All Kids Can Have Great Teachers (Without Firing Any Teachers

The best teachers should be able to rise far above average teachers on the salary scale — and they should have far more responsibility.

All Kids Can Have Great Teachers (Without Firing Any Teachers

By Maura Larkins 

Voice of San Diego

September 7, 2012

No one really knows what’s going on in individual public school classrooms. Observations by principals tend to be fleeting and few. We don’t need to fire anybody, but we do need to use highly-skilled teachers and ordinary teachers where they can do the optimal good.

The truth is that the critical moments in learning don’t happen continuously five hours a day. They add up to at most a couple of hours each day, and probably much less.

The rest of the time an ordinary teacher can handle lesson reinforcement, computer activities, art projects, silent reading, etc.

The best teachers should be able to rise far above average teachers on the salary scale — and they should have far more responsibility. In my plan, each classroom would have a full-time regular teacher.

Several classrooms would share a master teacher, who would be responsible for student progress, teaching lessons part-time and guiding the regular teacher.

Gifted regular teachers would be eligible to become master teachers. Instead of bringing in vendors selling the latest gimmick for tens of thousands of dollars, master teachers would do all necessary training.

Here’s the comparison for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands):

Currently: $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 = $300

New plan: $100+$50+$50+$50+$50 = $300 (minus exorbitant cost of education vendors)

If we add more money, we could have more master teachers. Meaningful evaluations of teachers would have to be instituted. Current evaluation systems are worse than useless.

My plan would call for frequent observations by both master and regular teachers, who would observe classrooms in other districts to keep school politics at bay. The observations would have a beneficial side effect: they would allow teachers to pick up new ideas.

Can it make a big difference if we pay top teachers a top salary?

A recent Mario Koran story at Voice of San Diego leads with the results of some new research:

 "...[R]esearch shows teachers don’t react to financial incentives the way you might expect."

This is true as far as it goes, but this research applies to people who are already teachers.

We need to pay lots more to some teachers to draw a higher number of exceptionally-gifted individuals into the profession.

A few years ago I was happy to hear a school board member say that we needed more highly-intelligent teachers.

But I seemed to be the only person present who agreed with the board member.

"Oh, no!" another attendee protested. "We've already got very talented teachers! Just the other day I was talking to  a woman who is a paramedic who is very excited about becoming a teacher. She seemed so enthusiastic and dedicated."

Well, that's great. I agree that quite a few paramedics could make a successful transition to teaching, but the woman completely missed the point. We're talking about people who function at an even higher level than a good paramedic. We're talking about luring doctors and other similarly high-functioning people.

We need to pay the top 25-35% of teachers enough, and give them enough responsibility, so that people will choose teaching instead of medicine or science or journalism, etc.

Research shows that teachers today are drawn from lower-achieving college graduates than was the case decades ago. When I was a child many women who could have been doctors actually did become teachers. These days we'll need to pay high achievers much more money to get them in the schoolroom door.

Once they're in the classroom, I believe that the research on incentives cited by VOSD will prove true: financial incentives won't make a difference in how those new teachers teach.


Here's the VOSD story:

Why Paying Teachers More Won’t Fix Education

A major court ruling upheld state laws on teacher hiring and firing, leading one reader to ask why we can’t just pay good teachers more money. But research shows teachers don’t react to financial incentives the way you might expect.

By Mario Koran |  
 April 21, 2016
Voice of San Diego
 
A California appeals court last week reversed a 2014 decision that declared state laws governing teacher hiring and firing violated students’ equal rights to a quality education.
Plaintiffs in the Vergara v. California case –nine students represented by high-profile attorneys – argued state laws made it too easy to hire and too difficult to dismiss a small but significant number of ineffective teachers who disproportionately ended up in impoverished schools.
Last week’s decision vindicated teachers unions who saw the lawsuit as an attack on the tenure, layoff and dismissal policies they support.
In the reversal, a three-judge panel determined plaintiffs failed to show the statutes necessarily harmed students:

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“Although the statutes may lead to the hiring and retention of more ineffective teachers than a hypothetical alternative system would, the statutes do not address the assignment of teachers; instead, administrators—not the statutes—ultimately determine where teachers within a district are assigned to teach. Critically, plaintiffs failed to show that the statutes themselves make any certain group of students more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than any other group of students.
With no proper showing of a constitutional violation, the court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes. The court’s job is merely to determine whether the statutes are constitutional, not if they are “a good idea.”

“I’m not going to mince words — we lost,” David Welch, founder of the group driving the lawsuit, said in response to the decision. “This is a sad day for every child struggling to get the quality education he or she deserves — and is guaranteed by our state constitution.”
Welch pledged to take the case to the California Supreme Court.
State superintendent of public instruction Tom Torlakson and the California Teachers Association applauded the ruling.
“Stripping teachers of their ability to stand up for their students and robbing school districts of the tools they need to make sound employment decisions was a wrong-headed scheme developed by people with no education expertise and the appellate court justices saw that,” CTA President Eric Heins said in a statement.
Vergara has become symbolic of public skepticism that teacher protections like tenure are good for kids. Groups in both Minnesota and New York have initiated similar efforts to challenge teacher protections.
Last year, a poll conducted by USC and the Los Angeles Times found the overwhelming majority of  respondents thought teachers receive tenure too quickly (after 18 months on the job) and that performance should matter more than seniority when teachers are laid off.
“The judges are saying things are not right in California, that there are drawbacks to the current system, but this is not something for the courts to decide,” Katharine Strunk, an associate professor of education at USC,  told the New York Times regarding the Vergara decision.
“I don’t think anyone believes that these laws are the best we can do.”
In other words, regardless of Vergara’s outcome, there’s broad consensus the system could be better.
But if making it easier to fire ineffective teachers wouldn’t necessarily improve teacher quality, what would?
One reader wonders if there’s a way to incentivize better teaching with better pay.
Question: Why are teachers’ unions unwilling to allow for a more pay-for-performance model of teacher evaluations, compensation, promotions, terminations, etc?  We should want to reward the best teachers with better compensation and benefits so as to attract top talent and motivate great results; and we should rid ourselves of underperforming and/or burnt out teachers.  — Jon Bellmonte, interested reader
In 2014, then-Congressional Candidate Carl Demaio announced he’d lead a series of education town hall meetings in San Diego.
The Vergara decision had created a vacuum for teacher evaluation, Demaio said, and he wanted to fill it with measurable performance standards developed by local school boards, teachers and parents. Based on those standards, school districts would reward exceptional teachers:

“I want parental involvement in how we evaluate our teachers. But the most important thing is that we need to make sure that the dollars go to our best teachers. Our best teachers that are actually making progress with our kids should receive whatever available monies we have for pay increases or bonuses,” Demaio told KUSI.

Teachers unions typically reject merit pay. They say teachers aren’t motivated by money.
Lindsay Burningham, president of the local teachers union, told me in 2014 that teachers are motivated not by money and corporate values – but by working in collegial environments where teachers collaborate with colleagues and principals:

“If pay was tied to student performance, or test scores, I don’t think teachers would risk it. Because so many factors impact learning that have nothing to do with what happens in the classroom – things like poverty and home life.
Don’t get me wrong, competitive pay helps, especially when you consider that San Diego Unified teachers are among the lowest paid in the county. If you look at the our Fight for 5 campaign, and see the things we’re pushing for, pay and benefit increases is one component – but it’s not the only one.
If salary is what attracts people to the teaching profession, those are the ones who leave after a few years and contribute to the high turnover rate. There’s so much more to it when it comes to retaining teachers, things like low class sizes.”

This was the same argument school board trustee Richard Barrera used when he testified during the Vergara trial.
Barrera pointed to inner city schools like Central Elementary – the school once led by current Superintendent Cindy Marten – as evidence San Diego Unified had raised performance at high-poverty schools by creating collaborative environments in which teachers wanted to work.
Things like merit pay, or even evaluating teachers based on the improvement shown by students in their class, would divide teachers and make them less likely to share information with their colleagues, Barrera said.
This might sound like a cynical attempt to preserve the status quo, but there’s evidence to support Barrera and Burningham’s points.
After the Vergara ruling in 2014, education writer Dana Goldstein highlighted some of the reasons merit pay has had trouble gaining traction:

“From 2009 to 2011, the federal government offered 1,500 effective teachers in 10 major cities—including Los Angeles—a $20,000 bonus to transfer to an open job at a higher poverty school with lower test scores. In the world of public education, $20,000 is a major financial incentive. All these teachers were already employed by urban districts with diverse student populations; they weren’t scared of working with poor, non-white children. Yet less than a quarter of the eligible teachers chose to apply for the bonuses. Most did not want to teach in the schools that were the most deeply segregated by race and class and faced major pressure to raise test scores.”

Firing bad teachers, Goldstein writes, doesn’t address the larger problem: getting good teachers to take jobs in high-poverty, racially isolated schools.
To do that, Goldstein writes elsewhere, we need to reimagine the problem, such as by focusing more on principals, instead of only looking to teachers.
That’s not to say school districts should stop looking for better ways to recruit, train and evaluate teachers. But reforms focused exclusively on teachers overlook the larger systems in which high-poverty schools operate.

Vergara v. California: the Case That Could Blow Up Teacher Tenure (But who cares? Without a good teacher evaluation system, it won't make much difference.)

Judge Rolf Treu must issue a ruling on the case by early July. Source: Courtroom View Network

See all posts on Vergara v. California.

The main problem with the current system is that principal evaluations are a joke. Principals rarely observe teachers, perhaps because school politics is so influential that principals are not likely to criticize a powerful teacher or defend a politically-unconnected teacher. Observations should be done by outsiders.

Get rid of tenure or keep it--but if you want good teachers you need to evaluate them in a meaningful way.

See: How about we try to make better use of both effective and (currently) ineffective teachers?

The Case That Could Blow Up Teacher Tenure
By: Mario Koran
Voice of San Diego
April 28, 2014

The toxic debate over hiring and firing teachers in San Diego Unified has reverberated for years.

Union-won teacher protections mean school districts that want to dismiss an ineffective or even dangerous educator face a dizzying legal web that can cost hundreds of thousands to navigate. Even then, efforts to send a teacher packing might not work.

For the most part, calls to reform the system have rung hollow. Any significant change would mean a change to state laws.

Vergara v. California, a case being deliberated in Los Angeles County Superior Court, would do just that. And if the plaintiffs succeed, the impact could set off a mushroom cloud that will envelop school districts across the state and beyond.

Driving the lawsuit is Students Matter, a group founded by Silicon Valley business mogul David F. Welch. The group recruited students from several California school districts to be the public face of its case.

A cast of heavy-hitting attorneys, which includes the lawyer who helped defeat the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, argue that current protections keep ineffective teachers in public schools and violate students’ constitutional rights to an education.

Plaintiffs say these policies have the most disparate impact on schools that serve black or Latino students, as bottom-rung teachers are more likely to end up at high-poverty schools.

Their objectives are straightforward, but ambitious: Increase the time it takes teachers to earn tenure, revamp dismissal policies so it’s easier to get rid of the lemons and strike last-in-first-out policies that favor seniority over quality.

Attorneys for the California Teachers Association joined the state in its defense, as the ruling will impact their members directly. They argue that teacher protections are a benefit – like health care – that helps attract and retain quality employees to a challenging and humbly paid profession.

Let’s take a look at each prong of the case within the context of San Diego Unified.

Tenure

Union leaders don’t like to call it tenure. That’s a word reserved for college professors who’ve got academic freedom – not those in the trenches of K-12 public schools, teachers union President Bill Freeman told VOSD in the past. Union leaders prefer “permanent status.”

Regardless of what we call it, here’s how it looks in San Diego Unified. Once they’re hired, rookie teachers have to make it through a two-year probationary period, during which they can be dismissed for pretty much any reason.

But because the district has to tell teachers by mid-March whether they’ll be invited back for the next school year, the trial period is actually shorter than two years. In the past, the district hasn’t been particularly aggressive in the number of probationary teachers it sends away – only about 1 percent wasn’t given tenure.

“With such little time, you don’t even have enough information to actually consider whether they’re an effective teacher,” said Nancy Waymack, a managing director for the reform-advocacy group National Council on Teacher Quality.

California requires one of the shortest probationary periods for teachers in the county, she said. Most states wait until teachers have been around three or more years until they’re offered permanent status.

Other states have upped the bar by requiring that measures like test scores or student surveys be included in teacher evaluations. And while some California districts like Los Angeles Unified embraced “value added metrics,” a way of gauging teacher effectiveness by measuring student improvement, San Diego Unified just uses principal observations.

“In general, California is a lot further behind in make changes to teacher policies,” said Waymack. “They’re way behind the curve in rating effectiveness.” ‘Who Are the “Grossly Ineffective” Teachers?’

Some of the most famous cases have come out of Los Angeles Unified: There was the teacher who mocked a boy after he tried to commit suicide, jibing him to cut deeper the next time. There was one who stashed porn and cocaine vials in his desk. Both contested their dismissals – and won.

Once a teacher is granted tenure, it’s very difficult to fire him or her.

Protections for tenured teachers extend beyond what’s given other public employees. For example, teachers get warnings and time to improve before being fired, and can take their case to a panel and appeal it if they disagree with a ruling.

Those protections can be clipped if a teacher is accused of something egregious or criminal – like coming to school drunk, or molesting a student. But the dismissal process can be so byzantine and costly that it’s impractical to try to fire a teacher for being “ineffective.”

In their closing brief, attorneys for the state and California Teachers Association wrote: “Who are the ‘grossly ineffective’ teachers? How is that term defined? … Plaintiffs have not answered any of these questions.”

Of course, that’s also a convenient point for the union to make: It hasn’t agreed to test scores or other measures as a factor in teacher evaluations.

Last in, First out

When layoffs happen, the youngest teachers are the first to go. This might mean that a more veteran teacher, even if he or she has accrued complaints from parents and doesn’t bolster student test scores, gets to keep the job while a younger teacher walks.

Striking that protection, plaintiffs argue, would mean that the district hangs onto which teachers it sees fit, instead of reducing employees to faceless numbers.

They say these rules disproportionately impact black and Latino students, because less experienced teachers are more likely to end up in schools with higher rates of student poverty and are the first to go when teachers are laid-off.

But lawyers from the California Teachers Association argue that “well-run” districts like San Diego Unified have been able to sidestep the worst impacts of layoffs by using discretion. For example, if a younger teacher is credentialed in special education, that teacher might bump out a longer-tenured teacher without the extra certificate.

And the spirit of collaboration that San Diego Unified teachers showed when they agreed to extra furlough days and delayed paid raises, they argue, would be undercut by removing teacher protections that promote teamwork and sacrifice.

What’s Next

Lawyers from both sides handed in their post-trial briefs on April 10, and the judge has until July to make a decision. An appeal is likely either way.

In the meantime, the teachers union and San Diego Unified are sidling up to the bargaining table.

The district hasn’t given exact details about what they’ll be seeking, but if you look closely at the contract proposal it recently sent the union, you’ll see hints of some of the same reforms Vergara plaintiffs are calling for.

In addition to revamping teacher evaluations to include student and parent feedback, San Diego Unified wants more wiggle room for where it decides to place teachers.

VOICE OF SAN DIEGO IS THE "PARTNER" OF UPforEd

Maura Larkins' note: The story above seems to be somewhat impacted by the fact that Voice of San Diego is a "community partner" (I think that means having one or more major donors in common) of UPforEd, a group that says on its website:

We can help change the story...Students Matter, a national non-profit organization dedicated to sponsoring impact litigation to promote access to quality public education, has filed a lawsuit, Vergara v. California, challenging outdated and potentially harmful state laws that keep ineffective teachers in schools, allow great teachers to be laid off, and could jeopardize the future of our students.

It seems that of the seven current VOSD Community Partners, some partners might have donors in common with VOSD, and others might simply be donors themselves. It would be nice if VOSD explained on its site exactly what this means. The other partners are:

American Medical Response
UC San Diego Extension
Hughes Marino
SDG&E
California Western School of Law
La Jolla Playhouse

COMMENTS FROM VOICE OF SAN DIEGO

JLDodd

The teachers know who should not be there, an initial step would be for the school staff to have a retention secret vote conducted by the principal for those in their probationary period. Those folks not making the cut are invited to leave…
jim dodd


Maura Larkins [response to Jim Dodd]

Jim Dodd's comment is a beautiful illustration of my point about school politics. He states:

"The teachers know who should not be there, an initial step would be for the school staff to have a retention secret vote conducted by the principal for those in their probationary period. Those folks not making the cut are invited to leave."

In my experience, the teachers do NOT know how other teachers teach. They believe that their friends are good teachers and that their targets are bad teachers. I think it would be nice if teachers spent time in each others' classrooms so that teachers would know the truth.

It's hilarious that teacher union officials are very tuned in to gossip, but they don't want test scores to be considered. Test scores would be much more reliable than "secret votes" by teachers. Teacher cliques would have an enormous impact on such voting. All members of the clique would know ahead of time exactly how they should vote.

Using my own experience as a guide, here is what would happen: the probationary teachers who are good politicians would become part of the ruling teachers clique, and would be supported no matter how poor their teaching skills might be. If a probationary teacher exhibited independence from the clique, which, by the way, would likely consist of mostly mediocre teachers, he or she would be targeted for elimination.

Maura Larkins' note: Here is an earlier comment by Jim Dodd that appeared 9 days ago.


JLDodd
I know from past experience with San Diego Unified and other districts that the teachers know who should be let go, so why not ask them to nominate the bottom 10% to be replaced each year? Bill & Melinda Gates say that replacing the bottom 10% of teachers is a strategy that will absolutely work (from studies at their Foundation). But since the teachers unions are organized to protect the worst teachers, I don't expect the union will be happy with this proposal…jim dodd


Maura Larkins' response:

I looked up the Gates Foundation paper Empowering Effective Teachers.

I did not find anything about firing the bottom 10% of teachers.

I did, however, find some statements that seem reasonable and designed to help improve public education:

One barrier to major systems change is the
lack of robust, multidimensional measures
of teacher effectiveness.

The contribution of teachers to student
learning and outcomes is widely recognized.
A teacher’s effectiveness has more
impact on student learning than any other
factor under the control of school systems,
including class size, school size, and the
quality of after-school programs.

In a study of Los Angeles schools, the
difference between the performance of a
student assigned to a top-quartile teacher
rather than a bottom-quartile teacher
averaged 10 percentile points on a
standardized math test.

Researchers studying high schools in North
Carolina found that having a class with a
strong teacher had an impact 14 times greater
than having a class with five fewer students.

MASTER TEACHERS AND MERIT PAY 1

I believe that ineffective teachers who are not abusive to kids could be paid less and should work under a master teacher rather than being fired. Firing the lowest 10% of teachers would simply mean that one-tenth of teachers (a small percentage) would probably be replaced with average, mediocre teachers. That would leave the vast majority of students in the hands of mediocre teachers.

MORE COMMENTS FROM VOSD

VeronicaCorningstone
But how many new teachers are hired on the probationary basis? Last time layoff notices went out, the "last in" teacher at my school had been there 8 years! All the newer teachers had been hired on temporary, 1-year contracts. We had a newer teacher who was ready to quit the profession because she didn't want the instability of year-to-year contracts. I don't know if she did or not, but she was extremely frustrated.

Ideally, tenure enables quality teachers to dig in deep with the subject matter, as opposed to stressing over test scores and keeping a principal happy. Also, the popular teachers are not always the most competent ones. Just saying.

Maura Larkins' response:
Your words are very reasonable; I very much agree with your last point.

Dennis Schamp
Maura - what outsiders would you choose? Parents? While I support parents working with us and supporting their students, I personally would not want one conducting my evaluation, unless they can prove to me they have some sort of teaching background. Without that, they really don't have the background to tell me how to do my job better. I would not presume to evaluate my doctor, or my neighborhood police officer for the same reason. Plus, what's to keep them from tanking an evaluation because their student is not doing well in my class - and they choose to blame me rather than look at their own child's performance.

Ditto with the district's other thought on having students contribute to teacher evaluations.

I would be very open to having a more realistic evaluation system. But there isn't one. Yet.

Maura Larkins
I agree that parents from the same school could not be relied upon to be unbiased. And I agree that you can't just send a parent into a classroom to do an evaluation. But you might have them check for certain specific things, such as interactions with students, ability to engage students, and simply record what's going on. I think all evaluators should come from a different district. I would expect that most evaluators would be teachers. Young teachers could learn a lot at the same time that they'd be recording their observations. Experienced teachers could give more nuanced feedback.Edit (in 4999393 minutes)

Dennis Schamp
And if the way I interact with my students is not what a parent expects, then...what? I'm ineffective? No - I would push against any parent evaluation of teachers, no matter if a casual observation or a formal one. Without full knowledge of what goes on in a classroom, parents are not qualified to tell me if I'm a good teacher or not. I would not appreciate having an outsider taking notes on everything I do, then using those notes to report back to my administrators. If that observer does not have educational training, credentials, or the like, then they are not qualified to evaluate my performance. Period.

Maura Larkins
May I explain further before you put a period at the end of your rejection of my idea? I think I failed to explain that I would NOT want parents to EVALUATE, but merely track simple facts such as HOW OFTEN a teacher interacted with students (as opposed to sitting at his or her desk correcting papers). I should also clarify that I was thinking of academic interactions, not discipline. Teachers and students should be speaking, writing on white boards (or laptops), drawing charts. Teachers should be moving around the classroom (and students should be allowed to move once in a while, too!) One of the problems in education is that some students are ignored. Simple, factual observations by unbiased individuals could track this. The observers might be parents, but parenthood wouldn't be a requirement.

Dennis Schamp
Maura - I must still disagree with this plan. How often I interact with my students during a lesson or class project depends upon the level of interaction they need from me. The push from Common Core is to provide the students with instruction, then leave them to their own designs, with guidance and direction from me, rather than 2 hours of lecture and note-taking. Even before CC, our district curriculum was moving towards less-structured instructional environment. If I choose to sit for a moment and review notes/papers/lessons/etc, am I suddenly going to be seen as ineffective by this parental observer? The notion that I walk the floor for the full 115 minutes of my class is absurd. There are times when the students are working on group or individual projects in the class...after they have received explicit and direct instruction, front loading, scaffolding, and then given time for a Q&A session. I may not check in again with them for (horrors) 15 minutes or so. Would the parent observer then determine that I am not engaging my students and decide I am not an effective teacher? Or would they understand that students also need to be responsible for their own education?

And no - I would not have time to stop and explain all of my plans/reasons/methods/etc. to this parent observer. That would take away from the educational time.

I have no problem with a parent or guardian coming in as a guest to informally observe and watch the class work. But I draw the line at having that parent tell me if I'm effective.

Maura Larkins
I appreciate that you are being specific about the types of behaviors teachers should engage in. This is the type of discussion that is needed to create a template for what observers should be looking for. I agree that the notion that you walk the floor for the full 115 minutes of your class is absurd. Surely you did not understand me to say that? Also, I tried to make clear that I would want non-professional observers to make simple factual observations, NOT value judgments. I would not expect you to explain ANYTHING to a non-professional observer, but I think that teacher interviews by professionals would make sense as part of the evaluation process. If your experience is like mine, you never had a principal ask you what you had learned from your years of experience and what you were doing in your classroom.

Maura Larkins

I'm curious about a couple of things.

1. If you were the evaluator, what would you expect a teacher to be doing during the time that the students were left "to their own designs"-- if that teacher wanted to be rated as highly effective rather than average or below average?

2. Are you saying that Common Core expects teachers to have NO interactions at all with any students during the time that students are left "to their own designs"?

ScrippsDad 39

Hey Guys - I think a major component of an evaluation is being lost here. You want to focus on the teachers interactions with students, and, when they do and how much they do for all the reasons is good to evaluate and understand.

BUT - please note that an evaluator can also look at how engaged students are regardless of what they are doing and what the teacher is doing. If the teacher is not directly working with students and students are doing projects, reading, etc... it can certainly be noted about how involved they are or engaged in that activity. So, an observer is not just observing the teacher, but, students and a classroom. If students are not engaged in these group or individual projects, I would say that that is a criteria for effective teaching.

I have been involved in an evaluation process and the criteria for evaluation are many and comprehensive and based on a scale system for statistical review. The viewing is done multiple times over various times so not a once only effort to avoid "bad days", etc... The evaluation criteria cover a broad spectrum of topics, instruction, engagement, etc... AND, both admin and teachers vetted this out and agreed to implement it. The observer is noted so it can be looked at and reviewed from the perspective of the observer which could be (will be) a parent, peer, or Principal or more.

I think it very important to understand how and what criteria is used to evaluate to avoid these one stop one time evaluations on "teachers". Evaluating teachers is not just how they interact with students, but, how they engage and manage students, run their classrooms, etc... and this can be evaluated regardless of the teachers disposition at any one time or specifically any individual or class engagement of a teacher directly to students.

when you go back over a years worth of this type of evaluation, it is clearly shown areas of success, areas that need improvement, etc... and provides a quality feedback mechanism to help teachers better perform.

It's tool to improve, not a vehicle for determination of continued employment.

Maura Larkins

You make an excellent point, Scripps Dad, in noting that we can observe the effects of a teacher's long-term involvement with students by looking at how engaged the students seem to be from the moment they walk into the classroom. And of course, there are still more things to observe that we haven't mentioned here.

The evaluation system your school is using sounds wonderful. Are you talking about SDUSD? Are you able to tell us the name of this evaluation process?

It's tool to improve, not a vehicle for determination of continued employment.



Maura Larkins

To Scripps dad:

I also agree with you on some more points:

1) An extended period of time with lots of observations is needed to make an evaluation legitimate;

2) Evaluations should be a "tool to improve, not a vehicle for determination of continued employment."

And I'd like to add another use for evaluations.

MASTER TEACHERS AND MERIT PAY 2

We know that some teachers are educational geniuses, truly gifted. And others are more restricted in their pedagogical repertoires.

Also, there are differences in emotional intelligence. Some teachers might be great at making most students buckle down, but at the same time they might actually be setting other students back quite a bit because of extreme rigidity and cruelty. Some teachers help students simply by being kind and respectful, even if those teachers aren't particularly brilliant.

We need to utilize teachers effectively. Evaluations could help determine which teachers could be given more responsibility by being assigned as master teachers. Master teachers could come in and give a few lessons each week to supplement the work of regular teachers who might be terrific at classroom management and follow-through on lessons, but don't have the necessary spark to get students deeply engaged.

I think we could attract super teachers with extra pay, but the regular teachers are perfectly capable of doing most required tasks for less pay.

Orleans parish school system could easily have made things better rather than making them worse, now owes back pay to 7,000 fired teachers

The 2013 Orleans Parish School Board meets for the first time Jan. 14, 2013, at Hynes elementary in Lakeview. Danielle Dreilinger, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

Dear folks at Orleans parish school system:

You could so easily have made things better rather than making them worse.

The Orleans parish school system sounds remarkably similar to the school systems in Chicago and in Chiapas, Mexico--and here in San Diego. Like board members and administrators across the US, you have been shamefully cowardly when it comes to fixing schools.

Firing legions of teachers isn't the answer. First of all, the problem runs deeper than individual teachers. Second, you made a mess without fixing the huge problem in your schools. Of course, that just means that you're doing what the National School Boards Association expects from all board members.

The problem could be solved easily.

American schools are wasting resources. We under-utilize the top 10 % of teachers, and we over-utilize mediocre and incompetent teachers.

If New Orleans had properly used the skills of its top teachers, and at the same time allowed less competent teachers to play roles that they are fully capable of playing, it could have a superb school system today.

You New Orleans board members probably had some sincere desire to provide better teachers. But the only changes you would consider were those that had powerful political backers. So you probably deluded yourselves into thinking you were doing good for kids as well as for yourselves.

Why do most school board members refuse to do anything unless they get a political or personal advantage? Obviously, we keep electing the wrong people to school boards--people willing to play ball with the powerful usually get elected.

Sincerely,
Maura Larkins

Hey, New Orleans, You Probably Shouldn’t Have Fired Those 7000 Teachers After Katrina. #Payup
by Doktor Zoom
January 17, 2014

So it turns out that Louisiana’s attempt to “remake” public education after Katrina — which mostly consisted of opening up the state’s coffers to grifty charter schools and handing out vouchers for religious schools, regardless of their quality – has run into just a teensy bit of a problem: in their zeal to screw teachers’ unions, they also fired over 7000 teachers without due process, and a court in the teachers’ class-action suit has found that the teachers are entitled to damages. Not the full 5 years’ back pay and benefits the teachers sought, but 2-3 years’ pay, plus benefits for those who were enrolled in them before being fired:

The decision validates the anger felt by former teachers who lost their jobs. It says they should have been given top consideration for jobs in the new education system that emerged in New Orleans in the years after the storm.

Beyond the individual employees who were put out, the mass layoff has been a lingering source of pain for those who say school system jobs were an important component in maintaining the city’s black middle class.

It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, of course, but in the chaos following Katrina, pushers of charter schools and other schemes to privatize public education were quick to jump in and “help” — mostly helping themselves to large pools of money for “rebuilding.”

And just to add insult to catastrophe, the influx of new reformers have changed the, shall we say, complexion of New Orleans schools, not to mention siphoning public money into private education companies:

More young, white teachers have come from outside through groups such as Teach for America. And charter school operators often offer private retirement plans instead of the state pension fund, which can discourage veteran teachers who have years invested in the state plan.

Though many schools have made a conscious effort to hire pre-Katrina teachers and New Orleans natives, eight years later, people still come to public meetings charging that outside teachers don’t understand the local students’ culture.

And just to underline the message that a new boss was in town, the 7,000 teachers were first put on “disaster leave without pay,” and then unceremoniously fired in 2006. For an extra kick in the teeth, the terminations themselves were often badly botched:

Notices were delivered to teachers’ old addresses, sometimes to houses that no longer existed, and they directed teachers wanting to appeal the layoff to come to the School Board’s building, which Katrina had destroyed. This happened even though state-appointed consultants Alvarez & Marsal had set up a hotline to collect teachers’ evacuation addresses.

The charters rushed in, able to pick and choose their students and with no obligation to hire teachers displaced by Katrina. The public school system was largely taken over by the state-run “Recovery School District,” leaving only 6 schools in the Orleans Parish School Board, down from 120. But hey, it was good for kids, and cost-effective… as long as the fired teachers didn’t win their class-action suit. Now that the teachers have won, the back pay and benefits may cost the state and the city $1.5 billion, according to an estimate by attorneys during the appeal. Oops, stupid due process. (Also, yes, that is billion with a b. We mathed it.)

Golly, it’s almost as if treating contracted employees as a bunch of storm-damaged debris to be carted off to the landfill was not such a cost-effective strategy after all.

[NOLA.com via Charles Pierce]


7,000 New Orleans teachers, laid off after Katrina, win court ruling
Danielle Dreilinger
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
January 16, 2014

In a lawsuit that some say could bankrupt the Orleans Parish public school system, an appeals court has decided that the School Board wrongly terminated more than 7,000 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. Those teachers were not given due process, and many teachers had the right to be rehired as jobs opened up in the first years after the storm, the court said in a unanimous opinion.

The state is partly responsible for damages, according to Wednesday's ruling from Louisiana's Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. However, its five-judge panel did reduce the potential damages certified by the District Court: Instead of five years of back pay plus fringe benefits, the appeals court awarded the teachers two to three years of back pay, with benefits only for those employees who had participated in them when they were employed.

During the appeal, lawyers said the damages could amount to $1.5 billion.

The class-action case applies to all School Board employees who were tenured as of Aug. 29, 2005, the date that Katrina blasted up the Louisiana-Mississippi line and New Orleans levees failed, flooding much of the city. Many employees were members of the United Teachers of New Orleans, but the appeals court ruled that an earlier settlement with the union did not prevent this case from being tried.

The decision validates the anger felt by former teachers who lost their jobs. It says they should have been given top consideration for jobs in the new education system that emerged in New Orleans in the years after the storm.

Beyond the individual employees who were put out, the mass layoff has been a lingering source of pain for those who say school system jobs were an important component in maintaining the city's black middle class. New Orleans' teaching force has changed noticeably since then. More young, white teachers have come from outside through groups such as Teach for America. And charter school operators often offer private retirement plans instead of the state pension fund, which can discourage veteran teachers who have years invested in the state plan.

Though many schools have made a conscious effort to hire pre-Katrina teachers and New Orleans natives, eight years later, people still come to public meetings charging that outside teachers don't understand the local students' culture.

The 7,000-plus educators were initially placed on "disaster leave without pay" then terminated, a decision that was made final on March 24, 2006.

The circumstances of those layoffs rubbed salt in the wound, plaintiffs said: Notices were delivered to teachers' old addresses, sometimes to houses that no longer existed, and they directed teachers wanting to appeal the layoff to come to the School Board's building, which Katrina had destroyed. This happened even though state-appointed consultants Alvarez & Marsal had set up a hotline to collect teachers' evacuation addresses.

Meanwhile, the state took over almost all the city's public schools and radically expanded the opportunity to charter them. The tragedy of the storm offered the opportunity, reformers said, to make big changes that would give the children the education they deserved.

Schools reopened one at a time or in handfuls, in a decentralized system. The charters had complete control of their own hiring.

The defendants in the suit sought to justify the layoffs by saying they had no idea when or how many schools would reopen, and that they could not keep paying teachers for jobs that no longer existed. Almost all its schools had been taken over by the state Recovery School District, and the few remaining Orleans Parish public schools were dependent on state per-pupil funding to operate. With no students, there was no money.

In the end, the Orleans Parish School Board directly ran only six schools, down from more than 120. As of last year, the School Board directly employed only 600 people.

Civil District Court Judge Ethel Simms Julien initially ruled for the teachers in 2012. The appeal was argued in May.

The reduction in force

The appeals court panel that ruled Wednesday was composed of judges James McKay III, Edwin Lombard, Paul Bonin, Daniel Dysart and Roland Belsome, who wrote the opinion.

It said the School Board had the right to institute a reduction in force. But the method used by the board denied teachers their constitutionally protected right to be recalled to employment, the court said. Even with the schools closed, the School Board was legally required to create a "recall list" of teachers who were available to return to work. The board did not, even though it had that information.

Furthermore, the School Board should have used that list to rehire employees for jobs as they opened for the next two years.

"In failing to create the recall list, the appellees lost the opportunity for employment for a minimum of two years," Belsome wrote.

The court's decision did not address the question of whether employees had been properly notified of the layoffs or given a meaningful opportunity to appeal.

The state's role

During the appeals hearings, the judges challenged the plaintiffs to explain why the state was liable. The judges suggested the plaintiffs targeted the state for fear the local School Board wouldn't be good for the money.

Julien, the trial judge, had ruled the state was responsible for two reasons: Officials interfered wrongly with the teachers' employment contracts, and the state was a partner in managing the schools at the time. Cecil Picard, the state education superintendent at the time, had signed a memorandum of understanding with the School Board to overhaul the local board's finances, which resulted in consultants Alvarez & Marsal coming in.

The appeals court overturned both arguments. It said the memorandum of understanding did not create a broader legal partnership, and state law gave Picard the authority to take over New Orleans' schools, which resulted in the layoffs.

However, the appellate judges did think the state had some role: It should have rehired some of the teachers itself for the schools it commandeered for its Recovery School District. The law governing the state district says that when schools are taken over, existing teachers "shall be given priority consideration for employment in the same or comparable position."

Wrote Belsome: "There is absolutely no evidence that qualified appellees were provided the consideration mandated by the statute. To the contrary, the record clearly shows that the state advertised for these positions nationally and contracted with Teach for America to hire inexperienced college graduates (who) did not have teacher certification."

For that reason, the state is responsible for an extra year of back pay and benefits to teachers who would have met the criteria to be rehired. That's much lighter than Julien's initial ruling, which made the state equally responsible with the Orleans school system for five years of back pay plus benefits.

Brent Barriere, lead attorney for the School Board, said he thought employees would not get paid if they had found other jobs.

Reaction

Willie Zanders, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said the unanimity of the decision indicated the strength of their arguments.

"I'm very pleased and humbled at the same time," he said. "We have experienced, through the funerals and the phone calls, a lot of the hardships these educators have had to endure." Gwendolyn Ridgley, one of the seven lead plaintiffs, died in 2012.

He added, "It's a victory for them even though it's not the final step," referring to the state and School Board's right to appeal.

Barriere said the School Board was not ready to discuss the likelihood of an appeal. State Education Superintendent John White did not respond to a request for comment.

As expected, the union's parent organization, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, was thrilled with the Fourth Circuit's ruling.

"These employees suffered a dual tragedy: Once when the levees broke and another when their livelihoods were taken from them," said federation attorney Larry Samuels.

But Carter, of United Teachers of New Orleans, said he thought the anger among veteran educators had begun to subside as newer teachers -- some of whom have joined the union -- understood "it wasn't the educators who were here who were the problem" before the storm. He supported what he called the "renaissance" in New Orleans education.


Orleans Parish School Board swears in members, chooses president
Danielle Dreilinger
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on January 14, 2013

Orleans Parish School Board members were sworn in for a new four-year term on Monday, including three new representatives, Sarah Newell Usdin in District 3, Leslie Ellison in District 4 and Nolan Marshall II in District 7. The board also unanimously elected Ira Thomas as president and Ellison as vice president.

The Orleans Parish School Board currently oversees about one quarter of the parish's 80-odd schools, including Lusher, Ben Franklin and McMain. No schools have returned to OPSB control since the state created the Recovery School District to take over failing schools after Hurricane Katrina.

The new additions return the board to majority black membership. They may also shift the board's political leaning to a slightly more conservative stance, though where Marshall stands remains unclear. Though he is a lifelong Democrat, his father was a Republican and he has expressed measured support for the charter school movement.

The highest-profile new member is Sarah Newell Usdin, who led the reform incubator New Schools for New Orleans. She raised over $150,000 for her school board bid, far outpacing other candidates, much of it from supporters outside the district.

Ellison, a religious conservative, replaces liberal Lourdes Moran on the West Bank.

This spring, the board is set to choose a permanent superintendent to replace interim Superintendent Stan Smith.

The $4 Million Teacher

The $4 Million Teacher
South Korea's students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
AMANDA RIPLEY
The Wall Street Journal
Aug. 3, 2013


Kim Ki-hoon [above] earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.

Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online. 'The harder I work, the more I make,' he says. 'I like that.'

Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students' online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).

I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.

Tutoring services are growing all over the globe, from Ireland to Hong Kong and even in suburban strip malls in California and New Jersey. Sometimes called shadow education systems, they mirror the mainstream system, offering after-hours classes in every subject—for a fee. But nowhere have they achieved the market penetration and sophistication of hagwons in South Korea, where private tutors now outnumber schoolteachers.

Viewed up close, this shadow system is both exciting and troubling. It promotes striving and innovation among students and teachers alike, and it has helped South Korea become an academic superpower. But it also creates a bidding war for education, delivering the best services to the richest families, to say nothing of its psychological toll on students. Under this system, students essentially go to school twice—once during the day and then again at night at the tutoring academies. It is a relentless grind.

The bulk of Mr. Kim's earnings come from the 150,000 kids who watch his lectures online each year. (Most are high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea's version of the SAT.) He is a brand name, with all the overhead that such prominence in the market entails. He employs 30 people to help him manage his teaching empire and runs a publishing company to produce his books.

To call this mere tutoring is to understate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Mr. Kim works for, is listed on the South Korean stock exchange. (A Megastudy official confirmed Mr. Kim's annual earnings.) Nearly three of every four South Korean kids participate in the private market. In 2012, their parents spent more than $17 billion on these services. That is more than the $15 billion spent by Americans on videogames that year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. The South Korean education market is so profitable that it attracts investments from firms like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group and A.I.G.

It was thrilling to meet Mr. Kim—a teacher who earns the kind of money that professional athletes make in the U.S. An American with his ambition and abilities might have to become a banker or a lawyer, but in South Korea, he had become a teacher, and he was rich anyway.

The idea is seductive: Teaching well is hard, so why not make it lucrative? Even if American schools will never make teachers millionaires, there are lessons to be learned from this booming educational bazaar, lessons about how to motivate teachers, how to captivate parents and students and how to adapt to a changing world.

South Korean students prepare to take the standardized exam for college admissions on Nov. 10, 2011. The country has a 93% high-school graduation rate.

To find rock-star teachers like Mr. Kim, hagwon directors scour the Internet, reading parents' reviews and watching teachers' lectures. Competing hagwons routinely try to poach one another's celebrity tutors. "The really good teachers are hard to retain—and hard to manage. You need to protect their egos," says Lee Chae-yun, who owns a chain of five hagwons in Seoul called Myungin Academy.

The most radical difference between traditional schools and hagwons is that students sign up for specific teachers, so the most respected teachers get the most students. Mr. Kim has about 120 live, in-person students per lecture, but a typical teacher's hagwon classes are much smaller. The Korean private market has reduced education to the one in-school variable that matters most: the teacher.

It is about as close to a pure meritocracy as it can be, and just as ruthless. In hagwons, teachers are free agents. They don't need to be certified. They don't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay is based on their performance, and most of them work long hours and earn less than public school teachers.

Performance evaluations are typically based on how many students sign up for their classes, their students' test-score growth and satisfaction surveys given to students and parents. "How passionate is the teacher?" asks one hagwon's student survey—the results of which determine 60% of the instructor's evaluation. "How well-prepared is the teacher?" (In 2010, researchers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found classroom-level surveys like this to be surprisingly reliable and predictive of effective teaching in the U.S., yet the vast majority of our schools still don't use them.)

"Students are the customers," Ms. Lee says. To recruit students, hagwons advertise their results aggressively. They post their graduates' test scores and university acceptance figures online and outside their entrances on giant posters. It was startling to see such openness; in the U.S., despite our fetish for standardized testing, the results remain confusing and hard to interpret for parents. Once students enroll, the hagwon embeds itself in families' lives. Parents get text messages when their children arrive at the academies each afternoon; then they get another message relaying students' progress. Two to three times a month, teachers call home with feedback. Every few months, the head of the hagwon telephones, too. In South Korea, if parents aren't engaged, that is considered a failure of the educators, not the family.

If tutors get low survey marks or attract too few students, they generally get placed on probation. Each year, Ms. Lee fires about 10% of her instructors. (By comparison, U.S. schools dismiss about 2% of public school teachers annually for poor performance.)

All of this pressure creates real incentives for teachers, at least according to the kids. In a 2010 survey of 6,600 students at 116 high schools conducted by the Korean Educational Development Institute, Korean teenagers gave their hagwon teachers higher scores across the board than their regular schoolteachers: Hagwon teachers were better prepared, more devoted to teaching and more respectful of students' opinions, the teenagers said. Interestingly, the hagwon teachers rated best of all when it came to treating all students fairly, regardless of the students' academic performance.

Private tutors are also more likely to experiment with new technology and nontraditional forms of teaching. In a 2009 book on the subject, University of Hong Kong professor Mark Bray urged officials to pay attention to the strengths of the shadow markets, in addition to the perils. "Policy makers and planners should…ask why parents are willing to invest considerable sums of money to supplement the schooling received from the mainstream," he writes. "At least in some cultures, the private tutors are more adventurous and client-oriented."

But are students actually learning more in hagwons? That is a surprisingly hard question to answer. World-wide, the research is mixed, suggesting that the quality of after-school lessons matters more than the quantity. And price is at least loosely related to quality, which is precisely the problem. The most affluent kids can afford one-on-one tutoring with the most popular instructors, while others attend inferior hagwons with huge class sizes and less reliable instruction—or after-hours sessions offered free by their public schools. Eight out of 10 South Korean parents say they feel financial pressure from hagwon tuition costs. Still, most keep paying the fees, convinced that the more they pay, the more their children will learn.

For decades, the South Korean government has been trying to tame the country's private-education market. Politicians have imposed curfews and all manner of regulations on hagwons, even going so far as to ban them altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under military rule. Each time the hagwons have come back stronger.

"The only solution is to improve public education," says Mr. Kim, the millionaire teacher, echoing what the country's education minister and dozens of other Korean educators told me. If parents trusted the system, the theory goes, they wouldn't resort to paying high fees for extra tutoring.

To create such trust, Mr. Kim suggests paying public-school teachers significantly more money according to their performance—as hagwons do. Then the profession could attract the most skilled, accomplished candidates, and parents would know that the best teachers were the ones in their children's schools—not in the strip mall down the street.

Schools can also build trust by aggressively communicating with parents and students, the way businesses already do to great effect in the U.S. They could routinely survey students about their teachers—in ways designed to help teachers improve and not simply to demoralize them.

before a teacher even enters the classroom.

No country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too—or the free market may do it for them.

—Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, "The Smartest Kids in the World—and How They Got That Way," to be published Aug. 13 by Simon & Schuster.

"Why Elites Fail" explains why school administrators and teacher unions work together to protect their turf at the expense of students

I have seen school administrators and teacher unions working together, at the expense of students, to protect their respective turf. The following brilliant article shows why this happens and asks whether true meritocracies are actually possible.

This article is adapted from Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, © 2012 by Christopher Hayes and published by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House Inc.

Why Elites Fail
Christopher Hayes
The Nation
June 6, 2012

  In 1990, at the age of 11, I stood in a line of sixth graders outside an imposing converted armory on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, nervously anticipating a test that would change my life. I was hoping to gain entrance to Hunter College High School, a public magnet school that runs from grades seven through twelve and admits students from all five boroughs. Each year, between 3,000 and 4,000 students citywide score high enough on their fifth-grade standardized tests to qualify to take Hunter’s entrance exam in the sixth grade; ultimately, only 185 will be offered admission. (About forty-five students, all from Manhattan, test into Hunter Elementary School in the first grade and automatically gain entrance to the high school.)

I was one of the lucky ones who made it through, and my experience there transformed me. It was at Hunter that I absorbed the open-minded, self-assured cosmopolitanism that is the guiding ethos of the current American ruling class. What animates the school is a collective delight in the talent and energy of its students and a general feeling of earned superiority. In 1982 a Hunter alumnus profiled the school in a New York magazine article called “The Joyful Elite” and identified its “most singular trait” as the “exuberantly smug loyalty of its students.”

That loyalty emanates from the deeply held conviction that Hunter embodies the meritocratic ideal as much as any institution in the country. Unlike elite colleges, which use all kinds of subjective measures—recommendations, résumés, writing samples, parental legacies and interviews—in deciding who gains admittance, entrance to Hunter rests on a single “objective” measure: one three-hour test. If you clear the bar, you’re in; if not, you’re out. There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well-connected. If Michael Bloomberg’s daughter took the test and didn’t pass, she wouldn’t get in. There are only a handful of institutions left in the country about which this can be said.

Because it is public and free, the school pulls kids from all over the city, many of whom are first-generation Americans, the children of immigrant strivers from Korea, Russia and Pakistan. Half the students have at least one parent born outside the United States. For all these reasons Hunter is, in its own imagination, a place where anyone with drive and brains can be catapulted from the anonymity of working-class outer-borough neighborhoods to the inner sanctum of the American elite. “I came from a family where nobody went to college. We lived up in Washington Heights. We had no money,” says Jennifer Raab, who as president of CUNY’s Hunter College oversees the high school as well. “It was incredibly empowering.” When she surveys the student body, “it gets me very sappy about the American dream. It really can come true. These kids are getting an education that is unparalleled, and it’s not about where they come from or who they are.”

But the problem with my alma mater is that over time, the mechanisms of meritocracy have broken down. In 1995, when I was a student at Hunter, the student body was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic. Not coincidentally, there was no test-prep industry for the Hunter entrance exam. That’s no longer the case. Now, so-called cram schools like Elite Academy in Queens can charge thousands of dollars for after-school and weekend courses where sixth graders memorize vocabulary words and learn advanced math. Meanwhile, in the wealthier precincts of Manhattan, parents can hire $90-an-hour private tutors for one-on-one sessions with their children.

By 2009, Hunter’s demographics were radically different—just 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic, according to the New York Times. With the rise of a sophisticated and expensive test-preparation industry, the means of selecting entrants to Hunter has grown less independent of the social and economic hierarchies in New York at large. The pyramid of merit has come to mirror the pyramid of wealth and cultural capital.

How and why does this happen? I think the best answer comes from the work of a social theorist named Robert Michels, who was occupied with a somewhat parallel problem in the early years of the last century. Born to a wealthy German family, Michels came to adopt the radical socialist politics then sweeping through much of Europe. At first, he joined the Social Democratic Party, but he ultimately came to view it as too bureaucratic to achieve its stated aims. “Our workers’ organization has become an end in itself,” Michels declared, “a machine which is perfected for its own sake and not for the tasks which it could have performed.”

...In his classic book Political Parties, he wondered why the parties of the left, so ideologically committed to democracy and participation, were as oligarchic in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right.

Michels’s grim conclusion was that it was impossible for any party, no matter its belief system, to bring about democracy in practice. Oligarchy was inevitable. For any kind of institution with a democratic base to consolidate the legitimacy it needs to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. The rank and file will not have the time, energy, wherewithal or inclination to participate in the many, often minute decisions necessary to keep the institution functioning....

Read more here: Why Elites Fai.l

Does teacher merit pay work? A new study says yes.

I believe that an even better plan would be to pay excellent teachers very high salaries, and put them in charge of several classrooms with regular teachers. But I also like the idea of rewarding regular teachers for better performance.

Does teacher merit pay work? A new study says yes.
Dylan Matthews
Washington Post
July 23, 2012

There’s very good evidence that teacher quality matters a lot in terms of student performance in school and success later on in life.

The economist Raj Chetty of Harvard, for example, has found that students randomly placed with more experienced kindergarten teachers not only perform better on tests but earn more and save more for retirement as adults, are likelier to go to college, and go to better colleges than their peers with less experienced teachers.

Eric Hanushek of Stanford estimates that a good teacher – defined as at the 84th percentile, or one standard deviation above the mean for you stats nerds – provides students with test scores associated with an increase of between $22,000 and $46,000 in lifetime earnings.

Findings like these lead some to favor “merit pay” regimes that include student test scores as a determinant of teachers’ salaries. This has met opposition from teachers’ unions and testing skeptics, who argue that it would result in teaching-to-the-test at the expense of actual learning. For a long time, the data has been mixed on merit pay. Two studies from Mathematica Policy Research in 2010 that found little benefit, while a study in Nashville found mild benefits for fifth graders but none for other students.

That has changed with the publication of a new paper (pdf) by Harvard’s Roland Fryer, the University of Chicago’s Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and John List, and UC San Diego’s Sally Sadoff. The authors went into nine K-8 schools in Chicago Heights, a city 30 miles south of Chicago, and randomly selected teachers (who had to consent, which 93.75 percent did) to take part in a merit pay scheme. The students affected were overwhelmingly low-income, with 98 percent receiving free or subsidized lunches. Teachers in the experiment were offered $80 per percentile improvement in student test scores, for a maximum reward of $8,000, compared to a typical teacher salary of $50,000.

The authors split teachers in the study into a control group, who were not offered any rewards, a “gain” group, which was promised rewards of up to $8,000 at the end of the school year, and a “loss” group, which was given $4,000 upfront and asked to pay back any rewards they did not earn. The idea behind the latter group was that loss aversion should motivate teachers to perform better than they would if they only stood to gain more money. Additionally, the gain and loss groups were split, with a “team” group being rewarded on the basis of theirs and fellow teachers’ test scores, and the “individual” group being reward only on the basis of their own scores. The conclusion: it worked, and it worked almost twice as well when the money was given at the start and then taken away:

To get some idea of what the numbers on that graph might mean, using Hanushek’s estimates, the testing gains of those of the “loss” group are associated with an increase in lifetime earnings of between $37,180 and $77,740, and those of the “gain” group with an increase of between $20,350 and $42,550. Interestingly enough, it didn’t seem to matter much whether the pay was tied to the performance of a given teacher or to the team to which that teacher was assigned. This suggests that a merit pay regime need not pit teachers in a given school against each other to get results...

Here's how every child can have an excellent teacher--without firing any teachers!

WHY WE NEED TO USE CLASSROOM TEACHERS DIFFERENTLY

"There’s very good evidence that teacher quality matters a lot in terms of student performance in school and success later on in life. The economist Raj Chetty of Harvard, for example, has found that students randomly placed with more experienced kindergarten teachers not only perform better on tests but earn more and save more for retirement as adults, are likelier to go to college, and go to better colleges than their peers with less experienced teachers. Eric Hanushek of Stanford estimates that a good teacher – defined as at the 84th percentile, or one standard deviation above the mean for you stats nerds – provides students with test scores associated with an increase of between $22,000 and $46,000 in lifetime earnings."--Washington Post

Lots of kids get stuck for years with various incompetent teachers, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can fix the problem. And not spend any extra money!

Am I crazy to think this?

HERE'S THE MATH:

Here's the comparison for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands):

Currently: $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 = $300

New plan: $100 + $50 + $50 + $50 + $50 = $300

HERE'S THE PLAN:

An excellent teacher could come into each classroom for just a few hours a week and make a huge difference--if that teacher had responsibility for student success and authority to make decisions.

Parents should not need political clout to get a good teacher for their child. Every student should--and could--have a great teacher, without wasting time and energy on the losing battle to fire incompetent teachers.

The truth is that the critical moments in learning don't happen continuously five hours a day. They add up to at most a couple of hours each day, and probably much less. The rest of the time an ordinary, mediocre teacher can handle the skill practice and lesson reinforcement, computer activities, art projects, silent reading (how much skill is needed to be in charge of that?) and so on.

GIVING SUPPORT TEACHERS A REAL JOB

At my old school we were paying a top salary--well over $60,000, for a computer teacher who was very nice, but her job was merely to familiarize kids with computer programs. An aide could have done the job. When the principal (Ollie Matos) tried to switch that computer teacher to giving basic reading and math lessons, the teachers went ballistic. The story became a sensation in the San Diego Press, and a group of angry teachers were named the "Castle Park Five" by San Diego Union-Tribune editor Don Sevrens. Basically, what the teachers wanted was 45 minutes a week in which they could send their students to another teacher. But in my plan, classroom teachers would have this kind of help and relief for more than an entire day each week! The nice computer teacher could become a master teacher!

Resource teachers like computer teachers and language and math support teachers could become master teachers. And let's face it: how much good are those resource teachers able to do? They go around and offer suggestions, but they are really doing the equivalent of passing out band-aids. I would never want such a job. It might be relaxing not to have direct responsibility for student learning, but isn't that the point of being a teacher?

NO MORE ABUSIVE TEACHERS

Academics would not be the only thing that master teachers would be responsible for. Abusive, immature teachers with a habit of undermining students could be overruled and guided by the master teacher.

WE COULD SAVE MONEY!

Why do we pay bad teachers the same amount of money as good teachers? It makes no sense!

Excellent teachers should be paid much more than average teachers, and could be responsible for all students in several classrooms.

Each classroom could have a full-time regular teacher who be paid a lower salary, but would be eligible to become a master teacher. The master teacher would also be responsible for helping and guiding the regular teacher.

Here is a chart of average teacher salaries in the US.

In California the average teacher salary is roughly $60,000 (with a starting salary of $35,000.)

We could allow regular teachers to rise in salary to an average of $45 thousand, and allow master teachers to rise to an average of $90 thousand--for overseeing four classrooms.

Money for support teachers and teacher aides would be switched to master teacher positions in the classrooms. (Of course, special education would still require teacher aides.) Some people who are currently teacher aides could become regular teachers.)

Here's the comparison for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands):

Currently: $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 = $300

New plan: $92 + $47 + $47 + $47 + $47 = $300

MEANINGFUL EVALUATIONS OF TEACHERS WOULD BE REQUIRED

Of course, meaningful evaluations of teachers would have to be instituted to make this plan work. Current evaluation systems are worse than useless. My plan would call for frequent observations by both master and regular teachers, but they would observe classrooms in other districts to keep school politics out of the process as much as possible. The observations would have a beneficial side effect: they would allow teachers to get pick up new ideas.

I believe it would be good to use student test scores when choosing who is to be a master teacher, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. The good thing about it is that it would take some of the politics out of teacher evaluation. It should be noted that although student test scores vary widely from year to year for most teachers, some teachers do get consistently high scores from their students year after year.

Here's how every child can have an excellent teacher--without firing any teachers!

There’s very good evidence that teacher quality matters a lot in terms of student performance in school and success later on in life. The economist Raj Chetty of Harvard, for example, has found that students randomly placed with more experienced kindergarten teachers not only perform better on tests but earn more and save more for retirement as adults, are likelier to go to college, and go to better colleges than their peers with less experienced teachers. Eric Hanushek of Stanford estimates that a good teacher – defined as at the 84th percentile, or one standard deviation above the mean for you stats nerds – provides students with test scores associated with an increase of between $22,000 and $46,000 in lifetime earnings.--Washington Post

Lots of kids get stuck for years with various incompetent teachers, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can fix the problem. And save money!

Am I crazy to think this?

HERE'S THE MATH:

Here's the comparison for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands):

Currently: $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 = $300

New plan: $100 + $50 + $50 + $50 + $50 = $300

HERE'S THE PLAN:

An excellent teacher could come into each classroom for just a few hours a week and make a huge difference--if that teacher had responsibility for student success and authority to make decisions.

Parents should not need political clout to get a good teacher for their child. Every student should--and could--have a great teacher, without wasting time and energy on the losing battle to fire incompetent teachers.

The truth is that the critical moments in learning don't happen continuously five hours a day. They add up to at most a couple of hours each day, and probably much less. The rest of the time an ordinary, mediocre teacher can handle the skill practice and lesson reinforcement, computer activities, art projects, silent reading (how much skill is needed to be in charge of that?) and so on.

GIVING SUPPORT TEACHERS A REAL JOB

At my old school we were paying a top salary--well over $60,000, for a computer teacher who was very nice, but her job was merely to familiarize kids with computer programs. An aide could have done the job. When the principal (Ollie Matos) tried to switch that computer teacher to giving basic reading and math lessons, the teachers went ballistic. The story became a sensation in the San Diego Press, and a group of angry teachers were named the "Castle Park Five" by San Diego Union-Tribune editor Don Sevrens. Basically, what the teachers wanted was 45 minutes a week in which they could send their students to another teacher. But in my plan, classroom teachers would have this kind of help and relief for more than an entire day each week! The nice computer teacher could become a master teacher!

Resource teachers like computer teachers and language and math support teachers could become master teachers. And let's face it: how much good are those resource teachers able to do? They go around and offer suggestions, but they are really doing the equivalent of passing out band-aids. I would never want such a job. It might be relaxing not to have direct responsibility for student learning, but isn't that the point of being a teacher?

NO MORE ABUSIVE TEACHERS

Academics would not be the only thing that master teachers would be responsible for. Abusive, immature teachers with a habit of undermining students could be overruled and guided by the master teacher.

WE COULD SAVE MONEY!

Why do we pay bad teachers the same amount of money as good teachers? It makes no sense!

Excellent teachers should be paid much more than average teachers, and could be responsible for all students in several classrooms.

Each classroom could have a full-time regular teacher who be paid a lower salary, but would be eligible to become a master teacher. The master teacher would also be responsible for helping and guiding the regular teacher.

Here is a chart of average teacher salaries in the US.

In California the average teacher salary is roughly $60,000 (with a starting salary of $35,000.)

We could allow regular teachers to rise in salary to an average of $45 thousand, and allow master teachers to rise to an average of $90 thousand--for overseeing four classrooms.

Money for support teachers and teacher aides would be switched to master teacher positions in the classrooms. (Of course, special education would still require teacher aides.) Some people who are currently teacher aides could become regular teachers.)

Here's the comparison for four classrooms and one extra salary (in thousands):

Currently: $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 + $60 = $300

New plan: $92 + $47 + $47 + $47 + $47 = $300

MEANINGFUL EVALUATIONS OF TEACHERS WOULD BE REQUIRED

Of course, meaningful evaluations of teachers would have to be instituted to make this plan work. Current evaluation systems are worse than useless. My plan would call for frequent observations by both master and regular teachers, but they would observe classrooms in other districts to keep school politics out of the process as much as possible. The observations would have a beneficial side effect: they would allow teachers to get pick up new ideas.

I believe it would be good to use student test scores when choosing who is to be a master teacher, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. The good thing about it is that it would take some of the politics out of teacher evaluation. It should be noted that although student test scores vary widely from year to year for most teachers, some teachers do get consistently high scores from their students year after year.

From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model

From Finland, an Intriguing School-Reform Model
By JENNY ANDERSON
New York Times
December 12, 2011

Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan: “Who here wants to be a teacher?”

Out of a class of 15, two hands went up — one a little reluctantly.

“In my country, that would be 25 percent of people,” Dr. Sahlberg said. “And,” he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, “it would be more like this.”

In his country, Dr. Sahlberg said later in an interview, teachers typically spend about four hours a day in the classroom, and are paid to spend two hours a week on professional development. At the University of Helsinki, where he teaches, 2,400 people competed last year for 120 slots in the (fully subsidized) master’s program for schoolteachers. “It’s more difficult getting into teacher education than law or medicine,” he said.

Dr. Sahlberg puts high-quality teachers at the heart of Finland’s education success story — which, as it happens, has become a personal success story of sorts, part of an American obsession with all things Finnish when it comes to schools.

Take last week. On Monday, Dr. Sahlberg was the keynote speaker at an education conference in Chicago. On Tuesday, he had to return to Helsinki for an Independence Day party held by Finland’s president — a coveted invitation to an event that much of the country watches on television.

On Wednesday, it was Washington, for a party for the release of his latest book, “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland?,” that drew staff members from the White House and Congress.

And Thursday brought him to the Upper West Side, for a daylong visit to the Dwight School, a for-profit school that prides itself on internationalism, where he talked to those seniors.

Ever since Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million that does not start formal education until age 7 and scorns homework and testing until well into the teenage years, scored at the top of a well-respected international test in 2001 in math, science and reading, it has been an object of fascination among American educators and policy makers...