I don't think it's necessarily true that "Merit pay invites rivalries among teachers, when what’s needed is collaboration."
If my pay is only affected by my performance then I'm quite happy to collaborate with other staff members to help them improve.
Personally I like Warren Buffett's approach to merit pay: 80% of your salary is due to your performance, while 20% is due to the performance of your other team members [1]. This gives an incentive improve your performance and to be a team player.
Well, there's the theory of merit pay, and then there's the practice. I have no idea how merit pay works in the schools trying it out, but my hypothesis is that the overall bonus pool is finite and small. After a few cycles of the game, so to speak, teachers realize that only N merit bonuses can ever be given out in any year. Under such conditions, striving for a merit bonus is directly competitive with your peers, and the pursuit (and awarding) of that bonus can get very political very quickly. Anyone who's ever worked at a large company with stack ranking, department-wide quotas on performance tiers, etc., will know all too well how this sort of system can produce adverse outcomes if not implemented very carefully.
Buffet's system seems like an improvement on that scheme, but it, too, can be perverted under the wrong evaluation and management systems. If the group bonuses are team or unit-based (which seems likely, given the way such systems are usually implemented in order to manage at the local/proximate level), then team leaders compete for political favor. What results is that the savviest team leaders secure the rewards for their teams, whether by currying favor with the higher-ups, or by inflating their performance evaluations. (There are ways around this, however, and they rely on the artful management of access and information symmetry.)
I'm not opposed whatsoever to the idea of giving teachers bonus pay, or hell, higher pay in general. We should be trying to make the profession more prestigious and attractive, and accordingly, raising the bar on whom we accept into the field. There seems to be something working in the Scandinavian model, which regards (and rewards) teachers sort of like how the US regards and rewards lawyers, consultants, and other professionals. Perhaps the US is just too big and too heterogeneous to make something like that work. And there is something to be said about being unable to fire underperformers (though I do think that's putting the cart before the horse). Today's reformers are focusing on culling the dead weight, or on opening up more charter schools. The problem is that most of the weight is dead weight right now. We've had decades of adverse selection into public school teaching, which has become a profession of last resort. Culling dead weight is fine, but we need to rethink the way we treat and compensate the profession if we want to attract professionals to the field.
You just need to have a much wider pool than just one school. If the state has 100 high schools then you helping out at your local school has a net positive effect.
Possible downside is losing schools will have an even harder time competing. As a counter for that you might want some sort of built in correction factor based on the schools population.
> If my pay is only affected by my performance then I'm quite happy to collaborate with other staff members to help them improve.
It works that way if the bonus pool is not finite, i.e. everyone gets more when they perform better. The moment they limit the pool to top N performers, incentives flip from promoting strong collaboration and helping each other to strong competition and sabotage.
The public policy discussion around public education would be a comedy if it wasn't so damned tragic.
Let's review a few commonly-understood facts.
1) Public education continues to take more taxpayer money while providing little to no improvement in "outcomes" for kids, whatever that means [insert your own definition]
2) For those kids lucky enough to learn enough to be employable, businesses are now picking up the slack, with on-the-job mentoring and training. Business does a lot of training in the U.S.
3) Blaming one group or another isn't useful. It's not the parents, or the taxpayers, or the teacher's unions, or the administrators. What we have here is a systemic problem. The system is structured such that it sucks the life out of the teachers and continues to consume more and more resources. It's a bad system.
4) Making the system worse is the fact that it's full of consultants and external experts -- all of whom have some different idea of just what the hell the education system is supposed to accomplish. This article was a good example of that. Great ideas -- I love the idea of emphasizing relationships -- but markedly different from "Teach Johnny to read and write" or "Educate Sue enough so that she can get a job" or "Amit needs to be prepared for college". We all have different goals here.
So the problem is clear: there is no defined problem the education system is trying to solve. Therefore there is no strategy that can be "best", there is no expense that is either productive or non-productive, and there is no advice that is more or less useful than any other.
Until this issue of definitions is solved, no further progress can be made. In fact, no further progress is possible. Yes, you can come to the table with some great ideas, and you can make little snide political attacks against those who have different worldviews. Maybe even the other professors will pat you on the back. But you're not helping things.
So we're left with the problem Socrates gave us: the definition of terms. Without that, I am not optimistic that progress can be made. And guess what? Once we have a common definition of what the schools are supposed to be doing, we have a test. And so we are back to where we started. No matter what you do, you're going to have to measure it if you want to have some meaningful discussion about how it's done. That's an epistemological conclusion, not a political one.
I agree that the debate over education is crippled by a lack of clear teleological goals that everyone can agree on before discussing. But that's expected in a big discussion.
Most Big Social Issues have this same problem because they are political by nature, not technological or epistemological. Our society hasn't reached consensus on what an 'education' is, just like how it hasn't decided what a good life is (work/life balance debate), what 'freedom' is (drug criminality debate), or what a just war is.
But ESPECIALLY with education, I wouldn't expect a 'defined problem' or a set of agreed upon terms to come about by consensus. Why? Like tax policy, education policy has a very intimate relationship to politics and social classes because it affects everyone closely. The issue of definitions is 'solved' when one group's ideas win by force of influence.
The point you may be missing is that this has already happened. For the wealthy, the system isn't broken at all. The current system of standardization (test scores, bean-counting admissions processes) for everyone with a side of elite tutoring and private schools for themselves isn't failing. It's doing quite well: Pay extra disposable income for Mary to have better 'aptitude' --> secure acceptance into the next stage of life. The wealthy don't want to make the masses dumb, that would be too dangerous and gut their workforce . They'd rather make them predictably average so their children can beat their peers, reliably, with extra financial firepower.
They may not think these details out consciously, but it's the game being played.
Sure it's a political problem. So -- people who want to change the system are required to define what the system is to them. We all don't have to have agreement. Petitioners for change simply have to clearly define their terms. That way we can judge them on whether our definitions are similar, whether those goals are worth meeting, whether the strategies employed might meet them, and whether or not their argument is self-consistent. None of that guarantees a "best" outcome, after all it is political, but it guarantees a reasonable framework for public discourse.
I remember reading a study for early education that found that simply touching each student (high-five, hug, etc) every day significantly improved their performance. I imagine the need for a personal connection to the teacher diminishes gradually as we mature.
The problem I see is how do you scale personal connections and foster more social bonds?
Why haven't schools adopted the business model of "hiring great people and letting them do what they do best"? Pay them well, give them support, infrastructure, and enough oversight to help them resolve their issues quickly and effectively...and then just trust them to be productive and successful.
Is it a lack of funding that stops this from being a reality? A lack of qualified applicants? Is there a good reason this model wouldn't work?
It works quite well in other countries (for instance, Finland). We have a few problems in the US:
-- no profit in it (as observed above)
-- we don't really respect teachers or education in the US
-- school boards and local politicians want control over curricula and political agendas. Can you imagine some bright amazing young teacher teaching unadulterated evolution in some counties in Texas?
Kids are seen as a cost, not an asset or an investment, and we like to cut costs. And I do think there are broad swathes of the political establishment that are really invested in keeping America dumb.
> we don't really respect teachers or education in the US
That's probably the most important answer right there. If teachers had the same, or even higher, status in society as doctors and lawyers (had just as many tv-series where they were superstars etc.) we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
The same issues with measuring performance exists in those other jobs as well, but the perspective on teaching is always from the top. Everone's an expert in a way that's not true for law and medicine (to carry on the metaphor above).
>And I do think there are broad swathes of the political establishment that are really invested in keeping America dumb.
To me this sounds as crazy as thinking that the US government knew about 9/11. Unless your under living under extraordinary circumstances (a disease bankrupting you, etc) nothing can stop you from learning. People choose how they spend their free time if they choose to watch TV instead of learning, it's their own choice not some mandate from the establishment.
Elizabeth Green , in her book[1] claims that this whole debate regarding teacher evaluation, free markets VS teacher autonomy is wrong. The answer lies in better teacher training. [2] Is an interesting article about that, which shows what can be done and how does it work when you offer better teacher training.
Herein lies the problem. People in control of the system are afraid to trust. It's a tradeoff for them, and they choose heavily standarized education that delivers mediocre but predictable and consistent results over an education that could deliver significantly better results but is much harder to quantify. They also get measured and promoted based on some performance metrics , so it's not surprising that they decided to screw up the system to make it more quantifiable.
Schools have a fixed level of funding. If employees do an amazing job it does not increase revenue. I.e it's not a business. How many great peopke do you know that will take 60k a year in salary?
... with too many students, more each year, and ridiculous amounts of homework assigned, so much that there's no way a teacher can even look at it all (on your own time at night) much less evaluate it, ...
There is at least a solution to that one, stop assigning homework. It has no positive effects before middle school that anyone has been able to find.
Are we wasting our children's time by giving them more homework?
Ozkan Erena, Daniel J. Henderson
Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.
How do you hire great people? Seriously. This is a perennial topic here at HN, and we don't have good answers. We know that interviews don't work. We know that tests can help weed out the truly unqualified, but can't reliably identify great candidates. Ultimately, we mostly fall back to "hire quickly, fire quickly."
And now we're right back to evaluating performance and firing.
This. Think about how hard it is to figure out who is going to be a good developer, and then think about how much harder it is to figure out who is going to be a good teacher.
Why not simply put them in a classroom and watch them teach? Give them a day of lecturing to (existing) classes on whatever topic they want (or you can pick the topic). The incumbent teacher can observe and comment. Or you could hire them on a trial basis (one year) with oversight. There aren't any trade secrets to hide here.
Often they are on a probationary hire arrangement.
When I was in college, I knew of only one person who was competent in our mathematics classes whose aim was to be a HS teacher.
For many, teaching is a career they fall into. When a couple starts a family, for instance, one of the spouses will seek a job in teaching so that his or her hours will eventually be aligned with their children's.
I know very few successful engineers or journalists (etc.) who switch to a career in teaching. Those folks teach night school at the local college.
Maybe if we made teachers, full-time, year-round professionals? I know administrators are, but I'm talking about the people who are actually in the classroom. Summers can be spent improving instruction, maybe in a collaborative session with other teachers.
I don't see what this has to do with the hiring process, but in response I can say that you're speaking to an institutional difference. At my undergraduate institution most of the mathematics majors aimed to be middle or high school teachers (and now are), and their education was supposedly geared toward that. I say supposedly because the "education track" had lower standards and easier requirements than the other tracks (applied and pure math). So they might not be the same people you call "competent."
Moreover, most of the professors at my institution came from industry. They also did not originally aim for teaching, but switched into it. Many of them happen to have a PhD, but there is no research at my college (it's a polytechnic institute). If high school teachers had the same level of respect and comparable pay (and were similarly sought after), I see no reason why this couldn't also occur in high schools. We do, after all, see so many articles on HN about how there aren't enough jobs for our graduates.
Then I think we agree on what the solution may be- getting the same level of professional respect. I think one way to do this is to make it a full-time, year-round profession.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that this might severely cripple the people who entered the profession because of its' family-friendly schedule.
I'm glad to hear that most of the mathematics majors at your undergrad institution were intending to be teachers. That gives me some hope.
[Specifically, I was responding to the 'hire for one year with oversight' bit.]
I see a cultural basis for some of the problem. Money is a huge factor. But if you are going to give more money, you're going to want to demand more. Some of the teachers in place now aren't particularly competent. By making it a more demanding profession perhaps we can get more people who want to do it for love of a subject rather than convenient hours.
Because there's no way to weed out under performers, the teachers unions block every attempt at doing so. So the system must be highly regulated and inspected to limit the damage that bad teachers can do. The weird thing is, good teachers are happy to be shackled to the same system, collective pay bargaining etc.
If bad teachers could be fired! then the money spent on inspections would easily cover better pay for the good ones. But the unions must be smashed first.
This is an argument often used by teachers to shut down debate, but what you forget is we have all been to school. We know what goes on first hand, everyone does.
So I hear teachers whine about their long hours, but I remember perfectly well that "teaching" consists of putting a video on then going outside for a smoke. For the same pay as the guy who actually does a lesson.
And this is why charter schools are such a sterling success? This is why West European schools are uniformly catastrophic wastelands compared to ours? -- This experiment has already been run repeatedly, there is nothing in it at all.
A) There is a finite supply of great teachers. Only tele-teaching technology might allow great teachers reach every student
B) Letting great teachers do their thing would require the government to voluntarily give a large group of people autonomy (which is why many great teachers elect to take a lower salary at a private school, where they have more latitude)
How much should they get paid?
Who are these great people and where do I find them?
How much oversight should they be given without restricting them?
How much should I trust the teacher vs a few vocal parents? Vs the silent majority?
The reason why your model wouldn't work is that nothing concrete was stated.
The problems of inner city schools go beyond the education system. It's like trying to fix Iraq by sending more doctors - it does little to address the root cause.
Interesting claim: The creation of strong social bonds, possibly in conjunction with Deming's “plan, do, check, act” cycle, is essential to successful change in schools. (And more successful than extrinsic methods like vouchers or charter, or technological approaches.)
[Disclaimer: I work for an ed-tech company. This reflects my views, not theirs.]
I'm not sure exactly how the article of the title is reflected in the content of the article. It just sounds like the author complaining about perceived depersonalization of schooling.
So true. When all students were mainstreamed, it did a huge disservice to every student. Essentially it means troubled kids don't get help; and everybody else gets no education. The classroom can be turned into a day-care space.
Teaching should be a business. Then the best models of teaching will get the best customers. When you have schooling as a government service, there is little incentive to provide good education.
Going to school is probably the most miserable experience of my life. It's up there with having a job that started at 7:30 AM.
The teaching as a business model is what's broken. It seems to work pretty damned well everywhere else.
And what does your personal experience of that model have to do with it? A lot of people have adjusted schooling hours to better reflect children's biological rhythms. The specific failures of your personal education need not be systemic issues.
Finally, the fundamental issue with education is that it is meant as the great equalizer in society meant to put everyone on a decent pedestal to start things off. It is fundamentally unfair that some children be better educated than others for any reason whatsoever. Scandinavian countries have been aware of this and, while it's never a solved issue, have been doing substantially better than their peers in most areas.
Please let me know where all these kids who love school are.
Besides, it doesn't matter what your schooling is as much. Someone who has rich parents and a high school diploma has a higher income than someone with poor parents and a college degree.
Also, you can educate yourself for free on the Internet. I learned more this way than I did in college.
> Please let me know where all these kids who love school are.
Oh, they exist. They're smack in the middle of the IQ standard distribution curve, that part of the curve for which the educational system was designed. They don't have to be dissuaded from original thoughts, or curiosity, or a tendency to question what they're taught, because these are inbred instincts.
It's hard for kids to love school; schools are prison. The only cases of people liking school I know were: a/ the bullies, b/ people in schools that are not run like prisons (my high school was that), c/ kids who developed Stockholm syndrome towards the school.
I suspect that c/ is actually an important goal of schooling - because such people make great employees later.
I loved school because I enjoyed learning and was the top of the class. I had a compulsion to finish every test first, and have the highest score. IMO, I was born to learn, and would have succeeded in almost any type of educational system.
That's because of the twisted market government has created. In the real world, most roads are built on taxpayers money and police is paid for using tax money of the very same people they beat up. But is this real world a place you want to live in? If I don't like how I myself or my children are being educated (protected, treated), I should be able to stop paying and go buy someone else's services immediately. Without that, the feedback loop is broken and the system stops working properly.
That's a fine bit of moralizing, but the reality is you have to illuminate a sane path from here to there. Most the paths I've seen proposed do not seem in the least bit viable.
The best models of teaching will not get best customers. The best models of getting kids into college will win. That's what parents pay for. Which is a very different goal than any actual education.
When you have schooling as a government service, when the school doesn't have to care about stupid things like getting money, then they have time to focus on some weird and short-term-unprofitable things like actual education.
If school were for-profit, what incentive would there be to provide quality schooling to those who can only afford to pay very little, or can't afford to pay at all?
"But charter students do about the same, over all, as their public school counterparts" -- what a pathetic liar. There are redundant empirical evidence supports that charter students perform better.
This author is totally progressive ideology-minded.
"But for each of the CREDO studies, two questions need to be asked: What are the findings? and How strong are the data and analyses? The 2009 findings were somewhat favorable to conventional public schools—although not as favorable as some skeptics argued. The 2013 findings appear to show some improvement for charters, with great variation between schools and between states—and with an overall national estimate of students in charter schools scoring approximately 0.01 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.005 standard deviations lower on math tests than their peers in conventional public schools (the former being statistically significant; the latter not). That is, the ‘findings’ question can be answered as follows: small differences shown in 2009 are even smaller in 2013. The CREDO findings are highly consistent with an overall body of research concluding that the test-score outcomes of the sectors are almost identical."
"The move follows state schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan’s assertions — after an 8-day series about charters published by the Free Press — that he would crack down on poor-performing authorizers. The “State of Charter Schools” series showed that Michigan charters receive nearly $1 billion per year in taxpayer money from the state, often with little accountability, transparency or academic achievement."
I hope I don't get down voted, but unless you're being schooled in a hovel and/or lack decent living conditions, it's up to you. No one is a self-made man, every successful man has been supported in some way by society, but there is a certain threshold at which you can't blame circumstances. I support public education from kindergarten to PhD level, but I don't think everyone needs to have the best education possible. Everyone should have access to proper conditions for learning, then it's up to the students to learn or not to learn.
Inner city living is the emotional equivalent of a hovel: single parent never home or addicted, mother has different abusive boyfriend each month, a walk to school is an invitation to join a gang - living in the inner city is about surviving to see tomorrow. One cannot study if the basic needs are absent.
You don't define 'proper conditions for learning'.
How about a space of your own? An environment that isn't disturbed by noise?
Easy access to books and study aids? A laptop? Fast broadband? All the Amazon vouchers you can eat? Parents who aren't worried about basic financial security?
Where is the threshold?
I guess you mean 'good enough schooling', but that's hardly enough if the rest of the environment does its damndest to devalue what 'good enough schooling' is trying to do.
And a point no one has mentioned is that schools homogenise try to homogenise education.
A good education would try to find individual talents and nurture them on top of a baseline of general competence.
The industrial production line approach to education is the opposite of this. Now, as it happens we have plenty of students who need training, and we have plenty of adults who need jobs.
I doubt everyone can be a teacher, but there could be a lot more talent-based education than there is, without having to turn it into the 'personal extra tutoring for my snowflake' model that richer parents pay for.
The point of the article was not that "everyone needs to have the best education possible". Go read it again. The primary message is that personal touch is crucial, and can often make a difference in the value you extract out of an education.
The problem is you have to go to school (or have a parent home-school you) by law which robs you of much of the time and motivation to improve yourself. The more time and discipline you expend doing rote memorization so you can graduate and pass the standardized test, the less time you can spend learning something useful.
> All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in
> the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to
> make it in school. They need a champion, someone who
> believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the
> picture.
The author then goes on to throw out all attempts to measure and improve education and say it needs a personal touch everywhere. When I was a student I hated all my teachers because I just read the books, aced all the tests, and ignored the the homework. I skipped class as much as I could without violating official graduation policy and read books under a tree or at a rest stop. Teachers just got in the way. Any personal touch by the teachers would have just slowed me down more than they already were and made me hate them more.
Let's stop with this touchy feely nonsense and measure and improve. If you go out and run every day you may feel good about yourself, but you'll never turn in good times unless you measure your time and work on improving it each time. You'll do even better if you compete with teammates and rivals during practices and meets. I think this article is what happens when you let an English major or similar comment on process, something they really didn't need to get their near worthless degree.
If my pay is only affected by my performance then I'm quite happy to collaborate with other staff members to help them improve.
Personally I like Warren Buffett's approach to merit pay: 80% of your salary is due to your performance, while 20% is due to the performance of your other team members [1]. This gives an incentive improve your performance and to be a team player.
[1] Page 19 of Buffett's 2010 letter to shareholders: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2010ltr.pdf