Comments on: Kerry on Education

By: harry

harry — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:44:32 +0000

tracy—that’s interesting. I agree that principals should be allowed to manage, and with providing incetnives for them to go to low-decile schools. Have you got examples of authorities that try to get skilled managers into principal positions? Or, if not, of people who have fleshed out the proposal more? Hope you’re still reading. Thanks.

By: Tracy

Tracy — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 06:27:21 +0000

Harry – I personally think we can use the success of individual principals as a basis for policy. At a first stab – free up the ability of a principal to manage a school, provide rewards for high-performing principals to move to low-decile schools, provide professional training courses for principals, provide incentives for skilled managers to become principals (the last two I’d definitely run pilot schemes to see if they’d work). And, on the other hand, we can also ignore proposed reforms that don’t increase principals’ ability to manage their schools. Maddie – if those students need a decent education to help them improve their circumstances – and I agree with you on this – how do you think that can happen without holding someone responsible for the students’ performance?

By: Maddie

Maddie — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 03:36:35 +0000

I’ve spoken to principals about bad teachers and their response has often been “there is no one else to do the job.” If you want good teachers you first and foremost need to attract good people to the job. This requires taking a market approach – making it an attractive enough job that there is competition to weed out the least qualified. It’s no surprise that the school districts that pay well and have good facilites attract the best teachers. It is also interesting that in the US we act as though the entire responsibiity for how well a classroom learns lies on the teacher’s shoulders. This is not the case in many other countries where if a child is falling behind in his/her studies it is seen as the family’s job to get that child caught up. This also means that teachers who work with students who have dire circumstances at home are not expected to perform miracles. I don’t mean to write off these students. I’ve volunteered in classrooms where Monday mornings were chaos because many students had barely eaten all weekend, then gorged at the school breakfast and were ill as a result. These were students who needed a decent education to help them improve their circumstances. But how can you hold a teacher responsible for these students’ poor perfomance? Some teachers told me “I’ll lose my job if I stay here because the scores will be so low.” Why would anyone want to work in these circumstances?

By: harry

harry — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 20:58:25 +0000

No, I agree that it’s not impossible (though doing it by test scores is). Or even particularly difficult! My point was just that, since most union contracts deprive managers of the pwoer to do it, most managers are not capable of doing it (did the principals in your school know anything about how to evaluate teachers? If so you were lucky—not in the schools I know). So there’s a kind of stand-off, in which the unions are not being unreasonable. We’d need very different kinds of manager if we wanted them actually to manage (if you see what I mean). And Kerry doesn’t have a proposal which addresses that. tracy: I just meant (but didn’t exactly say) that school reforms won’t make as much difference as people like to anticipate, because out-of-school factors are so important. But I am VERY sceptical of the arguments pointing to schools doing well in bad circumstances. These situations are, very often, due to charismatic and successful principals (or higher-up administrators) attracting high quality teachers into a particular school or district, and rarely last beyond the departure of the principal. It is a matter of pushing the pieces around, not something on which systematic reform can depend. Of course, individual schools and districts should compete for those principals if they can identify them, but I don’t think we can use the phenomenon as a basis of policy (at least, that’s my reading of the literature on this).

By: Laura

Laura — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 17:40:11 +0000

re: merit pay for teachers. I think it is very interesting that Kerry proposed this at all. I think this the first time that a Democrat in a national election put forward a policy that goes so counter to the interests of the teachers unions. It really does show the slow decay of the power and credibility of the teachers unions. I agree with you that judging teachers based on student test scores is a bad idea, but I don’t think it is impossible to evaluate teachers in other ways. Having worked in the public school system, everybody knows who is the good teacher and who isn’t. Other teachers know the score. Also in private sector, employees are constantly evaluated in on subjective variables. Not just by how many widgets they make. At my husband’s firm, employees are evaluated by the superiors, by their peers, by the office secretaries, by others in different departments. Many of the variables are subjective like how well does the employee communicate with others. I’m not really sure why evaluating teachers is considered impossible.

By: Tracy

Tracy — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 08:29:56 +0000

If schools can’t do much to improve educational outcomes because of other factors driving educational outcomes surely the solution is to save a lot of money by shutting schools down (or turn them into considerably cheaper child-sitting services). We could then spend the money saved on something useful, like eradicating glue ear in small children. Personally I suspect that schools may not be able to do much about relative educational outcomes, but there’s probably a lot they can do about absolute educational outcomes. In NZ there’s been a fair bit of research into schools in low socio-economic areas (every school is put into 1 of 10 deciles based on the socio-economic status of the area their students come from, schools drawing on poorer areas get more funding), and there are some schools who do exceptionally better than the average. It seems to come down to the quality of the principal. Certainly Taita College has drastically turned around with a new principal.

By: Eric Tyler

Eric Tyler — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 04:40:31 +0000

We don’t have the Praxis in CA anymore. Now you have to pass the CSET in your subject area, and the content of the test is entirely about your specific subject area. You definitely could not even come close to passing the math CSET without knowing the Pythagorean Theorem.

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:09:13 +0000

Sorry—the link didn’t post above; here it is. http://www.actuary.ca/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=21151

By: Sam

Sam — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:06:18 +0000

The above link has a discussion on education and how it could be fixed, with various ideas. I have a few comments, based on my experiences as a substitute. First, the application of “Due Process” and “Free Speech” law to schools makes it much harder to keep sufficient order for students to learn. The difficulty of maintaining orderly classes is one reason that teachers quit teaching. Second, the idea that teachers should all be paid about the same is a real hindrance. Math teachers are more valuable, in alternative occupations, than Social Studies teachers. Teachers who will teach in challenging schools are in short supply relative to teachers in suburban schools. The obvious solution is to pay some teachers substantially more than others; Kerry’s proposals are a step in the right direction, but not enough of a step. Third, well-qualified (high standards) has a different meaning in the education world than it does for most people. It means “has taken lots of education classes.” It doesn’t mean “knows a lot about the subject being taught.” The teacher exams are very heavily weighted toward various theories of child development; the grasp of math and English required is not very high. (You can pass the Praxis without being able to use or apply the Pythagorean theorem—I substituted for a math teacher who couldn’t.)

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 17:44:45 +0000

That, in turn, depends on the un-legislatable beliefs and intentions of those who administrate and work in them. Nicely stated—I have always thought of this as a major problem facing school reform legislation but have never been able to put it in words. A related thing is, all our school problems would be solved if there were just a lot more really good teachers—but “really good teachers” is impossible to specify; and my hunch is that just about all potential really good teachers are already working as teachers. But they do not suffice, so you need to hire a lot of pretty good, mediocre and crappy teachers as well.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 17:36:15 +0000

You are wrong about the politics of vocuhers since it is one of teh largest inroads the Republican party has made with teh Catholic Church is trhough the use of vouchers.