We Shouldn't Reward Teachers ...

[Tuesday Afternoon]

[Demo_Chris]

1. Teachers are paid very well and given tremendous respect...

The 'misguided mandate' is that we expect objective results-- something every other employee in America operates under.

[sharp_stick]

3. Tremendous respect?

I don't know about that, I see a lot of douchebags just being douchebags and yammering about short days and summers without a clue what actually happens.


Often the only time I see a teacher being given tremendous respect is when they manage to step in front of some fucknut with a gun or block some pedo trying to get into the playground.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

4. I like the part where he says they are paid -very- well.

[Demo_Chris]

17. Yeah, because they are. Them's the facts...

Teachers are easily in the top 20% in terms of pay, and damn near no one comes close to their benefits.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

18. I wish you would put me on ignore.

[Demo_Chris]

27. *HUGS*

[Are_grits_groceries]

34. You are out of your mind.

And that's putting it nicely.
I taught for years and have had family in the education system since WWII. It is something I have kept up with.

You have ZERO idea about teachers and their pay, benefits, etc.

[Demo_Chris]

89. Here are the facts...

National average 45K plus, plus epic benefits. That's fantastic money these days -- a single teacher earns more on average than the typical family, and no one comes close to the benefits. If you don't like it don't do it, but don't try to pretend that this isn't good money.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/15/how-much-teachers-get-paid-state-by-state/

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary

[mcar]

92. Epic benefits?

Excuse me while I fall over laughing. $600/month for family health coverage with a $3000 deductible. Add $200/month for dental, extra for vision.

Plus, we have to pay for my teacher SO's continuing education to keep his certification. I won't even mention the hours he puts in as an hs math teacher. When he retires in 5 years, if he makes it that long and if the FL legislature hasn't eliminated it, he'll get a huge 45% of his salary as pension. Yippee!

Epic benefits my butt.

[Are_grits_groceries]

94. You are still out of your mind.

I want you to list those 'epic benefits. I sure didn't get any and neither did anybody else I know.

I already did it for years. I know what I am talking about because of direct experience.

Quit spewing bs right wing shite. I have heard that from them for years.

[Demo_Chris]

99. Health insurance, sick days, vacation, pensions, unions, tenure, months off ever year...

Are you SERIOUSLY trying to suggest that teachers do not receive fantastic benefits when compared to the average American worker?

[titaniumsalute]

110. You call these benefits epic?

My wife is a teacher.

1. $800 per month for healthcare for a family of four IF we went through her school district. Now THAT is an EPIC cost.
2. OK. Yes they get some sick days. Just as I do and my staff at work. Epic? Not really.
3. Vacation? So vacation is now an EPIC benefit? By the way most teachers do not get vacation time (I'm not including the summer break because that is NOT a vacation.)
4. Pension. Take a fucking look at the pathetic pensions now being raped by the states. Epic is bullshit in this case.
5. Tenure. Some teachers get tenure, some do not.
6. Months off per year. My wife is paid for the days she works, not the days she doesn't work. We actually broke down her salary once to the hours she works. It came down to about minimum wage.

Sorry Chris...you are sorely misguided and ignorant of the facts. I'm surprised you seem so eager to want teachers to race to the bottom. Sickening.

[Drahthaardogs]

104. After reading his posts

Yes he is out of his mind. I had two employed and educated parents and we qualified for food stamps. Why he likes the race to the bottom is beyond me.

[Demo_Chris]

112. I do NOT like the race to the bottom, and teachers are not even in the race...

THAT'S the point. Compared to most Americans -- the ones paying their salaries -- teachers are doing great. Single teachers earn on average the median FAMILY income in this country, plus benefits most can only dream of. In a nation full of truly desperate people teachers aren't the underclass, they are solidly in the middle, and if they are married to someone doing well -- like another teacher -- they are sitting comfortably near the top 20%.

If someone thinks that's struggling then they don't have a clue what suffering is. They sound like someone with a bad haircut comparing their plight to a cancer patient in chemo.

[Aerows]

96. You didn't have a good teacher did you?

One that taught you critical thinking and reason-based logic?

I mourn for those like you.

[Demo_Chris]

98. Good enough to teach me about Ad Hominem arguments. nt

[Aerows]

103. Not well enough, actually n/t

[Rosa Luxemburg]

144. The total hours that we actually work brings us lower than minimum wage

The so called epic benefits don't cover everything - that depends on the school system.

[JaneyVee]

151. OMG $45K/YR! EPIC!!!!

Whose side are you on?

[cyberswede]

29. Do you have a link to support your claims?

A quick Google search shows me that the top 20% of US wage earners make about $97,000 per year.

The average teacher salary in the US is $56,383 (which means half of teachers make less).



And regarding benefits:

MYTH: Teachers receive excellent health and pension benefits that make up for lower salaries.

FACT: Although teachers have somewhat better health and pension benefits than do other professionals, these are offset partly by lower payroll taxes paid by employers (since some teachers are not in the Social Security system), according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Teachers have less premium pay (overtime and shift pay, for example), and less paid leave than do other professionals.

Teacher benefits have not improved relative to other professionals since 1994 (the earliest data EPI has on benefits), so the growth in the teacher wage
disadvantage has not been offset by improved benefits.

The benefits of other workers would not have declined as much in recent years if they had the protection of a union, collective bargaining, and an independent voice on the job -- like public school teachers.

http://www.nea.org/home/12661.htm

[jeff47]

32. I'm sure they have a lovely anecdote all ready

Where a friend of a friend knows a teacher who makes $300k/year.

But not so much with the "data" or "evidence".

[MADem]

51. I'm guessing there's no link to support the claim.

I think what we're seeing here is a little bit of pot stirring for its own sake.

[oldhippie]

57. I hope .....

... you're not a math teacher?

The average teacher salary in the US is $56,383 (which means half of teachers make less).

Yeah, yeah, I know. Average, mean, median? It's all the same, you know what I mean. (sigh)

[cyberswede]

65. oops...

and I just helped my 11 year old with her mean, median, and mode unit homework a couple months ago!

Aren't mean and average the same thing? I forget...

edit: I'm not a teacher of anything, let alone math.

[oldhippie]

76. It's a common error .....

It gets confused all the time. Yes, mean and average are the same. Median was the term you were looking for above, where half the values of a group are above and below.

It doesn't really mean much to most people. But we engineers tend to be picky about such things. Using the wrong values in designs can be dangerous in many cases. So we nag sometimes.

[joeglow3]

66. I quit reading when the link tried to equate teaching to public accounting

I spent time on both in college, but ended up with my degrees in accounting (degrees because a Masters is now required to just sit for the exam that is required to be a CPA). The two professions require different skill sets, but the technical knowledge needed for teaching was much lower.

Plus, if you want to compare the two, you HAVE to take into account the time off teachers get for summers. Sure, teachers work overtime for 9 months of the year, just like every other profession, except we do it for 12 months. I averaged 70-80 hours a week in the last year (with one week where I worked 127 out of 168 hours in a week). I know about a half dozen teachers and none of them even sniffed hours like that.

Thus, if you take the number of hours I worked my first year (the basis of comparsion in your article) and divided it by the hours worked, I guaran-fricking-tee I got paid less per hour than any of my friends who graduated that year and began teaching.

[cyberswede]

71. Do you mean the first article?

As I said - that was a quick Google search, and I only looked at the chart to get a general figure for the top 20%. Regardless, there's no way in this universe that teachers are in the top 20% of wage earners in the U.S.

As for the notion of hours worked, here:

MYTH: The school day is only six or seven hours, so it's only fair that teachers make less than "full-time" professionals.

FACT: Other professionals hardly have the monopoly on the long workday, and many studies conclude that teachers work as long or longer than the typical 40-hour workweek.

- Six or seven hours is the "contracted" workday, but unlike in other professions, the expectation for teachers is that much required work will take place at home, at night and on weekends. For teachers, the day isn't over when the dismissal bell rings.

- Teachers spend an average of 50 hours per week on instructional duties, including an average of 12 hours each week on non-compensated school-related activities such as grading papers, bus duty, and club advising.

- When the Center for Teaching Quality studied teachers' workdays in Clark County, NV, it found that not only did most teachers work additional hours outside of the school day, but that "Very little of this time is spent working directly with students in activities such as tutoring or coaching; far more time is reported on preparation, grading papers, parent conferences, and attending meetings."

MYTH: Teachers have summers off.

FACT: Students have summers off. Teachers spend summers working second jobs, teaching summer school, and taking classes for certification renewal or to advance their careers.

- Most full-time employees in the private sector receive training on company time at company expense, while many teachers spend the eight weeks of summer break earning college hours, at their own expense.

- School begins in late August or early September, but teachers are back before the start of school and are busy stocking supplies, setting up their classrooms, and preparing for the year's curriculum.

http://www.nea.org/home/12661.htm

[joeglow3]

79. I addressed that

I am saying the assumption is that teachers, when working, work the same number of hours per week as other professionals. The citation you make assumes that professions other than teachers are only working 40 hours a week, which is bullshit. Thus, once we have an apples to apples comparison on an equal number of hours worked per week, suddenly that 2 months off in the summer suddenly DOES make a difference.

Second, great that they are working summer jobs. However, the analysis does NOT include that in the salaries of teachers when making a comparison. Thus, they are STILL comparing salaries of 10 months worth of work (with overtime hours worked) to 12 months worth of work (also with overtime hours worked).

[IllinoisBirdWatcher]

75. Using "homework" hours doesn't count...

Critics of teachers are so quick to point out that they only "work" six hours per day. The fact that lesson planning and homework correcting "doesn't count as work" is beyond sad.

So, when my CPA takes a month off on April 16th, she counts it as "work" time, ie: paid vacation.

In order to get to the average teacher salary posted up-thread, a Masters degree is required. Nice to know it is now required to sit for a CPA exam, but many states have required a Masters to teach for decades. To reach the top of the teacher salary schedule, most districts require an Ed.D. or Ph.D. (completed on the individual's time and individual's dime). Not sure if a Ph. D. is required for top CPA salaries.

But the real joke is all those homework hours. In comparing CPA wages to teacher wages, the CPA should only be counting client contact hours. "Good" CPA's should be donating the hours of data entry and analysis for the good of their cliients (students). And their employers should not be sending them to warm climates for weekend or week long required re-certification junkets. CPA's should be doing that out of the goodness of their hearts.

As for average salaries, there is this:

Meanwhile, a CPA with 20 or more years of experience earns between $65,000 - $110,000 per year.

or this:

CPA Salaries

Senior $111,925
1 to 3 Years $88,825
Up to 1 Year $74,525

[joeglow3]

80. I agree with the top number

Those numbers are accurate and I agree that can be a point to discuss. As for the "CPA Salaries" I have never seen numbers like that at any job I have looked at. I worked almost 10 years in Big 4 and never saw numbers like that for seniors.

[JDPriestly]

67. People do not understand that for every hour spent in the classroom with students,

a teacher spends a couple of more of his "free time" grading papers, preparing lessons and generally updating his knowledge in his field. They don't know how many summers teachers spend taking courses and bringing their credentials up to date, etc.

People think that teachers just miraculously come up with grades, return papers with grades on them, and come to class and just talk extemporaneously with no preparation. They have no idea how many weekends and nights teachers spend working for their kids.

People mistakenly think that teaching is easy and that they themselves could do it. They couldn't. Most people don't even have a clue as to how to raise their own children to do well in school.

A lot of parents think highly of their skills as parents when in fact if their children are not doing well in school, they need not point the finger at the teachers, they need to go look in the mirror and point their finger at themselves. This is one area of life in which too few Americans want to admit to their responsibility. The most important influences in a child's life are his or her parents. And divorce and family squabbling on a daily basis are often the real reasons for a child's inability to learn. Deal with your intra-family problems and your children's grades are likely to improve.

[senseandsensibility]

93. I was just thinking about that the other day.

As teachers, we spend six hours working directly with students. That is very draining and demanding work. You must manage their behavior, differentiate instruction, speak loudly all day, stand on your feet all day, and be flexible enough to react to all kinds of student needs, all the while never deviating from a demanding "script" that you are required to teach. That leaves two hours (assuming an eight hour day, which of course is a joke) to do everything else. What do I mean by that? I mean reams of paperwork required by our districts, grading papers and especially tests by hand and then entering them online, referring students for special help, communicating with parents by phone, e-mail and/ or note, meeting with colleagues, making copies, decorating the classroom to provide a welcoming and educational physical space for students (this alone can be very time consuming), organizing the classroom, ordering supplies, cleaning the classroom (no one dusts at my school unless the teacher does it), attending staff meetings, answering e-mail, planning and organizing field trips, meeting with our after school program leaders to co-ordinate homework help, plan fundraisers, plan family nights, plan for the Science Fair, plan programs such as the Winter Program and Multicultural Night, plan the Spelling Bee, do report cards ( I was responsible for giving each student over seventy grades this quarter), .....really, the list is never ending. Most of the time I not only take hours of work home every night, but work on the week-ends, too.

[spartan61]

56. Are you kidding me?

I am a retired teacher with 32 years in the classroom. Top 20% in terms of pay? What are you smoking? After 32 years and with a Master's (mandated in my state), I finally made $50,000 my last year in teaching. Much of my earnings went to pay for my tuition for my mandated Master's and for classroom supplies. It's very obvious you have no idea how much teachers earn and how much working time is spent outside of school time. Spend just one week in a classroom of 35 children and you will change your tune.

[Maedhros]

74. That's why Unions are good for America.

They allow workers to negotiate for better pay and benefits, AND GET THEM!

This is also why conservatives hate teachers, because they are a great example to the rest of the working class.

[One_Life_To_Give]

85. 120K/yr? Really

Getting to 120K/yr family income for teachers means marrying someone who has better average income than a teacher. Only a couple of states pay teachers enough for a married couple of teachers to reach the top quintile.

[LWolf]

107. Bullshit.

My oldest son quit college after 2 years and an AA, took a job in retail, became a manager within a year, and by the end of the second year was making more money than I did after working in public education for 20 years.

Without the student loans, the constant cost and time invested in more classes to meet license renewal requirements, the batteries of tests which change and have to be retaken periodically that prove subject matter competency over and over and over above and beyond the university degree, without shelling $$$ out of his own pocket to keep his office supplied, without working without pay weekends, holidays, and other non-contractual days, and outside of contractual hours, to fulfill all the duties listed in the contract which cannot be completed DURING contractual time.

With a better benefit package that has a lower deductible, and lower copays.

Your "facts" don't stand up to reality.

[titaniumsalute]

109. Please cite your sources for this

Because you are wrong. My wife is a teacher. 8th year with a Master's Degree. Works from 7am to 5 or 6pm every school day. Spring Break is a trip for her chorus students which she must attend. Pays for her own mandated continuing education. She makes $38,000 per year...less than my office assistant who has a high school diploma.

[awoke_in_2003]

113. His source is his ass...

because that is where he is pulling this stuff from

[titaniumsalute]

115. LOL...I gave you a big fat HEART for that comment...

[awoke_in_2003]

119. Well thank you...

Money has been tight or I would be giving out some, too.

On edit: I did some some free cash, but I followed the advice of a fellow DUer about the Russian Freedom fund. Here is the link to the post, for exposure. http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4475154

[titaniumsalute]

125. NO worries my friend

I don't give hearts expecting one back. Just a little token of my appreciation for your verbal thoughts on the topic. Peace!

[awoke_in_2003]

129. And peace to you. nt

[Blue_Tires]

124. I'm curious to know where you live...

I came very close to changing careers to become a schoolteacher, and even in a well-funded, well-managed school system with up-to-date facilities, the opening pay made me reconsider...

I have two ex-girlfriends who went on to become teachers in two different states, and they both said on several occasions they had to pay out-of-pocket so all students could have basic supplies for the year...

[Rosa Luxemburg]

143. I get to school at 6.45 am and I stay late then

I am working most of the evening and weekends. Below minimum wage. We are expected to do this.

Try teaching and it will change your mind.

[joeglow3]

5. You have some shitty friends

Everybody I interact with respects the hell out of teachers.

[sharp_stick]

11. Friends?

I don't usually refer to my friends as douchebags. I tend to use the term douchebag as a derogatory slur pretty widely but avoid dropping it on my friends unless they cheer for the Yankees.

Perhaps in your world where everyone you interact with is such a virtuous respectful wunderkind calling them douchebags is OK.

That's cool.

[joeglow3]

14. Well, duh

Of course Yankees fans are douchebags.

[msanthrope]

38. Hey!!! nt

[Demo_Chris]

15. I think the vast majority respect teachers...

If you are holding out for more get over it -- even Lincoln didn't manage that trick.

[sharp_stick]

35. I guess that depends on

what would constitute respect and who exactly is doing the respecting.

Personally I'm not holding out for more because I'm not a teacher and not interested in becoming one. I don't think I could take the reduction in salary or all that extra respect you think is out there.

[Are_grits_groceries]

37. No they don't.

People think that they can teach.
It is something they are very familiar with. Doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, etc are jobs that most people haven't really don't come in contact with continually.

Teachers spend a lot of time with kids. When they grow up, many conveniently forget the problems.
They think it's a cake job with fun times in the summer. It's not.

[kmlisle]

60. The closer you get to a teacher the more respect you probably will give them But

The further away you are and the less connected to their students you are the more like you are likely to disrespect them (like some of our commenters here).

So most parents respect their kids teachers. But the NY Times, Washington Post - both of which have corporate branches who make money on fixing the education system - , Fed Dept of Education (AKA Arnie), Michelle Rhee and friends and others who rarely step into a public school classroom except for a photo opp, say a lot of disrespectful things about teachers and somehow that is what gets printed in the MSM. If you wonder why remember these media corps profit from fixing education and the "Bad Teacher" narrative has convinced people it is all broken (some of it actually is but corporate money is not fixing that).
On the other hand even people like Arie and Rhee respect the teachers of their own children in their exclusive private schools.

But the narrative of "Bad" public school teachers makes money for corporate privatizers and so that narrative continues for as long as there are public funds to profit off of. Unfortunately Teachers and their students in the public schools are the victims of this process. But only their parents and teachers care about this (when they actually figure out what is happening). And a slow moving Armageddon is slowly dismantling our public schools. Children are being trained to take tests instead of being educated and it is all being done for a profit for testing and tutoring and consulting and charter school corporations. In case you haven't noticed Capitalism is no respecter of persons. In this case our children and their teachers are the persons who are not being respected.

[Are_grits_groceries]

7. Paid well? Seriously?

You need to return from what ever dimension you are visiting. You sure aren't in this one.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

9. paid -very- well and given -tremendous- respect ...

Love the qualifiers.

[cyberswede]

16. Are you in the US?

...'cause teachers here are woefully underpaid. And more often than not they are not given the respect they deserve for a very difficult job.



Oh...and most other employees in America aren't expected to be assessed on the performance of others (performances which are affected by a bunch of mitigating factors over which the teacher has no control, I might add). Do you think dentists should be paid based how few cavities their patients have?

[Tuesday Afternoon]

22. thank you cyberswede.

[malthaussen]

41. On that note...

... there used to be a Chinese tradition that one paid his doctor so long as one was healthy, but payment ceased when one fell ill. Funny thing, that went out of style pretty quickly.

-- Mal

[JDPriestly]

68. If that rule were applied to a lot of parents, the parents would be forced into starvation.

[reusrename]

21. It's hard to produce results without the proper tools.

I include small class sizes as a tool.

[Jefferson23]

26. You forgot the sarcasm thingie. n/t

[upaloopa]

28. Sorry but you don't know squat about teaching.

Please go get yourself some education and then re enter the discussion.

[roody]

44. How much is very well?

[HERVEPA]

47. That's bullshit

Teachers are repected? You haven't been paying attention.
You develop the measure for objective results and the world will honor you. It just aint that simple.

[WilliamPitt]

48. I was paid $25K a year when I taught high school.

You are wrong.

[malthaussen]

54. But gee, Bill, wasn't that like, 1930?

One of my high school teachers in '73 admitted to being paid $7500 per year, which was more than some entry-level positions for similarly-educated individuals, and less than others. So far as I've been able to tell, that's held pretty slack (or slipped down a bit), just as in every other line of work.

-- Mal

[Demo_Chris]

100. The average american teacher, regardless the state, earns high 40's. nt

[JDPriestly]

63. In LA most teachers have graduate degrees, but they are not paid nearly as well as other

professionals with the same experience and education. Doctors and lawyers and many business executives are far better paid than teachers with the same professional background in their fields. Hey! Plumbers are better paid than a lot of our teachers depending on the location where the teachers are working.

[Kablooie]

77. Tremendous respect for those who deserve it.

Teachers that dislike teaching and do a subpar job can damage students.

Kids can grow to hate a subject that is poorly taught when they might otherwise have been interested in it.

Alternatively a teacher that loves teaching and works hard can instill a lifelong interest that would otherwise have been missing.

[Squinch]

88. Snork!

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

97. Teachers used to get tremendous respect

and still do from much of the general public, but school district administrators now treat teachers like dirt. Teachers are under constant attack. It has become absolutely abusive. I retired before I planned to because schools have become an unbearable place to work.

[B Calm]

108. I made more money driving a truck than my son does teaching high school.

[hunter]

120. Just because you are getting pissed on...

... doesn't mean everyone should get pissed on.

That's how this whole downward spiral began.

Pretty soon people will be licking boots for dimes, and the people without tongues will be complaining about how highly paid the boot-lickers are.

God we need some people with backbone in this nation.

We've become a nation of cowards and serfs.

UNION YES!!!

[cyberswede]

123. Yes! It's not the fault of teachers that other professions aren't unionized.

State/federal employees get the same crap from the RW. They're paid too much, their benefits are too good...etc.

Private sector workers should get better pay/bennies, not the other way around.

I can't believe anyone on a Democratic board doesn't get that.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

152. This is such an important point. And, teachers a losing much that they had

gained in that past due to union busting and privatization.

[madfloridian]

126. No, teachers are being used as scapegoats.

They are the only ones blamed by this education department. That is what the "reformers" are doing.

You can not have "expert objective" results when what is going on the brain is involved as far as learning goes. You can not grade teachers on tests made in secret and graded in secret.

You are only grading the results of teaching to the tests.

[WinkyDink]

127. You have no idea of which you speak.

[Kali]

130. holy shit

[Recursion]

131. Yes and no

Teachers' median salaries nationally are higher than the rest of the countries' median salaries nationally, but teachers are also much more highly educated than the rest of the population so it's not a very good comparison. Compare them to middle managers, say (another population in which pretty much everybody has a bachelor's degree and most have a masters) and it shakes out they make rather less than their cohort.

The "up" side of this, at least until recently, was that in a lot of cases they had a level of job security and benefits that's pretty much unheard of in what remains of the rest of the economy. It was a trade-off (and kind of reflects the public-sector private-sector tradeoff in general).

As for highly respected? depends, I guess. What they did and do have is district bureaucracies that try to micromanage every professional decision they make, and -- especially recently -- parents who simply refuse to believe that their precious little Trevor or Caitlyn could possibly be at fault in any situation, and are more than happy to go to the administration at the first sign of pushback from the teacher. For all the cool things about charters, my main reason for disliking them is that they seem to entrench that "consumer" mindset among parents.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

139. I wish that I was paid very well but

my union fought for me to get a pay rise.

No one else seems to support teachers

[Initech]

150. Do you work for the Heritage Foundation?

[One_Life_To_Give]

2. When we can throw them under the Bus?

When we can throw them under the Bus every time a potential voter thinks differently? They must be scapgoated as the reason Johnny can't read, Susie can't count and OLTG writes run on sentences.

[JDPriestly]

69. Why Johnny can't read?

Because he can't sleep because mommy and daddy are arguing again and they scold him constantly and beat him up and then daddy walks out and mommy cries and then this lady talks to him about whether he wants to live with mommy or daddy and he says he wants to live with both of them if they would just stop yelling and crying so much and daddy gets drunk on the weekend and watches football on the TV and doesn't take Johnny to the park or the museum or play ball with him and then Johnny goes to school and he feels like crying all day and he gets into a fight and then he has to go to the principal's office and he starts his life out just like mommy and daddy did fighting and flunking out and it's just one awful day after the other and in high school he starts taking drugs and ends up in juvenile court or rehab and then his mommy and his daddy blame his teachers for not teaching him better.

[Blue_In_AK]

122. Plus 1,000

[gopiscrap]

6. Thank you

on behalf my who has been a teacher for 33 years: THANK YOU!!!

[Tuesday Afternoon]

8. and You are welcome on behalf of my brother and his wife who are both teachers

[gopiscrap]

10. It's amazing the shit she has to put up with

also it's all about money and tests now!

[FreeJoe]

12. I disagree

I think that we should reward excellent teachers for their efforts. We should pay them very well to encourage them to keep teaching and to lure other people into teaching. At the same time, I don't think that we should reward mediocre teachers and should get bad teachers out of the system. It isn't easy determining who is a good teacher and how is a bad one, but the notion that we shouldn't reward the best relative to the worst seems misguided to me.

Maybe its because I'm in the middle of comp planning. I'm going to be giving raises to those on my staff that are underpaid relative to their contributions, give smaller or no raises to those that are not. I'm going to give big bonuses to those that had really good years and smaller bonuses to those that didn't. I don't think they'll feel demeaned by getting a "reward".

[Tuesday Afternoon]

13. semantics. reward as opposed to EARNED.

I don't know about you but, I work hard for and Earn every penny I am paid and I am not a teacher.

I also think they earned those bonuses that you thinking you are bestowing as a reward.

sheesh.

[FreeJoe]

20. I don't disagree that ...

...they earned their bonuses. If I did, they wouldn't get them. That is exactly my point. The teachers that EARN more by teaching well should get paid more (rewarded) than teachers that don't EARN as much. Some teachers work really hard and are really good at what they do. Some teachers don't work very hard and aren't good at what they do.

I don't want to play semantic games. Call it pay, bonus, reward, compensation, or whatever you want. My point is that high performers should be paid more than low performers. The differential in pay should be significant for positions where the differential in results is large. I think that teaching is one of those.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

24. ugh. please put me on ignore.

[HERVEPA]

49. How the hell are you going to measure it. Test scores??? Give me a break.

[joeglow3]

136. Lets see if you can guess how my job performance is measured.

[Red State Prisoner]

83. And how...

would you recommend we determine who has EARNED it vs. who has not? Test scores? Evaluations? When was the last time you taught a class of 38 to 40 individuals? Were you able (excellent teacher or not) to determine their various levels of ability? If per some miracle you were able to determine these various abilities, would you then able to present your lesson (within the confines of the class time that you are given) in a manner that could reach each and every student in an equally effective and efficient manner? Let's be honest and say no, as even the greatest of teachers lack the time and resources to reach every student at the level they'd like to. Now imagine that despite the myriad of elements that are beyond your control the size of your salary is dependent upon one test that hardly begins to measure the true level of effort you've put into your class. Sorry, but trying to squeeze the world of education into a business template just doesn't work. There are simply too many variables at play. Good classes, bad classes (it's all about the luck of the draw), budget cuts, and new policies and regulations all play a part. Obviously there are a few bad apples here and there, but those are few and far between. Teaching is a tough, thankless, and woefully underpaid profession that a couple of summer months hardly begin to compensate for.

[Squinch]

90. And how are you going to determine that? Test scores? Say Johnny

has a very low IQ and teacher X teaches him half of what a child with a medium IQ would learn this year. So that teacher is considered to be substandard. However, with any other teacher Johnny would have learned a twentieth of what a child with a medium IQ would learn. But too bad, we need to boot that teacher. (This is a VERY common occurrence.)

How about the teacher with a class of children in which 6 regularly don't get enough to eat, 7 are living in shelters, so god knows what is going on in their lives, 4 have emotional disabilities and behavior problems, and the other 12 are doing OK. Half of the children in that class don't make the standards on the standardized tests. Guess which half. So that teacher needs to be judged to be substandard. (Again, this is a VERY common occurrence.)

So you are you going to determine which teachers are good and which are bad?

[Recursion]

133. If you can't determine that, why does it matter who teaches?

If there's not a way to judge a teacher by his or her impact on student performance (rather than by fitting in with some a priori model of how a teacher "should" teach, which is how observations usually seem to run), then why does it matter who's teaching to begin with? Shouldn't we just find the cheapest teachers possible? If the rich kids are always going to do well and the poor kids are always going to do badly, and no teacher can be expected to overcome the problems facing those who teach poor kids, doesn't the argument against TFA kind of disappear?

[Squinch]

134. You have missed the point. I am not saying that there is no way to judge a teacher by

his or her impact on student performance. I am saying that the way the teachers are being judged has nothing to do with student performance because it has nothing to do with the student.

The methods that are being used today judge all students on the same scale. Special education teachers are judged by the same standard as teachers who have no special education students. That is, they are being judged by how many of their students can pass a Pearson developed test.

Teachers who have many students passing are considered satisfactory. Teachers who do not are considered unsatisfactory. If a teacher is found unsatisfactory a certain number of times, that teacher is fired.

The result is that teachers need to triage their students. Those most likely to be able to be trained to pass the test get all the attention. Some classes are comprised of children whose limitations mean they were never likely to reach their grade level. The teachers of those children are simply shit out of luck.

In the past those students unlikely to pass a standardized test were taught to their level, to try to bring them to the next level. Now, teachers are told "You must be on page 19 of the math book on the same date as all the other teachers in your municipality are on page 19 of the math book, and you can only teach math by this prescribed method. If some students are falling behind or don't understand this method, you cannot go back and work with them to try to bring them up to speed, and you can't try other methods to reach that child because by next Thursday, you better be on page 26. If you are not on page 26 next Thursday, you will be deemed unsatisfactory. X numbers of unsatisfactories, and you are fired."

Under this system, once a student falls behind, there is little hope that he will ever be given the chance to catch up. The teacher's choice is to attend to that lagging student and be fired, or attend to the already succeeding students and keep their job.

There IS a way to do this, but ignoring the student in the process, both in terms of ability and in terms of ignoring less talented students, is not the way. Here's a possibility: look at the student's rate of growth in past years by looking at the tried and true methods of measuring progress (i.e., not the ill-constructed Pearson tests.) Judge the teacher on meeting or exceeding THAT STUDENT'S average rate of achievement. Allow the teacher the leeway to use different methods to reach different students. Get the MBA's who have never set foot in a classroom out of the process.

This is just common sense. To judge the teacher without taking the student into account is ridiculous, and destructive, and futile. It has nothing to do with student learning or teacher ability. But it does make a truck load of money for Pearson, Teachers College, Teach for America and charter schools.

(Taking some of the $billion that has gone to Pearson and throwing it at enrichment programs, like music, art, drama, sports and after school programs wouldn't hurt either, given that right now we have a bunch of 6 year old automatons who spend 5 months out of the school year drilling nothing but test taking skills.)

[Recursion]

141. Well, personally I've never dealt with a merit pay model as simplistic as you describe

I've only dealt directly with DC and MD public schools, but in both cases it compares progress to the child's past progress (at least starting in 2nd grade, I think), with some "fudge factors" for the overall class's rate of (IIRC) free school lunches and ESL and some other thing I can't remember (homelessness? something like that).

Special education teachers are judged by the same standard as teachers who have no special education students.

So, fix that. That's easy.

[Squinch]

146. See my reply to your other post. It's not easy to fix it when those who are in a position

to fix it refuse to fix it, and are making literally billions of dollars for not fixing it.

And yes, the system is asinine. That is the point.

[el_bryanto]

19. A reward is something optional

It's nice to reward employees - nothing wrong with that. A good Christmas party maybe. Or an extra day off here and there. I appreciate it - i'm sure most people do.

But because of Conservative policies, particularly in regards to state and local taxation, as well as federal taxation, most of our Governments are strapped for cash.

They need to cut budgets of anything optional. And a reward is something optional. That's why the language matters. Teachers should make what they earn, and they aren't. If once they are making what they deserve maybe we can throw some rewards on top of that (and then cut back on those rewards in lean years).

Bryant

[haele]

52. Problem - define "teaching well". Teaching is not a production line.

One teacher is not in charge of the student, can't control the quality or the environment of learning for the student from grade 1 to grade 12. Or even grade 1 to grade 6.
You can't identify where the student started "breaking" or what teacher "performed poorly" when a child stops progressing or fails. You also can't define "success". If the student is perfectly happy not going to college, can't wait to get out of school and work for his/her self, and his/her family doesn't care about academic success, it's not the teacher's . A child who's talent has is not "suit and tie" professional and might simply require certification and trade school/apprentiship to make a career - if it requries anything at all - at in does not need to get straight "A"s in high school. Average is what 70% of the students are, and to go around thinking that if you as a child don't strive to be an all-around validictorian and can't get high marks on every test and consistantly "show improvement", you're a failure - and your teachers failed you.

It's not the teacher's fault a student can't pass a test if the child isn't mentally wired for that sort of test taking, is hungry and tired, or has anxiety or stress issues.
It's not the teacher's fault a student isn't artistic enough, is advanced, is slow, or has a learning disability. It's not the teacher's fault what the student's home life is, or if the student is a perfect student, a manipulative sociopath, or a disruptive bully.
It's not the teacher's fault a student decides it isn't worth it for a few months, or has a hormonal/emotional breakdown, or is just being a kid.
It's not the teacher's fault the tools to teach are often not available, even though the taxpayers are complaining about the taxes used to support education. Or that piratization in the educational field has made newer, efficient tools to teach expensive to purchase and maintain, and that the most challenged public school districts are unable to provide these tools to the majority of the students who need them. It's not the teacher's fault that there are too often a higher ratio of highly paid administrators and administrator's staff to teachers than needs be. It's not the teacher's fault that most of the parents of their students may not be able to, have the time to, or, be willing to be involved with their children's education.

It's not the teacher's fault that education has become a service business rather than a public service.

So to say a teacher who is great and life-changing for some children but not for others is "not teaching well" for whatever reason is bunk. The amount of teachers who are actually mediocre are far fewer than the general public would like to think. The amount of public officials and talking heads who think that teachers are just "facilitators" or hobby enthusiests that show up and tell the kids what to read, facilitators who shouldn't be paid much more than day-care providers or civic center docents, are far greater in number than "poor teachers".

While one can identify people who shouldn't be teachers (the ones who are consistantly burn-outs, ignorant of their subject, or bullies who get off on lording over the weak), there is no definintion that can be used to truely measure "teaching well" on any regular basis by which to assess "merit".

Each child is different, and each teacher has a different talent or art to teaching. A mis-match between teacher style and student receptiveness, exposure to a bad, bullying teacher, or just stress from not fitting in with peers, or running with a bad crowd, and a student can carry on an attitude that is condusive to failure all the way through their basic educational cycle.
Is that the fault of subsequent teachers? Should that one child - or several children like that child in one class - be able to adversely affect their "teaching scores" if they can't break through attitude or anxiety and be able to reach him or her within the 180 hours or so they have access to that child?

It's not like the teachers and school are a customer service center and can just "refuse service" or return the child to his/her parents because "sorry, the warrenty was voided" or offer to exchange the kid in for a better model.

Haele

[senseandsensibility]

64. Your post is very well thought out and expressed.

You make many excellent points that the average person probably never thinks about. In fact, I wish you would post it as an OP.

[Chiquitita]

81. Great post

I agree it should be an op

[The2ndWheel]

84. Then what are teachers paid for?

To put up with the bullshit from parents and kids?

The amount of teachers who are actually mediocre are far fewer than the general public would like to think.

How does anyone know that if nobody can define "teaching well" or "success"?

[haele]

87. No one can define "parenting well" either. Good parents have bad kids, and vice versa.

And success is certainly up for interpretation.

Okay, for your first point - teachers are paid by the public to provide a means by which to validate the state's efforts and interest in ensuring there is a baseline of knowledge and assessment in the ability to learn, and to providing basic education to the masses. Y'know immigrants who want to become citizens need to take a classes and citizenship test to be able to live their lives in this country without causing undue confusion and stress because they don't know the accepted customs.
Likewise, providing children a basic knowledge of how to read, write, do sums, basic health and sanitation, basic knowledge of laws and customs (social information) to discourage lawlessness and anarchy, and to provide the ability to understand the reasons for research and logic through historical examples instead of having the citizenry of this country wander around in random tribal associations acting in a knee-jerk, reactive fashion will make this country better for everyone involved.

Teachers are public servants. Their job is to attempt to provide these things to children. But because children are children, and no two mature or learn at the same level or speed, it is nearly impossible to accurately assess when there is a problem if the child is learning but it has not "clicked" or taken, or if the child is refusing to learn, or if the child is incapable of learning.
It is possible, however, to provide and encourage, but how to you assess that? If you're a teacher, you know you can't take a hammer out and beat learning or understanding into their heads; and any fool with a memory can recite from rote. Learning is not memory, and that's what standardized testing depends on.

The problem with standardized testing is that it just shows how many children paid attention in class and if there were gaps in the curriculum - which is noticeable if certain questions are missed by every child. But they're not - and never could be - an accurate gage of if the child has learned. Especially while the brain is still developing, and much of the earlier information the child took in is still obscured by their maturity outlook and capability of understanding what is going on around them.

It's different for adults who have supposedly matured. While adults can take standardized tests to get a position, they have already "learned" how to backfill what was answered by rote with what they actually need to take the job. Standardized tests are positional filters for adults, experience and production is the measure of their knowledge.

As for success? What is that? How do you measure that?

How much money you make, how many degrees you have, where you are in the hierarchy of your career? Are you artistic? Are you powerful? Are you comfortable? Do you have lots of friends? Do you have lots of enemies?
If you have a wide range of experience and talents?

Same in education. Your educational success is that you have as much education you need to thrive or survive at what you do in life.

A child who graduates with a low "C" average struggling through all sorts of personal and environmental problems has succeeded just as much as the straight-A Valedictorian - perhaps even more.

Teachers may have tried to help this child, but couldn't at the time they had him/her because there was no way they could dedicate their attention to the two or five troubled children in that one classroom. So their class scores go down, and their evaluation goes down.
And eventually they burn out, and become "bad teachers", because they're expected to hammer learning and rote into all the children's heads and pass the damn tests to prove their school is a "good school".
They're no longer expected to provide learning skills and education to the students as they mature enough to learn; they're expected to enforce educational conformity and force the students to "get with the program" - and it's their fault the child fails.

So yeah, I guess you can say it. The Business of Education has turned Teaching from a service to a production line. Teachers are nothing more than glorified babysitters with Master's Degrees and little power over curriculum and educational practices because the Administrators with their PhD's in Management and (if that) a minor in education know better. Teachers are paid by the community to put up with bullshit from the parents and students. Glorified Tutors and Babysitters. Not to teach or to provide a resource for learning.

Because we all know in our Very Important Society, public servants are fungible, students are fungible, and learning is certainly not as important as being in a position of power, metrics that hit their profit points, and looking good in public.

Haele

[The2ndWheel]

114. Very true. Nobody is trying to figure out what to pay parents though

teachers are paid by the public to provide a means by which to validate the state's efforts and interest in ensuring there is a baseline of knowledge and assessment in the ability to learn, and to providing basic education to the masses.

Tough to validate something when overall success and failure can't be defined, or assigned to any specific person.

Likewise, providing children a basic knowledge of how to read, write, do sums, basic health and sanitation, basic knowledge of laws and customs (social information) to discourage lawlessness and anarchy, and to provide the ability to understand the reasons for research and logic through historical examples instead of having the citizenry of this country wander around in random tribal associations acting in a knee-jerk, reactive fashion will make this country better for everyone involved.

I don't know if the first part of that has much to do with the second. Basic knowledge of those aspects of life can be taught and learned anywhere, even in random tribal associations. We lack those random tribal associations only because of the state's efforts and interests throughout history, which are difficult to invalidate, since there are fewer and fewer alternatives to it.

There's no question that the job of teacher is a tough one, because you are talking about 30+ different kids in the same class. Which sort of dovetails with the idea of validating the state's efforts and interests. You're taking a bunch of random kids, or a bunch of random tribal associations, and trying to make them all have the same baseline from which to live. How has the state done that in relation to tribal associations over the course of time? It used its version of a hammer most of the time. So that the state has ended up with standardized tests as the answer is hardly a surprise.

Every square peg must fit into the round hole of society. If society is standardized, its citizens have to be as well, or else it doesn't function. We live in a mass society, so we have to be mass produced. We are products on a production line.

[FreeJoe]

105. Thank you

First, let me say "thank you" for taking the time to respond to my post with such a passionate and well reasoned response.

I don't disagree with you on many points. I think that we should spend more money on classrooms and less on administration. I agree that there are large differences in the students that teachers are asked to teach. These differences exist between individual students and between the groups of students assigned to different teachers. I don't think there is much point in dwelling on where we agree, so my response will be focused more on the controversial topic of whether we should compensate teachers differently based on performance assessments.

You make several different points. It looks to me like you are questioning whether there is a meaningful difference in quality between teachers, whether we can define what constitutes superior teaching from inferior teaching, and whether we can accurate measure difference in teaching quality.

I am definitely not an expert in the field of teaching. My only relevant experience is as a student, a parent of students, and occasionally teaching technical classes to professionals. I do have experience in managing and setting compensation for other professionals. I regularly face the challenge of assessing the performance of people whose output is difficult to measure.

It looks like you acknowledge that there are some bad teachers ("The amount of teachers who are actually mediocre are far fewer than the general public would like to think" and "While one can identify people who shouldn't be teachers&quot . Those comments imply that we agree that there is a difference between superior and inferior teaching.

The next significant issue is whether it is possible to define what constitutes superior and inferior teaching. Again, teaching is not my area of expertise, but I think this is possible. We have teachers for a reason. Why do you think we have teachers? I think we have them to impart knowledge to students, to improve the ability of students to learn, and to improve the ability of students to reason.

The real challenge comes with measuring teacher performance. You make several criticism of measuring performance of teachers based on the performance of their students. One area where I disagree is that you emphasize the impact of a wayward student on the performance assessment of the teacher. My response to that is that teachers teach large numbers of students and do so year after year. While it is possible that a teacher would get assigned many kids going through a personal crisis each year, for most teachers, aggregating the performance of their students should ameliorate that issue.

Another issue is the distribution of good vs bad students to different teachers. Obviously, assessing teachers on the objective performance of their students would be a bad idea because teachers of higher achievers would be unfairly rewarded and teachers of low achievers would be unfairly punished. This problem could be addressed by measuring the change in performance of students rather than their absolute performance. In other words, a teacher with students that went from the 10th percentile in testing to the 20th percentile would be assessed as having performed better than a teacher with students that went from the 90th percentile to the 80th percentile. Of course, that presumes that you can make meaningful inferences from the performance of students on tests. That is definitely controversial.

There are other means that could be used. Administrator evaluations. Peer assessment. Parent surveys. Professional assessors. Once again, it's not my area of expertise (as is probably obvious). I'm no more qualified to dictate how teachers should be evaluated than they are to tell me how I should evaluate systems analysts (which is not easy either). I would look to the education profession to tell me how we can reward their higher performers so that we can encourage high performance and encourage more people to want to become teachers.

If you say that we cannot assess the difference in performance between teachers, I question why we care who we hire as teachers. If there is no way to distinguish the quality of their work, why no just put random people in those roles? Surely there are some means of assessing who is doing it well and who isn't. I can say that, as a student, I knew which of my teachers was good at teaching me and which weren't. As a parent, I can tell you which of my kid's teachers are outstanding and which are terrible.

Don't be discouraged by the fact that any assessment process will be flawed. The same is true for other professionals. When I assess an analyst, I have a hard time knowing whether they succeeded because their project was easier than it looked or failed because it was harder. I would be stunned to find out that all of my assessments were spot on. I can say with confidence that over time, my strongest employees get paid more and my weakest employees get paid less (and often leave the find things that they can do better).

[haele]

121. The issue I have is that due to budgeting, the administrations almost always use student performance

Universities assess their professors for tenure (their merit system) through peer reviews, publishing, continuing education/research efforts, and observation over time, but that's not the way public K-12 education assess their teachers.
On Edit - Universities usually assess their professors for tenure, but over the past 10 years, universities have been more concerned about budgets and shareholders than they have been with quality of the education they provide, so this statement is pretty much dated, and should read "When University Provosts think it would be of benefit to institutional standing if they grant the occasional tenure, they typically assess their candidate professors through..." It's starting to become a sad statement that higher level education is considered a product marketed to the elite or those who want to become elite, rather than a service or goal for common good.

Unfortunately, for the majority of K-12, teachers are assessed primarily on their student performances and secondarily the amount of "volunteer" time they provide the school over the year. I have known three long-time "teachers of the year" suddenly dropped to substandard in evaluations due to an unusually large crop of poorly performing students over the period of two years - and the district use that to drop the "merit pay" those teacher had been receiving and to review their contracts early due to the substandard rating, finagling a significant pay cut out of them if those teachers wanted to remain in the school district.
I have also known teachers who maintain their evaluation scores consistently by teaching the test and not pushing their students beyond what "McGraw-Hill" and the school board suggests the students should be learning at that grade level, and while they never received additional pay for the "superior work", they also didn't risk their jobs and pay if they ended up with a classroom they couldn't manage to standards set by the administration and school boards.

Honestly, merit pay is not a significant motivator of "teacher improvement". Your teacher is a professional in a field similar to the medical field, where native talent drives skill level, and teaching skill that makes a great is really not something that can be taught (i.e. - what do you call someone who graduated last in their MD class - Doctor). In my experience (YMMV) what is a better motivator of "teacher improvement" is respect on the job, honest feedback and being treated like a professional instead of like a babysitter.

K-12 Teachers will be superior, average, or poor due to their native talents - and most of your teachers are going to be average professionals, just as most doctors are average doctors. And in most places, they need to have graduate degrees, like your average professional. Teachers aren't "Miss Mary" with her primary BA in Humanities and a second BA in Education teaching 2nd graders because she couldn't find a man to take care of her while she was at State anymore. That was so Hollywood 1950's (even though it was actual 19th century).
But that is how both the public and "Professional Educational Administrators" act like they perceive the average K-12 teacher.

So they should be assessed like professionals - by the skills they acquire and maintain, and their consistency in providing education over time. That's how they assess teachers in countries where education is a valued profession.

And maybe, we as a society would be better off thinking of education as something important for everyone, instead of only important for those who can afford to go to grad school and as a sop to the rest of the plebes who won't need any more education than it would take to get a job where the primary greeting is "how can I help you?"

BTW, our new School Superintendent in San Diego Unified is an actual average (not charter or magnet) Elementary School Principal in the Mid-city with a high minority/large ESL enrollment and former elementary school teacher for 25 years prior.

For the first time in a looong time, schools are not going to be run by the latest Educational Management theory pushed by retired Government or Business Leaders who took the job, but by someone who has been in the trenches and knows what works in the city as it is. She's already garnering some significant interest in the changes she is making to administration policies and teacher's position of power in their classrooms in terms of curriculum development and teaching assessments. It will be interesting to see where she is going to take education in the city.

Sorry for being long-winded. Education and the need for access to universal education is a subject I feel very strongly about.

Haele

[LWolf]

111. Allow me to explain why it "isn't easy:"

It's because teachers are people, students are people, and some people work better together than others. The reality that every school administrator knows is that every teacher on a given staff will have some students that think their teacher was "excellent," others who thought they were "mediocre," and others who thought they were "bad." No teacher is "excellent" or "bad" across the board, but teachers grow more professionally working with each other in an atmosphere of professional collaboration.

It's also because students don't come standardized, with the same backgrounds and preparation. They come, like people, in all of their diverse glory, and they don't all respond the same way to any teacher, no matter what that teacher does.

The topic gets muddier when you look at the call to give the "excellent" teacher the struggling students; because, of course, the only reason students struggle is "bad" teachers, and a year with an "excellent" teacher will "fix" them. Of course, that doesn't work, and suddenly the "excellent" becomes "mediocre."

At it's core, public education is a public service which is supposed to offer equal opportunity to advance to all, regardless of what they walk through the door with. In order for that to happen, public education MUST happen in an environment of cooperation and collaboration, not competition. When teachers cooperate and collaborate, the weaker are supported and can grow stronger, and every student's opportunities expand. In an environment of competition, it's EXPECTED that some teachers, and their students, will do better than others, and that competition is rewarded, which limits the collaboration and cooperation that benefit all.

Public education is not a business, nor a factory, and teachers are neither assembly workers nor sales people. The business model does nothing for public education but harm.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

142. Most teachers are disillusioned

Most teachers graduate from colleges and basically are taught the same stuff. Politics and inept administrations prevent teachers from doing well. Now we are going to be evaluated on how well our students perform. How this is going to be measured - pick baseline accuracy at the beginning of the year and predict the accuracy at the end of the year. It is called a SLO. What a load of baloney!

[Packerowner740]

23. My wife retired after 31+ years of teaching and

I approve this message.

[Nye Bevan]

25. I don't have a problem with paying great teachers better than poor teachers.

Looking back at my school days, I had some excellent, inspiring teachers, and some teachers who made everything boring and didn't care. I have no problem with "rewarding" the good teachers.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

30. Please, put me on ignore.

[Nye Bevan]

31. I've never used Ignore and never will.

I want to see what everyone has to say, even those I typically disagree with. And I am mild-mannered enough that nothing anyone says to me online upsets me the slightest.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

36. I am so glad nothing anyone says to you online upsets you the slightest.

god forbid.

really.

that you are not bothered because you are mild mannered ....

you may think that is why you are not bothered.

and that is fine.

keep thinking that.

cool.

[HERVEPA]

50. Measured how????

[malthaussen]

53. Asking that question validates the principle...

... I think the problem is that teachers are not production workers and should not be compensated in a manner similar to them.

-- Mal

[HERVEPA]

73. Agree. That was actually my point. No good way to measure.

[Nye Bevan]

58. Here is one example of how it can be done:

http://www.jackson.k12.ms.us/departments/human_resources/publications/teacher_eval.pdf

[HERVEPA]

72. Yuck and Yuck

[haele]

78. Hmm... Still problems with that method

Beginning with the first page with this supposition:
"Every student has the responsibility to come to school prepared and willing to learn, and is ultimately
responsible for self, family, community and country. All stakeholders must be involved in the pursuit of educational
excellence by participating, doing, leading, creating, encouraging, sharing, learning, and understanding."

How do you make students responsible?
My smart, artistic stepdaughter had mild learning and severe emotional disabilities (PTSD) from the manipulative crap her mother put her through before we could get custody at the age of 13 (and "mommy dearest" had already broken her) - some-days she really did want to learn, some-days you couldn't get her out of bed, some-days, she wouldn't come home and we had to call the cops on her.
We dragged her - sometimes kicking and screaming - through JHS and HS until she finally got her diploma just shy of turning 20.
See, she did very well in the classes where the teacher was able to spend time with her - but if there were too many children, or if due to budget, the class had ended up being a "teach the book" class with lots of take-home work, she did very, very poorly and would just check out of class by week two. She needed teacher involvement and immediate feedback to keep going; or in-class tutoring geared to smart-but-not-advanced children, and the latter was not available.
Most of the "educational system" problems came from the administration level - they kept wanting to shuffle her off to the gang-banger and special needs students "holding schools" that shuffled them off into the adult assistance programs/minimum wage track because there was no recognized difference between kids who were performing poorly. If the child wasn't obviously learning disabled or had parents who could afford to get the lawyer - like we did to finally get her into the one IDP school set up for public school children with anxiety or depression - they were disposable - and the teachers sent to teach in these holding schools were bottom of the barrel.

For the most part, her teachers were good - in fact, four were "teachers of the year" in the district; but they had to fight for resources and the overcrowded classes with mixes of children who wanted to learn and those who were biding their time meant that she didn't get a lot of the help she needed. Was it the teacher's fault? For the most part, no. As I indicated, most of her teachers were very good and would probably qualify for merit pay under the evaluation system in this handout - if they didn't have a couple kids like her in each class that year that there is absolutely no way they can take the time to "re-direct" in the hour a day they have with that child.
It's not the elementary school teachers that fail the most in these sorts of evaluations, it's the JSH and HS teachers.

There's where sticking point. There are a lot of troubled kids out there in public schools for whatever reason. Good teachers are still being set up for failure in the most critical learning times for children because of standardized tests and "performance metrics"-based evaluations. And someone who is not a dedicated teacher can get merit pay easily if they know how to game the system enough to meet the performance metrics. The more time you take to help the kids with trouble, the worse your performance metric can become because you don't have enough time to take with the kids who are otherwise on track or doing well.

This is a good evaluation plan if - if the school district has involved parents, the class sizes are manageable, and most children do not have major learning or emotional issues.
If not, well, you just teach the curriculum and get rid of any kid who starts to bring your metrics down and you'll still do very well.

It's not a production line or a systems validation test where you have static parameters to work with. There is no "either it works or it doesn't", or even a truly objective incremental gage to accurately evaluate progress in kids.
If you can find an objective incremental gage that can be used assess the best way to evaluate and handle the average kid's progress so there will be more successful outcomes, please let us parents know....

Haele

[Smarmie Doofus]

59. So... the "boring" teachers will do what, exactly, to get their hands on that "reward"?

Become less boring and learn to care?

And how does one measure "boring"?

And indifference?

Still better question: SHOULD one measure them?

And what about the ones who are "boring" but not indifferent?

And the ones who are exciting but indifferent?

[Nye Bevan]

61. Do you think it is possible for poor teachers to improve themselves?

Is this whole thing a waste of time? http://www.jackson.k12.ms.us/departments/human_resources/publications/teacher_eval.pdf

[malthaussen]

33. Dang me!

Judging from some of the responses to this thread, there are a lot of people still pissed off about that detention when they were 13...

Seriously, I'm always shocked at the anti-teacher vitriol and disregard of easily-verifiable facts whenever the subject comes up. Somebody has done a really good job at painting a big target on Teacher's back.

-- Mal

[raven mad]

39. I had ONE "bad" teacher. Out of 15+ years of school. ONE.

And he was more bored than bad.

Pay them. They are worth more than their weight in gold, coke, pot, NFL players, etc.

WAY more. One of my sons is what they called then "dyslexic". His kindergarten teacher spotted it. He learned to read so well we could barely keep him in used books!

[TheMathieu]

42. In 4th grade, I had one that was absolutely loony tunes.

It was clear she picked the wrong profession and needed professional help.

If I were to judge the entire profession on that anecdotal evidence, I wouldn't be a very good liberal.

For the most part, in hindsight, I didn't have a lot of exceptional teachers... but most did their job and did it well. Most of the bullshit in my public school system was from corruption at the BOE and all the misguided education reform that focused on writing portfolios and weeks of standardized testing at the end of every school year.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

43. thank you for sharing that

[TheMathieu]

40. Agreed. Merit pay is a horrible policy.

Numerous studies have shown that offering monetary rewards for job performance does little to motivate and often causes detrimental effects.

So, yes... teachers should be paid well without discrimination. The mythical "free rider" is a straw man used to dismantle public education.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

45. yes. thank you.

[malthaussen]

46. Besides, "merit" pay brings in the question of evaluation...

... and I can see no way to objectively analyze teacher "performance." The games they are playing in that area are ridiculous.

-- Mal

[Nye Bevan]

62. How about this?

http://www.jackson.k12.ms.us/departments/human_resources/publications/teacher_eval.pdf

[Squinch]

91. Looks to me like about 1/2 of Jackson's schools were considered to be performing badly

according to the Mississippi state classification in 2012:

http://www.jackson.k12.ms.us/about/2012_testscores/2012_state_summary.pdf

[Recursion]

132. Then why does it matter who teaches?

No, really.

If you can't come up with an objective way of saying that some teachers are better than others, why not just look for the cheapest teachers we can find?

[malthaussen]

135. I dunno, how do you "rate" a physician?

Beyond meeting minimum standards of competence? How do you rate a lawyer, a dentist, a fireman, an engineer... the list goes on.

There are jobs in which performance can be evaluated by objective criteria, and then there are jobs where they cannot. We assume minimal goodwill on the part of any professional.

Hell, you can hardly tell which baseball players are "better" than others, despite a raft of statistical evaluation attempts. You come up with a WAR for teachers, then we'll talk.

-- Mal

[Recursion]

138. Well, quite a few of those are rated by outcomes

Beyond meeting minimum standards of competence? How do you rate a lawyer, a dentist, a fireman, an engineer... the list goes on.

Well, I realize this is a non-starter here, but in most of those cases they are rated by the outcome of their work, despite the fact that not all of that is entirely within their control.

[Squinch]

137. It isn't that you can't come up with a way to do that, it's that the people who never set foot in a

classroom have come up with a measure that has nothing to do with teacher effectiveness or student learning.

Say you have a child with a low IQ or learning disability. That child typically learns a quarter of what most children learn in math in a year. Say that in the third grade, that child has a teacher with whom the child learns two thirds of what most children learn in math in a year.

That teacher, under this system, is rated ineffective because the child has not advanced a grade level.

That child was NEVER going to advance a grade level, but do you agree that that is an ineffective teacher?

[Recursion]

140. Then fix that. Hell, every system I've seen already fixes that.

Agreed, that's stupid. Fix it. Actually the "value added" systems I've seen make exactly that adjustment; they have a model based on past student performance about what you can "expect" from them this year and compare his performance to that.

Say that in the third grade, that child has a teacher with whom the child learns two thirds of what most children learn in math in a year.

That teacher, under this system, is rated ineffective because the child has not advanced a grade level.

Well, no, like I just said in a value-add model the teacher comes out looking great from that. That's what DCPS used, at least.

[Squinch]

145. Teachers and teachers unions are not in a position to fix it. There are literally billions

of dollars to be made by the current system, and it is backed by Gates and Arnie Duncan/Obama and every corporation on the gravy train. They dictate the policies.

And I don't know about the DCPS system, but in NYC, the "value added" is not measured by individual student improvements. It is measured by aggregate numbers of students who pass the test in the grade. So the situation I described above holds: the teachers must concentrate only on those who have a hope of getting the required grade because if not enough of the children get the satisfactory grade, the teacher gets an unsatisfactory rating and after, I believe, 3 of these, he or she is fired. That teacher must concentrate on her most talented students and not the students that don't have a prayer of passing the test.

Even if a teacher is experienced enough that he or she is able to attempt to teach those children that don't matter to the testing process, the measure of his or her effectiveness will dismiss all those students who improve faster than usual but who don't change a test grade. In many classes, many of the students are NEVER going to move into that higher test grade.

[Recursion]

147. Fair point, but you do have to remember the context here

The context (again, at least in DC, which is the district I've actually worked in) was that the WTU so adamantly stonewalled any outcomes-based assessment, for so long, that they lost all input when it finally happened. In 1999, 97% of DCPS teachers received "excellent" markings from their "observation"-based system. Come on. At least the math teachers should be able to acknowledge what's just on its face wrong with that.

I had a 7th grade science teacher who told us the Sun had kinetic energy because it rises in the east and sets in the west. Last I checked (three years ago) she's still teaching, despite every parent whose kids had her complaining about how bad she was. Now, that was Mississippi, and the Mississippi union rules are very strange and a holdover from the absurdly slow integration process, so that's not even a particularly valuable anecdote for the rest of the country, I just feel the need to mention it in terms of where I'm coming from here at an emotional level.

But at least in DC the WTU had this view that DCPS was a jobs program for Ward 8 (I saw the WTU head give a speech in 2002 that lasted half an hour, mentioned the importance of these stable jobs for the community, and literally didn't say a word about students), and fiercely resisted any attempt to get rid of teachers that really did have no business being in the classroom but were somebody's cousin. (Thought question: is there any other profession about which someone's motives are attacked for the statement that there are members of that profession who shouldn't be in that profession?) They did this all the way up until the city got put in receivership. For that matter, about 2/3 of the teachers I knew in DC wound up at charters because it was the only way to escape the absolutely broken school system administration (I think people underrate this as an attraction to charters for a lot of teachers -- plus the generation gap; these were 20-somethings like I was at the time who were getting screwed by the seniority system).

Even if a teacher is experienced enough that he or she is able to attempt to teach those children that don't matter to the testing process, the measure of his or her effectiveness will dismiss all those students who improve faster than usual but who don't change a test grade. In many classes, many of the students are NEVER going to move into that higher test grade.

And, to me, these were all reasons why teachers should have been more involved in the development of an evaluation system rather than fighting the very existence of one to begin with.

If the instruments are faulty, that's a big problem, but I'm much more worried about their impact on the kids' lives (who, after all, have a lot of the course of their lives determined by tests) than on their teachers'.

[Squinch]

148. The world of education today bears little resemblence to the world that

existed in 1999 or 2002. I am not a teacher, but I do most of my work in the schools. I have never seen a time when the teachers were given any entry into the process or consulted about the process.

Also, all the bright young things that I know who go into charter schools these days are chewed up and spit out in a matter of 2 or 3 years.

Also, teachers are pretty easily fired these days within a few months.

Also, to fight the old battle of "the teachers should have accepted an evaluation system 15 years ago" is moot. Most everyone who can leave the system these days does leave as soon as they can, so most of the people who were fighting an evaluation system are long gone. I would venture to guess, though, that many of them foresaw the corporatization of schools and fought evaluations because they knew the evaluations they ended up with would be completely moronic. Those people have been proven correct.

And yes, the point here IS the impact on the kids' lives. The impact is that we now have two classes of students: first we have the ones who are already successful, who will be taught how to take tests, and second we have the ones who have greater needs, who will not be taught much at all. The generation that is coming up, the one that will take over the running of things from you and me, will be comprised of one half who are very good at taking tests, and another half who know very little of anything.

And by the way, those countries whose school systems are successful tend not to use any of these measurement systems.

[Squinch]

149. One more observation about this: you describe

bad old days of cronyism and inept teachers.

Between then and now, the new methods of managing and assessing teachers have been put in place.

Under these new methods, the US has fallen in relation to other countries with respect to student achievement.

So, if we are going to go with outcomes based criteria, we gotta bring back Mrs. Jones and the Sun's west to east kinetic energy!!

[RC]

55. Don't forget the administrators and school boards teachers have to put up with, too.

Most of those people don't have much, if any classroom time and they get to tell the teachers how and what to teach.

That said, the "average pay" shown in the chart is after 20 or more years of teaching. Starting pay is much lower. Even as low as $20,000 in some places. And forget the 'continuing education' they have to pay for out of their own pocket for. That minimum education they are expected to acquire after a certain amount of time isn't cheap either. That is what the newer teachers do with their 'Summer vacations' for years, on their below average pay.

[charlives]

70. All I can add is....

My wife and I have taught for 30 yrs. My daughter wanted to teach since she was a little girl. We tried to dissuade her.

[Starry Messenger]

82. k&r

[stillwaiting]

86. Yeah, we don't do that very well in this country, do we?

But we should. We really should.

[Aerows]

95. Any "Democrat" that disparages teachers

or denies that they need higher wages, isn't a Democrat. They didn't get the benefit of a good teacher.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

102. Thank you.

[49jim]

101. I started teaching in 1971

in upstate NY for a salary of $6800.00. I taught first, third and fifth garage for a total of 9 years. In 1980 after earning my masters degree i was making $16,000!

[WinkyDink]

128. '71 here, also! Same salary in PA, 50 miles N. of Philly.

[LWolf]

106. Thank you. nt

[justgamma]

116. Maybe we should call them babysitters.

$5.00 an hour X 30 kids X 8 hours per day X 280 days a year. They should get $336,000 a year.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

117. !

If we are going to play the semantics game, this would be the way to go!

Notice how the countries that are excelling in STEM do not need this discussion.

Wonder why that is?

[ctsnowman]

118. K & R