[argumentum]

"From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time."

It may not be that expensive, if class sizes are not that important you can have fewer teachers. The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.

[bsder]

> The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.

For good reason: who gets to make those decisions? Parents? Imagine being a biology or history teacher in the deep South. Children? We already have data that the most effective teachers are liked least. Administration? Are those older teachers really poor are they just expensive? Are those "merit" bonuses going to the best teacher or to the one who volunteered to coach the basketball team?

The last time a teacher evaluation got implemented in Pennsylvania, they dropped it in a hurry because too many teachers couldn't pass it and they were going to have to pay WAY more to import teachers who could.

As has been pointed out previously, firing a genuinely bad teacher is generally straightforward and the procedure is well-documented. However, the administration doesn't want to put in the time or paperwork to do it. And, maybe, just maybe, that administration that's whining about firing and the overbearing paperwork really doesn't have a case and simply wants rid of the teacher for political reasons.

[reuven]

This is a sticky problem, no doubt. But we need to find a way to get rid of bad teachers.

Right now, in both the US and Israel (and perhaps other countries), we're in an extreme and untenable situation, in which bad teachers cannot be fired. In the elementary school that my children attended (and that my son still attends), bad teachers were sent off to teach computers. Or science. And so forth. You can imagine what this tells the children, the parents, and the teachers about how much we value these subjects.

There was a New Yorker story a few years ago that described how bad teachers couldn't be fired... and thus were sent to a building every day, where they checked in and did literally nothing all day. Yes, they received their full salary and benefits in exchange for doing literally nothing.

I'm guessing that a reasonable alternative is to have some sort of weighted system, in which the principal's evaluation, parents' complaints, and student performance all count toward whether a teacher can be fired. The biggest thing should probably be the principal's evaluation, but perhaps if a teacher gets fired, they can get another job, in a different school -- but perhaps the parents' evaluations and the students' performance can be used to determine how many other schools they can go to before being kicked out of the system entirely.

> The last time a teacher evaluation got implemented in Pennsylvania, they dropped it in a hurry because > too many teachers couldn't pass it and they were going to have to pay WAY more to import teachers who > could.

This is perhaps the most important point: Good teachers need to be paid well. They need incentive to become teachers, and to remain teachers. Which means that people will have to pay a fair amount in order to get a good education. In the US, this will mean taxes have to go up, which is a recipe for political suicide. In Israel, this means taking money away from other things in the education ministry (since we already pay, per capita, more for schooling than most European countries).

[argumentum]

I don't think the money issue is a tough sell, if you can demonstrate high returns on the investment. As it is, the US spends more per student than everyone else, but gets mediocre results, so people are not confident that even more spending is going to be worth it.

I think the easiest first step is to spend more on teachers within the current budgets.

[argumentum]

You can factor in the opinions of parents, students, fellow teachers, admin, as well as test score improvements, college admissions etc.

I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

At my high school we had a mix of good & bad, as you'd expect. Everyone knew which teachers knew their subject, could communicate well, was more dedicated etc. Some of the most engaging teachers were the least liked because they graded harder, but if you had a rubric that included "grades fairly", "not boring" etc, students would be able to correctly assess them.

Of course some would be dishonest, but noise will cancel itself out, by and large.

[bsder]

> I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

You significantly overestimate the goodwill of everybody involved.

I had a butch, lesbian English teacher. Most of the community had "issues". Students hated her because she was a ferocious grader. Without tenure, she would have been gone.

However, her results were amazing. If you took her AP English class and got a B or above, you were getting a 5 on the AP exam.

So, what counts? Community? Administration? Parents? Students? How do you square the fact that everybody wanted her gone, but her results were stellar?

[argumentum]

They all count, as do test scores.

[bsder]

And there, we disagree.

She was extremely effective. Her students knew English and English Literature very well after her class. They tended to win writing awards as well as stomp the AP test flat. However, very few students and parents liked her (oddly, I did, but my father was an English teacher so I had already been brainwashed that English wasn't easy and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite), and, consequently, neither did the administration as they had to deal with complaints.

She's clearly a domain expert and way more competent at teaching English than anybody judging her. Why do you think that the community at large has any competence to judge her as a teacher? Of course, many of her students were were much happier with her once they hit college and found that composition was easy, but, unfortunately, very few of them ever came back to the area.

The high-tech equivalent is allowing an HR person on your engineering interview loop (never do this, by the way). Since they can't judge them on engineering, they will wind up rejecting candidates based upon their handshake, their clothes, or a hundred other things completely irrelevant to being an engineer.

[argumentum]

Well you could add in alumni then. All I'm saying is that measuring performance is not that hard a thing to do.

[flycaliguy]

Pay teachers based on performance and you eliminate the incentive for them to challenge the students. There would be a certain "classroom management" style of teaching that would become dominant and really force out the little bit of engaging and challenging content left in there.

The Finish model seems to be the best. Introduce this competitive element not on the job but on the way to the job. Pay for a teacher's education, right up to a required Masters degree, and attract ambitious bright young minds to the profession. Combine that with paid time in which teachers must consult with each other regarding in need individuals so as to handle disturbances and distractions from learning as best as possible. Toss in a breakfast program while you're at it and lets light up some young minds!

[reuven]

Precisely: Part of Finland's genius was in realizing that you can't easily get rid of bad teachers. So they created big incentives for potentially good teachers to consider teaching, and blocked potentially bad teachers from entering.

For example, they shut down teacher's colleges, and mandated a university degree for all teachers. This took political guts, but it has paid off.