Great ideas for improving educational outcomes for all. Some of it sounds like No Child Left Behind in seeking to define metrics for accountability. It’s odd to say republicans are collectively negative and dangerous on education policies, while you support good charter school systems. It’s democrats who have fought to block, or limit, their expansion in lockstep with the teacher’s unions.
1) yeah, that’s a common response. But it’s really that teaching is not competitive. It’s highly collaborative. It’s not about accountability.
2) no, the question is NOT about telling the top 20% from the bottom 20%. No policy could possibly work that way. To stick with your numbers, it’s about telling the top 20% from the middle 60% from the bottom 20%. It’s about anywhere you are drawing a line to make different groups.
3) no, you actually don’t need charisma to be an effective teacher. That fact that you think it is necessary…
4) “I don’t buy…” is the language of someone who doesn’t actually know, hasn’t tried to make it work, hasn’t read the research, or even thought deeply about how complex the question is. This is a really tough question, something people have been trying to find good solutions for for generations. Your instincts might not be the best guidance on this topic.
I think for all the talk from people about how teachers hate accountability or whatever, I think the vast majority of teachers would be OK w/ some sort of performance based standards based on actual outside teachers and administrators from other schools (to even out any worries about favoritism) looking in on how they teach, but many reformers don't like it because it's not a math equation and it'd be more time consuming and expensive than some standardized tests.
Teacher's don't like bad teachers, they just don't trust the same people who want to make their lives worse to determine who the bad teacher is.
Ironically, again, people seem to get why cops may not want the people who hate cops in charge of determining how cops keep or lose their jobs, but think teachers should welcome it.
> but many reformers don't like it because it's not a math equation and it'd be more time consuming and expensive than some standardized tests
It's unions that want objective metrics. Like "years of service." The crazy "delta-of-a-delta" to use test scores to determine effectiveness is the compromise.
I agree that the way most professionals should be graded on their performance is evaluation by other professionals.
I guess my issue with Charter schools is I don't see where this policy is supposed to end. Sure, at the margin it might make sense to improve outcomes by allowing students to get cheap education at state-funded private institutions, but that doesn't seem like a scalable solution; rather, we need to build state capacity to provide good education. I'm open to this meaning fights (maybe even big fights) with Teachers' Unions, but it seems like what Matt has in mind is charter schools.
I've read Matt's larger essay on this, I just don't find it credible that at a large scale, outsourcing to nonprofits is a wise way to build public services in any aspect of US government.
Matt writes about the pernicious effects of outsourcing to nonprofits in plenty of other spheres, so why would this be different?
"But thinking about it seriously, if we’re talking about learning loss (and we should be), shouldn’t we be talking about the old education reform standbys of standards and accountability?"
There is a vibe on the left - am I the only one who feels it? - that standards and accountability are... kind of bad? It's like there was such an overreaction to the punitive mindset that conservatives bring to every issue - education, crime, immigration, welfare, you name it - that we started to think that accountability and punishment are indistinguishable.
The left's obsession with "power dynamics" also feeds into hostility to standards and accountability - after all, a person who is enforcing standards has more power than the person they are enforcing them on, which in modern leftist orthodoxy automatically makes them the Bad Guys. And that sounds over the top, but honestly guys, it's not even really a caricature, it's absolutely what we've been doing. Some of us more emphatically and recklessly than others.
Yeah it’s the phones, but I feel like the fact that it took a DECADE for a critical mass of the education community to go “no seriously what the f—-, put your phone away” is emblematic of the problem I’m describing.
By no means am I trying to ascribe everything to “liberal permissiveness,” and all things considered it is probably not near the top of the list. But it’s a contributing factor in both reality and (especially) the public impression.
Yeah, I think even your most left-wing sort of teacher this comment section would despise for their views on education and social issues would also happily ban phones and honestly, go back to a 2003 standard of what's acceptable in electronics.
Like, I might be finally becoming an old man, but most of the so-called improvements in actual education pushed by all wings of the education movement from right to left outside of maybe digital/electronic blackboards actually seem to be a positive for education.
"During the era when education policy was overwhelmingly focused on low-end performance, students did better across the board. In the more recent era, low-end performance has declined precipitously and the performance of the top students is essentially flat."
This makes sense, especially given typical social promotion policies. The worse the low-end kids are, the more class time they're going to take up, both on dragging the curriculum and misbehaving in class (in part because they can't keep up with the curriculum and get restless.) So it's less opportunity to provide extra enrichment to the higher performing students.
Before social promotion, you could leave those kids back a year to get their shit together behaviorally, emotionally or academically, but now they are thrown into increasingly deep ends of pools they can't swim in, and we keep pulling them out until they're 18 and we say "you're on your own."
And you know, considering what the goal of SOCIAL promotion is, kids don't seem to be doing very well socially.
I think a greater reckoning with Obama's political legacy is necessary. Consider that while Obama himself was quite successful in his two terms: almost nobody picked up his vision. His chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, ran to his left and lost. Bernie Sanders forcefully pulled the Democratic Party left, and they have paid the price for it ever since. Personally: I think much of the blame for our current predicament stems from Obama's terrible choices in both 2016 and 2020, leaving the Democratic Party in disarray.
In 2016: Obama let his personal love of Hillary to push her as the next leader despite many disagreeing with him (including his own Vice-President). He sidelined Biden to push Hillary, and she lost a very winnable election to Trump. Obama largely stayed silent while Bernie Sanders took over the party, and then stayed silent while the 2020 primary became a race to the Left, leaving a now old Biden to win the primary.
Joe Biden rightly deserves blame for running again in 2024: but the Party did not stop him and that includes Biden's old boss. That does not mean it's his fault; but overall Obama left his party in far worse shape than when he found it. Obamaism was successful, but he never found good successors within his party. He is the most popular Democrat who has proven unable to instill that ideology throughout his party. Biden gets all the blame now for it, but Obama should bear a healthy portion of the blame for Trump.
I have devoted my whole professional career to improving the quality of our public schools—both as a teacher in high need schools and my work on various aspects of accountability since leaving the classroom.
But this idea of differentiated pay is never really thought through, carefully.
1) Teachers simply do not want it. It's being imposed on them.
2) Efforts to measure teachers performance and teacher quality are notoriously...challenged. Most barely pass the smell test, and I don't know if any that survive serious examination.
3) So, how to do you reward the best teachers if you can't validity identify them?
My own work has orbited around this question of identifying good teachers. There are two major challenges.
A) The ratio of supervisors to actual teachers is extraordinary low in k-12 education—and the supervisors have many many other responsibilities as well. They simply do not have time to engage in the kind of observation and coaching that gives the real knowledge of who the best teachers are. Best at classroom management? Sure. But teaching is more about far more the keep students in line. In theory, it's about fostering student learning.
B) Matt is long since sick my beating this drum but the standardized tests simply do not measure what they are supposed to measure. I do not simply mean that they are racially biased. I mean that they are not focused on the the actual grade-appropriate learning goals. All of my work is currently focused on this, but what we are measuring actually matters. And it matters if it is not the learning goals for those children.
Unfortunately, waving a magic wand that claims we can already identify the best teachers, just assuming that we can already do that, doesn't solve these problems. Charisma? Sure. Easier to recognize. Classroom discipline? Yeah, like I said. But actually helping students to grow in the ways we expect teachers of that grade(s) and subject(s) to? Nope, we need to do far far far better there.
I mean, surely part of the reason that teachers do not want differentiated pay is that some of the draw of teaching right now is that it's a profession in which you're largely immune from being held to performance standards. Given that status quo, you select in people who are averse to being held to performance standards and select out people who are high-performing and want to be recognized for it. So it's not surprising that it's unpopular with the current population of teachers, but that's the problem!
Your comments on identifying best-performing teachers sound to me a little like you're saying, "Hey, it's hard to reliably identify a top 5% teacher from a top 20% teacher," which is fair enough, but I don't buy that it is thus similarly hard to identify a top 20% teacher from a bottom 20% teacher. Maybe classroom discipline and charisma aren't enough to be a top 5% teacher, but if you don't have classroom discipline and you don't have charisma, are you really going to be an even adequate teacher?
I can still tell you now, 30 years later, which of my high school teachers were clearly top 20% and which were clearly bottom 20%. It was obvious to the students which ones were just phoning it in.
This wasn't necessarily the same as which teachers gave the easiest grades.
Maybe because teachers look at the rest of the professional world and see "performance standards" basically are "the whims of whatever people in C-Suite's matter this year and not what actually matters for their job."
Like, do you think most people w/ professional white collar jobs think Sigma Six or whatever the hot MBA thing of the moment is accurately tracking their performance?
Also, just for example, who's better at classroom discipline? A 9th grade teacher in Lakehurst who's had no incidents at all or a 9th grade teacher in Camden that's kept their rate from rising as opposed to other teachers. That doesn't even account for the part where in a group of 100 kids, maybe you get the 5 shitbirds out of 25, while another teacher only gets 2.
I think it's obviously true that in most organizations, most people's job performance is rated relatively accurately.
Not perfectly accurately, and there are dysfunctional organizations where job performance evaluation is really out to lunch, but decently accurately. I think people who throw up their hands and are like, "IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHO IS A GOOD WORKER AND WHO ISN'T" are silly.
I think you highly overrate how many people, especially in an office environment, think their bosses do a job of determining who is and who isn't doing a good job.
It's just that teaching is still one of the few jobs where the workers have actual power, as opposed to being able to be bowled over by whomever is in charge of them, you actually need to win over the employees, not just tell them, too bad for you like so many people seem to want too.
This isn't just teaching - look at how tech bosses turned to fascists after the slightest bit of pushback from their employees.
No, I’m not. My wife San employment attorney, and this issue is central to her work.
She talks about the importance of job descriptions, feedback, evaluation, performance reviews, documentation. It’s all there in office and other types of jobs.
There’s more data there. There are far better structures. There’s more awareness of performance.
Perhaps you do not know little supervision time school administrations have for teachers
And vice versa, I think that you're in the grips of a conspiracy theory.
Like, I just don't even really know what else to say. Like, I get that there is political hay to be made by blowing up the magnitude of differences in evaluation by 10x, and that some people find it freeing to imagine that they're the victims of conspiracy, but it's just obviously not true.
I mean, I've seen cases where I strongly believe that someone who is actively bad at their job is retained and promoted due to their being good at company politics. And I've seen cases where someone who genuinely has big strengths and big weaknesses are given overall evaluations that I disagree with. But this idea that everyone across all jobs everywhere their performance is just completely illegible? Come on. Nobody I've ever worked with has ever believed that. It's just cope by people who don't want their performance evaluated.
I mean, yes, I think in most 'email jobs' (not saying that as a dunk, but as a descriptor), outside of something like sales, when it comes to people outside of the bottom 10-15% and maybe the top 10-15% and I question the latter part, everybody else is in fact, pretty difficult to determine where they actually are.
The good news about teaching and determining whose good and bad is about 40% of teacher's leave after the 1st five years - obviously, some of these people are 'good teachers' who can't deal with the stress or very specific issues with teaching, but the reality is much like DOGE trying to find actual waste in government, finding bad teachers who don't self-select out of the job is actually pretty difficult outside of obvious situations, which makes the job of reformers who like the message of bad teachers ruining education as a fix (as opposed to y'know, poverty and other major issues that effect things far more than a teacher that scores a 5 instead of 6.5 on some rubric).
Yes, there will be a lot of just adequate teachers, just like there will be a lot of just adequate HR people, a lot of just adequate programmers, and so forth, because most people are just adequate.
Excellent post by Matt today even for those of us with little interest in New Jersey politics. And that's because it's an indicator of where dynamism is and isn't in the Democratic party these days, once you put aside the superficial uniting factor that opposition to Trump brings.
And just to bang that drum once again, this raises big questions for all those people who thought the Democrats shot themselves in the foot by not having a full and free primary for the presidential nomination. Sure, Biden had to be kicked out. But the primary would have been a crapshow because the forces that pushed the party toward being toxic were alive and well. Would the winning nominee, for example, have had a public break with the teachers' union? Looking at New Jersey, the answer is "no way."*
If candidates in New Jersey can't move toward the center on an issue like this, when will the rest of the party? I'm glad we're all opposed to Trump, and that may be enough for narrow victories in 26 and 28, but until we repair our brand they will always be at best nailbiters.
* The same for the way the race for the DNC chair was a festival of kowtowing to identitarian groups.
Hey Matt, I think you are under estimating the impact COVID had on kids' education and also how much it matters to the public.
I teach music lessons all over the Seattle area for a living. So I see kids from lots of different schools. One parent told me last year that a whopping 50% of their daughter's 4th grade class was a full grade level behind in reading. In a high income Seattle suburb.
I DO think parents and teachers alike will thank you for proposing stricter disciplining for kids. They got used to not showing up or doing work during COVID. I see kids at good schools missing huge amounts of class. They need penalties to their grades for being absent or late.
Oh that's interesting. I've privately wondered about this. The rates of suicidal thoughts in kids/teens is unbelievable. I think we do put the idea in their head to some extent.
Cognitive behavioral therapy did wonders for me, but maybe we don't need to teach kids who are already fine to identify negative emotions.
The Power of Character Strengths is a neat positive psychology book that teaches you all these different ways of framing positive attributes in yourself and people around you. There's a little test in there where you can see what your top character strengths are and what activities encourage them. Mine top strength was love of learning :)
It might surprise people around here who usually see me jump in to defend schools and teachers that I somewhat agree with Matt's policies here. Having worked as a teacher in a state without a union, I certainly understand why having some protections in place from capricious administrators is important. I think a lot of union hate is overblown and misplaced. Still, Matt is right to point to a few things that could change at the state level that would help schools improve.
The conversation around advanced coursework should be one of access to advanced courses, not one of restricting them. Parents hate this but they hate it in two semi-contradictory ways. They hate the idea that their bright kid would be denied a chance to succeed in advanced coursework. BUT they also like that advanced courses are selective in ways that advantage their kid but not all kids. Parents hate when tests deny their kids access to, say, advanced track math but they see other kids getting in who they believe should not. I have a feeling that this is why so many school systems have settled on teacher recommendations as a way to place kids on advanced tracks. They like the inefficiencies there. It's like NIMBY for placement decisions. Set a standard measure every kid must exceed, offer some other on-ramps later with higher standards, and don't cave to parents who try and pressure admins into getting their kids into the best classes. (That last one is a much harder fight than you'd expect!)
Teacher pay is really important. If you refuse to pay new teachers more than garbage men people aren't going to go into teaching. My training program has, year after year, had trouble filling seats. This means accepting students who we may not otherwise have accepted had there been more desire in the student body to becoming a teacher. Some of these students simply can't hack the basic courses and get bounced out anyway. Students believe that teaching is a dead-end career where you get paid little, face public hostility, suffer violent students, endure abuse from administrators, and are in the position of being blamed for problems that originate outside of schools. They are, I think reasonably, looking for other lines of work. Beyond that, the pay structure once you become a teacher should incentivize retention, instead it discourages retention. Chad Adleman has a nice post about that: https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/my-favorite-way-to-look-at-teacher
I would also like to see licensure reform. We have a weird kind of system where the traditional pathways have added more and more requirements of dubious value while at the same time states are adding lots of alternative pathways that often require little more than testing. (Again, why do the teacher prep program at all if alternative certification is a thing?) What we know is that teachers improve on the job. They get better as they teach and tend to reach their best somewhere between five and eight years of teaching. While there is some value in a good teacher preparation program, it's less than the improvement teachers make while on the job.
Teacher residencies are a great way to pair licensure, teacher training, and practical classroom experience with a guarantee of a job and placement on the tail end. Moreover, the structure of the residency usually means students take on little to no debt, a big concern among students these days. They've also proven very successful wherever they've been implemented. The challenge is that they are often small programs and require close coordination between school districts and the whoever is running the program (usually a university but not always). In my experience, it's hard to get schools to cooperate with any outside agency or university. A good path forward, and one Matt could include should he want to make more concrete policy recommendations, is a plan to expand teacher residency programs.
There are so many things that are needed to attract and retain teachers, as you know. I live in a district with decent teacher pay - starting pay is more than starting pay for Assistant District Attorneys - and still excellent teachers leave for lower paying jobs. Some of the vitriol against teachers in Slow Boring comments (not on this post so far, but others) reinforces why they might do this.
Because bluntly, a lot of centrist to center-left people see teachers as the overpaid help and think they're smarter than the teachers and could be doing their job, except they're doing something more "important".
This, but even when the stakes are high. "You can try to differentiate yourself from the pack, maybe, you know the NJEA is not going to back you anyway, so why not". Think deeply about what may be improved and how, and make a sterling case for it. Especially when the stakes are high. Don't just mark time!
Gottenheimer is an awful candidate who has spent all his energy as s congressman opposing congestion pricing and is a NIMBY to boot.
Great ideas for improving educational outcomes for all. Some of it sounds like No Child Left Behind in seeking to define metrics for accountability. It’s odd to say republicans are collectively negative and dangerous on education policies, while you support good charter school systems. It’s democrats who have fought to block, or limit, their expansion in lockstep with the teacher’s unions.
1) yeah, that’s a common response. But it’s really that teaching is not competitive. It’s highly collaborative. It’s not about accountability.
2) no, the question is NOT about telling the top 20% from the bottom 20%. No policy could possibly work that way. To stick with your numbers, it’s about telling the top 20% from the middle 60% from the bottom 20%. It’s about anywhere you are drawing a line to make different groups.
3) no, you actually don’t need charisma to be an effective teacher. That fact that you think it is necessary…
4) “I don’t buy…” is the language of someone who doesn’t actually know, hasn’t tried to make it work, hasn’t read the research, or even thought deeply about how complex the question is. This is a really tough question, something people have been trying to find good solutions for for generations. Your instincts might not be the best guidance on this topic.
I think for all the talk from people about how teachers hate accountability or whatever, I think the vast majority of teachers would be OK w/ some sort of performance based standards based on actual outside teachers and administrators from other schools (to even out any worries about favoritism) looking in on how they teach, but many reformers don't like it because it's not a math equation and it'd be more time consuming and expensive than some standardized tests.
Teacher's don't like bad teachers, they just don't trust the same people who want to make their lives worse to determine who the bad teacher is.
Ironically, again, people seem to get why cops may not want the people who hate cops in charge of determining how cops keep or lose their jobs, but think teachers should welcome it.
> but many reformers don't like it because it's not a math equation and it'd be more time consuming and expensive than some standardized tests
It's unions that want objective metrics. Like "years of service." The crazy "delta-of-a-delta" to use test scores to determine effectiveness is the compromise.
I agree that the way most professionals should be graded on their performance is evaluation by other professionals.
I guess my issue with Charter schools is I don't see where this policy is supposed to end. Sure, at the margin it might make sense to improve outcomes by allowing students to get cheap education at state-funded private institutions, but that doesn't seem like a scalable solution; rather, we need to build state capacity to provide good education. I'm open to this meaning fights (maybe even big fights) with Teachers' Unions, but it seems like what Matt has in mind is charter schools.
I've read Matt's larger essay on this, I just don't find it credible that at a large scale, outsourcing to nonprofits is a wise way to build public services in any aspect of US government.
Matt writes about the pernicious effects of outsourcing to nonprofits in plenty of other spheres, so why would this be different?
"But thinking about it seriously, if we’re talking about learning loss (and we should be), shouldn’t we be talking about the old education reform standbys of standards and accountability?"
There is a vibe on the left - am I the only one who feels it? - that standards and accountability are... kind of bad? It's like there was such an overreaction to the punitive mindset that conservatives bring to every issue - education, crime, immigration, welfare, you name it - that we started to think that accountability and punishment are indistinguishable.
The left's obsession with "power dynamics" also feeds into hostility to standards and accountability - after all, a person who is enforcing standards has more power than the person they are enforcing them on, which in modern leftist orthodoxy automatically makes them the Bad Guys. And that sounds over the top, but honestly guys, it's not even really a caricature, it's absolutely what we've been doing. Some of us more emphatically and recklessly than others.
Learning loss is almost entirely about iphones. Seems odd to be placing blame on anything else.
Yeah it’s the phones, but I feel like the fact that it took a DECADE for a critical mass of the education community to go “no seriously what the f—-, put your phone away” is emblematic of the problem I’m describing.
By no means am I trying to ascribe everything to “liberal permissiveness,” and all things considered it is probably not near the top of the list. But it’s a contributing factor in both reality and (especially) the public impression.
My understanding is the education community has been “put the phones away” since forever. They were put the beepers away 30 years ago.
It’s the parents who were freaking out about how will I contact little Madison is there is a school shooting.
Yeah, I think even your most left-wing sort of teacher this comment section would despise for their views on education and social issues would also happily ban phones and honestly, go back to a 2003 standard of what's acceptable in electronics.
Like, I might be finally becoming an old man, but most of the so-called improvements in actual education pushed by all wings of the education movement from right to left outside of maybe digital/electronic blackboards actually seem to be a positive for education.
"During the era when education policy was overwhelmingly focused on low-end performance, students did better across the board. In the more recent era, low-end performance has declined precipitously and the performance of the top students is essentially flat."
This makes sense, especially given typical social promotion policies. The worse the low-end kids are, the more class time they're going to take up, both on dragging the curriculum and misbehaving in class (in part because they can't keep up with the curriculum and get restless.) So it's less opportunity to provide extra enrichment to the higher performing students.
Before social promotion, you could leave those kids back a year to get their shit together behaviorally, emotionally or academically, but now they are thrown into increasingly deep ends of pools they can't swim in, and we keep pulling them out until they're 18 and we say "you're on your own."
And you know, considering what the goal of SOCIAL promotion is, kids don't seem to be doing very well socially.
I think a greater reckoning with Obama's political legacy is necessary. Consider that while Obama himself was quite successful in his two terms: almost nobody picked up his vision. His chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, ran to his left and lost. Bernie Sanders forcefully pulled the Democratic Party left, and they have paid the price for it ever since. Personally: I think much of the blame for our current predicament stems from Obama's terrible choices in both 2016 and 2020, leaving the Democratic Party in disarray.
In 2016: Obama let his personal love of Hillary to push her as the next leader despite many disagreeing with him (including his own Vice-President). He sidelined Biden to push Hillary, and she lost a very winnable election to Trump. Obama largely stayed silent while Bernie Sanders took over the party, and then stayed silent while the 2020 primary became a race to the Left, leaving a now old Biden to win the primary.
Joe Biden rightly deserves blame for running again in 2024: but the Party did not stop him and that includes Biden's old boss. That does not mean it's his fault; but overall Obama left his party in far worse shape than when he found it. Obamaism was successful, but he never found good successors within his party. He is the most popular Democrat who has proven unable to instill that ideology throughout his party. Biden gets all the blame now for it, but Obama should bear a healthy portion of the blame for Trump.
The head of a teacher's union jumping right into a governor's race is totally wild, has that ever happened before?
I have devoted my whole professional career to improving the quality of our public schools—both as a teacher in high need schools and my work on various aspects of accountability since leaving the classroom.
But this idea of differentiated pay is never really thought through, carefully.
1) Teachers simply do not want it. It's being imposed on them.
2) Efforts to measure teachers performance and teacher quality are notoriously...challenged. Most barely pass the smell test, and I don't know if any that survive serious examination.
3) So, how to do you reward the best teachers if you can't validity identify them?
My own work has orbited around this question of identifying good teachers. There are two major challenges.
A) The ratio of supervisors to actual teachers is extraordinary low in k-12 education—and the supervisors have many many other responsibilities as well. They simply do not have time to engage in the kind of observation and coaching that gives the real knowledge of who the best teachers are. Best at classroom management? Sure. But teaching is more about far more the keep students in line. In theory, it's about fostering student learning.
B) Matt is long since sick my beating this drum but the standardized tests simply do not measure what they are supposed to measure. I do not simply mean that they are racially biased. I mean that they are not focused on the the actual grade-appropriate learning goals. All of my work is currently focused on this, but what we are measuring actually matters. And it matters if it is not the learning goals for those children.
Unfortunately, waving a magic wand that claims we can already identify the best teachers, just assuming that we can already do that, doesn't solve these problems. Charisma? Sure. Easier to recognize. Classroom discipline? Yeah, like I said. But actually helping students to grow in the ways we expect teachers of that grade(s) and subject(s) to? Nope, we need to do far far far better there.
I mean, surely part of the reason that teachers do not want differentiated pay is that some of the draw of teaching right now is that it's a profession in which you're largely immune from being held to performance standards. Given that status quo, you select in people who are averse to being held to performance standards and select out people who are high-performing and want to be recognized for it. So it's not surprising that it's unpopular with the current population of teachers, but that's the problem!
Your comments on identifying best-performing teachers sound to me a little like you're saying, "Hey, it's hard to reliably identify a top 5% teacher from a top 20% teacher," which is fair enough, but I don't buy that it is thus similarly hard to identify a top 20% teacher from a bottom 20% teacher. Maybe classroom discipline and charisma aren't enough to be a top 5% teacher, but if you don't have classroom discipline and you don't have charisma, are you really going to be an even adequate teacher?
I can still tell you now, 30 years later, which of my high school teachers were clearly top 20% and which were clearly bottom 20%. It was obvious to the students which ones were just phoning it in.
This wasn't necessarily the same as which teachers gave the easiest grades.
Maybe because teachers look at the rest of the professional world and see "performance standards" basically are "the whims of whatever people in C-Suite's matter this year and not what actually matters for their job."
Like, do you think most people w/ professional white collar jobs think Sigma Six or whatever the hot MBA thing of the moment is accurately tracking their performance?
Also, just for example, who's better at classroom discipline? A 9th grade teacher in Lakehurst who's had no incidents at all or a 9th grade teacher in Camden that's kept their rate from rising as opposed to other teachers. That doesn't even account for the part where in a group of 100 kids, maybe you get the 5 shitbirds out of 25, while another teacher only gets 2.
I think it's obviously true that in most organizations, most people's job performance is rated relatively accurately.
Not perfectly accurately, and there are dysfunctional organizations where job performance evaluation is really out to lunch, but decently accurately. I think people who throw up their hands and are like, "IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW WHO IS A GOOD WORKER AND WHO ISN'T" are silly.
I’m not saying that at all. To the contrary. I am saying that we’ve been unwilling to take best in the systems we would need to do that.
I want those systems to be put in place. But they ain’t there, now.
I think you highly overrate how many people, especially in an office environment, think their bosses do a job of determining who is and who isn't doing a good job.
It's just that teaching is still one of the few jobs where the workers have actual power, as opposed to being able to be bowled over by whomever is in charge of them, you actually need to win over the employees, not just tell them, too bad for you like so many people seem to want too.
This isn't just teaching - look at how tech bosses turned to fascists after the slightest bit of pushback from their employees.
No, I’m not. My wife San employment attorney, and this issue is central to her work.
She talks about the importance of job descriptions, feedback, evaluation, performance reviews, documentation. It’s all there in office and other types of jobs.
There’s more data there. There are far better structures. There’s more awareness of performance.
Perhaps you do not know little supervision time school administrations have for teachers
And vice versa, I think that you're in the grips of a conspiracy theory.
Like, I just don't even really know what else to say. Like, I get that there is political hay to be made by blowing up the magnitude of differences in evaluation by 10x, and that some people find it freeing to imagine that they're the victims of conspiracy, but it's just obviously not true.
I mean, I've seen cases where I strongly believe that someone who is actively bad at their job is retained and promoted due to their being good at company politics. And I've seen cases where someone who genuinely has big strengths and big weaknesses are given overall evaluations that I disagree with. But this idea that everyone across all jobs everywhere their performance is just completely illegible? Come on. Nobody I've ever worked with has ever believed that. It's just cope by people who don't want their performance evaluated.
I mean, yes, I think in most 'email jobs' (not saying that as a dunk, but as a descriptor), outside of something like sales, when it comes to people outside of the bottom 10-15% and maybe the top 10-15% and I question the latter part, everybody else is in fact, pretty difficult to determine where they actually are.
The good news about teaching and determining whose good and bad is about 40% of teacher's leave after the 1st five years - obviously, some of these people are 'good teachers' who can't deal with the stress or very specific issues with teaching, but the reality is much like DOGE trying to find actual waste in government, finding bad teachers who don't self-select out of the job is actually pretty difficult outside of obvious situations, which makes the job of reformers who like the message of bad teachers ruining education as a fix (as opposed to y'know, poverty and other major issues that effect things far more than a teacher that scores a 5 instead of 6.5 on some rubric).
Yes, there will be a lot of just adequate teachers, just like there will be a lot of just adequate HR people, a lot of just adequate programmers, and so forth, because most people are just adequate.
Excellent post by Matt today even for those of us with little interest in New Jersey politics. And that's because it's an indicator of where dynamism is and isn't in the Democratic party these days, once you put aside the superficial uniting factor that opposition to Trump brings.
And just to bang that drum once again, this raises big questions for all those people who thought the Democrats shot themselves in the foot by not having a full and free primary for the presidential nomination. Sure, Biden had to be kicked out. But the primary would have been a crapshow because the forces that pushed the party toward being toxic were alive and well. Would the winning nominee, for example, have had a public break with the teachers' union? Looking at New Jersey, the answer is "no way."*
If candidates in New Jersey can't move toward the center on an issue like this, when will the rest of the party? I'm glad we're all opposed to Trump, and that may be enough for narrow victories in 26 and 28, but until we repair our brand they will always be at best nailbiters.
* The same for the way the race for the DNC chair was a festival of kowtowing to identitarian groups.
Hey Matt, I think you are under estimating the impact COVID had on kids' education and also how much it matters to the public.
I teach music lessons all over the Seattle area for a living. So I see kids from lots of different schools. One parent told me last year that a whopping 50% of their daughter's 4th grade class was a full grade level behind in reading. In a high income Seattle suburb.
I DO think parents and teachers alike will thank you for proposing stricter disciplining for kids. They got used to not showing up or doing work during COVID. I see kids at good schools missing huge amounts of class. They need penalties to their grades for being absent or late.
“ More mental health inputs sounds like a good idea”
I believe there are several studies that say it just makes things worse.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10764817/#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20qualitative%20studies%20highlight%20that,feel%20more%20stressed%20and%20unhappy.
And then we get to the actual reason for “learning loss” phones.
Oh that's interesting. I've privately wondered about this. The rates of suicidal thoughts in kids/teens is unbelievable. I think we do put the idea in their head to some extent.
Cognitive behavioral therapy did wonders for me, but maybe we don't need to teach kids who are already fine to identify negative emotions.
The Power of Character Strengths is a neat positive psychology book that teaches you all these different ways of framing positive attributes in yourself and people around you. There's a little test in there where you can see what your top character strengths are and what activities encourage them. Mine top strength was love of learning :)
It might surprise people around here who usually see me jump in to defend schools and teachers that I somewhat agree with Matt's policies here. Having worked as a teacher in a state without a union, I certainly understand why having some protections in place from capricious administrators is important. I think a lot of union hate is overblown and misplaced. Still, Matt is right to point to a few things that could change at the state level that would help schools improve.
The conversation around advanced coursework should be one of access to advanced courses, not one of restricting them. Parents hate this but they hate it in two semi-contradictory ways. They hate the idea that their bright kid would be denied a chance to succeed in advanced coursework. BUT they also like that advanced courses are selective in ways that advantage their kid but not all kids. Parents hate when tests deny their kids access to, say, advanced track math but they see other kids getting in who they believe should not. I have a feeling that this is why so many school systems have settled on teacher recommendations as a way to place kids on advanced tracks. They like the inefficiencies there. It's like NIMBY for placement decisions. Set a standard measure every kid must exceed, offer some other on-ramps later with higher standards, and don't cave to parents who try and pressure admins into getting their kids into the best classes. (That last one is a much harder fight than you'd expect!)
Teacher pay is really important. If you refuse to pay new teachers more than garbage men people aren't going to go into teaching. My training program has, year after year, had trouble filling seats. This means accepting students who we may not otherwise have accepted had there been more desire in the student body to becoming a teacher. Some of these students simply can't hack the basic courses and get bounced out anyway. Students believe that teaching is a dead-end career where you get paid little, face public hostility, suffer violent students, endure abuse from administrators, and are in the position of being blamed for problems that originate outside of schools. They are, I think reasonably, looking for other lines of work. Beyond that, the pay structure once you become a teacher should incentivize retention, instead it discourages retention. Chad Adleman has a nice post about that: https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/my-favorite-way-to-look-at-teacher
I would also like to see licensure reform. We have a weird kind of system where the traditional pathways have added more and more requirements of dubious value while at the same time states are adding lots of alternative pathways that often require little more than testing. (Again, why do the teacher prep program at all if alternative certification is a thing?) What we know is that teachers improve on the job. They get better as they teach and tend to reach their best somewhere between five and eight years of teaching. While there is some value in a good teacher preparation program, it's less than the improvement teachers make while on the job.
Teacher residencies are a great way to pair licensure, teacher training, and practical classroom experience with a guarantee of a job and placement on the tail end. Moreover, the structure of the residency usually means students take on little to no debt, a big concern among students these days. They've also proven very successful wherever they've been implemented. The challenge is that they are often small programs and require close coordination between school districts and the whoever is running the program (usually a university but not always). In my experience, it's hard to get schools to cooperate with any outside agency or university. A good path forward, and one Matt could include should he want to make more concrete policy recommendations, is a plan to expand teacher residency programs.
There are so many things that are needed to attract and retain teachers, as you know. I live in a district with decent teacher pay - starting pay is more than starting pay for Assistant District Attorneys - and still excellent teachers leave for lower paying jobs. Some of the vitriol against teachers in Slow Boring comments (not on this post so far, but others) reinforces why they might do this.
Nobody hates teachers more than educated liberals. Not sure why, but it never fails.
Because bluntly, a lot of centrist to center-left people see teachers as the overpaid help and think they're smarter than the teachers and could be doing their job, except they're doing something more "important".
Don't worry, I feel the same way about doctors too. 😂
This column integrates discussion of:
- a core, long-term power dynamic in the national Democratic Party
- the current state of play across the party
- and a deep-dive into the dynamics of NJ, notably ...
- ... why NJ presents the perfect opportunity to overcome the local maximum the party is stuck in
- for five specific actors
So good.
This, but even when the stakes are high. "You can try to differentiate yourself from the pack, maybe, you know the NJEA is not going to back you anyway, so why not". Think deeply about what may be improved and how, and make a sterling case for it. Especially when the stakes are high. Don't just mark time!