Diane Ravitch is a so on target. She wrote a great debunking of the film "Waiting for Superman" here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by dystopianfuturetoday.

I don't think she debunked anything at all and Stewart was uneager to ask any hard questions.

What really needs answering is what exactly makes schooling exceptional. Teaching is very much skilled labor, and yet somehow pay for performance is considered dirty, competition between schools is legally limited and somehow more charter schools to counter this limited choice is a bad thing.

Every instinct tells me this lady is part of the teacher's union PR machine of avoiding change or anything that may potentially decrease their job security. To call NCLB an example of the failings of standardised testing is to ignore the fact that states were able to set their own standards. It's to ignore the many inherent problems including the focus on reaching minimum proficiency rather that on standards improvement. Yes standardised requirements might decrease focus on the arts and electives in some schools, but given the choice of students in financially-strapped schools being provided an arts class versus being taught the basic minimum math and reading skills required to enter the workforce, the choice is obvious.

Measuring teacher performance should be a careful process, drawing a conclusion from several years and focus on the improvements of standards from year to year. Obviously, even the most complex indices of teacher performance will be flawed. But the best consumer products don't always succeed. Consumers might not understand them, your marketing may suck, maybe you picked the wrong time to enter the market. Yet somehow, just about in every private industry, there is choice, competitively low prices and a good level of service. There's no doubt that higher salaries and higher levels of training and support would help but given the US's attitude towards public spending, and it's debt situations this hardly seems feasible. Improving efficiency and allowing better skilled teachers to be paid more would be a more feasible way to approach the issue.

Again, my question would be, why are schools exceptional and not held to the same standard as every other skilled field?
>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Diane Ravitch is a so on target. She wrote a great debunking of the film "Waiting for Superman" here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-sc
hools/

Great article, Dft. It did deconstruct some of the faulty premises of the documentary quite well.

I think, by far, the most important factor in success in pre-college education is the family environment (income, parental support, parental pressure to succeed, at-home enforced discipline). This counts far more than teachers. Charter schools or even elite private schools aren't a cure for that (maybe boarding school or military school). The linked article gives an example:

"But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,” even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009). Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty."

I do agree with redsky that teachers do need to be "ranked and rated", even though this would have to be done carefully. But teachers are not the biggest problem with our academic problems. It's ultimately an increasingly anti-intellectual and lazy culture, and the bad parenting that feed into this culture.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by radx.

http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart/full-episodes/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart---march-3-2011/#clip425228

Canadians

@RedSky. Poverty and parental involvement are two of the biggest factors in student achievement. By implementing merit pay, teachers in rich neighborhoods would be rewarded; teachers in poor neighborhoods would be punished. This would serve as further disincentive for educators to teach in low income areas, and there are already plenty of disincentives to teaching in low income areas as it is. Merit pay would effectively punish teachers with the hardest jobs. Schools that don't perform well need more money, not less. It's not so much a 'dirty' idea, as much as it is a stupid, stupid, stupid idea.

Imagine if law enforcement had merit pay. Cops in high crime areas would get the least pay, and those who work in small towns and wealthy enclaves would get big bucks for sitting on their asses. Thus, the best cops would have a disincentive to work in areas where they are needed the most. This would be stupid, right? Imagine if firefighters had merit pay. It would serve as disincentive for firefighters to take jobs in dry brushy areas. Stupid.

Can you see how flawed this argument is?

NCLB was an abject failure. Obama's plan isn't any better. Look at the numbers, there is no sea change here. The point of education is not the memorization of arbitrary facts. The point of education is learning how to learn; learning how to think critically; learning how to figure things out for yourself post graduation. It's like the old Chinese saying about giving a person a fish vs. teaching a person how to fish.

The main premise of "Waiting for Superman" is that public schools are bad, and that charter schools are great. The data doesn't bear this out, in spite of the fact that charter schools can be exclusive in their selection process and can shun kids who are poor, kids with bad grades, kids that speak English as a second language and kids that are mentally or physically disabled. 46% percent of charter schools show no improvement over public schools. 37% are worse. 17% are better. This is from the CREDO study by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond.

Also, you need not rely on 'instincts' when facts are readily available. Here's a fish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch

One demerit for you.

How are schools exceptional? You didn't explain that in your comment.

As someone who has spent almost zero time reading up on education policy, but who's a total junkie for reading politics, I can explain why the current merit pay/charter school/standardized testing thing is pretty transparently a load of horseshit.

Let's start with who's in favor of it. Is this a popular idea in the Washington press corps? Yes, undoubtedly. Do they ever back good policy? I've never known them to. Conservatives love it, as do the perennially "moderate" Democrats. More bad signs. As for Waiting for Superman, all my pinko-commie friends tell me it was made and promoted by big money interests. That's not good, either.

Where else in the world do they have an education system like this? How's it working for them? Not having researched it, I can't answer that question, but no one who's for it ever says "look at how well <some country>'s education system works! We should copy them!" However the people who oppose it, like Ravitch, point to Finland, and the fact that it's almost entirely the polar opposite of what the big money wants for America, and Finland is almost always ranked #1 internationally for education.

Mostly, I just hear more union-busting in a lot of this talk. Ravitch sounded like she did too -- it's all about rooting out the "bad teachers", as if our education system's sole flaw is a lousy crop teachers that are bilking the system, with the aid of the eeeeevil teacher's unions.

It can't be poverty and budget cuts, noooooo, that'd mean admitting those dirty fucking hippies are right yet again...

@dystopianfuturetoday

Of course poverty and parenting matter significantly, but so does teaching. Teachers may well only account for 10-20% of achievable outcomes as she claims in her article, but with enrollment restrictions to their district for many schools and no incentive for good teachers to teach there, the schools mirror the poverty of the region.

I think you're too focussed on sticking within the constraints of NCLB. Rewards and recognition payments can be calibrated to the difficulty of raising standards in schools at different performance levels. If anything, pay for performance could be the very way to attract great teachers into impoverished regions and under performing schools where previously there was no such incentive.

There's no reason law enforcement couldn't work partially on merit. Again you need the right measurements though, not arrest rates, but levels of crime measured independently and regular opinion polls from the region on perceived safety, conduct and manner of police and other indicators.

Similarly, with the right combination of monetary incentives for working in disadvantaged areas, a focus on improvements in standards rather than purely meeting standards you could create a system that addresses many of the issues you raise.

There is no reason that any test needs to be solely the memorisation of arbitrary facts. That speaks more to the failure of exams that fully emphasize predictable questions rather than requiring a broad understanding certain concepts. I agree completely that school is about learning to learn, and partially that involves developing a work ethic and ultimately memorising some facts. There is no reason that good schools can not devote time towards the arts/music/theater when they feel that their students have mastered basic math and reading skills. There could very well be an upper limit to rewards for performance which allows the best schools to be incentivised to differentiate themselves with broader teaching.

I simply don't see how you can argue though that there aren't basic reading comprehension and a certain degree of numeracy skills, that you simply need to make a living in today's world. Skills that can be easily measured through well designed tests.

If intuition isn't good enough:

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/61/0,3746,en_32252351_32235731_46567613_1_1_1_1,00.html

Executive summary page 15 onto 16:

"Within countries where schools are held to account for their results through posting achievement data publicly, schools that enjoy greater autonomy in resource allocation tend to do better than those with less autonomy. however, in countries where there are no such accountability arrangements, the reverse is true."

"In countries that use standards-based external examinations, students tend to do better overall, but there is no clear relationship between performance and the use of standardised tests or the public posting of results at the school level. However, performance differences between schools with students of different social backgrounds are, on average, lower in countries that use standardised tests."

The only assertion I made about charter schools is to imply that having more of them and allowing more competition for enrollment would not be a bad thing. I am arguing my own point not one of a movie.

You missed my point with the last comment. That's exactly what I'm asking you. How is teaching the only skilled field where paying talented people is anathema?

@RedSky

There is an old legend about a Sensei who provides instruction to his students for free. As the months go by, the students start to feel guilty for not compensating their instructor, so they offer to pay him. When approached, the Sensei replies, "If I were to charge you, you couldn't afford me".

Teaching is a calling. No one goes into teaching to become rich, they do it because they believe it provides a valuable social service. When you throw 'merit pay' into the equation, it changes this dynamic. It cheapens the interaction. Whatever pittance that would be offered would be insulting compared to the amount of time and effort teachers spend on and off campus.

If you are doing it right, there should be a sense among schools, teachers and students that they are all in it together as a team, all striving to be the best they can be and cheering their peers to do the same. There would be nothing worse for this kind of camaraderie than to throw a roll of quarters on the ground and ask them to fight over it. In the private sector, where value is measured in dollars, fighting over loose change is part of the game, but to introduce this kind of game theory into what should be a supportive and nurturing environment couldn't be more wrong headed. When Coke and Pepsi fight, the consumer wins; when students, teachers, schools and districts start duking it out, we all lose (and corporations win says issy astutely). You can't solve social problems with market solutions.

Competition is not part of the soul of education. Sure, you find competitive elements in sports, arts competitions, science team, etc., but the point of education is not to 'win'. The point of education is to learn, and more specifically, to 'learn how to learn'. Tests are about winning and losing and do nothing to promote critical thinking or a greater understanding of the world we live in. Sure, you need tests to gauge progress, but when you make testing the center piece of the educational experience, you fail in the bigger picture.

Education should be about critical thinking, about asking questions and about preparing students to be intelligent and thoughtful adults, who will hopefully one day make this world a better place. To fill their heads (or their teacher's heads) with the motivating factors of greed, selfishness and fear is no way to make this world a better place.

berticus turned me on to a great book that is helping me to understand this debate better (among other things). It's not a book about education or politics per se. It's about the psychology that governs our decisions and interactions. The book is called 'Predictably Irrational' by Dan Ariely. You'd like it.

I've done a lot of teaching in many different contexts; one-on-one instruction, coaching small groups and directing big ones. When you do a good job, it is its own rewards, when you do a bad job, it is its own punishment. No amount of money in the world can give you the feeling of changing someones life for the better, and no amount of salary in the world can spare you the shame of failing a student.

It frustrates me that people want to force education into the shallow mold of markets. We've been at it for a decade now and our educational system is still in shambles. Heck, market solutions have fucked up nearly every aspect of our country, from jobs to banks to mortgage fraud to war to poverty. Enough is enough.

@dystopianfuturetoday

I disagree. For one, I think most people who feel they have a career and not just a job to get by are passionate about what they do, perhaps not initially but certainly over time as they become experienced. They might not be educating future generations, but they're contributing to society in their own way.

I honestly can't figure out how paying good teachers more cheapens anything. I certainly can't see how it would discourage them from teaching in the first place. I can definitely imagine though that there are plenty of capable, educated and willing would-be teachers who are simply not happy with a teacher's salary. Look at the amount of people who come back from the private sector to teach at university.

And the fact of the matter is, there already is merit pay in teaching. Principals and managerial level positions get paid way more. Why hasn't this destroyed the fabric of educational society?

Education for the most part is very compartmentalized and I would argue very measurable. Say you teach a unit in maths for a whole year. You have massive control over direction for that period. Yes, you depend on cooperation from prior year levels, and you may depend on subjects that tie into yours (physics perhaps) or vice versa. But you have huge amounts of autonomy throughout that year, and a huge potential to individual shape outcomes.

You oversimplify the rest of the private sector. Take banks, arguably the most purely money driven. At the insitutional level have a front end staff that deals directly with clients and wants to maximise profitable deals. Typically, a separate team counter-balances them on credit risk, and another on market risk (interest/exchange risk). In combination, the goal attained is not simply blunt returns, it's risk weighed outcomes, which can only be achieved through cooperation because of mutually competing objectives.

I'm just not seeing how if well organised, schools can't be the same. Well structured, the Coke and Pepsi in your examples would be schools. Somehow both these corporations have managed to work together as a team despite most employees chasing wage rises essentially at the expense of the other, right?

If teachers are so driven and personally motivated as you say, why is it then so few are willing to go to under performing schools to raise their standards? After all, if they were so intrinsically altruistic, that would be the first place to start, no? Teaching in the 'burbs to upper middle class kids with parents who have already motivated them to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is any good isn't exactly hard right? I find it difficult to see how you can deny here that incentives would help.

I think we have different paradigms on education. Yes, great schools should be full of engaging extracurricular activities to choose from and develop students as a person not just as a capable cog in the working machine economy. But the great schools in the US, over here in Australia are already great. The issue is the ones who can't provide a basic education. The focus here doesn't need to be wishy washy but on structured targets achieved in the best way they can. There should be expected basic standards of knowledge to be reached and if progress is consistently not being made towards them, there should be consequences.

Again, my experience has been that good exams, even the internationally standardised exams I took at the end of high school required critical thinking. Bad exam design is the problem.

You make it sound like people in the private sector carry around a jail ball weight of mistrust and fear around with them everywhere they go. People spend upwards of 8 hours a day in a skilled position generally because they enjoy what they do. They want to do well, and the pay reward is ultimately ancillary and a reinforcing look for the will to do well that they had in the first place.

As for the last comment, again we philosophically disagree but I would say markets didn't. In the US at least, poor regulation and the domination of policy direction by collective interests (corporate and union) through poor campaign financing caused the recent mess and much of what continues. Take a look at Australia as an example, and you will see a very different story. None of our banks got in trouble much because of good regulation, interest groups do not dominate elections and our economy never went into recession.

*promote discussion?

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, March 6th, 2011 5:39am PST - promote requested by RedSky.

@RedSky @dystopianfuturetoday

Let me see if I can split the difference on what you guys are talking about, because I think both of you are right, and that your ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

DFT is right in saying that the motivation for teachers should largely derive from enjoying the work itself -- the joy that comes from equipping children with knowledge so they can do better in the world, and the impact that doing this over a long timespan can have on the society they live in.

RedSky is also right that money does matter, and that we shouldn't be asking our teachers to be taking vows of poverty, and be forever denied getting individualized reward for individual success...but DFT is also right to be suspicious of monetary incentives becoming a distraction from the actual point of teaching.

So my answer to that is that we just need to be careful about how we design monetary incentives. I think we can do better than seniority, and I think DFT (and Ravitch) are right about this whole idea that it should be based on the performance of your students against some standardized test being a load of bullshit.

The problem with doing things that way is that it doesn't present a monetary incentive to be a better teacher, it gives you a monetary incentive to make sure your class is populated with the smartest students. Just look at how "prestigious" private universities operate -- the bar for getting accepted is so high that just being accepted as a student there is all most potential employers care about, not some sort of test scores. If they were really good at educating people, why would the barrier for entry be so high? Do they really think people with only a 1200 on their SAT can't learn anything from any of their classes? If so, doesn't that suggest that the "education" they're providing is really just a set of reading materials and exercises that the students use to teach themselves, and not a unique professional service worthy of the 5-figure pricetag?

My own idea on monetary incentives is that it should be based on how much a teacher improves their students. Give students a standardized test at the beginning of a semester, and give them another test at the end of the semester. Subtract the first score from the second score, and use that number as a basis for giving teachers a bonus.

Teachers who consistently wind up with negative numbers should be fired, teachers with consistently high numbers should be given permanent increases in their salary, and opportunities for advancement (such as they are). Teachers who do best nationwide should probably be studied, to see if there are techniques other teachers could learn from. Likewise, nationally underperforming teachers could be used as a roadmap of what not to do.

At an institutional level, we probably should also offer incentives for teachers to work in schools with generally underperforming students.

Off the top of my head I'm not sure how we set up good incentives for school administrators, but the same logic applies -- try to design the incentive to reward actual performance, and not how well someone games the system.

I don't think incentives would make much (if any) difference in the performance or recruitment of educators. Despite all the bashing done to educators, I've still not seen any evidence to suggest that they are proportionally worse than employees of other professions. Teaching is a very public activity with a high level of accountability. Between parents, administrators, fellow teachers, students, public performance, testing and grading, there is plenty of incentive not to suck.

If you were going to offer some kind of monetary incentive, why not give the teacher extra funds for his or her class? Money for extra books, desks, repairs, music, instruments, art supplies, sports equipment and other educational materials etc. That would mean a lot to a teacher in these days of ever shrinking education budgets. Or you could send the teachers off to one of the many teaching conferences that are hosted each year. A weekend at a teaching convention in Washington DC on New Orleans would not only be fun for the teacher, but productive for the school and students as well. The flip side of this argument is that the teachers with tougher assignments might be better served with extra funds and professional training.

Here are the 3 best things we could do to fix education:

1) Fix our economy/Fix our democracy: No small task, but it would be a miracle elixir of sorts. It would curb our war machine, help create new jobs, and in the process, provide food, shelter, less stressed out parents and stability for American kids.

2) Limit corporate influence over our political process: Corporations want public education to fail so that they can privatize and profit. As long as big money runs the government, it's going to be difficult to get the votes for a decent education policy.

3) Create a decent education policy: Find an intelligent alternative to NCLB (or whatever Obama is calling his redux) that students can connect with. Perhaps you could analyze the most successful education models out there and make a hybrid of characteristics that would best fit the particulars of our culture.

@dystopianfuturetoday agreed on all of the above. I'm definitely not one of those people who thinks the entire fix for education is coming up with inventive pay schemes for teachers, I'm just trying to point out that even if you are one of those people, the kinds of things you see bandied about aren't designed very well. Well, unless the design was to look like it's meant to make education better across the board, while really having the effect of making sure that only wealthy people have the ability to provide a good education for their children...

My gut feeling is that a lot of our educational problems are actually general economic disparity problems, coupled with the usual conservative brain damage keeping our schools persistently underfunded, and in many cases systematically sabotaged by ideological nuts on the school boards (see Texas).

There's probably something we could learn from other countries in terms of how to do it better (since pretty much all of them do), but mostly our issue is that generally we've let that conservative brain damage really infect our social psyche to the point where every discussion of public policy is always, without any exception at all, being a nasty debate between "do something" and "do nothing", rather than people coming up with competing solutions to a problem that we all agree needs to be addressed.

This RSA video explains the problems with merit pay better than I could: http://videosift.com/video/What-motivates-us