What can you say about the President of the United States?

The study this talks about applies specifically to subjects that you take standardized tests on, things like math. I made an exception in my argument for things like this where the goal is more or less factual memorization. How this type of thing would hold up in an art, music, or current events class has yet to be seen. Also as has been stated standardized tests alone are a bad way to measure teacher performance. Some of the studies on there actually support what I say. Like this one:

That's what I was talking about. If you want to reward good teachers like you said, then how are you going to measure the things one of the studies you've linked to said are qualities that produce better educated students? Like I said, if you can i'm all for it, but a lot of this simply seems to be teacher bashing based off the way things are in California- which seems to be more a problem with that union than a lack of a reward/punishment system.

Oh, you didn't say that. You merely blamed teachers for the school system being in shambles. I apologize for the mistake.

 

Those measurements work on standardized tests. You don't take standardized tests for art, music, current events, speech and debate, etc. Teachers craft their own tests. I think it would be rather easy to manipulate this system into giving you the results you want, say, making hard and confusing tests in the beginning and steadily making them more simple to show artificial improvement. I suppose you can make standardized tests for some of those classes, but i'm not sure how you could standardize participatory classes like some of the ones mentioned above. I see too many ways to manipulate this system to make it effective enough to put teachers livelihoods on the line according to these scores.

This is what was said:

You want to take this method from them because of the above reasons, i'm assuming. If they and their methods the union wants to hold on to are not at fault for the above reasons, why do you want to take it from them? It was not my intention to put words in your mouth, I just assumed you would want them to be responsible for those things before using it as a pretense to take this method from them.

 

I hear what you are saying, but I'd advocate holding parents more accountable for how their kids turn out before going after the teachers. When I get a 14 year old kid in my class, the 90 hours of instruction I give him is not going to magically make up for the 14 years of crappy parenting that's been performed by these people.

But if you want better teaching, then give teachers the tools and societal support necessary. Quit yammering about 'student rights' and letting them off the hook for unbelievably vile behavior with imbecilic platitudes like 'oh, kids make mistakes!'

As it stands, we have little to no authority to discipline or correct students, and many parents refuse to support our efforts to educate the little spawn.

 

I am left to wonder how many great teachers we have in the US. I can't speak for other nations, and this comment is not meant to be taken as an insult to joa or LKD, but in the US, we generally do not have the best and brightest of our college graduates getting into teaching. It seems like that there are relatively few very intelligent people that get into teaching, and that LKD and joa seem to be more the exception than the rule. They probably represent something like 10% of the teachers.

And I get that. If you're smart enough to be a doctor or a lawyer, you're probably smart enough to be a teacher, but hardly anyone who is smart enough to be a doctor or lawyer actually become teachers.

My wife is a teacher, as I've said. From what she tells me of people she went to school with, most people who go into teaching were "B" students in high school. They weren't dumb by any means, but they weren't at the top of their class, graduating with honors either.

Which brings me to my next point - if you implement a system to weed out the teachers that are performing poorly, I'm not sure the pool of potential teachers is deep enough that you can replace them with good ones. Presumably the good teachers already have jobs - I don't see how you're going to get good teachers by picking up the dregs that are out of work that no school wanted initially. And seeing as how you need lots of teachers - unless you want to ratchet up class sizes into the thousands - I think it is inevitable that you're not going to get only really good teachers teaching.

Which may help to explain why many underperforming teachers keep their jobs. Sure, the teachers' union play a big role in that as well, but chances are it's not so simple to find a really good teacher (who isn't already employed elsewhere) to get to replace one in your school who you feel is underperforming.

 

What you say is maybe one of the biggest problems with school today, in most of the western world. There is not enough money or respect in teaching to make it attractive to the best and brightest. I am not the best or brightest, well, I am quite bright very bright if I may say so myself and I am fairly certain that I could be almost anything. My biggest problem is that I completely lack ambition and to be honest is fairly lazy. Ambition and willingness to work hard is way more important than intelligence or talent for most professions. I have a friend who is a doctor, she is dumb as a brick by my standards but she has strong work ethics and is willing to put in the hours.

Many of the older teachers I have encountered have been brilliant but they became teachers when it was a decent job. Among the younger generation and if I look at the people I studied with it was a mixed basket. Quite a few was like me or pure idealists but there were also a few who were not very suited for the job at all. Now I am of course somewhat regretting my choice because even though the education was a breeze the work is not as free and relaxed as I had hoped. The complete opposite as a matter of fact. The fact that I work with the kind of students I already when I started my training said I never wanted to work with doesn't help either. I feel like Sisyfos.

If you want better teachers wouldn't it be a good idea to start paying them better and improving their conditions so "better" people would come and remove the "bad" ones?

 

But in order to do that, you'll need to change society's perception of teaching as a profession. No easy task. First of all, you need to attract better people to get into the profession to begin with. But even if you had a limitless pool of talented teachers, teaching isn't like a business where you expand because you're making money. School spend money - tax money. If you're going to pay them more, then you are going to have to tax more, and as you pointed out, there are some pretty obvious problems with that.

 

The problem is that you are not willing to pay for the hundreds of thousands of teachers to be "good". You are not willing to pay for a good education for all children. By "you" I mean society. Society like to harp and complain but is not interested in actually doing anything that works because the issue is so huge. Schools do not make money, what they aim to produce is productive citizens but just as it is hard to evaluate teachers there is no quarterly rapport about how much money you earn by producing well educated people. Even if the raw monetary benefit to society would be immense. Society prefer cheap and either idealistic or bad teachers. Most children will do well anyway and the only people who really suffer are already at the bottom of society and who cares about them? The children for whom school can really make a huge difference are the children no one gives a damn about. Their parents have no representation, they barely vote, they do not know where to go for help. If they are lucky they have some menial job. Even in Sweden pretty much all the problems in schools are isolated to "bad" areas. Most schools are doing fine but in areas with high unemployment, lots of "minorities", lots of drugs and other social issues that is where the problems are. In equal Sweden, this "socialist" paradise the difference between schools is immense. I was a temp in a school in a "rich" neighbourhood. I could count the number of pupils who needed special education on my fingers. Everything was new and shiny, those ten got all the help they needed. I was also a temp in a school that was the complete opposite, the problem kids in the rich school would have been average or above average in the school in the "bad" neighbourhood. The contrast between those two schools made me sick, they were both public schools. "Problem free" students were the exception, not the rule in that school. They were stuck either with bad teachers who couldn't get a job anywhere else or with poor passionate enthusiasts who were on the verge of burning themselves out.

Sweden is one of the rich countries of the world with the narrowest income gap. I can only imagine how it is in the US and especially in California if the image I have gotten from media is anywhere near the truth.

 

Well, if there is any job I would say is worse than teaching it is being a principal. You get squeezed from all directions and the salary isn't all that better than a teacher's.

 

Here, a small school principal gets around $120k (NZD), compared to a senior teacher who would be earning around $80k (NZD) (assuming no extra responsibilities). It's not a massive difference - although it does increase quite steeply for larger (and secondary) schools.

I'm going to do something scary here and try and bring some facts into the debate (gathered from the OECD Education at a Glance report, 2011).

Just to get a base, an article from the Gaurdian (not the best source, I know) looks at an OECD ranking of education in 2010, and ranks these counties as top (at least in Reading - Maths and Science rankings in brackets following) - also included USA and Sweden, as they seem to be the base of this discussion:
South Korea (1,3)
Finland (2,1)
Canada (5,5)
New Zealand (7,4)
Japan (4,2)
Australia (9,7)
Netherlands (6,8)
Belgium (8,15)
Norway (15,19)
Estonia (11,6)
-----
USA (reading 14, maths 28, science 17)
Sweden (reading 15, maths 20, science 23)


Looking at these four countries (and OECD average), the following are their teachers (primary school) starting pay rates and pay rates after 15 years experience (both with minimum education needed to teach) - all figures, obviously, in USD.

Code:

                       Starting                     15 Years
South Korea          30522                         52820
Finland               32692                         41415
Canada               missing                         missing
New Zealand          missing                         missing
Japan                 27995                         49480
Australia              34664                         48233
Netherlands          37974                         50370
Belgium               32429                         45614
Norway               35593                         43914
Estonia               14881                         15758
-------
Top Ten Average      30866                         42200
(excl. Estonia)           35275                         45978
OECD Average         29767                         38914
-------
USA                    36502                         44708
Sweden                30648                         35349

On average, the top ten schools (at least 7 of them) pay their teachers 18.5% higher starting rate than the average OECD country, and 18% higher after 15 years experience.

In the same report, looking at how these schools are held accountable - categories are School Inspection, Self-Evaluation, National Exams, National Assessments.

Spoiler

South Korea
Exams: No
Assessments: 5+ subjects
Inspections:2-3 years
Self-Evaluations: 2-3 years

Finland
Exams: No
Assessments: 2-3 subjects
Inspections: No
Self-Evaluations: No

Canada
No Data

New Zealand
No Data

Japan
Exams: No
Assessments: 1-2 years
Inspections: No
Self-Evaluations: 1 years

Australia
Exams: No
Assessments: 5+ subjects
Inspections: Missing
Self-Evaluations: Missing

Netherlands
Exams: No
Assessments: 5+ subjects
Inspections: 1 years
Self-Evaluations: No

Belgium
Exams: No
Assessments: 1-2 subjects
Inspections: 2-3 years
Self-Evaluations: No

Norway
Exams: No
Assessments: 3-4 subjects
Inspections: 3+ years
Self-Evaluations: 1 years

Estonia
Exams: No
Assessments: 5+ subjects
Inspections: 1 years
Self-Evaluations: 1 years

-------
USA
Exams: 3-4 subjects
Assessments: 5+ subjects
Inspections: Yes, but unknown frequency
Self-Evaluations: Yes, but unknown frequency

Sweden
Exams: No
Assessments: No
Inspections: 3+ years
Self-Evaluations: 1+ years

The thing that jumps out most for me is Sweden and USA (ironically?), both sitting on different ends of the spectrum when it comes to standardized testing (according to this OECD report). There were only a handful of countries - Scotland, Greece, Czech Rep, Austra, to name a few - that had less primary school standardised tests than Sweden. Only Turkey had a larger number of standardised tests at primary school than USA did. Yet despite these extreme differences (and large differences in pay, too), both of these countries fall very closely in their education ratings. Other than these two countries, I really don't see any clear patterns - some countries in the top 10 have high testing, some have low.

This says to me that maybe what makes a good education system, and good teachers, falls outside of accountability through standardised testing.

 

Interesting numbers, I have seen most of them before. I find it quite glaring that a teacher doesn't start with an comparatively all that low salary but it just doesn't get any bigger. I made the mistake in my current job of asking for way too little money when I was hired (first proper job, I really needed it and so on) and it is neigh on impossible to get a proper raise. I have to change job if I want a bigger salary which isn't all that uncommon but for a teacher switching jobs is the only way to climb on the pay ladder in Sweden.

 

It's different here. We're meant to get a performance assessment done each year by someone in senior management, and if we meet a set of fixed criteria we get around $7k pay rise. There are about 7 steps, I think, which usually takes about 10 or so years to achieve. There is also a fair bit of movement up to more senior positions within schools.

 

I have had great assessments and gotten comparatively big raises most years but a big slice of a tiny cake is still a very small slice. I have even been "promoted" to team leader and I doubt that will show in my pay check. I would need a raise of about €5000 a year to not feel insulted and extremely unappreciated every time I open my salary information. I still wouldn't make much money but at least I wouldn't feel like I was spat on. Do not even care or need the money, it is just a matter of respect and my current salary screams disrespect.

 

It won't. In my wife's school, being team leader was seen as a type of punishment. They just rotated it among the team members each year. It's a ton of extra work for about an additional $2K in pay annually. If you calculate the pay increase with the amount of extra hours you're working, it's not even a minimum wage increase.