I’m not a teacher but as part of my work at a museum I sometimes act as docent for school groups. When the children are well behaved, pay attention, and ask good questions you might think I’m the greatest docent since sliced bread. I engage them in a friendly manner, answer most of their questions (they stump the chump at times), and I look like I’m thoroughly enjoying myself. When the children are ill tempered, refuse to pay attention, and obviously don’t want to be there then I will appear to the casual observer to be a very bad docent. I’m not engaging the children in a very friendly manner, I don’t give them time to ask questions because that’s just an invitation for them to start talking over me, and it’s quite obvious I’m not enjoying myself especially when I threaten to let them sit in the bus for the remainder of the time they’re supposed to be at the museum (the nuclear option I have never had to deploy but I’m willing to push the button).
What I’m getting at is that my performance evaluation should take into account the quality of the students under my tutelage. Kids in character schools and private schools probably have a lot of advantages that kids in some public schools don’t have. They probably have parents who care about their kid’s education, probably have two parents living under one roof, and probably get to eat breakfast most days. In some public schools the opposite is true.
That’s fine, and kudos to you for your relative patience and work with kids. I hate kids a lot of the time in particular, though I like kids in principle and in general, if you see my point.
But I did anticipate your issue (just as I anticipated the issue of profit vs. non-profit by citing the ACS, which like lots of district attorney offices, non-profits, and other non-governmental agencies, has fairly summary proceedings for firing misfits despite being a not-for-profit).
Specifically, many charter schools exist almost indistinguishably side-by-side with neighborhood public schools (the same is true for many Catholic schools in ghettos). Check out this article – the same school building is split between a “charter public school” and “traditional public school” – and the outcomes are starkly different.
That’s hard to explain away by neighborhood, race, socioeconomic status, etc. Now, if you want to take it down to the hyper-particularized level of “Yes, but there are some poor, crack-addicted, black Harlem mothers who live in the same neighborhood as other poor, black Harlem mothers who somehow muster the initiative to take their kids halfway around the block to the charter-school entrance of the same building” – well, I don’t know, that just does not seem to me like a sufficiently compelling basis under which we acquiesce to a system-wide policy per which a lazy pervy teacher in suburban Staten Island gets three years paid leave after groping his sophomore math student.
I work for a non-profit (museum) and I could be fired immediately for violating ethical standards or behaving in inappropriately. I don’t object to evaluating the performance of teachers but I’m not quite sure how to go about doing it.
That doesn’t really prove much to me. Thinking back to my high school experience, there was a radical difference between the kids in AP English, regular English, and remedial English courses but they were all in the same school and lived in the same geographical area. I noticed a big difference between the students in the higher level courses versus the courses that everyone had to take (Health, foreign language, various electives). Just being in a charter school is indicative of the child having a parent or guardian that takes an interest in their education. An interest that might not be present in the kids in the non-charter school. So, no, I’m not quite sure it’s fair to compare them side by side.
I’m not an educator. Why do I need to personally design a review system before I can comment on the current one? I admit teaching is not an easy thing to evaluate, particularly if you think (as I do) that standardized tests are mostly busywork. I think the problem may be ratings rather than the method. If you read the article you can see that almost all teachers are rated satisfactory and almost all get tenure. It’s difficult for me to believe that 98-plus percent of all tenured New York City teachers are satisfactory and that 94 percent deserve tenure.
Because “Under the union contract, hearings on each case are held five days a month during the school year and two days a month during the summer.” That would have the effect of making any hearing take a long time. The unions also approve the arbitrators.
I’m saying this compensation structure is not the best one for education.
94 percent of teachers in New York City schools get tenure after three years, and 98 percent of them are rated satisfactory. Does that pass the smell test for you? It sounds like grade inflation to me. I think for some reason you are assuming I believe teachers are responsible for all the failings of the education system. I don’t. But a lot of the early part of this thread centered around tenure and about the rubber rooms in particular, so that’s what I’m talking about.
I don’t think you know anything about professional sports. Plenty of players try hardest when their contracts are running out and not as much at other times. It’s a much-discussed phenomenon: ‘you can expect a big year out of so-and-so, it’s his contract year.’ And plenty of others do mail it in after a big payday. Do all of them do it? No. They’re motivated by desire to succeed, to get better, pride, money, or whatever else keeps them personally ticking. But some of them do it. There is no question about this. And owners offer long-term contracts because that’s what is expected of them in their industry; if they don’t keep up with the rest of the market they will not be able to sign anyone.
But it seems to me that you’re denying this is an issue by trying to pretend that it has to be universal. That’s a nonsense argument, and it wasn’t true even in the example you chose to make your point. The example that sticks in my mind is a high school teacher I once had: he advised the student paper for three years, and after receiving tenure announced he wasn’t going to do it anymore because he didn’t need to.
I never made this assertion.
The current system is flawed in that it does not encourage teachers to improve after three years. It encourages them to do enough to win a job, and from that point on, it doesn’t matter much if they are good or bad. A good teacher is going to want to do a good job regardless. Others can just hang on and on. That’s a problem.
How do we get from there to your assumption that I think all teachers are lazy and dishonest?
Reread the first line of my first post in this thread. And for that matter, the last paragraph of the same post.
From a professional standpoint, that is.
I’m not particularly convinced of that. Everybody wants to protect his own job and unions get their strength by protecting everyone. (And I’m not at all opposed to unions.) The behavior documented in the article does not give me a lot of confidence that the teachers union really wants the bad teachers to get the axe.
If this is true, why don’t people respect teaching?
Fair point, but I feel the substance of your argument was more about how the rooms were bad. Point taken.
Don’t you think you can find embarrassing stories about almost any industry. At least embarrassing enough to reflexively justify not extending them certain considerations.
You’re right, my example was wrong. I knew that, but I think I may have just had a brain fart there. I still stick by my point that lawyers and doctors have advocates to protect their collective interests and influence pay that function in similar way to teacher’s unions.
Catholic Schools get to pick their students. A similar selection bias exist with most Charter schools.
Can you demonstrate that?
Because it’s easy to say something should be fixed, but it’s much harder to actually suggest a workable solution. Evaluating teachers more often would entail hiring more administrators at great cost. That’s money most places do not have.
Yet, the other article states the following:
So it’s not entirely clear that this is the union’s fault if their are not enough internal investigators to charge people in a timely manner. The UFT President doesn’t seem to be stonewalling either.
Who is rating the teachers?
I am very aware of the notion that people play harder in a contract year. I also know that it is largely a myth. Of course there may be notable examples of people who seem to stop trying after being given their money, but if it were a big problem, long-term guaranteed contracts would not be offered regardless of industry expectations. No owner would just give away tens of millions of dollars for nothing. Say you are the Yankees, and you have a chance to sign a 25-year old superstar. The guy wants an 10-year, $220 million contract. You think he will just stop trying after signing the contract. Why would you sign him for that long? If that is what the industry dictates, you would be better off letting your competitors sign him since you expect he will be mailing it in soon after signing.
Your anecdotes are not proof of anything.
If you think a significant number of teachers will mail it in after getting tenure, you should see some significant dropoff from year 3 to year 4. Has anyone ever demonstrated that this dropoff is real? The point is that just because you think something may be a temptation to be dishonest, doesn’t mean a statistically significant number of people will actually be dishonest. Treating something that “might” be a problem as a problem is hardly worthwhile when there are many other legitimate problems to tackle.
So you think there are teachers who try really hard for 3 years to get tenure, then they stop trying. They have the ability to be good teachers, but then they only try long enough to get job security?
Also, how are teachers supposed to improve? What does that mean exactly? I am asking an honest question. How often to teachers have an opportunity to see other teachers in action, or get new materials? Do they have access to studies showing the comparative effective of certain teaching techniques? How much constructive criticism is the average teacher given on a yearly basis? Tell me what a (for example) 7th grade Algebra teacher is supposed to do to become a better teacher? In many fields, you can become more efficient, work more often, attract more profitable clients, etc. You don’t have many opportunities to do that as a teacher.
I think anyone who mails in it after getting tenure is lazy and dishonest. That’s my characterization. Do you disagree?
Because people generally don’t respect education in this country. Because teachers don’t make much money relative to other fields. Because people don’t respect people who work with kids. Because people judge teachers by the worst among them. Because people don’t believe the government can do anything right. Should I keep going?
Of the people who have been charged, arbitration still proceeds at a snail’s pace. Hiring more investigators should help, and if they are setting limits on how long this process can take, that should help, too.
I am looking around to see if I can find out. I expect it’s detailed in contracts between the city and the teachers union.
I still disagree. The owners don’t want to waste money on players who don’t make an effort, but they don’t know for sure who won’t make the effort. And if you have to sign some players who don’t make an effort in order to sign several who do - and in turn they more than pay off your investment - that works out for the owners and it becomes an acceptable loss.
And I should point out that owners don’t guarantee contracts out of the goodness of their hearts. The contracts are guaranteed as part of the collective bargaining agreements between the players unions and the owners. Of the major pro sports, only the NFL does not have fully guaranteed contracts. And the NFL may be moving in that direction; players are demanding more and more guaranteed money and it’s a major labor issue for them.
You asked me why I think there are a lot of teachers who don’t make much effort after getting tenure. I told you the basis for my opinion.
Measured by what? Haven’t you been asserting that it’s difficult to measure teacher performance - a point I agreed with?
I didn’t say they were "really good. "I said they were good enough to get tenure. If 94 percent of teachers in New York City get tenure after three years, they clearly don’t have to be exceptionally good to get tenure. That makes it sound more like you will get tenure unless you blow it completely.
By seeing other teachers, studying different techniques, and continuing their own education. I do think they have opportunities to get better: for starters they don’t work during the summer, and I am sure the union can offer opportunities to pursue these kinds of opportunities.
I agree.
You don’t have to. I don’t think most of these answers are on target.
God this whole debate makes my blood boil. I think teachers should be paid much more than they are, the requirements to be a teacher should be much higher than it is, and teachers should be evaluated for performance and possibly lose their job if they don’t do a good job. This is what being a professional is about. I hate the conservatives for denying schools the money to be as a good as they need to be to measure up to the rest of the world, the teachers unions for pushing tenure and fighting tougher requirements, teachers for whining about how their jobs is somehow so special that they can’t be treated like other people in the workforce, education consultants for making up absurd shit like Whole Language out of whole cloth without any sort of empirical data to back it up, parents for being so stupid that their kids can’t learn from them, me for taking my kid out of the system so that it made it worse, the left for inserting stupid ideological nonsense like teaching self confidence, the right for trying to turn the school into a church, and I’m sure I forgot some other people as well.
First, the notion that people play better in contract years seems to be false. Second, owners have clearly done the math and come to the conclusion that it is not that big a problem. Why do you think we should use a different sort of calculus with regard to teachers? Is there no acceptable amount of “bad” teachers?
Measured by satisfactory rating for example. Or outside of class hours worked on average. I think we both agree measurement is difficult, but if this is a big problem, there should be some evidence of it.
You are ignoring the fact that roughly half of those teachers will quit with 5 years. It’s often higher in urban areas. Let’s say for the sake of argument that an equal number quit after each of the 5 years. That means roughly 30% of teachers will voluntarily leave before they ever get tenure. Many of those teachers are bad teachers. That means the 94% only reflects the percentage of teachers that bothered to stay around that were rated satisfactory. Attrition seems to be a relatively effective way to rid the field of bad teachers.
More importantly, what makes you think you can fill all those positions with great teachers? Let’s assume we have a perfect evaluation process for teacher effectiveness. How do you fill all the spots in a struggling school with these people? NYC has, I believe, about 80k teachers. What makes you think we can find 80k great teachers, with an education background, certified to teach the right subjects and grades, who are willing teach in these schools, even if we can perfectly evaluate their competence?
Despite “not being able to fire tenured teacher”, we still have teacher shortages in many areas. We can’t fill the positions even with bad teachers occupying those spots. What makes you think we’d be better off making it easier to fire those people, creating more of a shortage. Obviously, you don’t want teachers that are truly incompetent no matter what the cost, but we also don’t need to take away the perks of the jobs when we have a hard time attracting talent already. Especially since doing so means you will likely lose good teachers too.
When would they have an opportunity to see other teachers, or continue their education? Who is gonna pay for teachers to be idly watching other teachers teach? Who is gonna pay for their schooling? Also, what makes you think more education will result in a better teacher? Are you of the opinion that the best educated teachers are the most effective?
Assuming you agree that people do not respect teachers, why do you think that is the case?
Because professional sports is just entertainment.
I accept that nothing is perfect, so there will always be bad teachers. What I’m seeing leaves me concerned that there are too many of them and that it’s much too difficult to get rid of the ones who either are not good at their job or stop performing well.
I think the articles we’re discussing show that the satisfactory rating is a rubber stamp and shouldn’t be relied on for anything. The outside of class hours might be a useful measurement of teacher engagement, though.
If they’re bad teachers, why are they getting tenure and the benefits that come with it, and why are so many of them ratted satisfactory? There may be a correlation between bad teaching and teachers who quit, but I don’t know how strong it is. A bad teacher may quit because he or she hates the job or is told he won’t get tenure or good ratings, but a good teacher could choose to leave because of low pay, a bad school, insufficient support from administrators, personal reasons, or some other issue.
I never demanded all teachers be great. By definition, that’s not possible. But leaving that aside, are you suggesting that maybe it’s just not possible to find enough good teachers? Even with all the programs that try to recruit teachers, it’s just too hard to keep the good ones and hire enough to meet the remaining need?
Perhaps if teachers were paid better and fewer bad teachers - especially retired one and inept ones - were drawing large compensation packages, it’d be easier to hire more teachers. I hate to bring up the specter of the auto industry but I wonder if at some point, retired teachers will have to accept some similar changes in benefits.
You can’t possibly be arguing that teachers don’t have an opportunity to continue their education when they work 10 months a year. I know some of them teach summer school, but there is certainly an opportunity there.
Maybe some exchange programs can be worked out that allow teachers to take a few days throughout the year to observe each other. I’d be surprised if nothing like this exists now, but if not, maybe it should.
Don’t teachers get a bump in salary when they get a graduate degree, or additional graduate degrees or certifications?
I’m not of that opinion, and in fact I’ve wondered at times if New York State’s teacher certification rules (which are unusually stringent) are actually a hindrance. But I didn’t suggest that there’s a hierarchy going from teacher with a postgraduate degree on down. I said that could be one way for teachers to improve.
I’m not sure I agree with it as a generalization, but I will say that since everybody has had teachers (and everyone has had at least a few bums), I think there’s a perception that anybody can teach, or at least dabble in teaching. I think the current tenure system actually encourages that perception. And yes, the fact that teachers are doing something less tangible than selling stuff and are not motivated by a high starting salary may cost them respect from some quarters.
True, but you can find few industries where the stakes are as high, and the resources are as abundant. If you can’t get rid of the bums in sports, or predict who will be great over a long period of time, what makes you think you can more effectively accomplish the task with fewer resources and less direct means of measurement?
What makes you think there are that many bad teachers?
Because it’s hard to tell who is a bad teacher and who isn’t. Especially when you only evaluate them a few times a year.
I think that may, in fact, be the case. Particularly since we are at an impasse where many want teachers to give up all the perks of the job, but don’t want to pay them significantly more. Why would that deal convince more people that they should be a teacher? Even so, good teachers don’t mean great students.
Would you agree to give back X% of your income over the last X years so your employer could pay current employees more? Why do you expect teachers to do that? Do you think cops should do that as well? How are you expecting them to pay their mortgages and health insurance after you take away the money you promised them?
Sometimes. Usually, it’s not much. Still, if more education does not necessarily result in better teachers, or better results, what’s the point?
I’m not sure how the stakes are high. You don’t make money in sports just by winning, you make it with merchandising and advertising and TV deals. You can make tons of money in sports even if you are signing bad players to bad contracts. Not everyone who makes money in sports does it that way, but it can be done.
At the moment I don’t think there’s much of an effort to get an accurate measurement. The teachers union seems to be opposed to them on the grounds they could lead to persecution. There are abuses to be guarded against, just like a school should not be able to fire all its experienced teachers and save money by hiring new ones. But there has to be a middle ground there, and a universal tenure system for everybody who hangs on for three years doesn’t cut it. In the New Yorker article you can see a teacher complain that until the Bloomberg administration there was ‘no such thing as incompetence’- meaning teachers couldn’t lose their jobs for incompetence, the assumption was that the bad ones would just leave.
I didn’t make a statement about how many there are. I said I’m concerned there are too many based on my own experiences and based on what I’m reading and how the system we are discussing works. I think a system that is this heavily based on seniority is just too prone to abuse and is not responsive.
I’ve acknowledged that evaluating a teacher is complicated. I don’t think it’s impossible.
I’m fine with paying them more if it works. I have a bigger problem with letting a useless teacher hang around for decades and then retire at an early age with a lot of benefits.
I don’t think you’re listening, because I didn’t say I expect them to do that. I said I wondered if it would get to that point. Auto workers did things like that because their industry was going broke, and I was saying I wonder if teachers could eventually have a similar problem because the Baby Boomer teachers are retiring, or mostly retired - which means a lot of people drawing a lot of benefits, probably for a long time, while the system itself has funding problems.
I offered it as one option for how teachers can improve. If you don’t think it works, ignore it.
Improving teacher evaluation is a major part of Pres. Obama’s * Race to the Top* initiative. Here in Michigan, teacher evaluation is now required every year for tenured teachers where in the past it was only required once every three years. It must also be at least partially based on student test scores and can no longer be simply satisfactory/unsatisfactory. Also, the probationary period for a new teacher is required to be four years. When I started teaching it was two years with an optional third year. These changes were required just to apply for the grant and are now in place even though we missed out on the money in the first round of funding.
I believe these moves may help students, but I don’t know if these reforms will help the poor perception that some people have of teachers; what do you think? or is that fodder for another thread?
Not off point – see the P.S. in my OP, where I discuss this with some (heavily qualified) optimism.
I think anything that signals a move away from blanket resistance to compensation based on anything other than tenure will improve (or at least stop hurting) public perception. Same with the NYT article discussing the fierce battle over charter school caps – like it or not, the public is going to view union opposition to charters (which are wildly popular with parents) as fear of competition.
Student test outcomes are tricky but may be the least-worst proxy for teaching achievement. (Put differently – I remember some debates in which exasperated opponents of indexing pay to student test improvement said, okay, let’s test the teachers for basic (or advanced) math and literacy skills. That did not go over well, either, though I’d be all in favor.). The public just wants to see some standard other than “well, she’s been around a long time.” I remember in my high school days a “merit pay” law/policy was enacted and [my version of things] the teachers actively sabotaged/transmuted it into a standards-free joke where the linchpin of qualifying for “merit” bonuses was a school-wide (non-individual) “special educational project” (i.e., school A would spend the year having events about AIDS awareness, school B would have special presentations about drug avoidance, etc.). If your project had enough bells and whistles and meaningless rallies (almost all did, whaddya know) – everyone got the “merit” bonus. People don’t want to see that, they want at least to think individuals are being held to some sort of objective standard. Be nice (from the public perspective, especially in a bad economy) to see a few teachers in any given district fired just on general competence/lackluster quality grounds, given that this is consistent with what most people in the private sector have seen going on at their work in the past couple of years.
We need to make it so that those going into teaching are the top students, or at least the middle, rather than those with the worst test scores. Then the teachers need to act like lawyers and doctors and set high standards for their profession. And yes, I’m willing to pay extra taxes. I’ve voted for every school funding bill I’ve been offered.
I wanted to go back and address this again because I think you’ve sort of sidestepped the issue here. Yes, this behavior is lazy. That’s a given. The problem is that the system encourages this behavior. I think you’re looking at it only as a character flaw and overlooking the fact that different ways of paying teachers can reward different kinds of behavior.
Bad teams have a harder time getting high ad rates and lucrative merchandising deals. While you are right that it is not all about wins, having a good team helps a lot. And the stakes are huge. Millions of dollars are at stake.
I think the disagreement largely stems from a distrust of the reformers. Surely, not all of them have bad motives. But, can you think of a recent situation where workers have gained as much from making concessions as they have lost? Things may get cheaper. Things may become more efficient. But usually, workers suffer. It’s just part of a disposable culture; everybody is expendable. I don’t think that bodes well for schools, or for teachers, but I think that will likely be the result. Today, the vast majority of these situations seems to result in once respected professions simply becoming jobs. Being an auto worker used to be something respected; a road to the middle class. Now, it’s just a job. Teacher’s unions don’t want that to happen, and I don’t blame them.
Why shouldn’t they be able to fire all their experienced teachers to save money? What would prevent such abuses form occurring? If you take this thinking to it’s logical extension, teachers would likely only be able to demand a salary relatively close to the median since their productiveness and effectiveness cannot be that far from the median as well. You can only teach so many students, and work so many hours. Why would you pay a teacher 100k when you can hire two for 40k each?
My problem is that when you start treating schools like businesses, you get the good with the bad. Businesses fire employees all the time when they are too expensive. They also do plenty of other things that we would hate to see in schools. More problematic is that adopting a business approach would likely mean that social norms would be supplanted by business norms. Right now, you have teachers buying their own school supplies (out of kindness), volunteering, sharing lesson plans, etc. Schools are largely governed by social norms and mores. You would definitely see less of that if you start treating schools like businesses. NCLB has already created situations where teachers were so obsessed with making the numbers that they helped kids cheat on tests. These teachers did the same things many businesses do when they need to make the numbers. There is no doubt that a business approach can lead to positive outcomes, but they will always come at a cost when introduced in a social environment.
I don’t mean to sidestep the issue. I agree that this might be a logical assumption, but I think advocating for systemic changes, ones that you know will be extremely contentious, should only be considered when there are big problems with the status quo. I think we both agree that this may happen, but I don’t think it’s been demonstrated that it’s a problem that necessitates such a dramatic and punitive change.
I believe the quotation about children learning that you are attributing to one of the teachers if actually intended to be a reference to a George Bush flub made in Florence SC in 2000:
You are justified in thinking it was one of the teachers that said it. The article doesn’t make that clear.
I am for higher standards for teachers and enormous changes in the structure of many educational systems. I am for tying teachers evaluations to their students’ scores on standardized tests only if the teacher has control of all factors influencing the students scores and if there is absolute fairness in teacher assignment evaluation. (These are just a couple of the things to be considered.)
There is a continued reference in these posts to the teachers “unions.” The National Education Association is not a union. It doesn’t affiliate with unions. It doesn’t use membership dues for political purposes. You have only to look at the websites of the NEA and the actual teachers union (Affiliated Teachers of America?) – I’ve forgotten – to see the difference.
You are trying to mislead people to say differently. I wish it were a union sometimes.
At the risk of getting bogged down in the analogy, winning helps, but it’s not the only way to make money. And if you’re more interested in making money than in winning, there is no shortage of of ways to make money while your team loses. Teams like the Clippers have proved it is really not necessary.
Do you think they would trust any reformers, or is the current situation one they don’t want to jeopardize?
What about the auto workers? Do you think they were net losers because some of them lost jobs and they had to give up some of their benefits, or did they gain because the alternative was that their industry might have gone under, in which case they all would have lost their jobs and benefits?
I’m not persuaded by this way of thinking, and it’s not just because I don’t think teachers are about to be replaced by robots. Teaching is a job. It’s one with a responsibility that most of us consider important, but it’s a job. And if teachers don’t want teaching to be “just a job,” then they should be more willing to reform policies that protect bad teachers. Those policies reduce the quality of education and they’re not good for the kids who are being taught. If teachers believe their jobs are special because they educate children, they can’t do these kinds of things in support of bad teachers. Isn’t that attitude rather cynical?
You’re not taking it to its logical extension, you’re taking it to absurdity. I haven’t said schools should be run like a business and all free-market principles should be applied to schools. (Heurta88 did, maybe.) There’s no profit motive in public education anyway.
I do think it’s getting to be time for these kinds of changes. And I think policies like this are a significant problem on their own.