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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP, you keep going after this golden carrot of rewarding the "good" teachers.  How do you know if a teacher is good?  Research shows that there is no way to determine that quantitively and in an unbiased way.

There is no effective way to evaluate teachers because there is no effective way to equalize the product, which is students.

Research shows that students from high socio-economic families do appreciably better on standardized tests than students from low socio-economic families.  Therefore, teachers who teach in high socio-economic schools will always outperform teachers who teach in low socio-economic schools because teachers in high socio-economic schools are working with a population that is already ahead.

Then you must consider other factors that can negatively or positively impact students, and teachers working in low socio-economic schools always come out on the bottom.  You can have the greatest teacher in the world but put that teacher in a classroom with students who are worried about where they're going to sleep that night, or who are so hungry they are about to faint, or who slept outside and don't have access to a toilet so they have to poop so badly that they can't concentrate, or ... well, you get the picture.

It is an uphill battle.

Great minds have been working at the teacher evaluation process for decades and have been stymied.  Even the Gates foundation attempted to do refine the teacher evaluation process and had to stop in defeat.  In fact, the ASA put out a study two or three years ago that shows that teacher quality accounts for only 18% of student performance; the rest of student performance is determined by other factors.  That's pretty staggering.

Instead of beating the dead horse with your "we'll only pay the good teachers" bit, you should be more focused on how we improve the whole system.  When you open your mind, PP, and look at the research, you'll see that your method won't work.  So take some time off, readjust your attitude and come back with you're in a more open frame of mind.

DP[/quote]

I'm sorry, I was responding to 19:17 but I took so long to type that a bunch of others came in with responses.  I didn't mean you, 19:32.[/quote]

DP, but teacher quality not significantly affecting student performance isn't exactly a compelling arguement for paying teachers more. It would instead argue for reducing qualifications.

Though, 18% is actually a lot more than I expected. [/quote]

I beg to differ.  The 18% means to me that we don't have to go after the best and the brightest and divert the great thinkers to working in the classroom where they won't do as much good as if they were in a job that required their great thinking.  Instead, we can use the middle-of-the-road teachers to do the work.  The trick is that we need enough of them that they can do the job effectively and efficiently.  Right now we don't have enough of them.

If you've ever studied economics and market forces, then you know that when you have a scarcity in a workforce, you need to improve pay and work conditions.  Ergo, improving pay and work conditions for teachers will help us attract more teachers either into the field or back into the field after they've left it.  Nasty parents vilifying teachers, bad administrators mistreating teachers, and poorly run school systems treating teachers like children have contrived to make the problem that we have, not enough teachers, so now we need to do what we can to fix the problem.[/quote]

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