability to use it. Nothing more required; they got it all.

Of course one wonders why students aren't permitted to simply take the test instead of being taught—let alone learning—at all. We could have MMDs out and operating far faster that way, instead of wasting all those med school places for years.

 

[onthebottom]

Which would be no problem, as we all know the tests are superbly excellent—although not yet quite perfect—tools for assessing absorption of an entire curriculum and the rational thought processes for utilizing it in life and the world. A high test mark is therefore a concrete assurance there can be little or nothing lacking in the student's knowledge or readiness and ability to use it. Nothing more required; they got it all.

Of course one wonders why students aren't permitted to simply take the test instead of being taught—let alone learning—at all. We could have MMDs out and operating far faster that way, instead of wasting all those med school places for years.

Which I guess is why tests are used to give grades and gain admittance to higher education.

 

[onthebottom]

As usual you refuse to address the actual issues.

SATs and the like are used as admission tests for the small fraction of Americans who go to university and they are poor at that. Studies show that GPAs are better at predicting success.

Discussion and Conclusion

This research examined the relative utility of various predictors of college success as measured by students’ sophomore and senior-year college GPAs. The variables used in this prediction study included HSGPA, SAT, and CLA scores. As expected, HSGPA was found to be the best single predictor of college success (Atkinson & Geiser, 2009), accounting for 21.4% of the variance in sophomore-year GPA and 20.0% of the variance in senior-year GPA
http://cae.org/images/uploads/pdf/Comparing_Alternatives_in_the_Prediction_of_College_Success.pdf

And in case you missed it GPA (or grades as far as Canadian admissions go) are based on how teachers assess their students meaning the teachers themselves are better at predicting success than standardized tests. So standardized tests fail at their main goal of predicting future success (the purpose of education as I see it) and you now want to use it to evaluate something other than what the tests were designed for. Simply put, if the opinions of trained teachers are the best indicator of student success, it seems to me that the opinions of trained principals would be the best indicator of successful teaching. As I suggested before, have a couple principals the teacher doesn't know take part in the evaluation to remove accusations of bias.

It's pretty sad that despite me stating what I see as the best evaluation, you continue to claim there are no measures.

And the grades come from test scores.... Your dancing pretty hard. I will agree that education has done a shitty job building reliable measurements and metrics.

 

[FAST]

A good example

I'm sure this has already been covered, but I can't be bothered to go through the last page and a half.. I can tell you that if I were a teacher whose pay was directly linked to my student's results in standardized testing, I wouldn't teach fuck all other than how to pass the test..

YEP,...that's how the current breed of teachers look at teaching,...

FAST

 

[AdamH]

YEP,...that's how the current breed of teachers look at teaching,...

FAST

So then you agree that paying them for these "results" is a dumb idea?

 

[onthebottom]

So then you agree that paying them for these "results" is a dumb idea?

What results should they be paid for?

 

[AdamH]

What results should they be paid for?

Off the top of my head? Some kinda combination of their student attendance record, drop out rate, pass/fail rate, student/parent rating.. To be honest I don't know.. I can tell you that paying them based on how well kids pass a specific test won't improve a damned thing though..

 

[Toke]

Which I guess is why tests are used to give grades and gain admittance to higher education.

I don't get what you're saying... Using tests as admittance to higher education makes way more sense for individual students then assessing a teacher on the collective grades of 100+ students. Getting into University is seen as an individual's achievement. A teacher's success is not (and should not be) based on the success of a large number of students (way too many variables to consider).

 

[onthebottom]

Off the top of my head? Some kinda combination of their student attendance record, drop out rate, pass/fail rate, student/parent rating.. To be honest I don't know.. I can tell you that paying them based on how well kids pass a specific test won't improve a damned thing though..

Learning is the reason we have teachers, testing is how we measure learning. None of your other metrics would come close to measuring the desired outcome.

 

[onthebottom]

I don't get what you're saying... Using tests as admittance to higher education makes way more sense for individual students then assessing a teacher on the collective grades of 100+ students. Getting into University is seen as an individual's achievement. A teacher's success is not (and should not be) based on the success of a large number of students (way too many variables to consider).

See above.

I think the ONLY measure of teacher success should be "based on the success of a large number of students". Why else do we have teachers?

 

[AdamH]

Learning is the reason we have teachers, testing is how we measure learning. None of your other metrics would come close to measuring the desired outcome.

But you admit that all a teacher would have to do to get the results they would need, would simply be to teach the test.. So what's the fucking point?