I'm going to shamelessly overgeneralize and say that I've come to the conclusion that there are basically 2 types of people involved in education: 1) those who actually go into classrooms and teach, and 2) grifters.
Honestly, if the entire meta-industry of supposed experts and consultants surrounding the educational enterprise were burned to the ground tomorrow, it would be the best thing that could happen for education in the US.
2: Aspiring grifters. What are they in school for, if not to master the basic grifting skills?
Is that distinction going to be on the test?
Now that AI is good enough to do stuff like face recognition surely we can use it to grade art classes, and once we can test art we can use it to evaluate teachers and we don't have to cut it in favor of those courses which test easily like math. If only we can find a way to test recess performance we can keep that, too.
5.last - give all the kids fitbits and make sure they all take an at least average number of steps during each recess period.
I think you could safely go a lot further than saying that it seems ideologically driven.
I know several teachers, all under 40, on facebook and I never see them post anything from them about the teaching profession except laments about the proliferation of standardized tests and how the teaching profession is being dismantled. So, the theoretical young go-getting teachers who are supposed to benefit from education reforms and merit pay and charter schools popping up everywhere and the end of seniority-based decisions, do they actually exist? There must be some teachers who are happy because they got hired at a charter when they couldn't get hired by the school district. And there must be some somewhere who think that being paid based on standardized test results will help them get ahead of their older colleagues who won't try new things.
Or are they more like adjuncts with no job security, so they're demotivated too?
I serve on a state commission where we periodically do hearings on education, among other things. The two things that really strike me about standardized testing are that (1) somone presented data at our last hearing that my state spends more per student on standardized testing than ESL, and (2) the monologue about testing from senior educational administrators is almost entirely about punishing districts/schools/teachers with poor test results to the exclusion of asking how the system might assist these to perform better and in particular what additional resources they might need in order to perform better. It's a classic example of "the floggings will continue until morale improves."
Enrollment in education majors is dramatically plummeting here. Its hard to get people to do a job that you make unpleasant, boring, and poorly compensated.
My favorite education experiment is the US Airfrorce one, where it's actually genuinely random and they found that student evaluations correlate with good exam scores in a current class and anti-correlate with exam scores in subsequent classes (which instead corellate with experience). So even if you can measure value added accurately, it might be counterproductive.
Of course, in practice, the scammers selling actual value added evaluation metrics to school distracts almost surely do a sloppy shitty job that is not good enough to do what the actual researchers did.
Is 'anti-correlate' a word used in some fields?
10
Last time that came up, I read the Air Force study and it didn't really say what the one sentence synopsis says it says. That doesn't refute anything about how flawed both student evaluations and standardized tests are, but like everything else in education, it's not that simple.
Just skimmed the article, what part of my summary do you object to? Seems pretty similar to the authors':
Results show that there are statistically significant and sizable differences in student achievement across introductory course professors in both contemporaneous and follow‐on course achievement. However, our results indicate that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement, on average, harm the subsequent performance of their students in more advanced classes. Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value‐added but positively correlated with follow‐on course value‐added. Hence, students of less experienced instructors who do not possess a doctorate perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course but perform worse in the follow‐on related curriculum.
Student evaluations are positively correlated with contemporaneous professor value‐added and negatively correlated with follow‐on student achievement. That is, students appear to reward higher grades in the introductory course but punish professors who increase deep learning (introductory course professor value‐added in follow‐on courses).
I seem to remember correlations being extremely weak, but maybe that's my hard science bias.
Also,
"Results in Columns 4−6 for follow-on course achievement show that professor evaluations in the
initial courses are very poor predictors of student achievement in the follow-on related courses. Of
the 27 coefficients estimated, 13 coefficients are negative and 14 are positive, with none statistically
significant at the 0.05−level."
seems to say no correlation rather than anticorrelation.
Are we looking at the same paper? I can't find that quote. (http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/scarrell/profqual2.pdf)
What I see in Column 2 of Table 5, is every course evaluation question showing a negative correlation with value added to scores in future classes. (Though these correlations are less strong than the correlation to experience.)
All the good people left UC Davis years ago.
Of course they're extremely weak! Assuming a bare minimum of competency, why would you possibly expect teachers to have a huge impact on their students? Any results about teaching and value added are going to be teasing out small impacts.
I was reading their previous paper (2008, NBER working paper). Strangely, the 2008 paper has more data (12,568 students from 1997-2007) than the 2010 paper you link (10,534 students from 2000-2007).
It's not clear if they changed anything else about their analysis, but I would argue that the most generous interpretation is that that particularly correlation is not particularly robust.
It's hard to find one that is in the social sciences. We once had a nice correlation and then somebody went to a conference and reported this nice correlation. But we weren't done with all the data collection and our "nice correlation" was somebody else's "poor management." So they fixed the management and our nice correlation went away at the final time point.
That's bizarre. Why would you change from 1997 to 2000 without giving any sort of explanation? That looks suspicious as hell.
And yet inevitably these weak to non-existent correlations get used to claim that Objective Science(Tm) proves that we need to cut funding, destroy teachers unions, replace everything with MOOCS & etc. Hence my "burn the entire meta-industry to the ground" suggestion in 1.
There's a teacher shortage here. The only solution that hasn't been tried is actually paying teachers in money instead of platitudes.
That sounds a lot like the "worker shortage" that plagues construction companies in so many places.
You can't eat money, Cala. You can't eat platitudes either, but at least you'll feel good about yourself as you slowly starve to death.
The whole thing is pretty insane.
So supposedly, there is a measurable difference in what teachers do/are that can cause students to learn more. But we don't know what it is and can barely measure it.
So we offer you the following job: we will pay you relatively little to do something. You will be judged on how well other people perform after you do that something. We don't have any objective measure of any kind of correlation between what you do and how the other people will perform. And if they perform poorly, we will fire you.
Who would take this job?
25 - We need to go back on the pirogue standard.
There's a teacher shortage here. The only solution that hasn't been tried is actually paying teachers in money instead of platitudes.
Here too! They keep talking about how we're cutting standards for emergency certification. Rather than, right, the real money thing.
They pay pretty well here. They don't have any shortage I ever heard of.
In Pennsylvania the policy seems to be "we will never hire another teacher unless we're building an entire new school".
That's not true. I have a neighbor who got hired. It just takes a long time and she keeps getting laid off and called back.
To the OP: the 538 post struck me as having a glaring logical flaw. The critic (Rothstein, iirc) is saying that the study design makes systematic errors, because something it assumes is random really isn't. It's not even remotely relevant to say "well, when we used the same design on other data, we got similar results" --- that's exactly what you'd expect from a _systematic_ flaw. It's as though economists A said "Based on our observations of North Carolina, Thanksgiving is when American families gather to commit ritual cannibalism"; economist B objects that A is confusing different types of featherless bipeds; and economist A's friends reply "Nope, featherless bipeds being eaten in Southern California at the end of November --- cannibals all!"
Yesterday, my wife and I had our periodic "lets move back to NYC/no, because the schools only care about testing" argument again. In a very real sense, No Child Left Behind has totally fucked me over.
I was talking to a woman about my age this morning while I was waiting for a haircut, and she said her favourite teacher had completely ignored the syllabus while she was at school but had given her an enduring love of history.
Nowadays she'd be fired and fuck whether the kids love anything. It strikes me as a recipe for decline and fall on a huge scale if you look long term.
I actually wondered about 33 and decided I must have been misunderstanding something.
I'm confused also. Don't turkeys have feathers?
Not by the time they're being eaten they don't.
BEING EATEN BY WHOM, KEMO SABE?
That's the best nature picture ever.
This Felix Salmon story on the destruction of Cooper Union is a fascinating read:
http://fusion.net/story/192436/cooper-union-endowment-tragedy-betrayed-legacy/
and would make a good topic for a front page post probably (though maybe not at the beginning of a 3 day weekend).
43: Man, what a depressing read.
"Mendacious plutocrats destroy everything, part XXXXXXXXX."
At least they were disruptive.
Ned, back in 5: There must be some teachers who are happy because they got hired at a charter when they couldn't get hired by the school district.
We knew one of these; she quit after a semester because she found the administration essentially unbearable. (It's notable that Ohio has possibly the most dysfunctional charter school arrangement in the US.
43,44: Mendacious plutocrats and financially incompetent to boot. It's a kind of very uncreative destruction, almost ... Endless feretting around rules and due process in the service of making the organisation fit the same cookie cutter liberal arts college business plan in management's head.