More thoughts on teachers

[MillCreek]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2016208527_pacificpteachers25.html?cmpid=2654

What with the frequent posts on teachers on this board, I thought many of you would find this of interest.  Including the comments.  As Ms MillCreek, the elementary school teacher with 17 years of experience likes to say, in her opinion, the major predictors of scholastic success are class size, parental involvement and socioeconomic status.   The more involved the parents are with their children and the more money they have, the more likely the kids are to do well in school.  Interestingly enough, she thinks that parental involvement is more important than money.  This year, for example, she has very involved parents and a number of parental volunteers in her class, and she is confident it is going to be a great year.  Her opinion is based on teaching at poor schools, well-off schools and private schools. 

[makattak]

Statistics show your wife is wrong about class size. The other two, however, are very important.

The past 40 years shows that money is unimportant to educational outcomes in public schools. (Money spent may have an effect in other instances, but has been shown to have no effect in our current public school systems.)

[MillCreek]

What statistics would those be?  A quick Google looking for data in elementary schools came up with this:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED464725&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED464725

http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/ClassSize/academic.html

http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/class-size/

http://privateschool.about.com/cs/employment/a/teachingcond.htm

[makattak]

Class size has very little impact on educational outcomes. (Not none, but no significant impact until the classes are ESPECIALLY small.)

http://www.nber.org/papers/w8875.pdf

Results of the Tennessee STAR class-size experiment suggest that the internal rate of return from reducing class size from 22 to 15 students is around 6%.

i.e. cutting class sizes by 30+% gets a 6% better outcome.

[MillCreek]

I saw those studies about the return on the STAR experiment.  I wonder just how controlled these studies are, and can people argue with a straight face that the only variable effecting outcome is class size, the way the studies are constructed.

[vaskidmark]

Actually, the gross amount of money spent on an educational system has a significant and direct effect on the outcome product.  Unfortunately, the effect is a negative correlation.

Education does not improve by merely spending more money on buildings or equipment or textbooks or administrators, any more than it improves by spending more on teacher salary.  There is in fact a tipping point for each factor where spending more money is just throwing money at things without getting any increase in results, just as cutting expenses in any area can be statistically significant without actually decreasing effectiveness.  There is a balance, and a fair body of study (I won't call it "science" but it is more than a mere accumulation of anecdotes) on what the balance points are.  My reading and participation in the study and application of that knowledge leads me to the conclusion that none of the several "stake holders" in the educational system really wants to communicate and collaborate with the others - mostly because of a realistic fear that any support of reduction in spending in their sphere will be seen as both abdication of position (I'm important in this!") and eventual elimination from a place at the table.

My years as a teacher were in a system that proudly and openly grouped students by ability.  It also had an effective methology for moving students up and down the grouping scale based on a combination of classroom performance, standardized test scores and teacher assessment of "potential".  Kids who always tried hard might never get into the AP classes, but they were kept out of the ___-for-dummies classes.  And teachers were assigned classes based on a combination of peer- and administrator assessment as well as expressed desire.  I got _____-for-dummies three years in a row because I was deemed good at getting kis moved up and out into the middle-of-the-road grouping.  I was not always thrilled with the assignment but did see it as actually being an accolade rather than a banishment.  Other teachers were sent there to do the least possible damage.

My bottom line is that teachers need to be held in the same level of esteem as those who collect our garbage.  Maybe not the most desirable folks but certainly necessary to keeping the place running properly.  Until then, that difference between expressed importance and offered salary is going to tell the teachers how they are really looked at by the rest of the community.

stay safe.

[HankB]

On class size: I attended a private (Catholic) elementary school in Chicago. Average class sizes were in the mid- to upper- 30s; one class had 42 (!) students, which everyone agreed was too many.

Scholastic achievement - as measured on the standardized tests of the day, which IIRC were usually administered over a 2 or 3 day period to all grades every year - was well above average.

[RoadKingLarry]

My bottom line is that teachers need to be held in the same level of esteem as those who collect our garbage.

I strongly disagree.

We can get by far longer without teachers than we can without garbage collection.
That is proven every Summer.

[grampster]

I went through elementary school (1-8) in a class of nearly 60 kids, taught by one Sister of Mercy.  (who had absolutely no mercy whatsoever).  But in those days, most kids came from two parent households who civilized their children.  The parents expected their children to be disciplined in school when and if the child misbehaved, and if the parent found out, the kid got it again at home.  The critical point in education is that children need to be civilized by parents and taught the basics of the fact that there is a difference between good and evil because good and evil exists, stop denying it exists, and then demand that educators continue to imbue that reality.

Money, class size, fancy buildings, and myriads of teacher aids have generally no influence upon education.  Most surveys that say otherwise are nothing more than educational elitist studies that serve to prop up the destruction of the educational system and keep those elitists in control.  Mainly because those who do the studies mostly try and make the facts fit the foregone conclusion along with refusing to admit what is really wrong with the educational system; the teaching of moral equivalency, that the breakdown of the family unit doesn't matter, that pop culture is valid, centralizing the education system away from local control, and fallacy that every child must go to college.

[MillCreek]

Note that in my original post, my wife's opinion as to 'money' is the money of the parents.  People of higher socioeconomic status and children thereto tend to do better in school, in her opinion.

[MillCreek]

My bottom line is that teachers need to be held in the same level of esteem as those who collect our garbage.  Maybe not the most desirable folks but certainly necessary to keeping the place running properly.  Until then, that difference between expressed importance and offered salary is going to tell the teachers how they are really looked at by the rest of the community.
 

Just like other public servants, such as the military, police, fire, EMS and corrections personnel.  But if salary is a proxy for societal good, then clearly American civilization will collapse in short order without our professional baseball, basketball and football players.

[cambeul41]

MillCreek --

I thought your reference to socioeconomic status was clear in your OP.

It is closely related to parental involvement.  Friends, relatives, and neighbors often share similar values. If those values favor parental involvement in education, I expect the student success rate to be higher than if  everything is left up to the schools.

Families in lower socioeconomic environments that want to be involved in their children's educations are less likely to have access to to support they need.  They are less likely to find collaborators.

[Perd Hapley]

Then there is this matter of teachers' unions, and the related issue of firing (or not) under-performing teachers.

[CNYCacher]

Then there is this matter of teachers' unions, and the related issue of firing (or not) under-performing teachers.

How do you measure performance?

[HankB]

How do you measure performance?

How well their students perform, averaged over a number of years, as compared to the students of their peers?

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

they tried that here

in one odd case they had two teachers one had the worst performing class in math the other the best.
they went to the "best " teacher with the idea that she should coach her colleague .  she had bad news for their plan in the real world she was the one that taught both classes. it was "team teaching" and the performance difference was a result of class composition

[CNYCacher]

How well their students perform, averaged over a number of years, as compared to the students of their peers?

That only works if you can ensure completely random assignment of students to classrooms, and average it over many years.  In the real world this isn't possible.  In the real world, parents request teachers they like, or whom their friends like.  It's common for a teacher to seem to get lots of kids from the same neighborhood (or, "side of town") year after year, just because of parent requests.  When they are not bending to parent pressure, administrators are putting the tough case children in with the more experienced teachers.  High-performing kids go to the less-experienced teachers.  I think this a wise approach for obvious reasons, and it is probably the most beneficial to the children in the long run.  If you are going to fairly asses the teachers based on the performance of their students, this practice will have to go away.  You'll need to enforce some kind of random assignment system, which can not be altered.  You would need to pass laws defining the punishments for tampering with class lists.  And for what?  Remember you started down this road for the children.  Now we have more tough kids with new teachers, and more easy kids with veteran teachers.  Is that the idea situation for the kids?  make the kids suffer but at east we have established a pecking order for the teachers, right?  I would not be surprised to see that order roughly following "years of experience", which just happens to be the same metric which currently defines job security and pay rate.

[drewtam]

Are K-12 schools suffering from the same administrative bloat as colleges?


Some universities have gone from a 10:1 faculty to administration to 1:1 ratio. My impression of the administrative class of workers is that they are more meddlesome than helpful. And since the personnel budget gets soaked up by new administrator positions, the teacher to student ratio worsens.
The result is a compound effect. Not only is the student to teacher ratio worsened, but the teacher is then wasting time dealing with administration procedure.
I speculate there is also a negative impact on morale. Since the teacher is spending more time on bureaucracy, it demotivates them from making up for the lost time interacting with students by working longer hours. I'm sure the teacher's unions (where applicable) would also discourage working extra.

[grampster]

Leaving aside for the moment the lack of civilizing the children by their parents, it's the centralization of education that continues to obscure the politically incorrect reality that all kids are different.  Trying to evaluate teachers and curriculum based on centralized, one size fits all testing is ridiculous.  Too many over educated people have control of the education system.  They have over-complicated a rather simple thing by turning education into a massive one size fits all crumbling institution.  If we are to continue in this insanity, then the politicians and bureaucrats and union apparatchiks must be made equally accountable and face the same discipline as those teachers they place in situations they cannot control.  

A grass roots movement needs to begin to wrest control away from the bureaucrats, politicians, and unions and put control back into the individual schools.

[Perd Hapley]

How do you measure performance?

Are you suggesting that there is no way to fairly judge a teacher's job performance? Why not?

[CNYCacher]

Are you suggesting that there is no way to fairly judge a teacher's job performance? Why not?

I think I was asking a simple question.

[AZRedhawk44]

Are you suggesting that there is no way to fairly judge a teacher's job performance? Why not?

The only way to do that is via a standardized test.  The IOWA tests, the AIMS tests, whatever.  At which point, you get accusations that teachers are teaching to the test rather than teaching the material.  Which means the tests need to become more intricate so they can be more sensitive to "false teaching" rather than "appropriate teaching."

And there are no standardized tests for music, PE, art, drama, et cetera.  No standardized tests expressly for american literature versus english lit.  No standardized tests for foreign language studies.  There are huge swathes of our high school curriculum that are currently un-measurable by any type of objective reporting standard.

So, that leaves to to fall back on mere letter grades as a means of auditing a teacher's performance.  Suppose teachers are going to be motivated to actually fail students that need failing if it hurts the bottom line of their own checkbook?  Easy A's mean teacher gets to drive a new Mustang next year rather than the 8 year old Taurus.

This is a VERY difficult metric to nail down.  I worked for a school district for 5 years as a non-certified staff member in the IT department, and got to listen to this discussion as well as merit-driven evals for non-certified staff and what criteria to use.

[HankB]

. . . High-performing kids go to the less-experienced teachers.  I think this a wise approach for obvious reasons, and it is probably the most beneficial to the children in the long run . . . 

So the reward for extra effort on the part of a student is a lower quality teacher? Uh, uh, bad idea. We have few enough programs for gifted students as it is, and effectively punishing them for achievement is not only wrong, but wrong-headed.

[Perd Hapley]

The only way to do that is via a standardized test. 

I said the teacher's performance, not the students'. Why can't a teacher's job performance be evaluated by his superiors, as is the case in any other job? Do school administrators really not know whether their teachers are any good, aside from students' grades?

What I was really talking about were the stories I have heard of obviously bad teachers being very difficult to fire, due to union rules, tenure, etc.

[MillCreek]

^^^ At my wife's school, she is observed 0.5 day every quarter by her principal, assistant principal or an assistant superintendent.  They also use the input of co-workers and the results of her students on the state standardized tests.  I don't know about other districts, but her district definitely fires teachers, union or no.

PS: I asked her this morning, and she doesn't think that any district in Washington state offers 'tenure' to K-12 teachers.  She says you usually find that in the really big cities like New York and Chicago.  Every year around May, she and all the other teachers in the state are waiting to see if they will be offered a contract for the next school year. 

She points out that most of the national media stories about the district being unable to fire teachers due to the union are coming out of NYC and LA.  Especially NYC.