We Shouldn't Reward Teachers ...

[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).