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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.

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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.

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May 24, 2023·edited May 24, 2023

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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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Just to clarify - ARE there effective teacher performance measurements? How controversial is the measurement problem?

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May 24, 2023·edited May 24, 2023

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.

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May 24, 2023·edited May 24, 2023

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Sounds like education reform, like policing reform, is something that will cost money, if only to buy off opposition from teachers and police unions.

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'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?

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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.

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