That’s like a coach refusing to give their players water when they are dehydrated.
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No Child Left Behind was clearly terrible legislation when it was proposed, and it still horrifies me that it passed.
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The idea was to tie funding to school success. What it ended up doing was creating massive incentives to cheat, teach to the test, and dumb down the testing.
That and social emotional learning have done massive harm to the educational system in this country.
Here in commie country, we tie school funding to number of students enrolled. Weird, but true.
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All of which were obvious consequences to anyone who thought about the issue.
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Kinda like making people work for their healthcare and if they’re too sick to work, just let them die.
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It’s more like the referee controls the water and only hydrates the team that is winning.
It should make more sense after that.
It’s not like only hydrating the team that is winning. Schools are not competing against each other so that analogy is flawed. It’s more like paying someone more if they perform better.
Yeah it causes people to want to cheat (but so does giving tests to students, and the solution is not to stop testing students, because that cure is worse than the problem).
Yeah it causes people to teach to the test (but what’s wrong with that if the test is structured well, and if not, fix the test). Like is it wrong to study for actuarial exams from a course that teaches to the test?
The solution is not to stop paying for performance. But perhaps, allowances could be made for the general performance historically of the student population because every teacher knows that a lot of performance depends on student aptitude.
LAUSD has tried determining teacher performance by taking the students’ prior year end of year of the performance and comparing it to the current year’s End of the year performance.
Too many teachers didn’t like it, for obvious reasons. Fun fact, many of the kids’ and parents’ favorite teachers were shitty in this performance metric.
Ages ago, there was a private school in the Bay Area whose students would have been expected to do well on standardized tests. The school instead tested relatively poorly, parents got made, the principal said that the tests are dumb and he’d rather focus on developing skills that mattered more in the future. After much back and forth, he eventually caved, the school taught to the test for a year, crushed it, principal said “see, we do have good teachers, now let us teach your kids properly” and went back to teaching what he wanted the following year.
What are the obvious reasons?
Maybe you need to compare current year performance to an average of the last 3 prior years (where the prior years are calibrated to expected performance by age), instead of just the last year. Ya know, more data needed, actuarially speaking.
And this comparison shouldn’t be used to judge performance. Performance should be based on an objective metric. Teachers shouldn’t be penalized for students doing really well in previous years. But if performance is low, credit should be given for an improvement relative to prior years, as detailed above.
Favorite teachers can be favorite for a lot of reasons.
One of the possible reasons is that they teach well.
Another possible reason is that they are lenient and kids don’t need to learn as much to get good grades.
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I’d think this gets confounded with human development and outside factors. Did the kid have an off year because of bad teaching or out of control hormones? You could average out some of the individual factors, but teachers of kids in grades 5-10 are somewhat screwed. Also how much control are we going to give to teachers? Will we allow them to actually discipline misbehaving students and stop kids from messing around on their phones? How do you account for teachers having limited ability for punishing students who don’t do the work or cheat using ChatGPT? What’s the procedure if things get screwed up due to Covid or a natural disaster? Do the kids get evaluated relative to the local population of the statewide population? I know in my own province there were very-broad geographic differences in scores. Some local populations valued school far less than other populations. You could make 50% more than a teacher at the top of their pay range as a grade 10 drop out working as a truck driver at the mine.
As a lab instructor I was limited in what I could do to the student who skipped every lab and then plagiarized the entirety of their final project which wasn’t even on topic. She’d been “sick” and made a mistake.
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I feel like a lot of this would just be lost in the variance if they did proper stats.
If it’s being done based on percentiles, I’d argue that for a lot of things, a class’s average score under a particular teacher could vary by at least plus or minus 10 to 20% just based on class composition in a particular year and ignoring teacher performance.
ETA: by off year, I mean just one bad thing after another getting in the way of students having high marks this year e.g. high number of snow days, particularly bad year for illness, something major happening in the community/region and it’s a presidential election year.
Yeah some of it is randomness but I think some of any pay for performance is randomness