[2stop]

Research done more than 20 years ago (and repeated and confirmed) already found that teachers have very little effect on educational outcomes. The biggest correlative factor is socioeconomic status and education level of the parents. Everything else is hit or miss

But hey, let’s publish a pointless paper... because academia.

[sethammons]

I think this is an important paper. Even or especially if it confirms other studies. When I was a teacher in inner city San Bernardino, we were held accountable for student achievement ignoring student ability, socioeconomic situation, home life, or their capacity to disrupt the class. In large part, this is because of studies that say a teacher has outsized effect on student test scores. Now, I think a special kind of person can connect better with some kids and help them achieve. I think that is not something you can mass produce. With more studies showing teachers are not as critical as schools want to believe, maybe we can start focusing on other metrics to gauge suçcess.

[ckcheng]

> With more studies showing teachers are not as critical as schools want to believe, maybe we can start focusing on other metrics to gauge suçcess.

Like cost of hiring? Seriously, if teachers are not as critical, why not hire less or pay less salary... any half decent person in the classroom will do.

I think the study is about right that teachers are not as critical as they'd like to believe. I just don't know what to think of the implications...

[sethammons]

I still think a bad teacher is absolutely terrible and that teaching is not easy. I don't look at teacher salaries and think they are too high at all. I think we are bad at measuring what makes a good teacher. I just know it is not based on standardized test scores.

When I was a teacher, I had zero power to remove a disruptive or inattentive student from my class. I had 9th graders who could not deal with negative numbers being expected to do well on state Algebra tests that are of arguable quality. Even if they made substantial progress, they would not be to grade level.

I can still remember one student who after nearly a year of not being bothered to pay any shred of attention in class, during the final review, paid enough attention during the last steps of solving an equation: Me: Alright, and combining like terms, what is 10x - 18x? Student, suddenly paying attention: But wait, you can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number!

I can't stop the class on nearly the last week of 9th grade algebra to help this student understand negative numbers. And they are not interested in coming in to get help outside of normal class. Parents were not interested in making sure this kid got through school.

Not so fun fact: at this school, less than 4% would go onto any post-secondary education. Of them, about 2% would go on to finish a degree. Something like a 90% transitory rate (meaning that most students who started 9th grade at this school would transfer to a different school before graduation, if they made it that far). I could go on, but there was an underlying cultural issue that did not value education. That trend is hard to buck: I had third generation gang members, kids raising their siblings because parents (often a single parent) were working multiple jobs, kids dealing with daily violence, one kid was stabbed to death right off of campus. The majority of these kids and their families have no experience seeing what an education can do for their prospects. Add onto that a tough employment market (inner city San Bernardio!), and those who did have siblings who did get a degree, they often couldn't find a job.

All this to say, I don't think lowering salary of teachers would help. Maybe lowering the cost of administrators would help. At this same time, there were more administrative personnel in the district than teachers, something I could never understand.

[onethought]

Academia has solved this problem.

You are 100% right, the world has yet to catch up. But mostly because politics, politicians, voting... etc. Not because we don't understand the problem/solutions.

[sethammons]

Could you go a bit deeper there? How is it solved? I def agree that politics and ingrained behavior ("it was good enough for me when I was a kid!") can make change hard or near impossible.

[onethought]

The US has the most advanced research on this, yet possibly the worst education policy (pick whatever state you like).

Schools are funded incorrectly, schools end up Segregating on income, which sadly ends up segregating on race.

This ends up with rich schools and poor schools. Rich kids get good outcomes poor kids get bad outcomes. The cycle continues.

We know what we need to do, just no political will to do it.

[mjohn]

It's worth bearing in mind that this is not a study on educational outcomes, but is assessing how useful value-added models are for quantifying teacher performance. While the biggest correlative factor may well be socioeconomic status, that does not preclude teacher's having an impact on within-group differences.

From the introduction:

> In this paper, we provide a stark illustration of the limitations to using value-added models to identify high-and low-performing teachers. We do this by applying commonly estimated models to an outcome that teachers cannot plausibly affect: student height. Aside from the implausibility of teacher effects on height, student height is an attractive measure for this exercise since it is symmetrically distributed, interval measured, and arguably less prone to measurement error than achievement. We find that the estimated teacher “effects”on height are nearly as large as the variation in teacher effects on math and reading achievement.

It's also an interesting approach: take a model that is apparently predictive and see if it's also predictive of something that we know is unrelated. By showing that value-added models are displaying spurious correlation maybe policymakers will take note.

Could maybe take a similar approach to validating our ML models?

[dooglius]

According to the paper, many states are still using VAM so it bears repeating.

[obscurette]

Some pointers to these (meta)studies would be very nice.

[onethought]

Google Scholar is a thing.

https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=relationship+between...

[Ma8ee]

If you actually would have bothered to look at the paper, you would have noticed that that is somewhat what the paper tries to illustrate.

[onethought]

That was my point. It's trying to illustrate a point that is so well understood that I cannot tell if this paper is satire or not.

If you'd actually bothered to understand the domain we are commenting on...

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Could you please reference the specific studies you're referring too?

[onethought]

It's not "specific studies" its "All the studies ever done on this topic since we decided to start looking"

https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=relationship+between...