@Rand Rover…I think that teaching involves an emotional investment not required in a law office. If you don’t like the kids you can never do a good job, but for those who do it matters very much that they be given the support needed to achieve the success they hope for for each child.
CHILD
You deal with adults. Teachers help shape young minds, sometimes their whole lives.
I’ve never once confused my mother with the plumber. One helped raise me and the other has been called on to fix a problem I couldn’t handle myself.
LHOD, do you have a cite that the best predictor of student success is teacher quality?
Becky–meh. You seem to have a poor view of lawyers. I think there’s an emotional investment in every aspect of a person’s life that they have something significant riding on.
I’m guessing you had some stupid fucking teachers. Seeing as snowmobile salesman is like only two ticks above McDonalds.
Oh, yes, please, let’s start that.
Rand Rover, it’s sweet that you think I put together a good argument. The feeling isn’t mutual, though, and you’re not interesting enough to take seriously. Unless someone else needs me to Google for them, I’ll pass on the request for a cite.
You didn’t ask me, but since I anticipate this question coming up a lot let me just answer this for him to get it out of the way.
http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/Teacher%20quality.Evers-Izumi.pdf
Let’s say we get a new real-live member (not a troll) who is a KKK member, a pedophile and rabidly anti-US. And he’s always bitching about how the niggers are ruining his life, 5-year-olds should be able to choose to have sex with grown men, and the US should send all its nukes straight up and straight down. Isn’t there some part of you that likes to hear him bitch about those things? Well, that’s why I like hearing LHOD (et al) bitch about certain topics they like to bitch about.
LHOD and Jack Batty, I hope you learned your lesson.
Yeah. Steer clear of drinking scotch every night.
That article only defines a quality teacher in a post facto fashion. I.e., "For these measures I use a simple definition of teacher quality: good teachers are ones who get large gains in student achievement for their classes; bad teachers are just the opposite. "
That’s all well and good, but how do we determine that a person we are considering hiring as a teacher will be able to create large gains in student achievement? I didn’t see an answer for that in the article.
I think RR is just being…contemporary.
I mean, it’s not like girls don’t get called dude and guys don’t get called bitches all the time these days. It’s been going on for at least fifteen years now.
Who gives a shit? He in fact says that he only cares about the results, not the process. That’s not surprising, because he found no correlation in the ‘traditional’ measures (at least what’s measurable) of what makes a teacher good. So his definition is ‘a good teacher is one that makes a good student’. Which while post hoc and not pertinent to the question of ‘what makes a quality teacher’, is not what you asked.
Nor do I particularly care to ask that question. Someone may identify all of the factors but we just might have to accept the fact that identifying what makes a good teacher good is as impossible to concretely nail down as to what makes an actor profitable. You don’t, really, you just set some minimum requirements and if they pull in money/student results, great, keep them. Otherwise you can kick their ass to the curb.
You don’t have much experience with attorneys do you?
Let’s say you get 100 people together and give each of them a fair quarter. You tell them to flip it fairly. And you tell them that you want heads, none of them motherfucking tails goddammit.
Three of the coin flippers get 15 heads in a row. Well, glory be, you’ve just found yourself the best coin flippers in the universe. I guess those are the guys you keep on to get you all the heads you’d ever want, right?
This (well, these). Why is there so much focus here on something that doesn’t really appear to be an issue - teacher quality - and not on the things that are actually a drag on kids getting an education? Are you all just as lazy as the parents and have decided the teachers must be the problem, and not the fact the parents can’t be bothered to, you know - parent?
There are two ways of looking at teacher quality.
The shitty way is to take the research about teacher quality and mistakenly conclude that a good teacher can overwhelm the effects of a shitty homelife. I don’t believe that’s true, nor is that what the research says.
The other way to see it is that as a teacher, given my very limited influence on the homelife, the factor I have the most control over is the quality of my teaching.
Sure, if I could force every parent to read to their kid nightly, establish regular routines and consistent discipline, converse pleasantly and intellectually with their children throughout the day, feed the kids a balanced, healthful diet, and so on, I’d be living the life of Riley. But I can’t. What I can do is to take those kids who come to me after being up all night because their neighbor was blasting music, who came in late because mom overslept yet again, who had a Diet Dr. Pepper as their entire breakfast, who believe that they don’t need school because when they grow up they can sell guns just like dad, etc. (this character is obviously a montage, but all of kids from my experience)–I can take that kid and do my damnedest to make reading relevant to him, do my damnedest to get him to accept intellectual challenges.
Your argument only makes sense if you think that teaching success is random and completely out of the hands of the teacher after a certain point of competency. And I mean completely random. Not ‘we don’t know the process so it may as well be random’.
An analogy can be drawn with poker. There’s a large element of randomness to the game and sometimes the best player will lose to a total amateur, but nonetheless there will still be some better players than others. If you want to flush out lucky amateurs from your poker team you need to be less forgiving of failure–which means that sometimes you’ll wash out competent guys who just had a temporary bad streak. This isn’t a problem if you have enough people clamoring to be on your poker team that you can be totally unforgiving, but if candidates are turning down invitations because they think that you’re too quick to give players the boot you’ll need to provide compensation.
Cherry picking? No, it was pure laziness; the only country that had an average for their teacher was Japan. The fact that the numbers were so similar was pure coincidence (and possibly error). If my figure on per capita GDP on North Carolina was high, it only makes me wonder what you think your expectations for being paid like a ‘professional’ are.
You lost me at “persue”.
Perhaps you made the right decision 
What was confusing about my previous explanation, the one that appeared in the post you quoted?