I always wanted to be a teacher. Somewhere along the way I realized engineering would be more challenging and rewarding, and went that route instead. But I was maybe 5 years out of college when all this stuff really came to a head. I was not loving engineering so much and I recall thinking that if they wanted to “fix” the teaching profession, whatever they did, it ought to make it more appealing/accessible to people like me. (Egocentric, right?) To this day, if they had a program where, say, I could do a 3-month boot camp and then start teaching high school Physics and Calculus and STEM at half the salary I make now, I’d jump on it. But the hoops are too big and the pay is too low.
Ditto. I always had a lot of respect for my teachers, and a lot of patience for kids (even, say, as a teen towards younger kids). Training and teaching new employees has often been the most rewarding part of my career in the private sector. I think, like lots of people, I graduated college and started making decent money, would occasionally eyeball the teaching profession and see the low pay for starting teachers and just thought it completely unfeasible to make that jump with a young family.
That said, I have to commute quite a distance to make the money I do, but it's not like I'm making CEO money, either. I'd be willing and able to take a substantial pay cut to teach at one of the 5 or 6 schools within 3 miles of my house that desperately need teachers. However, it feels like if you are a mid-career professional looking to flip your skills and knowledge to teach the youth, you almost have to be willing to take a vow of poverty to do it at the schools that need it the most.
One of the best teachers I ever worked with was an engineer who made the leap into teaching. I don't remember why she made the change, but she was a phenomenal asset to her students and is probably one of those teachers that kids remember and think about years later.
(To the point of the article because I can't resist, she also hated that there was no science on the state tests, so she was not eligible for merit pay. I'd argue she taught some of those kids more math than their math teachers, but they got the $1000 check at the end of the year for her adding value!)
If you are serious about a career change this is the right time to do it. But you'd need to look at private schools, not public - unions have their salary steps in a legal bind and you'd be starting at 40K at best. Depending on the area, private schools I have found are willing to take risks on people shifting into education, and since there are no unions, you are able to negotiate the salary you want.
3 month boot camp = find a way for your current job to let you have a chunk of time off each day in the summer to teach a summer camp thing. Pay would be crap but the point is to start learning the skills and have something on your CV you can point to when you then show up at a private school asking for a full time job.
OR
Show up at a public / private school and ask them if you can run an after school STEM club. 1) Kids love making things. 2) Parents will sign them up for it. 3) Schools legit are scrambling to fill regular vacancies let alone after school stuff.
OR
Look around for NGOs that run STEM type things. See what kind of jobs they have on offer. NGOs are able to tap into grant money and pay is not strait-jacketed by union contracts. Many pay crap but some do not. Find the ones that do not.
Is there a good way to do this if you don't have a STEM background? I'm a high-level startup and operations executive and I've thought above moving into teaching. I'd be OK with the pay cut but my sense is that the non-STEM roles (history, english, etc.) require graduate degrees in those fields, and I'm not sure I'd be able to hack teaching high school math or science without a huge amount of remedial training (on top of training to be a teacher.)
You could start with things like Mock Trial programs or Entrepreneurial Studies (there's actually a national Lemonade Day program). Again - if you want to be able to negotiate any kind of salary beyond starting pay you'd need to look at private & independent schools. I should add also not religious - Catholic schools tend to pay the least out of all the types of schools I know of. Context matters, mine is East Asian international schools and Ohio.
Check out what's going on in your local area. Hard to say what ngo has a great link with schools. Eg there's a guy in Cleveland who runs a community garage and drives a trailer up to schools and they fix motorcycle engines after school.
Yeah...Ohio, and most places outside of major metro areas, start you much lower. Hilliard (a nice but not *too* nice suburb of Columbus) quoted me Masters with zero years of experience at 44k.
I almost hate to say it, but most (not all!) of the math education majors I saw in my upper-level math classes did not *truly* understand what they were doing. It was mostly mechanical for them, which is fine for a practitioner, but you'd ideally like a teacher to have a deeper appreciation of the subject.
The potential unnecessity of deeper understanding for teaching / learning useful skills is also weirdly on display in mathematics.
Like, elementary schoolers can do basic addition and subtraction, but trying to explain what the integers are with respect to a deeper understanding involves explaining what a ring is, which implicates what a group is, which implicates what a function is, which is all neat and valuable information but not really what we try to teach elementary schoolers. Likewise, epsilon-delta treatment of limits is neat, but it's also not really what even high school BC Calc is about despite the former being a more rigorous formalization of the latter.
In math the mechanics actually *do* have a lot of pedagogical separability from the subject matter. The distance seems smallest in algebra and word problems and geometry, but for a lot of primary and secondary school stuff I'm not certain that deeper understanding is necessarily even a huge value-add.
I might just be generalizing from my own experiences, but I felt that a good teacher who understood the subject helped me make connections between concepts. They can also contextualize things, e.g., know which techniques may be more or less important to move forward. To give a concrete example, all the integration tricks are mostly useless whereas knowing why a Taylor series works and what it's for is one of the most important things I ever learned for my career in physics.
I wanted to be an engineer, and then learned in my first *actual* physics course that I had never really been taught science in high school, just formulas and plug and chug. So ended up as a teacher.
I mean it's a longer story about science - I also realized well after college that I didn't have the "growth mindset" I would have needed to learn from the initial setback.
I spent ~15 years teaching history, mostly middle school, and now have what I am well aware is the best job I will ever have: enrichment support for K-8 at a private school. All the delights of teaching with even *more* autonomy and no grading.
Yep, I had a very similar experience. Weirdly, I ended up teaching at a university because I would have needed additional qualifications to teach high school. Now I work in faculty development- teaching university faculty how to teach - at an Ivy League school, but am still not allowed to teach high school.
I should clarify that I'm not talking about going into a tenure track research position where teaching is a secondary or tertiary responsibility. I was in a teaching-only adjunct role. Of course these are still not exactly the same thing, but to Marie's original point, it probably isn't great if someone has relevant expertise and would like to teach but ends up doing something else because the requirements are too onerous, even at a time when we are worried about teacher shortages.
That’s an important qualification. Nevertheless I *still* think these are different jobs. I concede that there is a lot of overlap in terms of many of the skills or even the disciplinary knowledge base , but there are still significant differences between being given authority and responsibility over minors and being an instructor of adults. It makes sense to me a priori that the state will control more tightly the licensing anyone whose going to work with minors.
Professors do research. But I was amazed to realize that a professor from whom I was taking an upper-level "senior" audit class was planning his lessons like a real "teacher": we even had a few hands-on activities. (I recognized the result of the lesson planning because I've had a bit of teacher training.)
I think I could have been a good teacher, and could have found enjoyment in it, but the bureaucracy and politics of the profession would have made me miserable, with so many people having so many Very Strong Opinions on how kids should be taught. Something like the 3 month boot camp over a summer that you describe where I have great control over what to teach would be nice, but also an opportunity that's not likely to arise.
in my experience schools are dreadfully pessimistic environments. there's usually a handful of veteran teachers who are really intelligent and successful, they teach all the highest-level classes and are close allies of the administration. then there's all the other teachers, who more or less openly despise admin and the aforementioned group of teachers and see any and all changes and actions as hostile threats.
the internet is...and yeah the faculty lounge is also hostile but the teachers who think this pessimistically don't give enough of a shit to say anything to the rookie.
It's going to be one of those crazy days when some dude we've never seen before leaves 1/3 of the total comments and Milan has to wave a flamethrower around.
Does every industry have these kind of nutjobs? I've encountered them a few other places online. One of my close friends teaches at a grad school of education and he'll reply like this in email chains, but I feel like he would have the sense to not waste his morning doing this. I was kind of excited upon reading this article as I have actual experience in what MY describes but now the comment section is this kid demonstrating the power of the false binary all over the place.
I do wish the kid would slow down and pick their shots - seems like there is an occasional point in some of their comments but hard to find that amidst the noise.
One of the pleasures of being on West Coast time is that one gets to read all the reactions people have to some deleted comment -- it really fires the imagination in wondering what said banned person wrote.
FWIW, my whole damn point is that we have incentivized a critical field like teaching to be one that requires participants to be “giving” because they are underpaid for their skills. I did not unpack my resume but I have plenty of experience teaching and coaching kids in STEM from all kinds of backgrounds. I never said I thought the job would be easy. But, ya know, if my “ilk” is unwanted and unneeded, I guess I’ll just go fuck off and stop spending all the time I do volunteering ✌️
Good question. Also clearly a calc/physics teacher would probably also teach Algebra 2, stats, etc. But maybe most of those roles are currently filled by excellent teachers?? Not a sarcastic question.
I was being rhetorical, I think they clearly are in high demand. My brother got an undergrad in math before his teaching degree and definitely feels this way.
There are just more high paying private sector options for folks with a strong math/physics background than a sociology/history one.
Based on personal anecdote, I feel like the hardest classes tend to be taught by the best teachers, because teaching Calc BC is hard and prestigious. But idk.
Sure. But are there enough of them to go around? I honestly don’t know. And in my imagination, someone like me would teach any HS math class necessary up to and including Calc BC.
I got to be a "junior teacher" when I taught English in the Peace Corps (*after* retirement I must always note.) "Junior" in the sense that I was more of a classroom aide rather than teaching on my own, which would have been impossible given lack of language for classroom management. But yes, the PC training was indeed a very useful 3-month boot camp. It was fascinating trying to think up ways to engage the kids and support my host-country counterpart teachers.
Another way to do it would be for employers to allow people to teach a class at the local high school after some training. Volunteer experts could work in partnership with a teacher, be present in every class to give one-on-one support and teach a few lessons on their own.) This would be much more meaningful than those silly "volunteer" days that companies send their employees out to do.
I feel you. My son in elementary school recently tried to recruit me for an open teaching spot at the school and my response was that the school couldn't afford me and we couldn't afford what the school would pay.
“Discounting the pay thing” is a big thing 😆 I don’t imagine it would be rosy, I have a ton of experience with kids and education, I just think the market forces that make it easy for me to blow off entirely are strong for lots of similarly-inclined people. Also I’ve looked into it, Ohio (where I live) has some kind of 2 year provisional license path but it has a lot of conditions on it, and only one school in the city qualifies.
Just wrote a long reply above about how to get in. I feel like I recall you are in the cincy area? I've got a Columbus - Cleveland - Cincinnati - Pittsburgh - Indy spreadsheet of both great districts and top notch private schools I made in 2018 when looking for a job within driving distance of Columbus. Country Day would be the one I would target if I were you. Summit is the other one I have heard great things about. But I know nothing about the pay scales in Cincy - they may just laugh you out the door when you tell them what you need to earn at half your existing salary.
Yeah, maybe I should look into whether private schools are able to be more flexible with credentialing. As it stands, if I can ride out 5 more years or so working for The Man, I'll be able to pseudo-early retire- in that scenario I could work with far less pay.
Oh they can 100% waive credentialing in Ohio. I have a teaching license but a decent number of my colleagues do not. It's a nice but not necessary feature of a successful application. And the more niche or in demand the position (robotics!!!), the more flexibility.
The low point of the push for teacher evaluations in NYC came when the Bloomberg administration released the evaluation results of all the public school teachers to the press, and the NY Post did this story about “the worst teacher” in the city, printing her name and picture for all to see:
It later came out that this teacher’s students were recent immigrants with special needs who did not speak English, so they had some academic challenges to say the least, and couldn’t possibly have scored well on the state exams that made up a big part of the evaluation.
The NY Post didn’t retract the story or add any context, and to this day if you google the teacher’s name this story shaming her is the first thing that comes up. It was pretty much impossible to get teacher buy-in for the system after that.
I get frustrated with the arguments against pay by merit.
They tend to be along the lines of "It's hard to measure!", "What if I get a bad boss that hates me for no reason!".
EVERY field has this problem. You're not special. Do people think it's trivial to determine with perfect accuracy who the most valuable software developer is? Just counting commits to git is stupid and everyone knows it. However there are clearly better and worse programmers, and I think just about everyone in tech would find it completely insane to say "Well, impossible to know for sure who is better so lets just pay based on seniority."
I (like everyone) know several teachers. All of them would tell you there are obviously good teachers and bad teachers and it's loosely correlated to seniority at best.
I have seen stronger forms of the statement I'm about to make, but to listen to the loudest 10% of teachers, teachers face many workplace problems that are TOTALLY UNIQUE to education (that are absolutely in no way unique to education).
I suspect the other 90% know that there's a support club for that, it's called everybody, and we meet at the bar. Those 10% though, holy cannoli.
These problems might not be unique to teaching, but they are particular to public service (with its unique sensitivity to corruption driving a need for systematized over subjective evaluation). Teaching is one of the largest and most visible public sector workforces.
Excellent example! This comment just completely handwaves away the *existence* of any job where you go on a factory floor, or any job where you perform any kind of field work.
I mean, if the proposal had been 'go by anonymous evaluations of your peers' that would still have a lot of problems, but it has a different set of problems. The obvious difference between a software engineer and a teacher is that, generally, a software engineer's output is dependent on their ability and the support they're given. A teacher's output is critically dependent on the input (students) they're given.
Now, teachers generally don't say this, because it sounds really bad, but the real answer is (as noted above in the story of 'the worst teacher in New York' that how well your students do (especially on comparative standardized tests) will be incredibly dependent on which students you get, a factor over which you have minimal, if any, control.
I don't know man... I've started with some pretty rough code bases...
In general I think everyone agrees you can't just look at outputs, it's delta over the course of the year. However I hate to get into the details of how good any test or method is. I'm sure none are prefect. My frustration is people throwing up their hands and giving up on the entire idea of rewarding merit. It's not acceptable.
I mean...isn't it? If you can't accurately measure 'merit' than trying to reward it is silly. Also, you probably want some sort of comparison of the costs of gathering/using the 'data to evaluate merit' versus the benefits of having/using that data. It's funny how the whole notion of cost-benefit analysis just sort of disappears in this arena...
Also, no, it's not delta over the course of the year. It's delta over the course of the year, compared to what a 'good teacher' could have done with those students. So, good luck with that comparison to a counterfactual.
Now, where I think you could do better would be more focus on what is probably a better measure of merit, which is (as you note) superior/peer review. But that's not sufficiently objective/numeric to meet modern expectations for discipline/termination/reward. I do think the belief that everything can be accurately measured and compared is fairly crippling to a lot of things and this is one of them.
No, it's not. It's unreasonable for an entire profession to declare themselves too hard to evaluate so just give me my standard cost of living +2% raise every year. If you disagree then we're at an impasse that isn't going to be resolved.
I don't feel like you need to a degree in data science to think through a how improvements in student performance over time could be a useful input to a performance appraisal. Seems obvious to me but others disagree. Performance on one data point on one cohort over one time period is clearly an inadequate way to comprehensively evaluate anyone on anything, and if there is a specific proposal to do so I'll happy call it out as dumb. It's just as silly as saying there is nothing to be gained by measuring student performance at all.
I'm also absolutely unwilling to concede we can't use superior/peer review. Not clear which "modern expectation" you're referring to, but if that's the sticking point then does this mean you're on board with fighting to change that expectation? Which does not apply in any private sector industry... many of which I'd contend have many subjective and hard to measure aspects to their jobs.
In my mind if that is a hard line folks are going to take (and I think it is harder than even most unions take) then I'll have to jump on some combination of a charter school/privatization train.
I mean, I personally am in favor of more flexibility in the use of peer/superior input and more flexibility in discipline/termination (all the way up the chain, so if you're a principal rewarding your buddies and firing your enemies, yeah, you should be fired).
But as a general rule that's been moved away from on the government side of things out of legitimate (but in my view misguided) concerns about favoritism, politicization, and misuse of discretion. There's a reason we ended up where we are, because seniority is easy to adjudicate and non-political.
I think that's a mistake in a whole range of things and we'd be better off increasing discretion and punishing people who we decide have misused that discretion, rather than limiting discretion and only punishing people who violate a specific written rule, but that's where we've ended up generally on the governmental side out of a combination of fear that discretion will be misused by the government/people and fear that they'll be punished for doing their jobs by employees/unions.
I frankly do not see a great way out of that bind.
No one's going for a policy that doesn't kick in for five years [especially since testing and data gathering will not hold still for those five years, so you're very unlikely to get comparable results].
I think the challenge for large, unionized employee sectors is that it's a lot easier for them to believe and codifying their own BS.
All those software developers (and every other profession I have experience with) are constantly complaining about their evaluation metrics. They also grumble about organizational changes and tend to think the bosses are doofuses. But they grumble and then move on, and probably even realize on some level that the evaluations and changes are in some way positive. They don't have a superstructure that's telling them their right and figuring out ways to convert the grumbling into political and community support.
Not sure how to articulate this - maybe it's true in other industries as well. But I'll try. In education, teachers are not just the provider of the service (helping kids learn), they are also the product (come to our district because we have the best teachers). Add to that the ability of teachers and principals to very easily ignore new initiatives by just not doing them, and the entrenched power of teachers in their unions, and you get a system very resistant to change.
> However there are clearly better and worse programmers, and I think just about everyone in tech would find it completely insane to say "Well, impossible to know for sure who is better so lets just pay based on seniority."
Yeah, but I am paid based on seniority and not based on merit. I mean, sure, supposedly I have my title because I am a good programmer who deserves the responsibility placed on me, and yes I am evaluated by my manager on a yearly basis to see if I live up to all of that.
The reality, though, is that I'm not paid based on my "objective" performance, I'm paid based on whether I can placate my boss and not piss off my coworkers too much. It's not like there's some formula that rates my code and spits out a salary level or anything. I'm certainly not paid more if write better code, unless I can sell that to my boss, and my company decides that I'm valuable enough to promote into an open position.
Plus, there is huge pay disparity between companies (especially FAANG vs non-FAANG), while I sincerely doubt that all the FAANG developers are so much better than the non-FAANG ones - they just live in the right place and managed to have the right pedigree/luck out in an interview.
All of that to say, while there are better and worse programmers, the reality is we _have_ thrown up our hands and just pay people based on seniority (or other, random, factors).
It's absolutely a subjective process and the metrics vary by org.
But every one I've seen has some sort of cohort grading system (junior/senior/principal) that they grade on a bell curve. Being at the top of that curve will get you a bigger raise/faster promotion/better assignments. That grading system is definitely influenced by metrics, but they do not drive the process (and they shouldn't).
If your companies have that curve and you're just annoyed you're not at the top because they don't use "good metrics" that's one problem. If you're saying they don't even have a curve and everything is just biased on seniority that's a different problem.
Sure, I agree that curve exists, but I would describe it as driven as much or more by experience/seniority as metrics. When I interview at a company, they have no decent way to evaluate my background other than how well I sell it - they certainly aren't checking my code. The tests we (as an industry) give to candidates are total BS that do not in any way evaluate their actual day-to-day work. Internal promotions are often based on whether you worked overtime to deliver a project as much as any coding competency.
I'll conclude this way: I agree that I cannot walk into a job and just expect to be promoted because of my experience, so it's not pure seniority. In general, though, people become senior devs (and even above) eventually - there are no junior devs with 15 years of experience. We also don't have good ways to measure developer productivity in a way that lets us objectively evaluate and promote people. Software is definitely less seniority-driven than teaching is, but the proposed reforms are far more data-driven than software is today.
This seems pretty divorced from reality. You act like this
> whether I can placate my boss and not piss off my coworkers too much
is not at all related to performance, for example.
> I sincerely doubt that all the FAANG developers are so much better than the non-FAANG ones - they just live in the right place and managed to have the right pedigree/luck out in an interview.
So they just pay those salaries for the hell of it? I agree, not every hire will pan out, and friction can allow someone to stay longer than they might deserve, but I would bet that the average performance is much higher there.
My expirence on both sides of the "levels.fyi" vs "glassdoor" pay divide in tech is there is a real talent difference but I'd say it's something like a standard deviation. Top ~20% of people writing SW at some non FAANG place like say Ford absolutely could fit in at a place like Apple, but it would take some adjusting and they'd mostly go from outstanding to "yeah he's fine".
I agree we aren't talking about two disparate distributions, but a standard deviation is still pretty significant. That would suggest 84% of the employees at the non-FAANG place would be below average at a FAANG.
Yup, completely agree. A large noticeable difference. That's how I got my ~20%.
However if you feel you're one of the top technical people at any company, you shouldn't be intimidated. Apply! Do your LeetCode and keep applying if that is what you want.
Fields that are not the civil service can lean on the holistic judgement of peers and superiors. Government can’t. Teaching is also uniquely bad for this since the teacher is the only adult in the room most of the time.
I just find that really hard to believe. Both my parents were teachers. They still talk about the worst ones they worked with now 30+ years later. I have a strong sense that everyone in the building could identify who really cares, who's effective, who's not, and who's totally checked out. You don't need decimal point precision for effective performance evaluations. Rankings work well.
Oh 100% this. It's so easy to tell. You can also add sub-categories to the general one of "not bad": "could be great if they would stop being lazy" and my personal favorite, "great for many kids but not all and we need lots of types of great teachers here so as long as they don't fuck up the kids who don't fit with them it's ok they are a net positive". The other thing is that good teachers can tell you who the best ones are. I was never the best teacher, but I have been lucky enough to collaborate with the best ones.
This is not a critical question, but one asking for illumination: how do other teachers tell which others are good or bad? Do other teachers see how they perform in the classroom? If so, how often? And if not via classroom observation, what are their other means of judging those teachers?
My mom was a teacher - sometimes you sub for your colleagues and see whether the class has learned anything. Sometimes your colleague asks for help preparing a lesson plan and asks you stupid questions. Sometimes you overhear a lesson next door while you’re working in your office. My favorite example was another teacher that tried to motivate their class by saying “I got a C in this subject at Cardinal Direction State University, and look, 3 years later, now I’m teaching it. If I can do it, so can you!”
In my Parent's cases, so mid 70s - 2015, the examples are all pretty egregious behaviors problems (e.g., not showing up / late, drugs / alcohol, physical / verbal coaching abuse) still with a sense of frustration how long the process took to fire these teachers. They worked for some of the largest districts in IL so even a small, small % distribution of teachers like this creates a huge problem.
You walk into or past enough lessons to see. A teacher who is always talking is at best one of the "might be good for some" - kids need to be doing things to learn.
As students get older, they'll find ways to ask you about the bad teachers. "Mr Smith, do you make your kids do x?" "Man, Mr Smith, can I please be late to my next class?"
Also lots of shouting at kids tends to correlate with being shite. They are kids. Their whole point is to make mistakes. You're a teacher. Your whole point is to steer them in the right direction. Shame is not typically a feeling one associates with growth.
It seems to me like a department head or principal should be able to say "Guided by, *but not handcuffed by*, these numbers in front of me, I am making the judgement call that I think you're a bad teacher so I'm PIPing/firing you".
That's how it worked when I taught in Georgia. There was some due process, but you don't get it until year three and all it meant is that the school board had to read your statement and judge whether to approve the firing. One way around this was for the principal to eliminate a teaching position at the school so the teacher wasn't being fired, but she'd have to go find another position in the district or she'd be out of a job. In fact, when I got hired, the principal explained to me he'd just let go an old teacher close to retirement by eliminating her position so that he could free up budget for hiring two new teachers. It may have been a flex or some kind of "hey, I'm the boss, you'd better know who's in charge around here" tactic but other teachers confirmed that this was their understanding of how it went down.
I’m sure teachers are the best judges of each others’ performance, as in most fields, but a public bureaucracy cannot go around using the subjective judgements of its employees to inform how it allocates taxpayer money. Not in procurement, not in HR.
Are you saying can't by law? Can't by statute? Can't by union contract?
Or just that their peers and superiors are uniquely unable to provide valid opinions as opposed to every other profession? I find that hard to believe.
However if true then I suppose we can do away with the entire tenure process and just give them lifetime appointments on day 1? Seems like it would save a great deal of effort.
The public is very prickly about perceived favoritism or corruption in public service, and there’s a long history of scandal there. Government is effectively required to use ineffective and wasteful but “objective” processes (see also contracting) because the alternative, discretion, is politically radioactive.
Private sector actors can be more willing to eat the cost of trusting someone to make a decision, even if it doesn’t work out.
Agree, this gets past some of the self serving rationalizations and gets closer to the core of the problem, but as Matt constantly harps on the degree to which we hamstring our government through an overabundance of fear of abuse is the source of a host of issues.
For a while I edited videos for a management consulting firm and like half of the content they produced was "when you try to implement performance evaluations everyone will hate it and complain and say their boss hates them, here are some steps to mitigate this and try to build buy-in" so I wouldn't exactly say that this doesn't happen in the non-unionized private sector, just that those groups by definition don't have the same way to vocalize their complaints.
I know quite a few teachers and my guess is any effort that truly threatens to reallocate the best teachers from the fanciest schools will meet a firestorm of opposition. Financially and politically powerful parents don’t want to change a status quo that funnels the best teachers towards their kids.
The whole point of being a Progressive is willingness to oppose the "financially and politically powerful [] who do not want to change the status quo."
However, teacher "goodness" is not an amorphous fluid. Assigning the teachers who are found to be best at pulling up the worst students in the worst circumstances does not necessarily mean that one-for-one the worst teachers are assigned to the students from the most unproblematic backgrounds.
As an addendum to your point, linking back to the powerful parents - liberal districts - suburbs that vote blue and pay great and offer great working conditions to teachers - are almost never also progressive.
Successful people rarely see to make their jobs harder.
LeBron James keeps changing teams and to bail on the harder job and find the easier path to a championship.
Some people seek the toughest work. But not all.
This is not just about teaching. This is about people.
But there ARE things we could to equalize this a bit. We’d have to give up on the kinds of tiny school districts that dominate the northeast. We’d have to centralize staffing — hiring and allocation — through district offices. Would it work? I don’t know. There are reasons to wonder. It makes sense that a teacher would not want to drive 45 minutes extra each way. It makes sense for them to want SOME control over their commutes.
Perhaps if we paid them like professionals it would help. But we don’t .
Perhaps, but that’s not really what’s being discussed here and would actually fall firmly under the heading of merit pay.
I would contend that I don’t want any wizards of student behavior, I want schools permitted, even mandated, to enforce discipline to the same extent they did a century ago. Parents whose kids are being disrupted from receiving an education should be able to sue districts for performance here to force expulsions and discipline.
Basically everything about the current set of “reforms” around classroom behavior and standards is completely directionally wrong and must be extirpated.
Given what the majority of teachers do and the skills they have, the $55k start, $100k top, $130k mid-level manager, and $160k principal pay scales on offer in my area are perfectly reasonable.
Increasing that, instead of directing funds to social programs that can help students escape the consequences of their home lives, would be a pointless squandering of limited resourced.
I was just at a meeting of school librarians in a relatively rural part of my state. They are worried about filling school librarian positions when people retire. For one open position recently, they had two applicants, and one completely ghosted them on the interview. For another job, an applicant came to the interview saying they didn't want to work mornings! They are located less than an hour from more suburban areas, so no one wants to be in a rural district where there is no money for anything.
For that reason framing it as a reallocation is probably the worst possible way to sell it. "Give more resources" to struggling schools or "make struggling schools more attractive" is a whole lot better
100% agree. My kids are in a "bad" school district. I was standing in line behind our new middle school teacher when he was talking on his phone (he didn't know I was there.) He had taken this job from a wealthier suburban district. He said something like "I will never again listen to anyone who says teachers in my new district are bad and don't work hard. They handle more in 10 minutes than my teachers in (old district) had to in 10 days. The average teacher in my new school works harder and is more dedicated than my best teacher in my old school."
Not 100% sure that’s the point Hunter made. I thought the point was the skill sets are actually pretty different and some teachers who do well in nice schools would struggle at tough ones.
I’m not that sure it’s a problem though. If you simply raise pay at tough schools, teachers whose skillset isn’t suited to them just won’t move. But it’d be a straight transfer from rich to poor people and will be resisted the way those usually are.
You can't shift districts very easily - at least not in Ohio. But the choicer assignments means fewer preps (only have to teach one course five times, not five courses one time) and typically the accelerated courses (tends to correlate with fewer disciplinary problems).
There's a deep sense of hopelessness in this series. The boards are made of uranium. The drill bit is made of butter.
I can recommend the book Weapons of Math Destruction, part of which is about teacher evaluation. The people doing the evaluating produced bad models of teacher performance, that left some teachers getting a bonus one year then getting fired for incompetence the next. I can see why teachers would find such a system capricious.
Secondly, I can recommend this Wesley Yang piece that I'm sure many have already read:
"The soaring rhetoric attending the bipartisan neoliberal push to reform education and close the achievement gaps that preoccupied the Bush and Obama years for which Teach For America was an adjunct now seems, as Matt Yglesias put it in a recent post “extremely old-fashioned.” It is an artifact of the Before Times. But as Yglesias notes in his series on the sudden disappearance of this project, it is the decomposition of this project that fertilizes today’s ideological manias."
I believe about 90% of the answer to why the reform movement died is in that post.
I also think one of its failings (that I wish Matt would get into) is never clearly defining what success would look like. Did the reformers ever do so in a way more specific than better than today? I am old enough to remember the movement and the politics but what I don't recall is the specific metric(s) the reformers had for themselves.
But they are not so tied to numbers that fit on spreadsheet.
We do not seek to improve medicine or law or architecture by ANYTHING analogous to these sorts of effort. We evaluate those professionals much more careful.
However, there ARE elements of the education reform project of the 00’s — and since 1983 more generally — that DO work and DO make a difference. The rise of education standards. The shift from local funding to state funding.
All of this requires acknowledging the huge successes of our efforts, require actually knowing the history of our education system. We do no longer have 5th grade dropouts. We barely have middle school dropouts. We do not give up on immigrants and students with disabilities. “Literacy” keeps being defined upwards. These are ENORMOUS successes.
There are others, too.
We expect more of kids than we used. And we DO get more. But because we are not kicking out the low performers, the averages do not go up as much. (See Simpson’s Paradox.)
Yea but this is exactly what I mean about stated, measurable goals. If your goal is raise the baseline learning of the median American student you may well be able to do that. If your goal on the other hand is close the achievement gap between the median student and the worst performers it is a whole different matter. That was the battle cry of the reform movement.
If you want pessimism go read some John Taylor Gatto essays. Sadly I think he hits the nail on the head in terms of the problems in institutional education. Unfortunately his solution is to destroy the institution and he proposed nothing that scales. But I still find his perspective quite valuable and insightful.
One assumption I see a lot of people implicitly making is that teachers of low income students make a lot less money than teachers at higher income student schools. However, this isn't generally the case.
In Indianapolis, (where I teach) the highest starting salaries in the metro area are for Indianapolis Public Schools. These schools have a reputation for being complete fiascos, with abysmal test scores. However, teachers there tend to be paid reasonably well. I currently teach at a moderately high performing charter, and salaries at my school are substantially lower. Its largely staffed by a rotating group of TFA members and people from similar programs with a core of veteran teachers.
The high performing suburban schools actually pay lower than IPS schools. The issue is that working conditions are just so much tougher at a Title 1 majority under-represented minority school that the higher pay isn't enough to compensate for most teachers.
Standardized test for pupils on entry, standardized test for pupils on exit. How much your pupils have improved is your score (it doesn't have to be the same test both times).
Normalize results vs. other students in the same year/area/ethnic group/other factors that you want to be part of the control not part of the result.
Where each teacher teaches just one class (probably common for younger pupils), wait until you've got enough data that you're averaging away the weird individual circumstances of certain students, or perform other data smoothing/massaging, e.g. reject outliers*.
Otherwise assign students improvements to teachers by some appropriate metric. Be sure to account for students joining classes partway or leaving classes partway. Be aware this can create perverse incentives to poach or expel** certain students mid-year.
*note that this has to be transparent to the teachers, but will influence outcomes. If outliers are rejected, for example, as a teacher you should ignore your most gifted and most struggling students - they won't form part of your performance assessment anyway.
**much better for your assessment to dump a student who starts to struggle than to help them, especially if you can justify this through non-academic means, e.g. disciplinary violations (which students starting to struggle because of, e.g. issues at home will probably have).
Honestly it's quite a difficult problem once you drill into it, and the perverse incentives are very real and destructive, operating both at a teacher-level and school-level.
The problem with this approach is that the poorest performing schools have much higher transiency, so it can be difficult to get measures at the beginning and the end of the year, never mind across years. I remember being the parent rep at some sort of committee in my "persistently failing" school district. I was shocked to learn that one of the elementary schools had an 80% transiency rate, meaning that only 20% of the students who started at the school in September were still there in June. There weren't empty seats - just lots of students cycling in and out. This has been improved somewhat with our district's dedication to keep students in the same school if they move WITHIN the district - although parents often want their kids to go to a closer school, for obvious reasons - and with making sure that kids who move to shelters outside the district can still stay in the school, as well as lots of charter schools in my city shrinking or closing, which means less cycling through those schools, but it is still a problem.
Well, it's definitely the naïve answer, but I think it's worth stating it explicitly.
In some sense random cycling in and out isn't an issue (except insofar that having a smaller sample size of students leads to noisier statistics).
The problem arises if the students leaving and coming in are not randomly selected but somehow share characteristics in common that would correlate with the extent of the improvement they would make (e.g, parents motivated to support their child might be more likely to pull them from a failing school and move to push them into a better school).
And the problem becomes actively malicious if teachers or schools can deliberately choose to set policies that start excluding students who are having poor improvement.
It is not controversial at all, among experts. It is well known and established. There’s no controversy.
None of the test developers support these uses. Go to the research conferences. As the psychometrician. Read the technical documentation.
No controversy.
The only question is HOW bad and HOW inappropriate they for this purpose.
(Now, the researchers tend to ignore item quality, so they are assuming that the tests do a better job of measuring the standards than they actually do. But even with that false assumption, they are STILL against basing teacher pay on test scores. )
Yes, the study cited does not really address the right null hypothesis. Does a program of paying for performance, having higher starting salaries to permit more rigorous screening up front, paying for difficulty of the assigned role, smaller class sizes, direct instruction, etc. etc. produce no measurable improvement?
Yes, class size works, if you have the available teaching force. If you don’t, the addtional teachers will definitely be below average. The more teachers you want to hire, the worse that problem is.
Direct instruction? Really? Direct instruction increases the cognitive complexity problem, rooting in in the pedagogy, and not just the assessments.
And that cognitive complexity problem just overwhelmingly dominates these test-based measurements. The content on the tests is the dumbest part, the dumbed down part, and simply does not represent the really lasting or impactful lessons. You end up measuring what is easy to measure instead of what it important to measure. And by doing so, you distort what is taught.
Mine was a sort of double negative comment. Matt cited a study of the ineffectiveness of school reform as a reason for the loss of interest. My point is that the study as reported did not actually show whether one or another of the things that "reform" might mean worked. Maybe the study just shows that "reform" seldom made it all the way down to affecting how teachers teach and students learn. That is in fact what Matt seems to argue.
What do you want to measure? Whom do you want to measure?
You seem to want to quantify the results, right? Why?
We can’t even quantify the content. All of this is based upon some arbitrary quantification scheme, so you will get arbitrary results. Now, some arbitrary results might be better than others. But we are not even vaguely close to having a concensus for how to weigh different elements in a quantification scheme, let alone how to implement.
So, outcomes-based performance lack the theoretical basis needed to even get started, well.
Ok tell us why grad schools aren't rent-seeking as MY says...because tbh I definitely picked the program that was the most flexible. Learned a decent amount but the point was the paper not the learning.
I think my short answer is that the requirements of these programs are set by state governments, and for whatever reason they are not interested in strict or difficult requirements. While there is definitely a lot of stuff universities are doing wrong here, the fix is a policy change at the state level. I'd also say that the graduate degree money printer isn't unique to education.
The longer answer is that I don't think I really disagree here. Graduate degrees of education are big money-makers for universities. Because states mostly require the degree and the student teaching and the whole rigamarole to certify teachers, as well as the use of graduate degrees to get pay bumps for existing teachers, they have historically had a large population of students interested in those degrees. While there are probably many valuable things students learn when getting a graduate degree in education, there is little incentive to design a system that pursues some idea of rigor or quality because you'd drive a lot of students out of the program. (And as you can see from a lot of the discussion here, there's not a lot of consensus about what rigor and quality really are, so the measures are messy).
There are a few durable findings going back decades and decades that relate here. The students leave these programs feeling like their student teaching was responsible for most of their learning. They often feel like the academic and theoretical aspects of the programs are not relevant to their work. Teachers often end up teaching the way they were taught, not the way grad school tried to train them to teach. It's all a huge problem for Teacher Education as a field and it's acknowledged but solutions are... I dunno? Teacher residencies are a thing that seems to work well and put more focus on the practical side of things but they're new and small and we need more comprehensive evidence.
Is it 100% rent seeking? No. Are there a lot of people there for the paper? Yes. That's why my preference is to teach grad students earning their initial teaching certifications instead of veteran teachers going back to get an MEd or whatever. I like when I have a class of people who've been out in the world for a bit and want to, for whatever reason, make a change and become teachers.
I think the "rent-seeking" will change, though, for a variety of reasons. Declining enrollment in education programs. Declining K-12 and higher ed enrollment. Low social status for teachers. Part of what these programs do is constantly cycle new teachers into the pool and that helps adapt to high teacher turnover. These are somewhat pressures that all of K-12 and higher ed will have to deal with sooner or later.
Re: the teaching as you were taught vs how you were trained, I think for me the biggest problem I ran into is that the training just wasn't really practical. I would sit down, really do my best to plan out how I was going to teach in a cooperative framework or whatever else, and I would end up realizing that despite all the theory I learned I had basically no idea how to put that into practice -- and I need to get my lesson plan done now, not after a bunch of googling and referencing.
The most useful training I received were the classes that were taught via the methods that students were supposed to be taught, which felt a little infantilizing given we were all adults but at least actually modeled how it was supposed to work.
Great comment, too (James; comment is also excellent).
It seems like the ideal would be to replace Master's in Ed programs with something more like apprenticeships. Then theory could be lightly sprinkled on once the basic mechanics are learned.
I think it’s worth also asking a proxy, macro, question. What’s our ideal for the desired social status of teachers ? Like all professions, this varied widely in history. In Ancient Rome teachers of children were often literal slaves. In a certain and highly idiosyncratic point of modern nation state building teaching was lionized, and mythologized , to the point of treating teachers not as upper class elites perhaps, but as highly prestigious and respected members of society. In the popular and literary imagination these mythologized teachers tend to be, not coincidentally, disproportionately men. There was also a period when the profession was already getting “feminized” and concomitanly losing prestige (reflecting society’s sexism) but the fact that women were generally barred from most other careers kept teaching at an inflated quality. There were and are, doubtless , countless of other possible scenarios. In short, the question is - where do we want our teachers to be on the social hierarchy? I think much will be downstream from that.
Teachers care a ton about this, and we need more and better teachers, so instrumentally the thing to do is to increase their status.
But there's also the reality that teachers tend to be among the lowest-performing white-collar workers on standardized tests and such. They want to be seen as lawyers but score like secretaries. Ideally that will improve. But on the current metrics of professional prestige--which are not necessarily the correct metrics--it's hard to argue that they're undervalued. What we would need is a new system of prestige emphasizing what you do for people versus who you are.
Really not sure how teacher performance on standardized tests is relevant? As THPacis says, we need to decide where we want teachers to be on the social hierarchy. What many are trying to do - eg TFA - is to change the status of teaching. When you do that through compensation or other societal forms of status, you change who wants to be a teacher.
Another way of viewing this would be to look at other countries where attitudes towards teachers are different. In East Asian countries that have high-stakes tests, you end up with "superstar teachers" who run tutoring centers. Those teachers are more like brands raking in millions a year. Do we want that? Or do we want something else? What's it like in the UK, or Europe?
I think Johnson's suggestion is the the way we decide the status of a job is already downstream of the types of people who go into those professions. I.e. the people with lower test scores go into teaching, and everyone knows this, and therefore no matter how much we talk about deciding what their status should be, the status will only change if the people becoming teachers are higher status to begin with. Not suggesting this is right, but I think that's what they're saying
I mean if you are looking at teaching across the centuries you have a serious apples to oranges problem...you really need to look only at the last two hundred years when you have national systems of compulsory education.
I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s essentially a question of the level of abstraction. Teaching kids arithmetic, or how to read and write, or teaching older teenagers philosophy - those things have been done since antiquity, and in the case of philosophy studying in some cases literally the same texts! So in some sense teaching as a profession can be compared across millenia. In another sense though you’re right, the idea of the modern school and of public education in particular only goes back a couple of centuries. Then again you can argue that even that isn’t good comparison because our social , technological and economical world today in 21st cent diverse America is radically different from say early 20th cent America- and that’s also correct. So yes, place and time make a difference , but comparisons can still be valuable so long as you take those differences into account.
I do wonder if there is a big structural way in which :1. The move from 1 household provider to 2 provider model and 2. The decline of noblesse oblige - have seriously hurt our quality of public services. It’s just fiscally very challenging , and carries serious downsides - to pay tons of public workers truly decent salaries. In the before times teachers were mainly women, who relied on their husband to bring home the serious bucks. It worked because at that time most men made enough to support a middle class family on their own. At the same time there was also a pretty substantial upper clsss that devoted their time to public service. Using their personal means to basically subsidize low paid jobs. There were serious downsides to this system, but also benefits. You could get very high quality people in public service without giving up and arm and a leg. While that model largely died, we haven’t actually made the necessary adjustments to maintain that same quality in a more egalitarian world eg a super high tax and redistribution regime (that would allow both public servants to be paid much more AND effectively make private sectors workers take home much less, narrowing the gap from both ends).
Is it even worth having a federal Department of Education? Are state and local bureaucracies insufficiently complex? How can another layer of paper pushers, hundreds or thousands of miles from the classrooms it regulates, add value in a cost-effective way?
The case for no strings federal subsidies is strong-- the federal government has greater taxing and borrowing power than states and federal money can pay for useful things. That does not mean we should maintain cadre of federal bureaucrats to monitor the state bureaucrats and write long winded memos about abstruse standards. Just let the treasury transfer a population-based subsidy to each state and let states compete to build the best system.
It is worth having a central place to focus on research. We have the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy and others. Build technical knowledge. Fund research. Discover best practices. Yes.
But this country will not abide national control over our schools. We favorite “local control”, unlike most advanced countries. Even states cede most of their control to local school districts. We have remarkable little regulation of teaching and learning, relative to other advanced countries.
So, I think your comment is based on a false premise. Other than civil rights being applied to our schools, the feds have VERY little power or authority. And they don’t even contribute 10% of the money spent on education in this country.
In fact, most of the US Department of Education’s budget is about student loans for higher ed.
So, let me ask: what long winded memos are your talking about? Which standards are abstruse? What are you talking about?
Starting from where we are, we should want to nudge it back toward "best practice." I'm not interested in redesigning the Federal Government from a blank slate.
This is one of the reasons I dislike the phrase "best practices" - it often serves to legitimate bad ideas. I'm sure it once had value, insofar as it gestured towards sharing great ideas proven to work in multiple places (how I'm reading your comment), but it's usage has degraded badly.
I mostly see it used in corporate settings, municipal politics, and position papers, where it's usually cover for superstitions or advice for people looking to CYA: functionally it means "the minimum I have to do not to get fired" (or for organizations, "the minimum to avoid lawsuits / shareholder action").
To the extent that it's about collecting and sharing great ideas, that's best done at most one remove from relevant actors that might benefit from it. Teachers talking among themselves can share great ideas, yes, and principals directly supervising teachers. But once you move up from principals, to superintendents and beyond, to identify and promulgate great ideas, they're subject to escalating distortion and degradation. It turns into a game of telephone, runs into principal-agent problems, and starts solving different problems entirely.
(I think this is part and parcel of the general corruption of the words "expert" and "expertise" - I'm trying to formulate a mailbag question about this, but can't quite get it together without turning it into a rant.)
[Edit: tried to improve the intro, to better explain why I take a detour through a pet peeve to respond.]
I think that the turnover issue is worth digging into more. Replacing employees is usually expensive, labor-intensive, or both, and you’ll probably experience some problems caused by understaffing (learning loss, disciplinary issues).
If your metrics for measuring performance are noisy (I understand that this is clearly true for most commonly used teaching metrics) or if differences in performance level aren’t that big, the cost of higher turnover can quickly eclipse the benefits of trying to optimize your workforce.
This is also a reason why a lot of administrators and school boards are okay with seniority-based comp structures— they really disincentivize turnover and reduce the associated costs.
So if the political incentives are so bad that imposing top down technocratic reform is so obviously doomed, isn't this a strong case for imposing market incentives instead? Don't vouchers create the power for parents to hold these systems accountable where the political system clearly can't?
Recreating the worst information asymmetries and perverse incentives of our medical and higher education systems combined seems like a terrible idea, in fact.
Parents and society have misaligned incentives. Society wants educated students who reliably have a certain set of skills. Parents want school to instead flatter their own ideas of what their children should be learning and doing. Also, parents are not particularly good at objectively evaluating their own students' success and level of effort -- it's important to remember that striver parents who *want* their kids to be hyper-optimized and consumed by pre-programmed schedules of school and extra-curricular are extremely rare, and most parents just don't want to have to think about it all that much and are most interested in ensuring their kid has a healthy social life and doesn't have behavior issues.
Reading Part IV, at the time, and again right now, I feel like it's mostly correct about how something like Arizona's ESAs play out, motivated parents sort their kids into schools with other motivated parents, it mostly works as a handout to religious weirdos, etc. etc.
Here's where I think Matt loses me. Matt has this conception of "education reform" as a sort of very specific set of technocratic policy proposals whereby we more optimally fund an idealized set of universal, plug and play educational pathways where ever kid goes in and they all get spit out the other end having received roughly comparable benefits, if not outcomes, regardless of external factors. The goal of reform is to maximize that universal benefit and the ways to do that are through optimally targeted funding and pedagogy selection.
I think that's fundamentally wrong. I think the potential benefits of education are very particularized to individual students and that the way to maximize positive outcomes is by providing a maximal availability of a wide range of flexible, idiosyncratic approaches to learning that support individually tailored outcomes. I don't really care at all what we're funding. The primary locus of education reform should be opportunities to develop and demonstrate valuable aptitudes through lots of varied tracking, assessment and certifications.
So vouchers without assessment IS just a handout to idiosyncratic homeschoolers. Just like public school without tracking is just daycare. I think today's post is a great demonstration of the political limits of the universalist, technocratic, funding allocation focused approached. I think the focus on optimal allocation of funding is misguided and inevitably captured by vested interests.
So do I think we should be nuking public education? No, of course not. We should do whatever we can to create public schools that can effectively serve kids with under-resourced, under-invested, absent, or otherwise dysfunctional parents. Do I think the political incentives will ever possibly align to maximize the whole range of educational opportunities the market could provide via public schooling? Also obviously not.
You get really wide variance with the evangelical schools. Some in the "Classical Christian school" movement offer rigorous dead-white-men/great-books-heavy curricula that look more like Phillips Exter than a conventional public school. But the worst ones are really, really bad.
The logic and technical facts of this approach are so very very bad.
The idea that teaching evaluation should reduced to ranking and statistics is at odds with the nature of the work and the way that other professions are understood.
The goal of teaching is long term impacts on children and communities. So focusing on short term outcomes is inevitably to be a problem.
Using a bad approach because it is easier for impatient people like who has an irrational preference for quantitative data over rigorous theories of action is just doomed.
Matt doesn’t treat this problem like the slow boring of hard boards. He wants a quick and “obvious” answer, regardless of whether it would actually work.
I agree. But I think that any reform is likely to cost more. And if linking teacher pay 100% to one-year value added (does anyone think is should be?) then we try another metric, and another
But that said, IS a short sighted "pay for performance" actually worse than seniority, if you insist on dichotomizing?
'don’t realize (or don’t remember) that downstream disputes about teacher evaluation 10 to 15 years ago were the genesis of so much factionalism'
If I'm talking about something in the past, is that 'downstream' or 'upstream' of where I am now? Water, naturally, flows downstream. Though Salmon swim upstream. Does the hivemind have a view on the correct usage?
It’s a clumsy sentence, but I read it as, “First there was a push for teacher evaluation, then [downstream of that] there were disputes about evaluation, and those disputes were the genesis of the factionalism we see today.
It seems obvious from the perspective of an educator but bears repeating loudly: performance-based pay needs to look at the performance of the TEACHER. In that scenario the test scores of the students, or more precisely the GROWTH in test scores above the expected level, are one factor amongst many that are considered. Here are some other harder to measure aspects of a teacher's performance: communication with parents, administrators, and colleagues; knowledge of course content; demonstrated use of varied pedagogical techniques for delivery of instruction; appropriate and varied use of assessment techniques.
Charlotte Danielson has developed a Framework for Teaching that was the core of the performance evaluation I experienced in my first decade of teaching. https://danielsongroup.org/framework/
I was a HUGE FAN of performance based pay - I was able to jump quite a few salary steps after demonstrating my overall strengths as a teacher.
The trick with implementing something like this is not just that you need to accommodate the inevitable bump in salaries - if we are able to address the crap pay of starting teachers, younger and effective teachers will flock to the profession, and it's not like all the experienced highly paid crap teachers will decide to retire early - you also need a TON of administrative personnel to feel like you've accurately assessed your teachers. So the buy-in needs to be not only amongst the rank and file but also as another commenter has pointed out at the principal level. And when a principal looks at all the problems they are facing, they don't have an extra three hours per day to spend observing and giving feedback to their teachers.
I always wanted to be a teacher. Somewhere along the way I realized engineering would be more challenging and rewarding, and went that route instead. But I was maybe 5 years out of college when all this stuff really came to a head. I was not loving engineering so much and I recall thinking that if they wanted to “fix” the teaching profession, whatever they did, it ought to make it more appealing/accessible to people like me. (Egocentric, right?) To this day, if they had a program where, say, I could do a 3-month boot camp and then start teaching high school Physics and Calculus and STEM at half the salary I make now, I’d jump on it. But the hoops are too big and the pay is too low.
"I always wanted to be a teacher."
Ditto. I always had a lot of respect for my teachers, and a lot of patience for kids (even, say, as a teen towards younger kids). Training and teaching new employees has often been the most rewarding part of my career in the private sector. I think, like lots of people, I graduated college and started making decent money, would occasionally eyeball the teaching profession and see the low pay for starting teachers and just thought it completely unfeasible to make that jump with a young family.
That said, I have to commute quite a distance to make the money I do, but it's not like I'm making CEO money, either. I'd be willing and able to take a substantial pay cut to teach at one of the 5 or 6 schools within 3 miles of my house that desperately need teachers. However, it feels like if you are a mid-career professional looking to flip your skills and knowledge to teach the youth, you almost have to be willing to take a vow of poverty to do it at the schools that need it the most.
One of the best teachers I ever worked with was an engineer who made the leap into teaching. I don't remember why she made the change, but she was a phenomenal asset to her students and is probably one of those teachers that kids remember and think about years later.
(To the point of the article because I can't resist, she also hated that there was no science on the state tests, so she was not eligible for merit pay. I'd argue she taught some of those kids more math than their math teachers, but they got the $1000 check at the end of the year for her adding value!)
If you are serious about a career change this is the right time to do it. But you'd need to look at private schools, not public - unions have their salary steps in a legal bind and you'd be starting at 40K at best. Depending on the area, private schools I have found are willing to take risks on people shifting into education, and since there are no unions, you are able to negotiate the salary you want.
3 month boot camp = find a way for your current job to let you have a chunk of time off each day in the summer to teach a summer camp thing. Pay would be crap but the point is to start learning the skills and have something on your CV you can point to when you then show up at a private school asking for a full time job.
OR
Show up at a public / private school and ask them if you can run an after school STEM club. 1) Kids love making things. 2) Parents will sign them up for it. 3) Schools legit are scrambling to fill regular vacancies let alone after school stuff.
OR
Look around for NGOs that run STEM type things. See what kind of jobs they have on offer. NGOs are able to tap into grant money and pay is not strait-jacketed by union contracts. Many pay crap but some do not. Find the ones that do not.
Is there a good way to do this if you don't have a STEM background? I'm a high-level startup and operations executive and I've thought above moving into teaching. I'd be OK with the pay cut but my sense is that the non-STEM roles (history, english, etc.) require graduate degrees in those fields, and I'm not sure I'd be able to hack teaching high school math or science without a huge amount of remedial training (on top of training to be a teacher.)
You could start with things like Mock Trial programs or Entrepreneurial Studies (there's actually a national Lemonade Day program). Again - if you want to be able to negotiate any kind of salary beyond starting pay you'd need to look at private & independent schools. I should add also not religious - Catholic schools tend to pay the least out of all the types of schools I know of. Context matters, mine is East Asian international schools and Ohio.
thanks for replying - gives me a place to start
Check out what's going on in your local area. Hard to say what ngo has a great link with schools. Eg there's a guy in Cleveland who runs a community garage and drives a trailer up to schools and they fix motorcycle engines after school.
Not sure which area you're living in, but in Seattle the starting salary for a teacher with just a BA is $67,603. And the highest pay rate is $132,151
https://www.seattleschools.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Cert-2022-23-7.0.pdf
Yeah...Ohio, and most places outside of major metro areas, start you much lower. Hilliard (a nice but not *too* nice suburb of Columbus) quoted me Masters with zero years of experience at 44k.
I almost hate to say it, but most (not all!) of the math education majors I saw in my upper-level math classes did not *truly* understand what they were doing. It was mostly mechanical for them, which is fine for a practitioner, but you'd ideally like a teacher to have a deeper appreciation of the subject.
The potential unnecessity of deeper understanding for teaching / learning useful skills is also weirdly on display in mathematics.
Like, elementary schoolers can do basic addition and subtraction, but trying to explain what the integers are with respect to a deeper understanding involves explaining what a ring is, which implicates what a group is, which implicates what a function is, which is all neat and valuable information but not really what we try to teach elementary schoolers. Likewise, epsilon-delta treatment of limits is neat, but it's also not really what even high school BC Calc is about despite the former being a more rigorous formalization of the latter.
In math the mechanics actually *do* have a lot of pedagogical separability from the subject matter. The distance seems smallest in algebra and word problems and geometry, but for a lot of primary and secondary school stuff I'm not certain that deeper understanding is necessarily even a huge value-add.
I might just be generalizing from my own experiences, but I felt that a good teacher who understood the subject helped me make connections between concepts. They can also contextualize things, e.g., know which techniques may be more or less important to move forward. To give a concrete example, all the integration tricks are mostly useless whereas knowing why a Taylor series works and what it's for is one of the most important things I ever learned for my career in physics.
I wanted to be an engineer, and then learned in my first *actual* physics course that I had never really been taught science in high school, just formulas and plug and chug. So ended up as a teacher.
😔 -not at becoming a teacher, but for missing out on learning real science! What do you teach?
I mean it's a longer story about science - I also realized well after college that I didn't have the "growth mindset" I would have needed to learn from the initial setback.
I spent ~15 years teaching history, mostly middle school, and now have what I am well aware is the best job I will ever have: enrichment support for K-8 at a private school. All the delights of teaching with even *more* autonomy and no grading.
Yep, I had a very similar experience. Weirdly, I ended up teaching at a university because I would have needed additional qualifications to teach high school. Now I work in faculty development- teaching university faculty how to teach - at an Ivy League school, but am still not allowed to teach high school.
It’s not the paradox you imply. Being a teacher and being a professor are not the same profession.
I should clarify that I'm not talking about going into a tenure track research position where teaching is a secondary or tertiary responsibility. I was in a teaching-only adjunct role. Of course these are still not exactly the same thing, but to Marie's original point, it probably isn't great if someone has relevant expertise and would like to teach but ends up doing something else because the requirements are too onerous, even at a time when we are worried about teacher shortages.
That’s an important qualification. Nevertheless I *still* think these are different jobs. I concede that there is a lot of overlap in terms of many of the skills or even the disciplinary knowledge base , but there are still significant differences between being given authority and responsibility over minors and being an instructor of adults. It makes sense to me a priori that the state will control more tightly the licensing anyone whose going to work with minors.
Professors do research. But I was amazed to realize that a professor from whom I was taking an upper-level "senior" audit class was planning his lessons like a real "teacher": we even had a few hands-on activities. (I recognized the result of the lesson planning because I've had a bit of teacher training.)
I think I could have been a good teacher, and could have found enjoyment in it, but the bureaucracy and politics of the profession would have made me miserable, with so many people having so many Very Strong Opinions on how kids should be taught. Something like the 3 month boot camp over a summer that you describe where I have great control over what to teach would be nice, but also an opportunity that's not likely to arise.
My husband teaches at a private school that has a summer camp. The summer camp is actually a pretty great 3ish month boot camp for teaching.
Daaaaamn dude. I didn’t mean to offend, no need to be cruel. Have a good day.
Frankly in that exchange you just experienced a little taste of the soul crushing educational culture you'd be working in.
Culture's made of people. Can you imagine being ceolaf's colleague?
in my experience schools are dreadfully pessimistic environments. there's usually a handful of veteran teachers who are really intelligent and successful, they teach all the highest-level classes and are close allies of the administration. then there's all the other teachers, who more or less openly despise admin and the aforementioned group of teachers and see any and all changes and actions as hostile threats.
the internet is...and yeah the faculty lounge is also hostile but the teachers who think this pessimistically don't give enough of a shit to say anything to the rookie.
this commenter does not seem to be offering substantive positive thoughts here...
It's going to be one of those crazy days when some dude we've never seen before leaves 1/3 of the total comments and Milan has to wave a flamethrower around.
Seems to happen about quarterly.
Does every industry have these kind of nutjobs? I've encountered them a few other places online. One of my close friends teaches at a grad school of education and he'll reply like this in email chains, but I feel like he would have the sense to not waste his morning doing this. I was kind of excited upon reading this article as I have actual experience in what MY describes but now the comment section is this kid demonstrating the power of the false binary all over the place.
I do wish the kid would slow down and pick their shots - seems like there is an occasional point in some of their comments but hard to find that amidst the noise.
I think most industries fire them.
The 14 Fists of Milan. Great movie.
Banned for being a dick.
One of the pleasures of being on West Coast time is that one gets to read all the reactions people have to some deleted comment -- it really fires the imagination in wondering what said banned person wrote.
FWIW, not sure if it's different on the app/phone, but you can click "show" to see the comment in this case on the web, at least.
Ah, thanks. I hadn't noticed that.
Sadly, the comment was much juicier in my imagination.
Yeah I’m surprised it earned a ban but Milan makes the rules 🤷🏻♀️ Might be temporary.
FWIW, my whole damn point is that we have incentivized a critical field like teaching to be one that requires participants to be “giving” because they are underpaid for their skills. I did not unpack my resume but I have plenty of experience teaching and coaching kids in STEM from all kinds of backgrounds. I never said I thought the job would be easy. But, ya know, if my “ilk” is unwanted and unneeded, I guess I’ll just go fuck off and stop spending all the time I do volunteering ✌️
This is a weird comment out of left field for a bunch of reasons... but... yeah actually they do need more calc and physics teachers most places?
Good question. Also clearly a calc/physics teacher would probably also teach Algebra 2, stats, etc. But maybe most of those roles are currently filled by excellent teachers?? Not a sarcastic question.
I was being rhetorical, I think they clearly are in high demand. My brother got an undergrad in math before his teaching degree and definitely feels this way.
There are just more high paying private sector options for folks with a strong math/physics background than a sociology/history one.
Ah I flipped your “they” and “do”
Based on personal anecdote, I feel like the hardest classes tend to be taught by the best teachers, because teaching Calc BC is hard and prestigious. But idk.
Sure. But are there enough of them to go around? I honestly don’t know. And in my imagination, someone like me would teach any HS math class necessary up to and including Calc BC.
Schools obviously need more calculus/physics/STEM teachers. What a stupid and mean comment to make.
I got to be a "junior teacher" when I taught English in the Peace Corps (*after* retirement I must always note.) "Junior" in the sense that I was more of a classroom aide rather than teaching on my own, which would have been impossible given lack of language for classroom management. But yes, the PC training was indeed a very useful 3-month boot camp. It was fascinating trying to think up ways to engage the kids and support my host-country counterpart teachers.
Another way to do it would be for employers to allow people to teach a class at the local high school after some training. Volunteer experts could work in partnership with a teacher, be present in every class to give one-on-one support and teach a few lessons on their own.) This would be much more meaningful than those silly "volunteer" days that companies send their employees out to do.
I feel you. My son in elementary school recently tried to recruit me for an open teaching spot at the school and my response was that the school couldn't afford me and we couldn't afford what the school would pay.
“Discounting the pay thing” is a big thing 😆 I don’t imagine it would be rosy, I have a ton of experience with kids and education, I just think the market forces that make it easy for me to blow off entirely are strong for lots of similarly-inclined people. Also I’ve looked into it, Ohio (where I live) has some kind of 2 year provisional license path but it has a lot of conditions on it, and only one school in the city qualifies.
Just wrote a long reply above about how to get in. I feel like I recall you are in the cincy area? I've got a Columbus - Cleveland - Cincinnati - Pittsburgh - Indy spreadsheet of both great districts and top notch private schools I made in 2018 when looking for a job within driving distance of Columbus. Country Day would be the one I would target if I were you. Summit is the other one I have heard great things about. But I know nothing about the pay scales in Cincy - they may just laugh you out the door when you tell them what you need to earn at half your existing salary.
Yeah, maybe I should look into whether private schools are able to be more flexible with credentialing. As it stands, if I can ride out 5 more years or so working for The Man, I'll be able to pseudo-early retire- in that scenario I could work with far less pay.
Oh they can 100% waive credentialing in Ohio. I have a teaching license but a decent number of my colleagues do not. It's a nice but not necessary feature of a successful application. And the more niche or in demand the position (robotics!!!), the more flexibility.
Good to know!
The low point of the push for teacher evaluations in NYC came when the Bloomberg administration released the evaluation results of all the public school teachers to the press, and the NY Post did this story about “the worst teacher” in the city, printing her name and picture for all to see:
https://nypost.com/2012/02/26/queens-parents-demand-answers-following-teachers-low-grades/amp/
It later came out that this teacher’s students were recent immigrants with special needs who did not speak English, so they had some academic challenges to say the least, and couldn’t possibly have scored well on the state exams that made up a big part of the evaluation.
https://www.politico.com/media/story/2012/03/fellow-teachers-come-to-the-defense-of-pascale-mauclair-singled-out-as-the-worst-by-the-post-000338/
The NY Post didn’t retract the story or add any context, and to this day if you google the teacher’s name this story shaming her is the first thing that comes up. It was pretty much impossible to get teacher buy-in for the system after that.
Alas, one can't take for granted that NY Post management and NY public school management have aligned goals.
I get frustrated with the arguments against pay by merit.
They tend to be along the lines of "It's hard to measure!", "What if I get a bad boss that hates me for no reason!".
EVERY field has this problem. You're not special. Do people think it's trivial to determine with perfect accuracy who the most valuable software developer is? Just counting commits to git is stupid and everyone knows it. However there are clearly better and worse programmers, and I think just about everyone in tech would find it completely insane to say "Well, impossible to know for sure who is better so lets just pay based on seniority."
I (like everyone) know several teachers. All of them would tell you there are obviously good teachers and bad teachers and it's loosely correlated to seniority at best.
I have seen stronger forms of the statement I'm about to make, but to listen to the loudest 10% of teachers, teachers face many workplace problems that are TOTALLY UNIQUE to education (that are absolutely in no way unique to education).
I suspect the other 90% know that there's a support club for that, it's called everybody, and we meet at the bar. Those 10% though, holy cannoli.
These problems might not be unique to teaching, but they are particular to public service (with its unique sensitivity to corruption driving a need for systematized over subjective evaluation). Teaching is one of the largest and most visible public sector workforces.
Excellent example! This comment just completely handwaves away the *existence* of any job where you go on a factory floor, or any job where you perform any kind of field work.
Too late, now we have to fight. I'm afraid it's in the internet bylaws.
I mean, if the proposal had been 'go by anonymous evaluations of your peers' that would still have a lot of problems, but it has a different set of problems. The obvious difference between a software engineer and a teacher is that, generally, a software engineer's output is dependent on their ability and the support they're given. A teacher's output is critically dependent on the input (students) they're given.
Now, teachers generally don't say this, because it sounds really bad, but the real answer is (as noted above in the story of 'the worst teacher in New York' that how well your students do (especially on comparative standardized tests) will be incredibly dependent on which students you get, a factor over which you have minimal, if any, control.
I don't know man... I've started with some pretty rough code bases...
In general I think everyone agrees you can't just look at outputs, it's delta over the course of the year. However I hate to get into the details of how good any test or method is. I'm sure none are prefect. My frustration is people throwing up their hands and giving up on the entire idea of rewarding merit. It's not acceptable.
I mean...isn't it? If you can't accurately measure 'merit' than trying to reward it is silly. Also, you probably want some sort of comparison of the costs of gathering/using the 'data to evaluate merit' versus the benefits of having/using that data. It's funny how the whole notion of cost-benefit analysis just sort of disappears in this arena...
Also, no, it's not delta over the course of the year. It's delta over the course of the year, compared to what a 'good teacher' could have done with those students. So, good luck with that comparison to a counterfactual.
Now, where I think you could do better would be more focus on what is probably a better measure of merit, which is (as you note) superior/peer review. But that's not sufficiently objective/numeric to meet modern expectations for discipline/termination/reward. I do think the belief that everything can be accurately measured and compared is fairly crippling to a lot of things and this is one of them.
No, it's not. It's unreasonable for an entire profession to declare themselves too hard to evaluate so just give me my standard cost of living +2% raise every year. If you disagree then we're at an impasse that isn't going to be resolved.
I don't feel like you need to a degree in data science to think through a how improvements in student performance over time could be a useful input to a performance appraisal. Seems obvious to me but others disagree. Performance on one data point on one cohort over one time period is clearly an inadequate way to comprehensively evaluate anyone on anything, and if there is a specific proposal to do so I'll happy call it out as dumb. It's just as silly as saying there is nothing to be gained by measuring student performance at all.
I'm also absolutely unwilling to concede we can't use superior/peer review. Not clear which "modern expectation" you're referring to, but if that's the sticking point then does this mean you're on board with fighting to change that expectation? Which does not apply in any private sector industry... many of which I'd contend have many subjective and hard to measure aspects to their jobs.
In my mind if that is a hard line folks are going to take (and I think it is harder than even most unions take) then I'll have to jump on some combination of a charter school/privatization train.
I mean, I personally am in favor of more flexibility in the use of peer/superior input and more flexibility in discipline/termination (all the way up the chain, so if you're a principal rewarding your buddies and firing your enemies, yeah, you should be fired).
But as a general rule that's been moved away from on the government side of things out of legitimate (but in my view misguided) concerns about favoritism, politicization, and misuse of discretion. There's a reason we ended up where we are, because seniority is easy to adjudicate and non-political.
I think that's a mistake in a whole range of things and we'd be better off increasing discretion and punishing people who we decide have misused that discretion, rather than limiting discretion and only punishing people who violate a specific written rule, but that's where we've ended up generally on the governmental side out of a combination of fear that discretion will be misused by the government/people and fear that they'll be punished for doing their jobs by employees/unions.
I frankly do not see a great way out of that bind.
No one's going for a policy that doesn't kick in for five years [especially since testing and data gathering will not hold still for those five years, so you're very unlikely to get comparable results].
I think the challenge for large, unionized employee sectors is that it's a lot easier for them to believe and codifying their own BS.
All those software developers (and every other profession I have experience with) are constantly complaining about their evaluation metrics. They also grumble about organizational changes and tend to think the bosses are doofuses. But they grumble and then move on, and probably even realize on some level that the evaluations and changes are in some way positive. They don't have a superstructure that's telling them their right and figuring out ways to convert the grumbling into political and community support.
Not sure how to articulate this - maybe it's true in other industries as well. But I'll try. In education, teachers are not just the provider of the service (helping kids learn), they are also the product (come to our district because we have the best teachers). Add to that the ability of teachers and principals to very easily ignore new initiatives by just not doing them, and the entrenched power of teachers in their unions, and you get a system very resistant to change.
> However there are clearly better and worse programmers, and I think just about everyone in tech would find it completely insane to say "Well, impossible to know for sure who is better so lets just pay based on seniority."
Yeah, but I am paid based on seniority and not based on merit. I mean, sure, supposedly I have my title because I am a good programmer who deserves the responsibility placed on me, and yes I am evaluated by my manager on a yearly basis to see if I live up to all of that.
The reality, though, is that I'm not paid based on my "objective" performance, I'm paid based on whether I can placate my boss and not piss off my coworkers too much. It's not like there's some formula that rates my code and spits out a salary level or anything. I'm certainly not paid more if write better code, unless I can sell that to my boss, and my company decides that I'm valuable enough to promote into an open position.
Plus, there is huge pay disparity between companies (especially FAANG vs non-FAANG), while I sincerely doubt that all the FAANG developers are so much better than the non-FAANG ones - they just live in the right place and managed to have the right pedigree/luck out in an interview.
All of that to say, while there are better and worse programmers, the reality is we _have_ thrown up our hands and just pay people based on seniority (or other, random, factors).
Do you work for a small ~6 person department? Or the government?
If so yeah... might not matter much.
If you work for any company with a large engineering department I'd say it's very unusual.
What sort of metrics do you feel large engineering departments use? I've worked for companies from 5 people to 1000, don't really see the difference.
It's absolutely a subjective process and the metrics vary by org.
But every one I've seen has some sort of cohort grading system (junior/senior/principal) that they grade on a bell curve. Being at the top of that curve will get you a bigger raise/faster promotion/better assignments. That grading system is definitely influenced by metrics, but they do not drive the process (and they shouldn't).
If your companies have that curve and you're just annoyed you're not at the top because they don't use "good metrics" that's one problem. If you're saying they don't even have a curve and everything is just biased on seniority that's a different problem.
Sure, I agree that curve exists, but I would describe it as driven as much or more by experience/seniority as metrics. When I interview at a company, they have no decent way to evaluate my background other than how well I sell it - they certainly aren't checking my code. The tests we (as an industry) give to candidates are total BS that do not in any way evaluate their actual day-to-day work. Internal promotions are often based on whether you worked overtime to deliver a project as much as any coding competency.
I'll conclude this way: I agree that I cannot walk into a job and just expect to be promoted because of my experience, so it's not pure seniority. In general, though, people become senior devs (and even above) eventually - there are no junior devs with 15 years of experience. We also don't have good ways to measure developer productivity in a way that lets us objectively evaluate and promote people. Software is definitely less seniority-driven than teaching is, but the proposed reforms are far more data-driven than software is today.
This seems pretty divorced from reality. You act like this
> whether I can placate my boss and not piss off my coworkers too much
is not at all related to performance, for example.
> I sincerely doubt that all the FAANG developers are so much better than the non-FAANG ones - they just live in the right place and managed to have the right pedigree/luck out in an interview.
So they just pay those salaries for the hell of it? I agree, not every hire will pan out, and friction can allow someone to stay longer than they might deserve, but I would bet that the average performance is much higher there.
My expirence on both sides of the "levels.fyi" vs "glassdoor" pay divide in tech is there is a real talent difference but I'd say it's something like a standard deviation. Top ~20% of people writing SW at some non FAANG place like say Ford absolutely could fit in at a place like Apple, but it would take some adjusting and they'd mostly go from outstanding to "yeah he's fine".
I agree we aren't talking about two disparate distributions, but a standard deviation is still pretty significant. That would suggest 84% of the employees at the non-FAANG place would be below average at a FAANG.
Yup, completely agree. A large noticeable difference. That's how I got my ~20%.
However if you feel you're one of the top technical people at any company, you shouldn't be intimidated. Apply! Do your LeetCode and keep applying if that is what you want.
Fields that are not the civil service can lean on the holistic judgement of peers and superiors. Government can’t. Teaching is also uniquely bad for this since the teacher is the only adult in the room most of the time.
I just find that really hard to believe. Both my parents were teachers. They still talk about the worst ones they worked with now 30+ years later. I have a strong sense that everyone in the building could identify who really cares, who's effective, who's not, and who's totally checked out. You don't need decimal point precision for effective performance evaluations. Rankings work well.
Oh 100% this. It's so easy to tell. You can also add sub-categories to the general one of "not bad": "could be great if they would stop being lazy" and my personal favorite, "great for many kids but not all and we need lots of types of great teachers here so as long as they don't fuck up the kids who don't fit with them it's ok they are a net positive". The other thing is that good teachers can tell you who the best ones are. I was never the best teacher, but I have been lucky enough to collaborate with the best ones.
Not a teacher, but this is how I've felt in my general corporate jobs. We didn't need fancy metrics, everyone knew how competent everyone else was
This is not a critical question, but one asking for illumination: how do other teachers tell which others are good or bad? Do other teachers see how they perform in the classroom? If so, how often? And if not via classroom observation, what are their other means of judging those teachers?
My mom was a teacher - sometimes you sub for your colleagues and see whether the class has learned anything. Sometimes your colleague asks for help preparing a lesson plan and asks you stupid questions. Sometimes you overhear a lesson next door while you’re working in your office. My favorite example was another teacher that tried to motivate their class by saying “I got a C in this subject at Cardinal Direction State University, and look, 3 years later, now I’m teaching it. If I can do it, so can you!”
In my Parent's cases, so mid 70s - 2015, the examples are all pretty egregious behaviors problems (e.g., not showing up / late, drugs / alcohol, physical / verbal coaching abuse) still with a sense of frustration how long the process took to fire these teachers. They worked for some of the largest districts in IL so even a small, small % distribution of teachers like this creates a huge problem.
Oh shoot yeah. Ruddy faced and smelling of breath mints on a parent teacher night. That exists.
You walk into or past enough lessons to see. A teacher who is always talking is at best one of the "might be good for some" - kids need to be doing things to learn.
As students get older, they'll find ways to ask you about the bad teachers. "Mr Smith, do you make your kids do x?" "Man, Mr Smith, can I please be late to my next class?"
Also lots of shouting at kids tends to correlate with being shite. They are kids. Their whole point is to make mistakes. You're a teacher. Your whole point is to steer them in the right direction. Shame is not typically a feeling one associates with growth.
Do you have control of your class is a huge part of knowing this.
There’s just a lot of tells when you are dealing with a terrible teacher. It’s not usually one thing.
It seems to me like a department head or principal should be able to say "Guided by, *but not handcuffed by*, these numbers in front of me, I am making the judgement call that I think you're a bad teacher so I'm PIPing/firing you".
That's how it worked when I taught in Georgia. There was some due process, but you don't get it until year three and all it meant is that the school board had to read your statement and judge whether to approve the firing. One way around this was for the principal to eliminate a teaching position at the school so the teacher wasn't being fired, but she'd have to go find another position in the district or she'd be out of a job. In fact, when I got hired, the principal explained to me he'd just let go an old teacher close to retirement by eliminating her position so that he could free up budget for hiring two new teachers. It may have been a flex or some kind of "hey, I'm the boss, you'd better know who's in charge around here" tactic but other teachers confirmed that this was their understanding of how it went down.
I’m sure teachers are the best judges of each others’ performance, as in most fields, but a public bureaucracy cannot go around using the subjective judgements of its employees to inform how it allocates taxpayer money. Not in procurement, not in HR.
I can see why it wouldn't work for it being the entire assessment, but why can't it be a component?
Are you saying can't by law? Can't by statute? Can't by union contract?
Or just that their peers and superiors are uniquely unable to provide valid opinions as opposed to every other profession? I find that hard to believe.
However if true then I suppose we can do away with the entire tenure process and just give them lifetime appointments on day 1? Seems like it would save a great deal of effort.
The public is very prickly about perceived favoritism or corruption in public service, and there’s a long history of scandal there. Government is effectively required to use ineffective and wasteful but “objective” processes (see also contracting) because the alternative, discretion, is politically radioactive.
Private sector actors can be more willing to eat the cost of trusting someone to make a decision, even if it doesn’t work out.
Agree, this gets past some of the self serving rationalizations and gets closer to the core of the problem, but as Matt constantly harps on the degree to which we hamstring our government through an overabundance of fear of abuse is the source of a host of issues.
It is obvious to everyone at the entire school and that’s why I’m upset with this stuff. Bad principals in my experience attack very good teachers.
Like the two bad principals I’ve worked with both really feuded with the best teachers in the school. Ran off multiple
Teacher of the year winners. No one comes for these losers till it’s too late and 60 percent of your teachers have quit.
For a while I edited videos for a management consulting firm and like half of the content they produced was "when you try to implement performance evaluations everyone will hate it and complain and say their boss hates them, here are some steps to mitigate this and try to build buy-in" so I wouldn't exactly say that this doesn't happen in the non-unionized private sector, just that those groups by definition don't have the same way to vocalize their complaints.
I know quite a few teachers and my guess is any effort that truly threatens to reallocate the best teachers from the fanciest schools will meet a firestorm of opposition. Financially and politically powerful parents don’t want to change a status quo that funnels the best teachers towards their kids.
The whole point of being a Progressive is willingness to oppose the "financially and politically powerful [] who do not want to change the status quo."
However, teacher "goodness" is not an amorphous fluid. Assigning the teachers who are found to be best at pulling up the worst students in the worst circumstances does not necessarily mean that one-for-one the worst teachers are assigned to the students from the most unproblematic backgrounds.
As an addendum to your point, linking back to the powerful parents - liberal districts - suburbs that vote blue and pay great and offer great working conditions to teachers - are almost never also progressive.
Successful people rarely see to make their jobs harder.
LeBron James keeps changing teams and to bail on the harder job and find the easier path to a championship.
Some people seek the toughest work. But not all.
This is not just about teaching. This is about people.
But there ARE things we could to equalize this a bit. We’d have to give up on the kinds of tiny school districts that dominate the northeast. We’d have to centralize staffing — hiring and allocation — through district offices. Would it work? I don’t know. There are reasons to wonder. It makes sense that a teacher would not want to drive 45 minutes extra each way. It makes sense for them to want SOME control over their commutes.
Perhaps if we paid them like professionals it would help. But we don’t .
“Perhaps if we paid them like professionals it would help. But we don’t .”
As I said elsewhere… we don’t?
Perhaps, but that’s not really what’s being discussed here and would actually fall firmly under the heading of merit pay.
I would contend that I don’t want any wizards of student behavior, I want schools permitted, even mandated, to enforce discipline to the same extent they did a century ago. Parents whose kids are being disrupted from receiving an education should be able to sue districts for performance here to force expulsions and discipline.
Basically everything about the current set of “reforms” around classroom behavior and standards is completely directionally wrong and must be extirpated.
Given what the majority of teachers do and the skills they have, the $55k start, $100k top, $130k mid-level manager, and $160k principal pay scales on offer in my area are perfectly reasonable.
Increasing that, instead of directing funds to social programs that can help students escape the consequences of their home lives, would be a pointless squandering of limited resourced.
I was just at a meeting of school librarians in a relatively rural part of my state. They are worried about filling school librarian positions when people retire. For one open position recently, they had two applicants, and one completely ghosted them on the interview. For another job, an applicant came to the interview saying they didn't want to work mornings! They are located less than an hour from more suburban areas, so no one wants to be in a rural district where there is no money for anything.
For that reason framing it as a reallocation is probably the worst possible way to sell it. "Give more resources" to struggling schools or "make struggling schools more attractive" is a whole lot better
Many "great" teachers just have great students. The old "born on third base but thought you hit a triple" issue.
I mean that's also surely laziness on the part of the admin.
100% agree. My kids are in a "bad" school district. I was standing in line behind our new middle school teacher when he was talking on his phone (he didn't know I was there.) He had taken this job from a wealthier suburban district. He said something like "I will never again listen to anyone who says teachers in my new district are bad and don't work hard. They handle more in 10 minutes than my teachers in (old district) had to in 10 days. The average teacher in my new school works harder and is more dedicated than my best teacher in my old school."
Not 100% sure that’s the point Hunter made. I thought the point was the skill sets are actually pretty different and some teachers who do well in nice schools would struggle at tough ones.
I’m not that sure it’s a problem though. If you simply raise pay at tough schools, teachers whose skillset isn’t suited to them just won’t move. But it’d be a straight transfer from rich to poor people and will be resisted the way those usually are.
You can't shift districts very easily - at least not in Ohio. But the choicer assignments means fewer preps (only have to teach one course five times, not five courses one time) and typically the accelerated courses (tends to correlate with fewer disciplinary problems).
There's a deep sense of hopelessness in this series. The boards are made of uranium. The drill bit is made of butter.
I can recommend the book Weapons of Math Destruction, part of which is about teacher evaluation. The people doing the evaluating produced bad models of teacher performance, that left some teachers getting a bonus one year then getting fired for incompetence the next. I can see why teachers would find such a system capricious.
Secondly, I can recommend this Wesley Yang piece that I'm sure many have already read:
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/taught-for-america
"The soaring rhetoric attending the bipartisan neoliberal push to reform education and close the achievement gaps that preoccupied the Bush and Obama years for which Teach For America was an adjunct now seems, as Matt Yglesias put it in a recent post “extremely old-fashioned.” It is an artifact of the Before Times. But as Yglesias notes in his series on the sudden disappearance of this project, it is the decomposition of this project that fertilizes today’s ideological manias."
I believe about 90% of the answer to why the reform movement died is in that post.
I also think one of its failings (that I wish Matt would get into) is never clearly defining what success would look like. Did the reformers ever do so in a way more specific than better than today? I am old enough to remember the movement and the politics but what I don't recall is the specific metric(s) the reformers had for themselves.
There ARE ways to do better.
But they are not so tied to numbers that fit on spreadsheet.
We do not seek to improve medicine or law or architecture by ANYTHING analogous to these sorts of effort. We evaluate those professionals much more careful.
However, there ARE elements of the education reform project of the 00’s — and since 1983 more generally — that DO work and DO make a difference. The rise of education standards. The shift from local funding to state funding.
All of this requires acknowledging the huge successes of our efforts, require actually knowing the history of our education system. We do no longer have 5th grade dropouts. We barely have middle school dropouts. We do not give up on immigrants and students with disabilities. “Literacy” keeps being defined upwards. These are ENORMOUS successes.
There are others, too.
We expect more of kids than we used. And we DO get more. But because we are not kicking out the low performers, the averages do not go up as much. (See Simpson’s Paradox.)
Yea but this is exactly what I mean about stated, measurable goals. If your goal is raise the baseline learning of the median American student you may well be able to do that. If your goal on the other hand is close the achievement gap between the median student and the worst performers it is a whole different matter. That was the battle cry of the reform movement.
If you want pessimism go read some John Taylor Gatto essays. Sadly I think he hits the nail on the head in terms of the problems in institutional education. Unfortunately his solution is to destroy the institution and he proposed nothing that scales. But I still find his perspective quite valuable and insightful.
I'd start with "seven lesson schoolteacher" which you can easily find in a Google.
One assumption I see a lot of people implicitly making is that teachers of low income students make a lot less money than teachers at higher income student schools. However, this isn't generally the case.
In Indianapolis, (where I teach) the highest starting salaries in the metro area are for Indianapolis Public Schools. These schools have a reputation for being complete fiascos, with abysmal test scores. However, teachers there tend to be paid reasonably well. I currently teach at a moderately high performing charter, and salaries at my school are substantially lower. Its largely staffed by a rotating group of TFA members and people from similar programs with a core of veteran teachers.
The high performing suburban schools actually pay lower than IPS schools. The issue is that working conditions are just so much tougher at a Title 1 majority under-represented minority school that the higher pay isn't enough to compensate for most teachers.
As i said elsewhere; basically everything about our “reforms” on student standards and behavior is directionally wrong in every way.
Just to clarify - ARE there effective teacher performance measurements? How controversial is the measurement problem?
Standardized test for pupils on entry, standardized test for pupils on exit. How much your pupils have improved is your score (it doesn't have to be the same test both times).
Normalize results vs. other students in the same year/area/ethnic group/other factors that you want to be part of the control not part of the result.
Where each teacher teaches just one class (probably common for younger pupils), wait until you've got enough data that you're averaging away the weird individual circumstances of certain students, or perform other data smoothing/massaging, e.g. reject outliers*.
Otherwise assign students improvements to teachers by some appropriate metric. Be sure to account for students joining classes partway or leaving classes partway. Be aware this can create perverse incentives to poach or expel** certain students mid-year.
*note that this has to be transparent to the teachers, but will influence outcomes. If outliers are rejected, for example, as a teacher you should ignore your most gifted and most struggling students - they won't form part of your performance assessment anyway.
**much better for your assessment to dump a student who starts to struggle than to help them, especially if you can justify this through non-academic means, e.g. disciplinary violations (which students starting to struggle because of, e.g. issues at home will probably have).
Honestly it's quite a difficult problem once you drill into it, and the perverse incentives are very real and destructive, operating both at a teacher-level and school-level.
The problem with this approach is that the poorest performing schools have much higher transiency, so it can be difficult to get measures at the beginning and the end of the year, never mind across years. I remember being the parent rep at some sort of committee in my "persistently failing" school district. I was shocked to learn that one of the elementary schools had an 80% transiency rate, meaning that only 20% of the students who started at the school in September were still there in June. There weren't empty seats - just lots of students cycling in and out. This has been improved somewhat with our district's dedication to keep students in the same school if they move WITHIN the district - although parents often want their kids to go to a closer school, for obvious reasons - and with making sure that kids who move to shelters outside the district can still stay in the school, as well as lots of charter schools in my city shrinking or closing, which means less cycling through those schools, but it is still a problem.
Well, it's definitely the naïve answer, but I think it's worth stating it explicitly.
In some sense random cycling in and out isn't an issue (except insofar that having a smaller sample size of students leads to noisier statistics).
The problem arises if the students leaving and coming in are not randomly selected but somehow share characteristics in common that would correlate with the extent of the improvement they would make (e.g, parents motivated to support their child might be more likely to pull them from a failing school and move to push them into a better school).
And the problem becomes actively malicious if teachers or schools can deliberately choose to set policies that start excluding students who are having poor improvement.
It is not controversial at all, among experts. It is well known and established. There’s no controversy.
None of the test developers support these uses. Go to the research conferences. As the psychometrician. Read the technical documentation.
No controversy.
The only question is HOW bad and HOW inappropriate they for this purpose.
(Now, the researchers tend to ignore item quality, so they are assuming that the tests do a better job of measuring the standards than they actually do. But even with that false assumption, they are STILL against basing teacher pay on test scores. )
Yes, the study cited does not really address the right null hypothesis. Does a program of paying for performance, having higher starting salaries to permit more rigorous screening up front, paying for difficulty of the assigned role, smaller class sizes, direct instruction, etc. etc. produce no measurable improvement?
What are you trying to measure?
Are you insisting on quantification?
Yes, class size works, if you have the available teaching force. If you don’t, the addtional teachers will definitely be below average. The more teachers you want to hire, the worse that problem is.
Direct instruction? Really? Direct instruction increases the cognitive complexity problem, rooting in in the pedagogy, and not just the assessments.
And that cognitive complexity problem just overwhelmingly dominates these test-based measurements. The content on the tests is the dumbest part, the dumbed down part, and simply does not represent the really lasting or impactful lessons. You end up measuring what is easy to measure instead of what it important to measure. And by doing so, you distort what is taught.
Mine was a sort of double negative comment. Matt cited a study of the ineffectiveness of school reform as a reason for the loss of interest. My point is that the study as reported did not actually show whether one or another of the things that "reform" might mean worked. Maybe the study just shows that "reform" seldom made it all the way down to affecting how teachers teach and students learn. That is in fact what Matt seems to argue.
I think your question is full of assumptions.
What do you want to measure? Whom do you want to measure?
You seem to want to quantify the results, right? Why?
We can’t even quantify the content. All of this is based upon some arbitrary quantification scheme, so you will get arbitrary results. Now, some arbitrary results might be better than others. But we are not even vaguely close to having a concensus for how to weigh different elements in a quantification scheme, let alone how to implement.
So, outcomes-based performance lack the theoretical basis needed to even get started, well.
I teach education courses, including in graduate school. Ask me anything.
-thought this would be fun rather than just blabbing my response to the article.
Ok tell us why grad schools aren't rent-seeking as MY says...because tbh I definitely picked the program that was the most flexible. Learned a decent amount but the point was the paper not the learning.
I think my short answer is that the requirements of these programs are set by state governments, and for whatever reason they are not interested in strict or difficult requirements. While there is definitely a lot of stuff universities are doing wrong here, the fix is a policy change at the state level. I'd also say that the graduate degree money printer isn't unique to education.
The longer answer is that I don't think I really disagree here. Graduate degrees of education are big money-makers for universities. Because states mostly require the degree and the student teaching and the whole rigamarole to certify teachers, as well as the use of graduate degrees to get pay bumps for existing teachers, they have historically had a large population of students interested in those degrees. While there are probably many valuable things students learn when getting a graduate degree in education, there is little incentive to design a system that pursues some idea of rigor or quality because you'd drive a lot of students out of the program. (And as you can see from a lot of the discussion here, there's not a lot of consensus about what rigor and quality really are, so the measures are messy).
There are a few durable findings going back decades and decades that relate here. The students leave these programs feeling like their student teaching was responsible for most of their learning. They often feel like the academic and theoretical aspects of the programs are not relevant to their work. Teachers often end up teaching the way they were taught, not the way grad school tried to train them to teach. It's all a huge problem for Teacher Education as a field and it's acknowledged but solutions are... I dunno? Teacher residencies are a thing that seems to work well and put more focus on the practical side of things but they're new and small and we need more comprehensive evidence.
Is it 100% rent seeking? No. Are there a lot of people there for the paper? Yes. That's why my preference is to teach grad students earning their initial teaching certifications instead of veteran teachers going back to get an MEd or whatever. I like when I have a class of people who've been out in the world for a bit and want to, for whatever reason, make a change and become teachers.
I think the "rent-seeking" will change, though, for a variety of reasons. Declining enrollment in education programs. Declining K-12 and higher ed enrollment. Low social status for teachers. Part of what these programs do is constantly cycle new teachers into the pool and that helps adapt to high teacher turnover. These are somewhat pressures that all of K-12 and higher ed will have to deal with sooner or later.
Re: the teaching as you were taught vs how you were trained, I think for me the biggest problem I ran into is that the training just wasn't really practical. I would sit down, really do my best to plan out how I was going to teach in a cooperative framework or whatever else, and I would end up realizing that despite all the theory I learned I had basically no idea how to put that into practice -- and I need to get my lesson plan done now, not after a bunch of googling and referencing.
The most useful training I received were the classes that were taught via the methods that students were supposed to be taught, which felt a little infantilizing given we were all adults but at least actually modeled how it was supposed to work.
As I often say, the biggest problem with teaching is those damn students who keep showing up every day expecting something new!
Great comment, too (James; comment is also excellent).
It seems like the ideal would be to replace Master's in Ed programs with something more like apprenticeships. Then theory could be lightly sprinkled on once the basic mechanics are learned.
Nothing to add except I loved this thoughtful comment. Great.
Why do students majoring in education have the lowest average ACT/SAT scores among all college students?
Because the degree programs are not selective.
No, no, please blab ;)
I think it’s worth also asking a proxy, macro, question. What’s our ideal for the desired social status of teachers ? Like all professions, this varied widely in history. In Ancient Rome teachers of children were often literal slaves. In a certain and highly idiosyncratic point of modern nation state building teaching was lionized, and mythologized , to the point of treating teachers not as upper class elites perhaps, but as highly prestigious and respected members of society. In the popular and literary imagination these mythologized teachers tend to be, not coincidentally, disproportionately men. There was also a period when the profession was already getting “feminized” and concomitanly losing prestige (reflecting society’s sexism) but the fact that women were generally barred from most other careers kept teaching at an inflated quality. There were and are, doubtless , countless of other possible scenarios. In short, the question is - where do we want our teachers to be on the social hierarchy? I think much will be downstream from that.
Teachers care a ton about this, and we need more and better teachers, so instrumentally the thing to do is to increase their status.
But there's also the reality that teachers tend to be among the lowest-performing white-collar workers on standardized tests and such. They want to be seen as lawyers but score like secretaries. Ideally that will improve. But on the current metrics of professional prestige--which are not necessarily the correct metrics--it's hard to argue that they're undervalued. What we would need is a new system of prestige emphasizing what you do for people versus who you are.
Really not sure how teacher performance on standardized tests is relevant? As THPacis says, we need to decide where we want teachers to be on the social hierarchy. What many are trying to do - eg TFA - is to change the status of teaching. When you do that through compensation or other societal forms of status, you change who wants to be a teacher.
Another way of viewing this would be to look at other countries where attitudes towards teachers are different. In East Asian countries that have high-stakes tests, you end up with "superstar teachers" who run tutoring centers. Those teachers are more like brands raking in millions a year. Do we want that? Or do we want something else? What's it like in the UK, or Europe?
I think Johnson's suggestion is the the way we decide the status of a job is already downstream of the types of people who go into those professions. I.e. the people with lower test scores go into teaching, and everyone knows this, and therefore no matter how much we talk about deciding what their status should be, the status will only change if the people becoming teachers are higher status to begin with. Not suggesting this is right, but I think that's what they're saying
I mean if you are looking at teaching across the centuries you have a serious apples to oranges problem...you really need to look only at the last two hundred years when you have national systems of compulsory education.
I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s essentially a question of the level of abstraction. Teaching kids arithmetic, or how to read and write, or teaching older teenagers philosophy - those things have been done since antiquity, and in the case of philosophy studying in some cases literally the same texts! So in some sense teaching as a profession can be compared across millenia. In another sense though you’re right, the idea of the modern school and of public education in particular only goes back a couple of centuries. Then again you can argue that even that isn’t good comparison because our social , technological and economical world today in 21st cent diverse America is radically different from say early 20th cent America- and that’s also correct. So yes, place and time make a difference , but comparisons can still be valuable so long as you take those differences into account.
I do wonder if there is a big structural way in which :1. The move from 1 household provider to 2 provider model and 2. The decline of noblesse oblige - have seriously hurt our quality of public services. It’s just fiscally very challenging , and carries serious downsides - to pay tons of public workers truly decent salaries. In the before times teachers were mainly women, who relied on their husband to bring home the serious bucks. It worked because at that time most men made enough to support a middle class family on their own. At the same time there was also a pretty substantial upper clsss that devoted their time to public service. Using their personal means to basically subsidize low paid jobs. There were serious downsides to this system, but also benefits. You could get very high quality people in public service without giving up and arm and a leg. While that model largely died, we haven’t actually made the necessary adjustments to maintain that same quality in a more egalitarian world eg a super high tax and redistribution regime (that would allow both public servants to be paid much more AND effectively make private sectors workers take home much less, narrowing the gap from both ends).
Is it even worth having a federal Department of Education? Are state and local bureaucracies insufficiently complex? How can another layer of paper pushers, hundreds or thousands of miles from the classrooms it regulates, add value in a cost-effective way?
The case for no strings federal subsidies is strong-- the federal government has greater taxing and borrowing power than states and federal money can pay for useful things. That does not mean we should maintain cadre of federal bureaucrats to monitor the state bureaucrats and write long winded memos about abstruse standards. Just let the treasury transfer a population-based subsidy to each state and let states compete to build the best system.
It is worth having a central place to focus on research. We have the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy and others. Build technical knowledge. Fund research. Discover best practices. Yes.
But this country will not abide national control over our schools. We favorite “local control”, unlike most advanced countries. Even states cede most of their control to local school districts. We have remarkable little regulation of teaching and learning, relative to other advanced countries.
So, I think your comment is based on a false premise. Other than civil rights being applied to our schools, the feds have VERY little power or authority. And they don’t even contribute 10% of the money spent on education in this country.
In fact, most of the US Department of Education’s budget is about student loans for higher ed.
So, let me ask: what long winded memos are your talking about? Which standards are abstruse? What are you talking about?
As with transportation this makes a lot of sense, but having a national entity to identify best practices and nudge states toward them is still OK
Once the system/bureaucracy is in place, it will never stop at 'identify best practices and nudge'.
The 'nudge' will get more and more heavy handed over time.
Starting from where we are, we should want to nudge it back toward "best practice." I'm not interested in redesigning the Federal Government from a blank slate.
This is one of the reasons I dislike the phrase "best practices" - it often serves to legitimate bad ideas. I'm sure it once had value, insofar as it gestured towards sharing great ideas proven to work in multiple places (how I'm reading your comment), but it's usage has degraded badly.
I mostly see it used in corporate settings, municipal politics, and position papers, where it's usually cover for superstitions or advice for people looking to CYA: functionally it means "the minimum I have to do not to get fired" (or for organizations, "the minimum to avoid lawsuits / shareholder action").
To the extent that it's about collecting and sharing great ideas, that's best done at most one remove from relevant actors that might benefit from it. Teachers talking among themselves can share great ideas, yes, and principals directly supervising teachers. But once you move up from principals, to superintendents and beyond, to identify and promulgate great ideas, they're subject to escalating distortion and degradation. It turns into a game of telephone, runs into principal-agent problems, and starts solving different problems entirely.
(I think this is part and parcel of the general corruption of the words "expert" and "expertise" - I'm trying to formulate a mailbag question about this, but can't quite get it together without turning it into a rant.)
[Edit: tried to improve the intro, to better explain why I take a detour through a pet peeve to respond.]
I mainly mean promoting "best practice" as opposed to regulation and funding.
The federal Department of Education has all of 4,400 employees; it's not exactly a huge bureaucracy.
I think that the turnover issue is worth digging into more. Replacing employees is usually expensive, labor-intensive, or both, and you’ll probably experience some problems caused by understaffing (learning loss, disciplinary issues).
If your metrics for measuring performance are noisy (I understand that this is clearly true for most commonly used teaching metrics) or if differences in performance level aren’t that big, the cost of higher turnover can quickly eclipse the benefits of trying to optimize your workforce.
This is also a reason why a lot of administrators and school boards are okay with seniority-based comp structures— they really disincentivize turnover and reduce the associated costs.
particularly relevant now given the pandemic-triggered turnover in education
So if the political incentives are so bad that imposing top down technocratic reform is so obviously doomed, isn't this a strong case for imposing market incentives instead? Don't vouchers create the power for parents to hold these systems accountable where the political system clearly can't?
Recreating the worst information asymmetries and perverse incentives of our medical and higher education systems combined seems like a terrible idea, in fact.
Super like
Parents and society have misaligned incentives. Society wants educated students who reliably have a certain set of skills. Parents want school to instead flatter their own ideas of what their children should be learning and doing. Also, parents are not particularly good at objectively evaluating their own students' success and level of effort -- it's important to remember that striver parents who *want* their kids to be hyper-optimized and consumed by pre-programmed schedules of school and extra-curricular are extremely rare, and most parents just don't want to have to think about it all that much and are most interested in ensuring their kid has a healthy social life and doesn't have behavior issues.
Matt was pretty down on vouchers in Part IV. I didn't see a comment from you in that article, what would be your rebuttal to that part?
Reading Part IV, at the time, and again right now, I feel like it's mostly correct about how something like Arizona's ESAs play out, motivated parents sort their kids into schools with other motivated parents, it mostly works as a handout to religious weirdos, etc. etc.
Here's where I think Matt loses me. Matt has this conception of "education reform" as a sort of very specific set of technocratic policy proposals whereby we more optimally fund an idealized set of universal, plug and play educational pathways where ever kid goes in and they all get spit out the other end having received roughly comparable benefits, if not outcomes, regardless of external factors. The goal of reform is to maximize that universal benefit and the ways to do that are through optimally targeted funding and pedagogy selection.
I think that's fundamentally wrong. I think the potential benefits of education are very particularized to individual students and that the way to maximize positive outcomes is by providing a maximal availability of a wide range of flexible, idiosyncratic approaches to learning that support individually tailored outcomes. I don't really care at all what we're funding. The primary locus of education reform should be opportunities to develop and demonstrate valuable aptitudes through lots of varied tracking, assessment and certifications.
So vouchers without assessment IS just a handout to idiosyncratic homeschoolers. Just like public school without tracking is just daycare. I think today's post is a great demonstration of the political limits of the universalist, technocratic, funding allocation focused approached. I think the focus on optimal allocation of funding is misguided and inevitably captured by vested interests.
So do I think we should be nuking public education? No, of course not. We should do whatever we can to create public schools that can effectively serve kids with under-resourced, under-invested, absent, or otherwise dysfunctional parents. Do I think the political incentives will ever possibly align to maximize the whole range of educational opportunities the market could provide via public schooling? Also obviously not.
Thanks for the reply!
You get really wide variance with the evangelical schools. Some in the "Classical Christian school" movement offer rigorous dead-white-men/great-books-heavy curricula that look more like Phillips Exter than a conventional public school. But the worst ones are really, really bad.
Sounds like education reform, like policing reform, is something that will cost money, if only to buy off opposition from teachers and police unions.
But it’s NOT primarily a money thing.
The logic and technical facts of this approach are so very very bad.
The idea that teaching evaluation should reduced to ranking and statistics is at odds with the nature of the work and the way that other professions are understood.
The goal of teaching is long term impacts on children and communities. So focusing on short term outcomes is inevitably to be a problem.
Using a bad approach because it is easier for impatient people like who has an irrational preference for quantitative data over rigorous theories of action is just doomed.
Matt doesn’t treat this problem like the slow boring of hard boards. He wants a quick and “obvious” answer, regardless of whether it would actually work.
I agree. But I think that any reform is likely to cost more. And if linking teacher pay 100% to one-year value added (does anyone think is should be?) then we try another metric, and another
But that said, IS a short sighted "pay for performance" actually worse than seniority, if you insist on dichotomizing?
'don’t realize (or don’t remember) that downstream disputes about teacher evaluation 10 to 15 years ago were the genesis of so much factionalism'
If I'm talking about something in the past, is that 'downstream' or 'upstream' of where I am now? Water, naturally, flows downstream. Though Salmon swim upstream. Does the hivemind have a view on the correct usage?
Hivemind reporting for duty! Causes are upstream, effects are downstream, so the past is upstream. (Salmon notwithstanding.)
Unless you are in a timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly situation.
It’s a clumsy sentence, but I read it as, “First there was a push for teacher evaluation, then [downstream of that] there were disputes about evaluation, and those disputes were the genesis of the factionalism we see today.
It seems obvious from the perspective of an educator but bears repeating loudly: performance-based pay needs to look at the performance of the TEACHER. In that scenario the test scores of the students, or more precisely the GROWTH in test scores above the expected level, are one factor amongst many that are considered. Here are some other harder to measure aspects of a teacher's performance: communication with parents, administrators, and colleagues; knowledge of course content; demonstrated use of varied pedagogical techniques for delivery of instruction; appropriate and varied use of assessment techniques.
Charlotte Danielson has developed a Framework for Teaching that was the core of the performance evaluation I experienced in my first decade of teaching. https://danielsongroup.org/framework/
I was a HUGE FAN of performance based pay - I was able to jump quite a few salary steps after demonstrating my overall strengths as a teacher.
The trick with implementing something like this is not just that you need to accommodate the inevitable bump in salaries - if we are able to address the crap pay of starting teachers, younger and effective teachers will flock to the profession, and it's not like all the experienced highly paid crap teachers will decide to retire early - you also need a TON of administrative personnel to feel like you've accurately assessed your teachers. So the buy-in needs to be not only amongst the rank and file but also as another commenter has pointed out at the principal level. And when a principal looks at all the problems they are facing, they don't have an extra three hours per day to spend observing and giving feedback to their teachers.