Public School Teachers - Performance Pay (2 Viewers)

[ivanaivan]

Hey check out what mr microsoft got to say about the teaching system.

YouTube - Bill Gates on creating great teachers

 

[^CoSMic DoRiS^^]

Despite what it might look like teaching isn't the cushiest job out there. If you want to be good at it, it takes up enough time and effort outside your actual working hours to make it just as difficult as any other profession. Anyone who just does it as a last resort/they think it'll be shit easy/they're shit at everything else is a moron and should be shot. There are far too many of these people, IMO.

I'm against performance pay for a number of reasons, but I'm totally for the firing of shit teachers - if, that is, we can find a fair and accurate way to determine who they are and I haven't seen or heard any ideas up til now that would be OK. You can't base a teacher's competence on published marks because there's too many other factors influencing that.

Possibly the idea of stricter ''ongoing learning''/professional development/whatever has something in it...I don't see why teachers should not have to do this to a good standard anyway.

 

[bwendan]

For every 1 good teacher, there are 5 shit teachers.

For every 1 actual statistic 5 are made up on the spot.

 

[katie tully]

For every 1 actual statistic 5 are made up on the spot.

I am a statistician, do not question me.

 

[smitty2007]

If uni lecturers can research and publish and submit things as well as prepare for classes and mark exams with less holiday time, why can't teachers?

You're a fool Lentern if you seriously believe your parents aren't the exception to the rule. And I see you proposing no alternative to increase the standards of teaching or teachers, except a whole lot of 'blah blah BUT MY PARENTS "

Nobody is disputing that your parents are probably very good. They're also very rare.

And if you saw Kman's post re: performance measuring, you would have seen he proposed a regression analysis method instead of just looking at the marks of the students in a single cohort and determining the teachers worth on that alone.

You will find that many lecturers will have a team of markers to help them out. Our lecturers never ran the tutorials, and it was the people that ran the tutorials that did the marking for the lecturer.
Also many lecturers only have one subject to coordinate over a semester. Compared to teachers who can have up to 7 classes to coordinate a semester.

 

[smitty2007]

I am a statistician, do not question me.

Where did you pluck the figures from to start with.

 

[katie tully]

Where did you pluck the figures from to start with.

A range of methods using a range of techniques, I think you'll find my results to withstand a 99% hypothesis test.

 

[loquasagacious]

The Greens’ amendment apparently survived because it came late, and was about an emotional issue in a night sitting where some MPs genuinely feared media insensitivity. Notwithstanding that concern, Parliament should have realised it was cynical and ineffective but, unfortunately, the amendment wasn’t rejected. If cooler heads had prevailed, most MPs would have instead endorsed a voluntary code of conduct for newspapers.

Now the debate will continue for another month until Parliament resumes and then we’ll see whether Rees sides with parents or with bureaucrats who have poor performance and worse resource allocation to hide – that is, the bottom line.

In the lengthy upper house debate, one of my Liberal colleagues, Charlie Lynn, said: ‘‘As a parent, I would have loved to have had a system that enabled me to look at the schools and find where I could best place my daughters.

"We know that parents are prepared to sacrifice almost everything for their children’s education. I think parents should have the opportunity to obtain as much information as possible to enable them to make proper decisions … ’’

I share Lynn’s view that parents want the information. And we all (MPs and families) would agree that any editor who seeks to sensationalise school listings would be quickly condemned.

It is important to remember the objective of greater transparency for government-held information, whether about public or private schools or other issues. More open government is a key objective of the Liberal Party. In public policy, transparency remains one of the few levers to pressure governments and bureaucracies to improve public sector and private sector performance.

Today’s state governments are lumbering dinosaurs in need of long overdue and substantial reform. In the community interest, more transparency is critical.

Peter Debnam | Benchmarks for school performance | School performance tables

Perhaps a little late to the party in terms of providing comment when the issue first arose but an interesting read nonetheless.

 

[banco55]

I'm against performance pay for a number of reasons, but I'm totally for the firing of shit teachers - if, that is, we can find a fair and accurate way to determine who they are and I haven't seen or heard any ideas up til now that would be OK. You can't base a teacher's competence on published marks because there's too many other factors influencing that.

This is a straw man argument that the teacher's unions always put out. Noone disputes that there are other factors that influence students' performance but there are lots of ways to structure a system to minimize the influence of those factors. ie an often proposed model is to evaluate a group of students from year to year. Given computers it would be damn easy to track students marks over time. Say you've got 26 kids in a class you could easily work out the average amount they have improved since last semester with a fairly simple computer program.

I'd also point out that plenty of professions have a performance pay component and in those jobs the people can't control 100 % of the factors either yet they live in the real world and don't have unions that can buy off political parties to protect their most incompetent members from the consequences of their incompetence.

 

[^CoSMic DoRiS^^]

This is a straw man argument that the teacher's unions always put out. Noone disputes that there are other factors that influence students' performance but there are lots of ways to structure a system to minimize the influence of those factors. ie an often proposed model is to evaluate a group of students from year to year. Given computers it would be damn easy to track students marks over time. Say you've got 26 kids in a class you could easily work out the average amount they have improved since last semester with a fairly simple computer program.

I'd also point out that plenty of professions have a performance pay component and in those jobs the people can't control 100 % of the factors either yet they live in the real world and don't have unions that can buy off political parties to protect their most incompetent members from the consequences of their incompetence.

Sure you could work out average improvement easily and that's fine. But I have a slight problem with it being based on summative assessments (tests, exams etc) which is how I have always been led to believe this averaging thing would happen. If you really want to see how students are improving (or not improving) then formative assessment is a better way to go, IMO. However since formative assessment is often not actually marked or graded (though it can be) it would be difficult to use this as the basis for performance pay, even though it would often be the more accurate ''measurement'' of the progress the students are making.

If there is a way to represent student progress in terms of their actual progress rather than just their exam marks from term to term then OK, maybe we can think about moving towards performance pay.

 

[loquasagacious]

Sure you could work out average improvement easily and that's fine. But I have a slight problem with it being based on summative assessments (tests, exams etc) which is how I have always been led to believe this averaging thing would happen. If you really want to see how students are improving (or not improving) then formative assessment is a better way to go, IMO. However since formative assessment is often not actually marked or graded (though it can be) it would be difficult to use this as the basis for performance pay, even though it would often be the more accurate ''measurement'' of the progress the students are making.

If there is a way to represent student progress in terms of their actual progress rather than just their exam marks from term to term then OK, maybe we can think about moving towards performance pay.

What is wrong with using summative assessments?

 

[^CoSMic DoRiS^^]

What is wrong with using summative assessments?

There's nothing exactly wrong with it, I just think formative assessment is a more accurate and fairer way to do it, is all.

 

[loquasagacious]

There's nothing exactly wrong with it, I just think formative assessment is a more accurate and fairer way to do it, is all.

Why?

 

[banco55]

There's nothing exactly wrong with it, I just think formative assessment is a more accurate and fairer way to do it, is all.

How is it more accurate when it's necessarily so much more subjective? I'm suspicious of formative assessment as it's very easy to manipulate and doesn't necessarily answer fairly basic questions about student achievement (a kid either understands how to do long division or they don't). I suspect the teacher's unions like it for the same reasons that I don't like it. There's a reason professional and accreditation exams bodies rely on old fashioned tests rather than wishy washy formative assessment stuff.

 

[^CoSMic DoRiS^^]

Why?

Both summative and formative have their place, right. But if we're talking about showing improvement, formative assessment is better suited. Say for example a kid gets 90% in an English test. That's fantastic, but that mark says nothing about where he started from at the beginning of the unit and where he went from there. It just says he got 90% in the end. You can't really judge how the teacher performed based off that, what if the teacher did nothing and the kid is just bright or lucky? Similarly if the same kid got 20% it doesn't prove the teacher is necessarily terrible. Formative assessment says more what the student can do and is learning to do, and implies more about how the teacher is performing in terms of structuring and supporting the learning of their students. For English, some kind of continuous reflective task where there is continuous feedback, revision, etc would show firstly that the student was actually learning something and improving from a beginning point, and secondly that the teacher was actively involved in helping this process along.

One problem I do see though is that this kind of assessment works better in humanities/arts/etc subjects, although there are ways to do it in maths/science/whatever as well.

 

[mr_robato]

Guy's,

Teachers Union has a habit of going on strikes every now and then when ever targeted. If they don't like something, they'll strike. Politicians can't afford to lose precious votes of parents (and of coarse the teachers would swing their vote).


That ought add to the equation a fair bit.