dagblog - Comments for "Evaluating the Teachers"

Diane Ravitch on it

artappraiser — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 03:12:52 +0000

In reply to Evaluating the Teachers

Diane Ravitch on it yesterday, she basically sez it's all Obama/Duncan's fault:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/01/holding-education-hostage/

I must admit I am not surprised that this is her opinion, and after that, I feel this:.

I couldn't agree with you

Verified Atheist — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:27:55 +0000

In reply to If I were in charge of

I couldn't agree with you more. I left teaching not because I wasn't being paid enough but because I wasn't able to take working with 30+ high-school students at a time. It was extremely demoralizing as well as very stressful. I could barely handle this with the advanced classes. For general and remedial, I didn't stand a chance of retaining my sanity — in case you were wondering what happened to it.

.

Resistance — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:22:19 +0000

In reply to Oh my kid got an 'f' in

I've seen people live in

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:14:38 +0000

In reply to Again, I'm having trouble

I've seen people live in desperate poverty, but sheets were all brilliant white, even without a washing machine. An appreciative environment doesn't have to be glitzy, highly-paid - it has to have a feeling of community, of not being under attack all the time. Having done some home schooling and not being that good at it, I appreciate the combination of entertainment, motivation, instruction, insight tutor, disciplinarian, friend and other features that go into the job, along with managing a chaotic group. But there are a lot of backseat teachers out there, people who are assured it's all trivially easy, that the ones in the classroom are just dumb and greedy, and that it can all be run like the bean counting department in the insurance company. (ok, I'm not sure the bean counting dept can be run that easily either). In the 1950's teaching was still a well-respected, professional position. Since then we've just shit on it decade after decade, and it's amazing that teachers persist.

But education is a political

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:07:35 +0000

In reply to Teachers are not the only

But education is a political football, and while most of us don't work for unions, half of the interest in education is to kill the union, and the other half is to show how much schools suck even with test scores going up. (Bob Somerby does a pretty good if repetitive job on this, noting that even with the challenges of US demographics and immigration the public schools usually score pretty well, but newspapers et al have to paint it black every time, aggregating results rather than showing gains of sub-groups, or comparing it all to Finland.

Meanwhile, someone like Michelle Rhee can show no progress but they make her a hero. Privatization, vouchers, lower pay, more teachers hours. Race To The Top, just another top-down test-'em-more-and-they'll-soar philosophy.)

If you've got kids ranging from bright to semi-retarded in a zoo-like inner city environment, do you want 60-80% of your evaluation coming from how kids do on standardized tests? Do the people doing auto-scoring understand progress rather than an unrealistic desire to see all children above average like in Lake Wobegon? With all the Math-Science-English focus on these tests, is there even any room for a teacher to try to insert fun, beauty, reflection, inspiration. teamwork, organization...? Facebook is built more on understanding Beavis-and-Butthead behavior than math algorithms and science. Health care is more than actuarial science when care-giving is included.

If I were in charge of

A Guy Called LULU — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 19:01:22 +0000

In reply to Not even sure if that's

If I were in charge of deciding where to throw more money, but a limited amount, I would spend it to hire more teachers to teach in smaller classes before I would give teachers higher salaries. That would make teaching both more possible and more rewarding. My opinion comes from being married, at one time, to a women when she went from college to the classroom as an idealistic, hard working teacher. She would have been much happier with a more manageable class size. That said, she resented that my union job paid more money than did hers on a yearly basis. She was educated, after all, with a college degree. I pointed out that I had supported her by working nights and a lot of overtime in a dangerous outside job for fifty weeks a year to make a couple thousand more than she made, starting out, working 180 days a year in the classroom.

Again, I'm having trouble

Michael Wolraich — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:58:41 +0000

In reply to Not even sure if that's

Again, I'm having trouble with the word "appreciation." I think that teachers are very much appreciated. I just think that their jobs are much crappier than they should be (of which salary is only one part). But having a crappy job is not the same as being unappreciated.

Teachers are not the only

Michael Wolraich — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:54:28 +0000

In reply to My brother-in-law is a

Teachers are not the only people who are difficult to evaluate. How do you evaluate a middle manager? An insurance claims processor? The difference is that teachers' unions argue that because of the difficulty of evaluation, teachers shouldn't suffer for poor evaluations instead of acknowledging like the rest of us that some managers suck, and evaluations aren't always fair, but that's life.

The evaluation issue is

Michael Wolraich — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:48:06 +0000

In reply to It could be both. But it

The evaluation issue is relatively new. Pay concerns have been around for a long time, and NYC has periodically addressed them. Not sufficiently of course, as you can imagine, but they have not been ignored.

But this is neither here nor there. Higher pay and more evaluation are not mutually exclusive, and I'm all for higher salaries for teachers, as I've said. If the unions pushed this hard for more money, they would have my enthusiastic support. But instead of drawing the line on pay, they have drawn it on evaluation. Screw that.

Not even sure if that's

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:17:13 +0000

In reply to I finally have a moment to

Not even sure if that's "unfortunate". A lot of motivation theory is figuring out what cranks people's tractors. People work for non-profits at ridiculously low rates because they like the feeling of doing good. Oddly enough, if they were paid more, it might feel like a for-profit activity and they might not feel as good. As Gaultier notes, the price is part of the fashion. What's sad is for teachers to work at lower pay and still feel underappreciated. Few went into that profession expecting to be rich.