Testing Undervalues Us, Teachers Say
Edward Langer has heard the arguments about paying teachers for performance instead of seniority. He doesn’t buy them.
Yes, Langer says, every school has teachers who spend more time monitoring the clock than their students’ homework. And some educators clearly excel compared with their peers.
But keying teacher pay to student outcomes — the method usually proposed for measuring a teacher’s value — seems about as fair as ranking a dentist’s performance on how many cavities he fills in a year, says Langer, a seventh-grade geography teacher at Buchanan Middle School in Hillsborough County.
“To base a professional educator’s pay on kids, and parents who might not stress that education, is not fair to the educator,” he says. “There is no perfect system. … Maybe the seniority thing is the least unfair.”
Many don’t agree with equating education with other businesses. Teachers work with children, not interchangeable supplies and products. Every child is different, they say, and — here’s the key — many come with baggage teachers can’t overcome.
“If I have a student, which I do now, on a third-grade level and I can raise them to a fifth-grade level, who’s to say that’s not progress?” says Natalie Gago, a reading specialist at Middleton High School in Tampa. “Am I going to have them on a ninth-grade level? No. There’s only so much I can do.”
Russ: “A market based education system would really resolve these issues. If you don’t like how your kids are being educated just move them.”
Unless you can’t afford it. Then you get whatever you get and your kids are deprived of the best means of improving their lot. You sure thought that through!
Milo,
What Russ is probably alluding to is that the money used to educate the youngster would follow them to the educational institution that they are moved to. So if a school is getting $11,000 a year (from the government) to educate Susie and Susie’s parents moved her to another school then that school would get the $11,000. The economic status of the parents isn’t an issue.
#26
As for parents who have English deficiencies and thus the implication that they couldn’t possibly judge the teacher’s ability to to teach their children is hogwash. These are the very people our current system keeps down due to their economic standing. They know it, most of them want a better education for their children and they know it when they see it. By your logic whole service industries (teaching is a service industry) couldn’t improve because the customers don’t understand the intricasies of the industry. By your “logic” customers in an expensive resturaunt can’t judge the food because they aren’t qualified to cook that level of food themselves. You are just plain wrong.
Yes jim it’s not about truth. It’s about truthiness! Moving your kid to another school incurs no cost at all outside of the schooling itself and stupid people never fight progress. Service industries have improved massively! Nobody complains about customer service because of the gargantuan improvement they’ve undergone! Privatize everything and all will be kittens and rainbows with frequent showers of cotton candy!
Teachers aren’t underpaid except for those teaching advanced classes who should get more. Right now they make about $35k a year for 9 months work.
Paul, once again your attempt to simplify something has blown up in your face. When all things are equal then one may make equal comparisons. Regardless, however, even in the same school with those six classes, none are equal. Remember, no matter of how often we say it, there is no such person as the “average Joe”. Everyone is different in their own way.
Looking at the teacher, why are we only rating her on the outcome of the class? She doesn’t pick her students. She probably didn’t pick the books. She didn’t pick her classroom. She didn’t get to pick her Principal. And she didn’t pick her curriculum. She probably bought a lot of schools supplies out of her own pocket too. So why is the student’s achievement her responsibility alone? If a student fails, it is the whole system that failed, not that one easy target, AKA the teacher. Blaming the teacher for the system is the same as blaming the grunt soldier for Rumsfeld’s mistakes.
Comparing the teacher to a salesperson is another bogus argument. Salesmen have much more leeway on their methods of selling. While the product or terms may be negotiated, those same conditions can’t be transferred into a classroom. Those living solely on commission sales seldom last very long in any one place.
#32
Sorry Milo, but you are just wrong on this one. The US university system is one of if not the best in the world. “Best” does not mean perfect nor does it mean that every US university is great nor does it imply that other counties do not have excellent universities. It means on average our universities are considered superior than in most other counties.
Some of the best students from around the world attend US universities. If the universities in their home country were superior attend a US university? I would wager that half my freshmen physics class was from Asia. If Japanese universities were better, why not attend one of those? Perhaps you are just thinking of the top echelon Canadian students who would do well at any university they attended. BTW, just sitting in on a class is not at all the same as taking the class for a grade.
Yes, there are stupid people that get into the universities but they don’t last. Typically it is their third year when they have to take serious upper division courses in a major that they flounder and become sociology majors. A EE friend of mine told me that in his first EE class, the instructor told everyone to look at the people next to them as 3/4 people were not going to make it as an EE.
Competition for students would make our elementary and high schools better. Regardless of your opinion of the US university system as compared to the rest of the world, you have to admit it is better than the elementary and HS system.
Paul: it’s the mean, not the peak, that counts.
Thomas: Same thing.
The level of ignorance of the teaching profession in some of these comments (as well as your recent editorial on PCMag) is astounding for people who presumably spent a few years in a classroom.
Yes, teachers work 10 months (not 9) a year, but during that time they largely work a 70 – 100 hour week. A month and a half off doesn’t really compensate for that.
Judging a teacher’s performance by the outcomes exhibited by his/her students conveniently elides the fact that student performance is a product of an interacting system of which the teacher is only a single part, and over the rest of which she exerts 0 control. Parents do not enforce study or homework, do not know how to help their kids study, and allow them to work full time jobs while in school. Inner city schools have issues with decripit facilities and crime that are not factors in suburbs (or at least less so), and students who may have serious cognitive deficits due to drug use among their parents. The law requires these students to be mainstreamed, rather than have specialized education, so they aren’t stigmatized but that disrupts the education of all the other kids. No Child Left Behind mandates testing for reading, writing and math. Notice how science is left out. The result is that in Atlanta City Schools, middle school children get a maximum of 50 minutes per week of science and much of that is lost on the frequent “Drop Everything and Read” days — where they are allowed to read Cosmo and Ebony instead of science books. Will you hold the science teacher responsible for the outcome of that? And the quickest way to turn a good student into a bad one is to change his peer group.
It is irresponsible to hold the teacher accountable to a single test score. The outcomes that need to be measured are more complex than a single number can credibly report. Where did the students start and how far did they go? Do their higher order thinking skills match their content memorization, or are they just walking dictionaries? A hallmark of human learning of complex skills is what is called U-shaped development — students who are in the process of learning a complex skill can exhibit a temporary degradation of performance. This generally happens when a skill is composed of multiple subskills that develop at different rates. I have observed this directly and rigorously in learning Newtonian mechanics. If you have not measured the student’s performance across time, you won’t see this and may inappropriately evaluate the student”s understanding. And with a standardized test, you will never see that the knowledge you are seeking is present, but it doesn’t reveal itself because it is in the process of being integrated with all their other knowledge.
Standardized testing as a basis for accountability is a bad idea for both teachers and students. For one thing, test questions are selected based on statistical reliability (does it always generate the same pattern of choices) and not on content. For another, standardized exams test recognition memory, not generative memory, and these are very different things. And for a third, since NCLB schools are in the habit of stopping all educational activities for a month or more before exam time so that students can be relentlessly drilled for 8 hours a day on multiple choice test question examples. Will you hold a teacher responsible for the outcome of that? Students, and teachers, should be assessed based on what they are able to DO, not what they are able to recognize, and this requires extensive assessment of actual performance embedded in the classroom, not a standardized test. Look at the new Georgia performance standards (based on the AAAS benchmarks for science understanding) for a good example of this idea at the classroom level.
And John: your comments about Internet research, cut and paste, and Powerpoint this week show quite clearly that you have never actually seen any of the work product that comes from these activities. All of Edward Tufte’s criticisms of Powerpoint apply in spades to student presentations. They know everything about the software, but the flashy animated multimedia presentations are generally devoid of content. The technology is used as a crutch to make a vacuum look like the Mona Lisa. Cut and paste papers are an ok start but three conditions need to be satisfied: proper attribution (but students try to avoid this in order to make someone else’s effort look like their own — this is where is passes over into cheating); recognition that web sites are NOT primary sources (any numbnuts can put up a web page; that doesn’t make them an expert on anything; only tight professional editorial practices and peer review can ensure that scientific information is not loaded with bullshit); and some effort to assemble a common theme or point of view or answer to a reasearch question based on evidence rather than just a random walk through the first five hits on Google.
Students spend far more time on the appearance of a presentation than on its content and then don’t understand why they get a bad grade since they worked so hard. Technology is used as a substitute for thinking rather than an aid. This semester, I required my astronomy students to do a project. Some of them did outstanding jobs, either doing observations or pulling together a lot of source material to answer a specific question, but too many of them were like the student who did a paper on black holes which was simply five paragraphs summarizing five web sites, three of which were actually about black holes, two were about string theory, and one was about particle accelerator experiments. In other words, a list of stuff, not a paper. Too many of them had the same bibliography they had after the first week, and too many of them skipped all the intermediate deadlines I had to check on their progress and give them feedback and then in the last week asked if there was any extra credit they could do to bring their grade up.
This issue of extra credit is emblematic of the entire problem with assessing teachers based on outcomes. Extra credit gets started in middle school and is used extensively in high school. Students learn to expect extra credit and rely on it to allow goofing off during the semester and pulling out a grade at the end. Why is this allowed? I have worked extensively with teachers at all levels and they all say the same thing: they don’t want to do extra credit assignments. They are forced to do it by their administrators who are responding to parent complaints about how the nasty teacher is messing up their child’s resume for college. So you would hold the teacher accountable for that?
pjcamp,
The best way to make teacher’s accountable is to let parents truly choose the school they wish their child to attend. If every parent could on a whim take their funding for school A and give it to school B, draconian testing would be possible, although I think that some sort of testing should be done at periodic intervals to ensure that students are not slipping through the cracks. It is unconscionable to have kids graduating from high school that cannot read, add or understand fundamental critical thinking.
That should read: draconian testing would NOT be …
To the individual that said that teachers get 35K for nine months work… do most jobs have you working 8-10 hours at work, only to come home and work an additional 5 plus hours at home? Do most other jobs require that you further your education with college courses, but offer no financial help to do it? Do most other jobs require you to use materials and supplies, but dont have those materials and supplies available to them and force you to buy them on your own?? Summers off?? Summers are spent planning, regrouping, and preparing for the next year to come… when I take all hours worked in just the school year (not counting summer) and divide by my yearly salary, then subtract the amount of money I spent on photocopies (because I have no books), lab supplies, and classroom materials, I make $2.75/hour….. most teachers teach because they love to teach not for the paycheck….
OK, I’ve read your comments about me and my job. I cannot be quiet anymore.
In the first place, I graduated with honors – nationally recognized honors. I have taught for over 12 years, first grade to eigth grade.
Every year that I have taught I have spent money of my own (usually about $1000 a year) to buy teaching resources, classroom materials, incentives, books, charts, stickers, stamps, craft materials, even band-aids! How many of YOU pay out of your own pocket to create a more conducive “work” environment, help your “underlings” become more productive, and lure them to want to do what they should be doing?
And parents? Any given day of the week, you can find parents who love what I do, while at the same time a different parent is complaining to the administration about the same thing! Unfortunately, the ONLY time a parent calls an administrator is because they want to criticize or complain.
Yes, I’ve faced burn-out….because of co-teachers who were so competitive that they couldn’t even share a worksheet!….because of administrators who have only walked in my classroom twice a year but have the gall to judge my teaching?…..because of parents who bitch, bitch, bitch, and never say thank you for working overtime to create interesting lessons for my kid……because my “to-do list” is never complete – no matter how many weekends or evenings I work…..because of all the hours I put into planning, and searching for the best way to present the material to my students so it will engage them and motivate them!……because I know that society judges me and calls me “adaquate” because they don’t want to take the blame.
So you ask……why do I do this if it’s so difficult? I LOVE hearing a child say, “Oh….I get it!” or “Hey….this class ROCKS!” I get so excited when I see a student rise up to my high standards and show that they have learned something new. I love greeting them each morning and joking with them throughout the day. Their victories are my victories, regardless of whether I am ever voted teacher of the year or if I ever get a bonus.