How hard is teaching.

I get that. But like I asked another person why don't they want to be there? School isn't something that kids have ever just loved but still went and learned. Something has to have changed over time.

 

That would seem very tough.

 

So you feel parents are the problem? Are you a parent? If so what are you doing different for you kids that the ones that have kids who don't pay attention don't do?

 

Kids didn't learn as well as they did before video games. Also, the video games now are much better. Kids 40 years ago weren't learning much either. The reason for the high stakes testing, etc. is because of the abuses of the system in the 1960s and 1970s, which haven't been resolved, as the lack of family structure is slowly tearing apart our society.

 

Not really. The educational system isn't much different from what it was 40 years ago, or even longer than that. I think the problem is that our society itself is falling apart due to the slow failure of families. Education is a symptom of that. There are a few changes in education that make things seem worse today--we have more standardized test scores to look at (the major international assessments, like the PISA, the TIMSS, etc., are about 25 years old), and we have added 4 year high school graduation rate as a measure of schools. I remember sitting outside my principal's office (fall 1981), waiting to talk to him about getting special permission to take a college class when I was in the 11th grade, and hearing him tell at least two students before me to just drop out, as they were just disrupting things and failing. That wouldn't happen today, as they would count against the school.

 

Well, I'm do believe that parents/families are the problem and I am a parent (and a former teacher). What I do differently, is first of all, my wife and I read to our kids when they were toddlers/elementary school students. We spent (and spend) time discussing intellectual things, and explaining things, and teaching them. We played games (board and card) with our kids. We eat most dinners together. When we see our kids falling behind in a subject, we work with them to build up their skills, etc. in the weak area. My kids know that poor academic performance is unacceptable.

My wife is a current teacher, and from talking to her typical city kids, they didn't get read to as kids. They aren't playing board games at home. They are eating junk food in front of the TV. Their parents don't know the subjects well enough to help their kids, and they really don't care if their kids get Ds, as long as they are passing.

 

"Who gets more of a bonus?" The one who can get the most out of the students. This means that the best teachers are the ones that produce the best students. For special needs students, you might want to consider just what it is you want out of them. It's a tough thankless job, and maybe the thankless part is a partial answer to your question. From what I've seen, it's a lot of taking the dirt out of boss hawg's hole and putting it in boss koompa's hole. At the end of the day, they've managed to learn how to push a shovel, which isn't something you need to pay the boss for.

I bolded the answer. If your wife is getting better academic results from worrying about feelings and emotions, then great! That is an empirical reproducible effect that we can point to and say "this works!". It's not what the teacher does, but what the results are that count. She can hit the lecture circuit and explain to educational conferences just how she achieves this, and that's fine. It's a bit touchy feely on that end, but if it works, then it works.

 

Which teacher is getting "the most out of students"? The one that teaches gifted students, but gets no gains out of them, or the one that teachers the extremely low performing kids up to simply low performing? I can make good arguments for either, although I tend towards the second. I think it helps our society more in the long run. The gifted students will perform well regardless. The low achievers need more work to get them to an acceptable level.

Also, some of this should be done based on supply and demand. There is little problem finding and hiring a teacher in a rich district with generally good kids. They should be paid less. it's much harder hiring a teacher to teach in the inner city. They should be paid more, due to that fact.

 

Interesting.

 

Compare each teacher's students' progress with their progress under other teachers, and with their IQ score. Simple.

There's always going to be some random variation for whatever reasons. Do we try to correct for all random variation with other professions? If a salesman's client is sick one day, so he can't make the sale, do we try to compensate for that? No, we just assume the random variations will more or less even out over time.

No one is saying ignore how they think and feel. Just don't mistake YOUR PERCEPTION of how they think and feel for actual data on how they think and feel and perform.

Great. In the kind of results-based compensation system we are talking about, where teacher performance is measured by student progress RELATIVE TO THEIR AVERAGE PROGRESS AND IQ, your wife would be well paid for exercising her skill.

WRONG. Schools are not falling apart due to teaching to the test. They are falling apart because THE TESTS DON'T MEASURE WHAT WE ACTUALLY WANT KIDS TO LEARN. Developing, administering, and grading valid tests takes work, it costs money, and we have not been willing to do the work or spend the money, mostly due to teacher unions' irrational and anti-scientific bias against testing.

 

Horrifying. But most people can tell similar stories -- though at least around here, I am certain they are becoming less common. I had one instructor at a technical institute where I was studying management decades ago whose idea of teaching was to get up in front of the class and read to them from the textbook. True story.

 

Big list.

 

Supply and demand is fine with me. All I want is to get it out of the federal government's hands and into the people who actually have to pay for the education of their children.

Your question of who is getting the most out of their students should not be up to you or me, but the people who are paying for that service. That's the demand part of it. The supply is going to have to deal with the demand, and vice versa.

Once you get the federal government out of the way, things will very quickly get better, with people feeling like they're getting a decent return for their money.

 

No, the real problem is that it is impossible to create such a test that can be easily graded by a scantron. Multiple choice answers just aren't sufficient to measure what we really want students to learn. We use multiple choice tests, and we are teaching to the test. You are basically describing an impossible situation, so we use the current flawed tests, and we are reducing education to "teaching to the test." The unfortunate thing is that the current way of "teaching to the test" probably produces worse long term results than the alternative, which is to teach what the kids truly need. My wife used to work at a magnet school that didn't teach to the test, and they were the best school in the district. Naturally, they are reducing the number of students selected to attend this school.

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Well, as a taxpayer and a parent of two students, I am one of the people who are paying for the service.

Can't get worse.

 

I see your point, and it is a very good one.

The other option is to have a single teacher teach a continuum of 6-week courses, so the kids progress through the teacher's range of class periods--same teacher but different course, or same teacher and same course if it is a repeat.

Spoken like a true Project Manager! I would love to see formal project management principles applied to education (based on the PMBOK).

I was a rarity as a teacher because I was both in favor of testing and in favor of teaching to the tests. The standardized tests in both California and Texas are high quality tests that actually measured the knowledge and skills mandated by the state for each course. Teaching to the test was indistinguishable from teaching the mandated subject matter & skills.

My problem was that they never did anything useful with the test results.

I do not see Constitutional problems, but there would need to be some serious amendments to Title I, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

The only homework-related activity that is empirically shown to improve academic performance is reading at or near the instructional level. On average (actually, per a GROSS GENERALIZATION) going up one Reading Grade Level represents the results of reading roughly one hour a day for a year (300-400 hours). That does not mean the text has to be school-related, be a book, etc. It just has to be written words in sentences and paragraphs.

The traditional concept of homework is independent practice, or finishing projects that cannot be completed in class. Any skill, (reading, writing, math, piano-playing, carpentry, etc.) requires practice for mastery. That does not mean that it must all be related to topics selected by the teacher.

It is also not the case that all the skills and knowledge required for a successful life, or even for academic success, are part of the curriculum. Joseph Campbell said, "Follow your bliss." Kids need time off from school activities precisely so they can follow their bliss. If school takes up too much of their time, kids will never develop those independently selected skills, or will develop them too late.

Kids also need to have time and opportunity to independently apply the curricular skills to non-curricular situations and projects. This is how kids determine whether the stuff they learn is true and useful. This is possibly the only way for kids to legitimize or discount the belief that their teachers know what they are talking about. (Failure to do this is why SJWs and precious snowflakes don't hang their gender studies teachers in effigy.)

Your coach analogy is perfect for illustrating my objection. It makes very little sense to evaluate a basketball coach with a team whose average height is 5.5 feet tall by the same measurement as a coach whose team height averages 6.5 feet tall.

This is where it is useful to consider the difference between Quality Control and Quality Assurance.

Evaluating the product against an identified and measurable standard is Quality Control -- in this case student performance and ability, as measured by some standardized, criterion-referenced test. That is a useful way to determine whether a student advances, but tells you nothing about the teacher. Did the kid make fewer baskets because his coach sucked, because the kid did not practice, or because he is only five foot two?

Evaluating the degree of adherence to a defined, approved, and required process is Quality Assurance --in this case, observation of teacher behaviors during classroom instruction, evaluation of unit plans and lesson plans, assignment instructions & rubrics, review of records of teacher contacts with parents, and similar artifacts. This is a useful way to determine whether the teacher is actually contributing in the most effective ways possible to the student's growth. Did the kid make more baskets because his coach worked to help him improve, because he is six foot eight, or because the coach threatened to rape his mom if he ever missed two in a row?

I understand the desire to have an easy way to tell the good teachers from the poor ones. However, because the job is so complex and fraught with infinite variation, there is no simple or cheap way to measure teacher performance. This is the difficulty of an enterprise whose end product is a changed human being.

The effect of this would be to concentrate the talent in the schools with the most academically motivated students in the richest school districts. It would also create cycles in the poorest districts, especially in the schools with the least academically motivated students, of inexperienced teachers teaching for a few years, then leaving for other professions as soon as they could, simply because their already non-competitive salaries get progressively lower. Some of these teachers would be highly skilled, dedicated, and caring, but would be discouraged from staying by the system you propose.

 

Reading to little kids is critical, and I think most people know this.

I like that you recognize the importance of playing cards. I learned basic addition facts by watching my parents play cribbage, and then by playing it myself.

 

It is nice to have teachers/former teachers contribute to this thread. There are so many on this thread who seem to think that, because they are taxpayers and were once students, they must somehow understand teaching. I didn't really understand until I had been teaching for a few years, so I cannot blame them for not understanding.

What I think is most amazing is how many responses include an implicit belief that if a teacher does not have some magical power to inspire or control a whole classroom of independent, thinking (some of them), and hormonally-driven people, then it must be because the teacher is unqualified, not trying, or a part of an intrinsically corrupt system. I never met a teacher who did not want to be a better teacher, and only a few who had stopped trying to be better.

Moreover, teachers are almost universally undervalued for the contributions they make to civilization through contributing to individual lives. Very often, the voices that echo longest in our hearts and minds are those of one or another of our teachers, whispering wisdom to us long after they are dead.

While many of our schools may have been in decline in many ways over the past 3 or 4 decades, most are still pretty good, thanks to the quality of most of our teachers. While I have a long list of improvements I would like to see, and while our schools show vast room for improvement, our teachers do an amazing job.

I have never even heard of a project that rivals the ambition of state-sponsored universal education, yet somehow Americans have come to take it for granted that 50 million of our kids will go to public schools every year and will be taught and cared for by highly educated and dedicated professionals.

Almost all American kids have by the age of 12 a better education than was available to almost anyone before the 17th century. This is because of the education and dedication of our teachers.

All kids are guaranteed by age 19 the opportunity to receive free of charge (or for their parents' taxes) an education that rivals any available to anyone prior to the start of the 20th Century. All they have to do is show up, pay attention to their teachers, and follow the teachers' instructions.

 

The difference between a coach and most other teachers is that kids are on the team by choice, and can be kicked off for not obeying the coach, not doing the work, not running the laps. That is the secret power of coaches.

Teachers of algebra, English, history, science, etc. have none of this advantage. This becomes obvious when you watch the football coach struggle with class control while teaching his two periods of health or history.

 

Actually, I do not think they want teachers who are responsible for teaching. They want teachers who are responsible for learning.

The problem is that junior is responsible for learning or at least he is supposed to be. Junior is a real person with free will. He is not some canvas that teachers can paint on at will, nor is he a box a teacher can unilaterally fill with knowledge and skills.

Education is not something that anyone can do to you. Education is something you do for yourself with the help of others, including teachers, parents, and other students. Junior will only ever get the education he actually deserves.

There is an increasing percentage of students who do not do their part of the process.

There is a corresponding percentage of parents (and other taxpayers) who want to blame teachers for junior being too lazy or uncooperative to do what he is directed to do in order to learn the material.

Until junior's parents and junior accept that hard reality, junior will get a crappy education, regardless of how good his teachers are.

 

Makes sense. Then teaching is a mess. Was it always like this? Most kids used to not want to be kicked out of school.

 

How did our parents know the subject and the current parents don't? What happened?

 

The one is tied to the other. Put a teacher in a classroom full of empty desks with orders to teach and you're going to get laughter. If the students are as uneducable as the desks they sit at, then why have them there in the first place? The whole idea is that they can be taught, else they wouldn't be there.

We obviously disagree on this. You're not making the teachers responsible for anything, other than simply being warm pieces of meat in the classroom. If the students can learn something about warm meat from this "teacher", then that's their responsibility.

No doubt. I've had a few of those warm meat professorial types before, and I admit that I could have learned more from them than I could have.

On the other hand, maybe that slab of warm meat might want to consider who is paying his salary, and that when his employers feel they aren't getting a decent return on their investment, then maybe they don't really need a slab of irresponsible warm meat in the classroom. Maybe he can be put on the grill and fired.

 

I like your statement about being teachable. But how is that determined?

 

Testing is the most obvious way. When there is no further academic achievement, then that particular student can be safely dismissed from the class. That's also how you apply responsibility to the student. Just say "sorry junior, but I'm not able to teach you anything more". Then it's up to junior and his parents to figure out where to go from there.

It's also how you determine the efficacy of the teacher. A teacher who can't teach will really find himself standing in front of an empty classroom.

 

You must be talking about union teachers in hyper expensive, underperforming big city school districts. The teachers around here work 10-12 hours/day, get a decent retirement that equates to about 1 1/2 times social security(instead of Social Security), and have to use many Summers working on more education to keep their jobs. They do get holidays and some Summers off, but most work extra jobs to improve their incomes. A teacher with 20 years experience makes about $65k-70k/year. Administrators make more, but it's easier to lose your job and nobody likes you any more.