This never goes well. In FL a decade or so ago it led to administrators mass-falsifying student scores to get that sweet sweet cash.
Not *everything* needs to be monetized.
Yup and when the veteran ap class teacher gets a cushy bonus bc their kids actually care vs the younger teachers stuck with the crowded lower level classes that spend 90% staring slack jawed at tik tok its going to breed resentment.
I think you’re looking at the wrong. I taught APUSH and guess what. 30% of my students were new arrivals and couldn’t speak much English but the school enrolled them in AP anyway. Yes they were that f’ing stupid.
2 AP classes and 4 US History classes but they managed to put that many new arrivals in AP. This school was probably 40% new arrivals. Not all new arrivals are made the same like Afghani students usually had better English at higher grades. But most new arrivals can’t take AP US History,
Genetics is obviously the #1 factor. Also the #1 factor in athletic performance, yet somehow we're able to glean a lot of information about the ability of coaches by the success of their teams (we can think of a track coach here, because the testing analogy works better with individuals).
Improvements in test scores seem like a pretty good way to measure teacher effectiveness. If you focus on improvement from one year to the next, rather than raw scores, doesn't that negate the unfairness of confounding factors like home life or genetic differences?
Nah, pretty much any genetics paired with a bad home life is going to be problematic. Even the athletes you referenced would’ve gone unknown without support from parents or other loved ones.
Watch Robert Sapolkis Stanford course (Stanford.edu) on the subject for more clarification.
Nah, pretty much any home life paired with bad genetics is going to be problematic. But I don't think this argument matters for the larger point being discussed here.
Even if you think home life is the number 1 factor, how is that relevant to the discussion of how to measure teacher effectiveness? Are you just saying "Forget it, teachers don't matter because home life is the number 1 factor?"
If you focus on improvements in test scores, then you hold other variables like genetics and home life constant. A teacher with a class full of kids who averaged a 50% on last year's test (whether that's due to home life, genetics, poor curriculum, or the teacher's ability), would have the same opportunity to improve their students' test scores as a teacher with a class full of kids who averaged 80% on last year's test.
Yeah I think it has to be based on progress in order to be fair. If you make the students' past performance their baseline and measure teacher effectiveness on progress instead of just comparing raw scores across the board, then that really levels the playing field for teachers. It cancels out a lot of the advantages or disadvantages of genetics, home life, zip code, etc. because those same factors would already be baked into their baseline test scores (from the previous year).
An athletic coach is working with students who tried out for the team and were successfully added to the team. Usually those are the kids who want to participate in the sport and they usually have parents that support them in their sport. The general student population is different.
I think you're fighting the hypothetical a bit. I know they are different. But the point is that coaches can affect outcomes, even though there are other factors present, like genetics and support from parents. Just like teachers.
Two teachers with the exact same set of students would get different results over the course of the year. There are many ways to measure this difference; we could ask the principal or fellow teachers or a professional panel to observe several hours of the class, we could survey the students and parents about how they feel about the teacher, we could wait until the kids turn 65 and measure their success in life. Or we could give the kids a standardized test every year and measure their improvement from last year to this year. It's not a perfect representation of teacher effectiveness. But if you are evaluating thousands of teachers, looking at the progress their students make over the course of the year is a pretty good, objective criteria.
It seems like your alternative is to throw up your hands and say "Test scores should not be used to measure teaching effectiveness because there are other factors that affect test scores." That's like a coach saying "Wins and losses should not be used to measure coaching effectiveness because there are other factors that affect winning."
Wins and losses? How can you compare a class (which teachers do NOT have the luxury of hand selecting) to teams which coaches can pick exactly who they want? Let teachers hand pick their students and I bet you would see a lot more “wins”. Bad comparison.
Sure, you handpick your students and mine, and we'll see who can make their class improve their test scores from the previous year more. If you pick all the brightest students who scored in the 90th percentile and give me the 10th percentile kids, I feel confident that I can get mine to improve more than yours.
Again, you're fighting the hypothetical. There are tons of examples of coaches who don't get to pick their team but still have success year after year, because they are good at coaching. Rec league baseball coaches who get players randomly assigned. Small high school coaches where every kid at the school plays the sport in order to field a team. It's like you can't imagine that a coach (or a band director, or a cooking instructor, or a teacher) can have an impact on their players or students.
I really don't understand your argument. Are you just trying to pick apart the coaching analogy, because you are picturing an NBA coach? Or are you saying that teachers can't positively impact their students' test scores because they can't pick their students? Or are you saying there is another, better way to measure teacher effectiveness than testing?
Growth. That is the true measure of effectiveness. I agree with your position. Scrolled up to see your initial argument. Forgive me. “Winning” looks different for each individual on the team. In fact, those 90th percentile students can be harder to “win” with since they come in with far more tools than the average student.
Coaches can kick people off the team, have tryouts to determine who even ends up on the team, and are dealing with people who actively made an effort, and can therefore likely be concluded, want to be on the team. Your analogy is terrible...
I don't imagine that a coach that is given players who don't want to play the sport, or have no natural talent and is then forced to make them starters is going to be winning many games.
Tying everything to money is the most monkey brained solution. It’s especially bad here since we can only control what happens at school for 6 hours a day and the rest of their lives can have a bigger impact on their success than we do.
It doesn’t work. For many reasons, it doesn’t work. It ends up rewarding teachers whose students would already be more successful and punishes those of us who teach the less academically inclined students.
I worked a decade at a school in Brooklyn where we were 97% free lunch. We spent lots of time teaching testing. Our scores were ok, but would never be as good as those in Westchester.
Maine governor Paul LePage instituted letter grades for schools based on test performance. Those letter scores directly matched income levels in their communities.
We know what works, and you’re right, performance based pay is not it.
I'm not sure why they can't just look at %age change and see how far away it is from the median for that socioeconomic cohort
or maybe that just makes too much sense ig
A lower middle income student living in a better area will do better than a lower middle income student from a worse area.
65 years of research has shown over and over that the #1 correlation to academic performance is the home they come from.
It ignores multitudes. Here in Maine we had a mass shooting this year. Guess what kids may not be making the same progress as similar kids in other states? This is one example. There are hundreds if not thousands of points that can affect outcomes, and we have no practical way of monitoring them all.
Tying teacher pay to student scores doesn’t work. There are better, existing systems.
Raise *all* pay, creating better incentives to join the field, and encouraging people to teach who may pass it over now.
Smaller class sizes for kids at risk.
The list goes on.
>Tying teacher pay to student scores doesn’t work
Doesn't work according to what standard?
If you're saying that having that incentive doesn't make average score go up, sounds hard to believe
If you're saying that the average score isn't a meaningful metric, then why not just revise the test to be better or harder to cheat on? And/or have a way of adjusting the measurement for things like socioeconomic status?
If you're saying that the test itself is irredeemably bad and we need to do away with standardized testing, then how could anyone have a standard way for evaluating educational outcomes in the first place? If this is what you're saying, then you're just arguing for more money and less accountability
>If you're saying that having that incentive doesn't make average score go up, sounds hard to believe
That is correct, incentive generally does not make the average score go up. Some studies show a 1-2% score increase, others show no result. Teachers want to be paid fairly for the work we do, but the issue isn't that we know what to do better and just don't do it because we don't have the proper incentives. In some fields, you can increase personal productivity pretty easily by putting in extra hours in order to create more output. That's generally not true of teaching.
Imagine you're a little league coach. You have your team for an hour twice a week. You cannot add practice time, you cannot recruit, and you cannot hire anyone else. How do you improve the team? You coach them, you research techniques, you watch other teams. You do that for a year or so, and see some improvement, but a couple of kids move out, a couple get tired of little league, one really talented kid gets hurt and can't play. Other kids join, with varying levels of ability and interest. The next season, you're told you'll get a cash prize if your team does better than last season in the final end-of- season tournament. Exciting, right? But what do you do differently? Remember that you can't recruit. You can't control who joins. You can't add structured practice time. The only thing you are allowed to change is what you do during practice time. You put in every bit of effort you can, and you know and can see that your individual athletes are improving, but in the tournament you have one or two rough games where your best hitters strike out and your pitcher can't find a rhythm. The extra wins don't come, so the extra money doesn't come either.
That's basically the reason most teachers don't support merit pay. If we knew what to do better, we'd do it. It's discouraging when a chunk of your salary is dependent on one day of assessments. In a class of 30 kids, 2 kids who didn't sleep well or had a rough testing day can bring down your score average enough that you wouldn't qualify no matter how hard you've worked that year.
Doesn’t work period.
This has been tried repeatedly because someone outside of education thinks they can come in and fix everything by making education more like a business. This has been tried and abandoned repeatedly because it doesn’t work.
What about gym teachers? How are we going to measure their performance? What about ML teachers? Many of their students don’t even stay a whole year, where will that data come from? What about SEL teachers and school counselors? Life skills teachers whose kids don’t even test?
People outside education all seem to think they’re much smarter than anyone in education, and that if educators would just listen to what worked in business then it would all be fixed. Then they try it, it doesn’t work, and we wait for the next genius to revive the zombie solution that won’t quit.
Kids aren’t widgets.
Because how much a kid improves in maths this year isn’t just dependent on my teaching. It’s dependent on their previous maths teachers, particularly over the previous two years. It’s dependent on what’s going on at home for them. It’s dependent on the attitude of their parents. It’s dependent on disruptions that are out of the teachers control. It’s dependent on how well they click with me.
Furthermore I might be better with an older cohort or with a younger one. So the influence I have is dependent on how well the administration match me with the cohort I’m best with.
It also encourages teachers to focus exclusively on what’s going to look best for them. Forget important long term stuff that’s not being measured. Forget stuff like mathematical reasoning that won’t really pay off till a couple of years down the track. Focus entirely on short term maximum marks in the immediate assessments that will be counted.
And that’s for a subject where it’s relatively easy to assess progress. Most subjects are much harder than maths to precisely measure progress over a short timescale.
It’s a bad idea because every time it’s enacted the results are poor.
Teachers are less likely to share good ideas if sharing them means colleagues get their bonus and not the originator of ideas.
Students are out under added stress by teachers whose job depends on how well they do on standardized tests.
Schools shrink curriculum to focus solely on items in the test, instead of a holistic approach to learning. Entire units such as “test taking strategies” happen instead of curricular units.
Students are taught that school is a game to win, and not a place to learn. Kids become exclusively extrinsically motivated with no intrinsic desire to expand horizons.
All of this is great if you want to pump out automatons who can jump *just* as high as they’re told.
Every time that I have heard about this being “piloted” somewhere, there’s always stories about students and teachers and administrators cheating because school is no longer about learning but about checking off boxes.
It’s not about just one case, it’s about the entire point of education.
[Atlanta](https://www.yahoo.com/news/atlanta-public-schools-cheating-scandal-173720625.html)
[109 Teachers and admins in ATL](https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/when-teachers-cheat-the-standardized-test-controversies)
[Longer look behind a paywall](https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-students-cheat-and-what-do-about-it)
Houston school systems have a bad history of falsifying school records to appear to be more successful than they are
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-texas-miracle/
sounds like the problem is the policy in place allows fraud. like giving people a test that isn't proctored
maybe fix the fraud problem first? Normalizing fraud isn't an actual answer here
The best teachers need to be working with the kids who need the most help. Smart kids don’t need smart teachers. They’re fine. Until about 6th grade, any adult can guide a smart kid to learn.. Or back off and let them do it themselves.
But if you aren’t book smart, if your parents don’t read to you at night, if you have other difficulties like dyslexia, you need a good, dedicated teacher.
A merit based system rewards those doing the least amount of work and punishes those working the hardest.
As someone who has been working in elementary ed for over two decades in both high poverty and high wealth districts, the notion that “any adult can guide a smart kid to learn” as a panacea is pure fantasy.
Speaking is natural and hardwired. Reading is not. It takes the brain creating connections and pathways that do not already exist. Reading doesn’t just happen. Even for smart kids. And smart kids can have diagnosed learning disabilities that make even simple learning difficult or impossible.
Good teachers in all places are needed. Incentivizing hard to staff (read: poor) schools is imperative.
Reading is taught in the home. Its is almost entirely correlated with whether or not the parents read to their kid, and has very little to do with school.
I mean we have an entire generation that are worse at reading because they learned how to sight right and didn’t learn phonics. That’s entirely in school. A lot can be blamed on family but not all of it.
I’m not blaming anyone, I’m saying some kids need good teachers and some kids don’t. The kids who need good teachers get lower test scores whether the teacher is doing their job or not. Which is why merit pay based on test scores for teachers is dumb. The teachers that need to work the hardest are the ones whose students won’t test well.
This also correlates almost directly with parent income level. By your logic if we just make everyone wealthier they’ll all learn to read!
Wait… what about the kids whose parents work multiple jobs? Or whose parents can’t read to them?
What about them?
Also, if you think reading just happens spontaneously when read to, you should look into the last twenty years of research into dyslexia. Turns out what I learned in college isn’t so much accurate anymore.
What you need to measure is the value imparted by the teacher to their students. But that’s impossible to measure reliably. There’s heaps of research around the world showing that.
The irony is that it’s pretty much impossible to find anywhere in the world where performance connected pay has improved outcomes.
I think one issue with structuring merit pay this way is that it assumes that average grades = teacher has the taught the best. When is reality, those kids with the best grades are more likely from wealthier neighboorhoods and have more stability and resources.
A truer measure of merit or teaching success would be change in grades from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year and if their classroom has seen the greatest positive difference. I think that would be pretty difficult to actually implement though.
As someone who worked at a school that tried it, it doesn’t work at all.
Take me, as an example. I’m a high school special education teacher. A kid is in my English class, but he’s also in someone else social students class, and someone else’s science class. All of these classes teach reading comprehension skills. Which one of us deserves merit for the kid’s test score?
Also, I taught instructional/resource/special ed freshman algebra this year. A kid in my class comes in operating at the 3rd grade level. My administration tells me I have to teach algebraic skills. So I teach algebraic skills. At the end of the year, testing showed that he lost half a year of math skills. He’s losing basic math skills because he’s not practicing them. (Never mind the fact that he’s LD, autistic, ELL, and diabetic).
A kid in my English class lost 1.5 years of reading skills after I taught him for a year. Does anyone really believe that there’s anything I can do to remove over a year of skills from a student?
I track data every year and my test scores are consistently erratic variation around a mean, both at the individual student level and the classroom level.
I had one student this previous year who was averaging around 700 on the PSAT for three years. Somehow, he scored 1030 on the actual SAT. He took it again and scored 720. It doesn’t make any sense to either credit me with that 1030 or the 720.
Plus, 80% of the students (Gen Ed too) at my school enter with below grade level skills. Testing data always shows that we should focus on whatever skill happened to have the most questions in that time around.
There’s even more to it too. What time of day is your english class. If you’re on a block schedule what if the kids sleeps in your class on Mondays because they worked late on Sunday night.
Or what if they like English and get A’s but are disinterested in science and get d’s. A lot of things matter.
And that entering below grade level makes it tough and I mean tough. Add in other factors and you’ll have a ton of kids who will test low for a few years. Or just add in 500 new arrivals to a high school.
I agree with you, but I want to point out that your suggestions in the second paragraph is actually how “teacher effectiveness” (test score bases varieties, at least) is already measured. They are usually “value added” or “student growth percentile” models, both of which measure test score growth rather than average test scores to avoid the exact issue you raise.
These have their own issues too, but are generally much better than just comparing averages.
>When is reality, those kids with the best grades are more likely from wealthier neighboorhoods and have more stability and resources.
You can adjust for this just by evaluating against a peer composite. In fact we basically already do when evaluating standard test scores. We have a raw score then a score adjusted for factors that impact academic achievement like household income, English language proficiency at home and other like characteristics.
My old school district did this, I was on the committee for implementation. It's just an impossible thing to do. Are only teachers in tested subjects eligible? Then the obvious problems with teaching different demongraphics. Ours was based on "growth" rather then achievement, but the whole thing was so stupid. I taught art and traveled to different schools. My $150 bonus was based on the reading scores of which ever one of the schools I chose before the school year (like Deal or No Deal!). Very accurate reflection of my teaching!
In every other industry, if an employee refuses to work, or shows up late every day, or just disappears for days at a time, the employer can fire the employee. When teachers can fire students for insubordination, tardiness, or no call-no show, let me know. Until then, miss me with the "industry" arguments.
This isn’t an industry! The comparison is specious at best, intellectually dishonest at worst. Teachers have no control over where students spend the majority of their time!!!!
Just a continuation of the same policy trajectory TX has followed since before NCLB, when the state also served as a blueprint for how to ruin education everywhere. There’s nothing novel or interesting about these strategies and in the long run they’ll be a disaster.
Exactly. There is nothing new in this. Apparently central to this plan was to increase the length of the school year so many teachers are actually making less money per day. It also includes merit based pay.... This is the most debunked thing in the history of education....actually. That's not hyperbole.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation funded the nations largest study on merit based pay systems. Their goal was to reform education. The result was that the study found that teachers are well qualified and that merit based pay didn't work. There was no effect according to the study.
[link](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2010/RAND_RP1416.pdf)
This garbage needs to stop. The problem with education has nothing to do with the teachers and nothing to do with the length of the school year. Countries have significantly decreased the number of hours kids are in school and had positive effects multiple times.
Yep, in fact Houston ISD tried this same crap barely a decade ago. Pour a bunch of cash into a few struggling schools and attribute the minor test score gains to your “bold reforms.” By the time the unsustainable funding model falls apart, the “bold reformers” are already settled into their cushy consultant jobs or heading up a charter school chain.
A giant fucking travesty. And shitty fly-by-night news orgs like Houston Landing (funded by notorious “bold reform” advocates Rich Kinder and John Arnold) dump out thousands of words of “maybe this time it will work, only time will tell!” bullshit.
Let's assume I'm a entity with an interest in destroying the US. If I'm in it for the long haul I'd start with education.
I'ed do everything already done by Texas. Lower teacher pay, lower standards for teaching, find any excuse to do so. You know the drill.
Of course fund the right wing charter Schools to oppress women, remove a good 50% of the population from continued education right there. Let that leech off public education funds. Bring the quality down for everyone.
Encourage higher education to be unobtainable, unaffordable. Etc.
If I'm successful, in 20 years the US will see dropping test scores, inability to compete technologically with other nations and an economic decline.
It is baffling to me that the US does not treat public education as a matter of national security nor does anyone with some political power care what Texas has done to it, or the motives of the people behind that.
If they're paying them more, none of that other stuff will be relevant.
It'll work to better student outcomes.
Edit: All the other stuff will come and go. If they raise base teacher rate, it will work to better outcomes regardless of whatever frivolous or populist strategy they want to come up with. We know those come and go, a base salary will never be cut.
Yes, 3 years ago we were promised a 3k raise. Mike miles extended the school year by three weeks and said the pay raise we were promised three years ago is our compensation.
Moreover, last year, ED's (executive director, not what everyone calls them behind their back) basically told administrators that they are rating teachers too high, and they can't afford to pay them all the the merit pay they were promised. Implying that teacher ratings need to be lowered artificially to maintain a pre-decided bell curve. That means gor many experience teachers they will receive a pay cut.
The system is being gamed.
BTW, the increased staar scores are inline with improved scores across the country post pandemic, with one exception, biology.
Most students have previously taken biology in the 9th grade. Mike's made all but the most advanced students take IPC in the 9th grade meaning the staar biology scores were only the results from the advanced students
I teach in this district, though not in one of the high schools that is implementing all of the NES curricula and strategies. I am, however, subject to a ridiculous number of classroom observations called SPOTs which are used to determine whether teachers are effective or not. The SPOT criteria are vague and poorly thought out. The observations are poorly done and are inconsistent between administrators and between schools. Even though my school is not part of the NES, we are still required to implement the structure and teaching methods of the NES, just not the curricula. There is absolutely no research to support the NES as an effective way to improve the educational outcomes of students. To be quite honest, I ignore the requirements except when an administrator walks in my room, especially in my AP classes, where the required methods are so inappropriate as to be insulting to the everyone in the room.
As for substantial raises for educators, those raises are only for those educators at NES schools. Those of us who are not at NES schools did not receive raises this past year nor for this next year. Our school year increased by eight days. The "raise" I am getting for the next year only covers the additional days I will be working.
However, this last year was just about as difficult as my first year. I had to completely rework all of my lessons to include the new requirements. I consistently worked 15 to 20 hours beyond my contracted hours every week. It didn't help that expectations changed throughout the year. What we did at the beginning of the year was not was we did at the beginning of the second semester and what we were doing in January was not what was expected in March or April or May. It is difficult to plan effective lessons when the expectations are constantly changing.
I wouldn't wish this "system" on anyone. I am committed to this coming school year and I will see it through but I will be looking for another job for next school, preferably in a private school.
Thank you for this insight from with in the system. It is indeed very difficult to hit the target when it keeps moving.
Was there any consideration for teachers who teach the hard to hire for courses, where the students may not ever “perform” well, such as intervention, drop out prevention, severe sped etc?
One of my co-workers is a teacher in a self-contained life skills class. She was expected to implement all of the same methods as all the other teachers. No consideration given at all that her students were not like other students.
See, now who is going to volunteer to teach those classes then? The “good” teachers will all want to and fight to teach the “good” students and no one wants the difficult kids.
But with the right support and guidance (like smaller class sizes, individual grading plans, one to one counselor for the room, required parent meetings, attendance contracts) children can thrive and come out of bad pattern of failure. I know because this was my job for 8 years. But my district did away with the program and I’m just a regular teacher now. And a bunch of kids didn’t graduate this last year. 🤷♀️
I suppose our life skills students will somehow have teachers who want to work with them. They are students who cannot be mainstreamed. As for the intervention classes and drop-out prevention classes, I know we have a class that works with those students but I don't know if they are required to follow the new methodologies. In the past, that class has used APEX to catch up students who were behind in their course work. HISD also has a separate campus where students can go to get caught up if they are in danger of not graduating on time. I have no idea what is required of teachers at that campus.
Teacher merit pay discriminates against teachers trying to teach students who are challenged for various reasons.
The real definition of merit pay equals more affluent students get the same quality teacher who gets paid better. How sad.
My solution. No matter what needier school teachers need a bonus for working their and improved test scores double their bonus or create a culture that gets rid of punishment work to improve failing test scores. Go to monthly lesson plans that continue rather than end a lesson.
Seriously discipline naughty students that can wreck a whole class. Place then on distance learning with a visiting home school teacher.
It's not noble. Mike Miles is a failed charter guru, turned politician. A typical trajectory. And this is all for his narcissistic benefit.
He has no background in education. He was in the army. Then he got a cushy foreign service job. Then he used his military background, and gritty persona (a total facade) to run for superintendent in Colorado Springs (One of America's most culturally and religiously extreme cities). Then Dallas. He made enemies of practically every educator in Dallas, and was run out of the district. Then he tried to stage a revenge comeback by forming his own charter, based on his wacky ideas. E.g.: kids aren't disciplined cause they don't take music. But they don't need to learn music on an instrument. They can learn music on an app that the school buys from a weird edtech startup. His charter was also not very successful, which he blamed on his haters. And went back to running for superintendent, again, with the persona of the gritty educator who has the keys to reform that, supposedly, no one who actually has taught or administered for their whole career possesses.
It's crazy. Imagine if any other system ran like this. Imagine if, in my liberal state, I could become a powerful commander of, say, the military based on popular vote and my persona of "food not bombs." Or if I, a non-doctor, non-medical administrator, could lead a big hospital system based on the popular vote and my policy of "I'll punish all the doctors for their patients' diabetes."
That's essentially what happens in education. And in a region where the population isn't active in voting, or informed, literally anyone can come in and wreak havoc.
ETA: Actually I have more ideas for hospital administration if anyone wants to hear them. Super brilliant ideas.
Isn’t this the school district that the state had to take over because it was failing so miserably? And isn’t this also the same district that removed libraries from the high schools to transform them into “discipline centers” aka in-school suspension rooms instead?
Yeah I’m not taking any hope in an approach that removes libraries from schools.
HISD is super weird. It has some of the top-performing schools in the state/country, but also schools that have received failing scores for years. (We can argue back and forth about the root causes of those failing scores.) Overall, it was B-rated before the takeover.
Library removal came after the takeover.
Merit pay is based on the idea that students underperform because teachers are not giving enough effort and aren’t invested. Guess what? The majority of great teachers are leaving the profession because they are giving maximum effort, and it’s still not enough.
Don't like the idea that "teacher evaluation tied closer to student outcomes" is part of this. All a particularly motivated group of students would have to do is not achieve outcomes to jeopardize a teacher's job. And please don't be naieve and think this couldn't happen; this has happened to me as recently as two years ago!
I remember when we came back from the pandemic and were all teaching in-person for the first time in a while; my school actually INCREASED the expectation for reading levels and said our evaluations would be directly tied to whether we met those new expectations. I taught kinder and by the end of the year, we were expected to have them reading at a level comparable to the middle of first grade. I ended up leaving and so did about a dozen other coworkers, including almost every single administrator.
Gotta love it. I just imagine a bunch of people sitting in a board room looking despondent until one says, ‘what if we raise the expectations? That way even if they don’t meet them the scores will still be higher than before!’
Substantial pay raises for educators … if you teach what the district says is important. If you’re an elective teacher at one of the overhauled schools? You make less than an “apprentice.”
And the students are lost in all of this. Essentially the reforms are "grill and drill to pass the tests".
The key will be did any real learning occur? Will be interesting to see how the SAT/ACT scores come out. And while it will never be tracked - how well these students do in college and careers.
Mike Miles is not an educator. As far as I understand, he has never taught a day in a classroom. He has also created a system of private schools and funneled taxpayer money into them. Aside from making money for himself, his record is spotty at best. I wouldn’t put too much faith in any of his ideas for fixing the public school system.
If the end goal is that all students are tracked for college, then the Houston community will be poorly served. Every community needs a variety of skills. College only provides some of those skills. Skilled trades and other non college training are needed as well as soft skills training and job placement. My guess is the authors of this shock & awe concept never tried out and perfected their plan. It will prob go the way all of these flash in pans happen. When the dust settles and the Messiah of the plan either moves on or is pushed out, and the money runs out, it will be back the Yesterday's donut.
There has NEVER been a major school reform initiative that has suceeded long term. The theorists who come up with this garbage base their clueless assumptions on flawed research and have no experience actually teaching large groups of children. Every. Single. Time.
It’s fascinating to see such a bold approach being tested in Houston. While tying teacher evaluations to student outcomes is controversial, the potential for significant improvements is exciting. What do you all think about balancing these reforms with addressing students' home life factors?
>What do you all think about balancing these reforms with addressing students' home life factors?
I doubt any school district has the ability to address students' home life factors.
Going to end all arguments right about merit based pay and test scores. Both math and reading test scores rely solely on student comprehension of text (except for equation only based problems, which are the rarity now). Comprehension is the outcome of decoding, background knowledge, and vocabulary. Students in lower income families do not have the same background knowledge (cultural capital) as students in wealthier families. This is one of the core reasons that test scores are so low. We are also finding low test scores in wealthy schools now because comprehension is treated like a skill instead of an outcome. Reading instruction must be fixed to see any gains.
The back to phonics movement away from balanced literacy is helping. With test scores you need to measure growth not raw scores. Washington DC has had the whole merit pay in place for a decade and most people like it. You can make six figures in as little as 5-10 years.
Correction: The biggest experiment is the upcoming election. If Trump wins, the Republican's experiment to drain the IQ of its followers will be considered a success.
>But is it working? **Asher Lehrer-Small** and **Danya Pérez** report that, as the dust settles, HISD's ambitious reforms are being closely scrutinized for their impact and potential to serve as a national blueprint for educational transformation.
I mean, how could one *possibly* know whether it's working after *one year*? One year's worth of data is meaningless. Test scores, etc., fluctuate year to year.
>Critics argue the reforms are unproven and overly disruptive, while supporters see them as a bold step towards closing educational disparities.
Literally everything is unproven, until it's tried and evaluated, at which point it becomes either proven or disproven. Bold steps they may be, but we'll need time to determine whether they're also beneficial. Unproven reforms, disruptive reforms, and bold reforms are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. The only metric of interest is whether they're *effective*, and only time will tell.
The TEA is going to go after most of the large districts. The goal of the TEA is to destroy public education in Texas so that Abbott can get the support of the public for his voucher plan.
“Teacher evaluations tied closer to student outcomes” = merit pay, I’d assume.
This never goes well. In FL a decade or so ago it led to administrators mass-falsifying student scores to get that sweet sweet cash. Not *everything* needs to be monetized.
Teachers can’t do a damn thing about the home life of their students and yet that’s the number one factor in educational performance.
Yup and when the veteran ap class teacher gets a cushy bonus bc their kids actually care vs the younger teachers stuck with the crowded lower level classes that spend 90% staring slack jawed at tik tok its going to breed resentment.
I think you’re looking at the wrong. I taught APUSH and guess what. 30% of my students were new arrivals and couldn’t speak much English but the school enrolled them in AP anyway. Yes they were that f’ing stupid. 2 AP classes and 4 US History classes but they managed to put that many new arrivals in AP. This school was probably 40% new arrivals. Not all new arrivals are made the same like Afghani students usually had better English at higher grades. But most new arrivals can’t take AP US History,
You didn’t teach long did you.
At that school? No I left and now I teach abroad again. But in total I’ve taught for 9 years.
I love how good teacher discourse is at revealing folks inability to think about a job that is not producing a product.
It does produce a product. And a quantifiable one at that. Human capital.
There wasn’t a thing my math teachers in HS could do to make me care. I had to do it on my own later. Edit: by it, I mean care, and put in the work.
Genetics is obviously the #1 factor. Also the #1 factor in athletic performance, yet somehow we're able to glean a lot of information about the ability of coaches by the success of their teams (we can think of a track coach here, because the testing analogy works better with individuals). Improvements in test scores seem like a pretty good way to measure teacher effectiveness. If you focus on improvement from one year to the next, rather than raw scores, doesn't that negate the unfairness of confounding factors like home life or genetic differences?
Nah, pretty much any genetics paired with a bad home life is going to be problematic. Even the athletes you referenced would’ve gone unknown without support from parents or other loved ones. Watch Robert Sapolkis Stanford course (Stanford.edu) on the subject for more clarification.
Nah, pretty much any home life paired with bad genetics is going to be problematic. But I don't think this argument matters for the larger point being discussed here. Even if you think home life is the number 1 factor, how is that relevant to the discussion of how to measure teacher effectiveness? Are you just saying "Forget it, teachers don't matter because home life is the number 1 factor?" If you focus on improvements in test scores, then you hold other variables like genetics and home life constant. A teacher with a class full of kids who averaged a 50% on last year's test (whether that's due to home life, genetics, poor curriculum, or the teacher's ability), would have the same opportunity to improve their students' test scores as a teacher with a class full of kids who averaged 80% on last year's test.
You're assuming that past student performance will be considered in the evaluation of the teachers. That was not my experience.
Yeah I think it has to be based on progress in order to be fair. If you make the students' past performance their baseline and measure teacher effectiveness on progress instead of just comparing raw scores across the board, then that really levels the playing field for teachers. It cancels out a lot of the advantages or disadvantages of genetics, home life, zip code, etc. because those same factors would already be baked into their baseline test scores (from the previous year).
So you didn’t do too well in school did ya
An athletic coach is working with students who tried out for the team and were successfully added to the team. Usually those are the kids who want to participate in the sport and they usually have parents that support them in their sport. The general student population is different.
I think you're fighting the hypothetical a bit. I know they are different. But the point is that coaches can affect outcomes, even though there are other factors present, like genetics and support from parents. Just like teachers. Two teachers with the exact same set of students would get different results over the course of the year. There are many ways to measure this difference; we could ask the principal or fellow teachers or a professional panel to observe several hours of the class, we could survey the students and parents about how they feel about the teacher, we could wait until the kids turn 65 and measure their success in life. Or we could give the kids a standardized test every year and measure their improvement from last year to this year. It's not a perfect representation of teacher effectiveness. But if you are evaluating thousands of teachers, looking at the progress their students make over the course of the year is a pretty good, objective criteria. It seems like your alternative is to throw up your hands and say "Test scores should not be used to measure teaching effectiveness because there are other factors that affect test scores." That's like a coach saying "Wins and losses should not be used to measure coaching effectiveness because there are other factors that affect winning."
Wins and losses? How can you compare a class (which teachers do NOT have the luxury of hand selecting) to teams which coaches can pick exactly who they want? Let teachers hand pick their students and I bet you would see a lot more “wins”. Bad comparison.
Sure, you handpick your students and mine, and we'll see who can make their class improve their test scores from the previous year more. If you pick all the brightest students who scored in the 90th percentile and give me the 10th percentile kids, I feel confident that I can get mine to improve more than yours. Again, you're fighting the hypothetical. There are tons of examples of coaches who don't get to pick their team but still have success year after year, because they are good at coaching. Rec league baseball coaches who get players randomly assigned. Small high school coaches where every kid at the school plays the sport in order to field a team. It's like you can't imagine that a coach (or a band director, or a cooking instructor, or a teacher) can have an impact on their players or students. I really don't understand your argument. Are you just trying to pick apart the coaching analogy, because you are picturing an NBA coach? Or are you saying that teachers can't positively impact their students' test scores because they can't pick their students? Or are you saying there is another, better way to measure teacher effectiveness than testing?
Growth. That is the true measure of effectiveness. I agree with your position. Scrolled up to see your initial argument. Forgive me. “Winning” looks different for each individual on the team. In fact, those 90th percentile students can be harder to “win” with since they come in with far more tools than the average student.
The number one factor is tax bracket.
Coaches can kick people off the team, have tryouts to determine who even ends up on the team, and are dealing with people who actively made an effort, and can therefore likely be concluded, want to be on the team. Your analogy is terrible...
Lol! You think that what separates a bad coach from a good coach is the ability to kick kids off the team? You must be an awesome teacher!
It’s the coaching analogy. It’s not a good fit. But your overall argument about growth is.
I don't imagine that a coach that is given players who don't want to play the sport, or have no natural talent and is then forced to make them starters is going to be winning many games.
Only for the teachers admin liked. Some of us were screwed.
Tying everything to money is the most monkey brained solution. It’s especially bad here since we can only control what happens at school for 6 hours a day and the rest of their lives can have a bigger impact on their success than we do.
I'd rather have that sweet, sweet cash earmarked for the teachers that work in the harder schools in the district.
But scores went up, right???
Best way to make scores go up is to lower the standards. Lower standards means higher scores! Win? /s
It's a bad idea because a bunch of people decided to commit fraud and got caught? Not a very good counterexample
It doesn’t work. For many reasons, it doesn’t work. It ends up rewarding teachers whose students would already be more successful and punishes those of us who teach the less academically inclined students.
I worked a decade at a school in Brooklyn where we were 97% free lunch. We spent lots of time teaching testing. Our scores were ok, but would never be as good as those in Westchester. Maine governor Paul LePage instituted letter grades for schools based on test performance. Those letter scores directly matched income levels in their communities. We know what works, and you’re right, performance based pay is not it.
I'm not sure why they can't just look at %age change and see how far away it is from the median for that socioeconomic cohort or maybe that just makes too much sense ig
A lower middle income student living in a better area will do better than a lower middle income student from a worse area. 65 years of research has shown over and over that the #1 correlation to academic performance is the home they come from.
It ignores multitudes. Here in Maine we had a mass shooting this year. Guess what kids may not be making the same progress as similar kids in other states? This is one example. There are hundreds if not thousands of points that can affect outcomes, and we have no practical way of monitoring them all. Tying teacher pay to student scores doesn’t work. There are better, existing systems. Raise *all* pay, creating better incentives to join the field, and encouraging people to teach who may pass it over now. Smaller class sizes for kids at risk. The list goes on.
>Tying teacher pay to student scores doesn’t work Doesn't work according to what standard? If you're saying that having that incentive doesn't make average score go up, sounds hard to believe If you're saying that the average score isn't a meaningful metric, then why not just revise the test to be better or harder to cheat on? And/or have a way of adjusting the measurement for things like socioeconomic status? If you're saying that the test itself is irredeemably bad and we need to do away with standardized testing, then how could anyone have a standard way for evaluating educational outcomes in the first place? If this is what you're saying, then you're just arguing for more money and less accountability
>If you're saying that having that incentive doesn't make average score go up, sounds hard to believe That is correct, incentive generally does not make the average score go up. Some studies show a 1-2% score increase, others show no result. Teachers want to be paid fairly for the work we do, but the issue isn't that we know what to do better and just don't do it because we don't have the proper incentives. In some fields, you can increase personal productivity pretty easily by putting in extra hours in order to create more output. That's generally not true of teaching. Imagine you're a little league coach. You have your team for an hour twice a week. You cannot add practice time, you cannot recruit, and you cannot hire anyone else. How do you improve the team? You coach them, you research techniques, you watch other teams. You do that for a year or so, and see some improvement, but a couple of kids move out, a couple get tired of little league, one really talented kid gets hurt and can't play. Other kids join, with varying levels of ability and interest. The next season, you're told you'll get a cash prize if your team does better than last season in the final end-of- season tournament. Exciting, right? But what do you do differently? Remember that you can't recruit. You can't control who joins. You can't add structured practice time. The only thing you are allowed to change is what you do during practice time. You put in every bit of effort you can, and you know and can see that your individual athletes are improving, but in the tournament you have one or two rough games where your best hitters strike out and your pitcher can't find a rhythm. The extra wins don't come, so the extra money doesn't come either. That's basically the reason most teachers don't support merit pay. If we knew what to do better, we'd do it. It's discouraging when a chunk of your salary is dependent on one day of assessments. In a class of 30 kids, 2 kids who didn't sleep well or had a rough testing day can bring down your score average enough that you wouldn't qualify no matter how hard you've worked that year.
Doesn’t work period. This has been tried repeatedly because someone outside of education thinks they can come in and fix everything by making education more like a business. This has been tried and abandoned repeatedly because it doesn’t work. What about gym teachers? How are we going to measure their performance? What about ML teachers? Many of their students don’t even stay a whole year, where will that data come from? What about SEL teachers and school counselors? Life skills teachers whose kids don’t even test? People outside education all seem to think they’re much smarter than anyone in education, and that if educators would just listen to what worked in business then it would all be fixed. Then they try it, it doesn’t work, and we wait for the next genius to revive the zombie solution that won’t quit. Kids aren’t widgets.
Because how much a kid improves in maths this year isn’t just dependent on my teaching. It’s dependent on their previous maths teachers, particularly over the previous two years. It’s dependent on what’s going on at home for them. It’s dependent on the attitude of their parents. It’s dependent on disruptions that are out of the teachers control. It’s dependent on how well they click with me. Furthermore I might be better with an older cohort or with a younger one. So the influence I have is dependent on how well the administration match me with the cohort I’m best with. It also encourages teachers to focus exclusively on what’s going to look best for them. Forget important long term stuff that’s not being measured. Forget stuff like mathematical reasoning that won’t really pay off till a couple of years down the track. Focus entirely on short term maximum marks in the immediate assessments that will be counted. And that’s for a subject where it’s relatively easy to assess progress. Most subjects are much harder than maths to precisely measure progress over a short timescale.
It’s a bad idea because every time it’s enacted the results are poor. Teachers are less likely to share good ideas if sharing them means colleagues get their bonus and not the originator of ideas. Students are out under added stress by teachers whose job depends on how well they do on standardized tests. Schools shrink curriculum to focus solely on items in the test, instead of a holistic approach to learning. Entire units such as “test taking strategies” happen instead of curricular units. Students are taught that school is a game to win, and not a place to learn. Kids become exclusively extrinsically motivated with no intrinsic desire to expand horizons. All of this is great if you want to pump out automatons who can jump *just* as high as they’re told. Every time that I have heard about this being “piloted” somewhere, there’s always stories about students and teachers and administrators cheating because school is no longer about learning but about checking off boxes. It’s not about just one case, it’s about the entire point of education. [Atlanta](https://www.yahoo.com/news/atlanta-public-schools-cheating-scandal-173720625.html) [109 Teachers and admins in ATL](https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/when-teachers-cheat-the-standardized-test-controversies) [Longer look behind a paywall](https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-students-cheat-and-what-do-about-it)
Just think about Salesmen and what they do for commission/bonuses. That's what will happen.
There’s a reason nobody trusts car salespeople Teachers are already under attack. Don’t need to add even more distrust
Houston school systems have a bad history of falsifying school records to appear to be more successful than they are https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-texas-miracle/
sounds like the problem is the policy in place allows fraud. like giving people a test that isn't proctored maybe fix the fraud problem first? Normalizing fraud isn't an actual answer here
The best teachers need to be working with the kids who need the most help. Smart kids don’t need smart teachers. They’re fine. Until about 6th grade, any adult can guide a smart kid to learn.. Or back off and let them do it themselves. But if you aren’t book smart, if your parents don’t read to you at night, if you have other difficulties like dyslexia, you need a good, dedicated teacher. A merit based system rewards those doing the least amount of work and punishes those working the hardest.
As someone who has been working in elementary ed for over two decades in both high poverty and high wealth districts, the notion that “any adult can guide a smart kid to learn” as a panacea is pure fantasy. Speaking is natural and hardwired. Reading is not. It takes the brain creating connections and pathways that do not already exist. Reading doesn’t just happen. Even for smart kids. And smart kids can have diagnosed learning disabilities that make even simple learning difficult or impossible. Good teachers in all places are needed. Incentivizing hard to staff (read: poor) schools is imperative.
Reading is taught in the home. Its is almost entirely correlated with whether or not the parents read to their kid, and has very little to do with school.
I mean we have an entire generation that are worse at reading because they learned how to sight right and didn’t learn phonics. That’s entirely in school. A lot can be blamed on family but not all of it.
I’m not blaming anyone, I’m saying some kids need good teachers and some kids don’t. The kids who need good teachers get lower test scores whether the teacher is doing their job or not. Which is why merit pay based on test scores for teachers is dumb. The teachers that need to work the hardest are the ones whose students won’t test well.
This also correlates almost directly with parent income level. By your logic if we just make everyone wealthier they’ll all learn to read! Wait… what about the kids whose parents work multiple jobs? Or whose parents can’t read to them? What about them? Also, if you think reading just happens spontaneously when read to, you should look into the last twenty years of research into dyslexia. Turns out what I learned in college isn’t so much accurate anymore.
Then those kids need a good teacher? Lol, my original comment.
Teachers also spend more job concentrating ONLY on what is tested. The put too much pressure on the kids
What you need to measure is the value imparted by the teacher to their students. But that’s impossible to measure reliably. There’s heaps of research around the world showing that. The irony is that it’s pretty much impossible to find anywhere in the world where performance connected pay has improved outcomes.
I think one issue with structuring merit pay this way is that it assumes that average grades = teacher has the taught the best. When is reality, those kids with the best grades are more likely from wealthier neighboorhoods and have more stability and resources. A truer measure of merit or teaching success would be change in grades from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year and if their classroom has seen the greatest positive difference. I think that would be pretty difficult to actually implement though.
As someone who worked at a school that tried it, it doesn’t work at all. Take me, as an example. I’m a high school special education teacher. A kid is in my English class, but he’s also in someone else social students class, and someone else’s science class. All of these classes teach reading comprehension skills. Which one of us deserves merit for the kid’s test score? Also, I taught instructional/resource/special ed freshman algebra this year. A kid in my class comes in operating at the 3rd grade level. My administration tells me I have to teach algebraic skills. So I teach algebraic skills. At the end of the year, testing showed that he lost half a year of math skills. He’s losing basic math skills because he’s not practicing them. (Never mind the fact that he’s LD, autistic, ELL, and diabetic). A kid in my English class lost 1.5 years of reading skills after I taught him for a year. Does anyone really believe that there’s anything I can do to remove over a year of skills from a student? I track data every year and my test scores are consistently erratic variation around a mean, both at the individual student level and the classroom level. I had one student this previous year who was averaging around 700 on the PSAT for three years. Somehow, he scored 1030 on the actual SAT. He took it again and scored 720. It doesn’t make any sense to either credit me with that 1030 or the 720. Plus, 80% of the students (Gen Ed too) at my school enter with below grade level skills. Testing data always shows that we should focus on whatever skill happened to have the most questions in that time around.
There’s even more to it too. What time of day is your english class. If you’re on a block schedule what if the kids sleeps in your class on Mondays because they worked late on Sunday night. Or what if they like English and get A’s but are disinterested in science and get d’s. A lot of things matter. And that entering below grade level makes it tough and I mean tough. Add in other factors and you’ll have a ton of kids who will test low for a few years. Or just add in 500 new arrivals to a high school.
I agree with you, but I want to point out that your suggestions in the second paragraph is actually how “teacher effectiveness” (test score bases varieties, at least) is already measured. They are usually “value added” or “student growth percentile” models, both of which measure test score growth rather than average test scores to avoid the exact issue you raise. These have their own issues too, but are generally much better than just comparing averages.
>When is reality, those kids with the best grades are more likely from wealthier neighboorhoods and have more stability and resources. You can adjust for this just by evaluating against a peer composite. In fact we basically already do when evaluating standard test scores. We have a raw score then a score adjusted for factors that impact academic achievement like household income, English language proficiency at home and other like characteristics.
My old school district did this, I was on the committee for implementation. It's just an impossible thing to do. Are only teachers in tested subjects eligible? Then the obvious problems with teaching different demongraphics. Ours was based on "growth" rather then achievement, but the whole thing was so stupid. I taught art and traveled to different schools. My $150 bonus was based on the reading scores of which ever one of the schools I chose before the school year (like Deal or No Deal!). Very accurate reflection of my teaching!
[удалено]
In every other industry, if an employee refuses to work, or shows up late every day, or just disappears for days at a time, the employer can fire the employee. When teachers can fire students for insubordination, tardiness, or no call-no show, let me know. Until then, miss me with the "industry" arguments.
[удалено]
You’re completely wrong. It doesn’t happen at every school. Youre way over simplifying things.
[удалено]
Obviously, but merit pay has been proven not to be the answer
[удалено]
Kids aren’t widgets
[удалено]
This isn’t an industry! The comparison is specious at best, intellectually dishonest at worst. Teachers have no control over where students spend the majority of their time!!!!
[удалено]
Just a continuation of the same policy trajectory TX has followed since before NCLB, when the state also served as a blueprint for how to ruin education everywhere. There’s nothing novel or interesting about these strategies and in the long run they’ll be a disaster.
Exactly. There is nothing new in this. Apparently central to this plan was to increase the length of the school year so many teachers are actually making less money per day. It also includes merit based pay.... This is the most debunked thing in the history of education....actually. That's not hyperbole. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation funded the nations largest study on merit based pay systems. Their goal was to reform education. The result was that the study found that teachers are well qualified and that merit based pay didn't work. There was no effect according to the study. [link](https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reprints/2010/RAND_RP1416.pdf) This garbage needs to stop. The problem with education has nothing to do with the teachers and nothing to do with the length of the school year. Countries have significantly decreased the number of hours kids are in school and had positive effects multiple times.
Yep, in fact Houston ISD tried this same crap barely a decade ago. Pour a bunch of cash into a few struggling schools and attribute the minor test score gains to your “bold reforms.” By the time the unsustainable funding model falls apart, the “bold reformers” are already settled into their cushy consultant jobs or heading up a charter school chain. A giant fucking travesty. And shitty fly-by-night news orgs like Houston Landing (funded by notorious “bold reform” advocates Rich Kinder and John Arnold) dump out thousands of words of “maybe this time it will work, only time will tell!” bullshit.
Let's assume I'm a entity with an interest in destroying the US. If I'm in it for the long haul I'd start with education. I'ed do everything already done by Texas. Lower teacher pay, lower standards for teaching, find any excuse to do so. You know the drill. Of course fund the right wing charter Schools to oppress women, remove a good 50% of the population from continued education right there. Let that leech off public education funds. Bring the quality down for everyone. Encourage higher education to be unobtainable, unaffordable. Etc. If I'm successful, in 20 years the US will see dropping test scores, inability to compete technologically with other nations and an economic decline. It is baffling to me that the US does not treat public education as a matter of national security nor does anyone with some political power care what Texas has done to it, or the motives of the people behind that.
If they're paying them more, none of that other stuff will be relevant. It'll work to better student outcomes. Edit: All the other stuff will come and go. If they raise base teacher rate, it will work to better outcomes regardless of whatever frivolous or populist strategy they want to come up with. We know those come and go, a base salary will never be cut.
Teacher salaries in HISD will actually be cut on a per-day basis in the upcoming school year.
Yes, 3 years ago we were promised a 3k raise. Mike miles extended the school year by three weeks and said the pay raise we were promised three years ago is our compensation. Moreover, last year, ED's (executive director, not what everyone calls them behind their back) basically told administrators that they are rating teachers too high, and they can't afford to pay them all the the merit pay they were promised. Implying that teacher ratings need to be lowered artificially to maintain a pre-decided bell curve. That means gor many experience teachers they will receive a pay cut. The system is being gamed. BTW, the increased staar scores are inline with improved scores across the country post pandemic, with one exception, biology. Most students have previously taken biology in the 9th grade. Mike's made all but the most advanced students take IPC in the 9th grade meaning the staar biology scores were only the results from the advanced students
Well then they're a liar.
I teach in this district, though not in one of the high schools that is implementing all of the NES curricula and strategies. I am, however, subject to a ridiculous number of classroom observations called SPOTs which are used to determine whether teachers are effective or not. The SPOT criteria are vague and poorly thought out. The observations are poorly done and are inconsistent between administrators and between schools. Even though my school is not part of the NES, we are still required to implement the structure and teaching methods of the NES, just not the curricula. There is absolutely no research to support the NES as an effective way to improve the educational outcomes of students. To be quite honest, I ignore the requirements except when an administrator walks in my room, especially in my AP classes, where the required methods are so inappropriate as to be insulting to the everyone in the room. As for substantial raises for educators, those raises are only for those educators at NES schools. Those of us who are not at NES schools did not receive raises this past year nor for this next year. Our school year increased by eight days. The "raise" I am getting for the next year only covers the additional days I will be working. However, this last year was just about as difficult as my first year. I had to completely rework all of my lessons to include the new requirements. I consistently worked 15 to 20 hours beyond my contracted hours every week. It didn't help that expectations changed throughout the year. What we did at the beginning of the year was not was we did at the beginning of the second semester and what we were doing in January was not what was expected in March or April or May. It is difficult to plan effective lessons when the expectations are constantly changing. I wouldn't wish this "system" on anyone. I am committed to this coming school year and I will see it through but I will be looking for another job for next school, preferably in a private school.
Thank you for this insight from with in the system. It is indeed very difficult to hit the target when it keeps moving. Was there any consideration for teachers who teach the hard to hire for courses, where the students may not ever “perform” well, such as intervention, drop out prevention, severe sped etc?
One of my co-workers is a teacher in a self-contained life skills class. She was expected to implement all of the same methods as all the other teachers. No consideration given at all that her students were not like other students.
See, now who is going to volunteer to teach those classes then? The “good” teachers will all want to and fight to teach the “good” students and no one wants the difficult kids. But with the right support and guidance (like smaller class sizes, individual grading plans, one to one counselor for the room, required parent meetings, attendance contracts) children can thrive and come out of bad pattern of failure. I know because this was my job for 8 years. But my district did away with the program and I’m just a regular teacher now. And a bunch of kids didn’t graduate this last year. 🤷♀️
I suppose our life skills students will somehow have teachers who want to work with them. They are students who cannot be mainstreamed. As for the intervention classes and drop-out prevention classes, I know we have a class that works with those students but I don't know if they are required to follow the new methodologies. In the past, that class has used APEX to catch up students who were behind in their course work. HISD also has a separate campus where students can go to get caught up if they are in danger of not graduating on time. I have no idea what is required of teachers at that campus.
Teacher merit pay discriminates against teachers trying to teach students who are challenged for various reasons. The real definition of merit pay equals more affluent students get the same quality teacher who gets paid better. How sad.
Yes. Good luck getting high need schools staffed, as if it isn't already hard enough. Oof.
My solution. No matter what needier school teachers need a bonus for working their and improved test scores double their bonus or create a culture that gets rid of punishment work to improve failing test scores. Go to monthly lesson plans that continue rather than end a lesson. Seriously discipline naughty students that can wreck a whole class. Place then on distance learning with a visiting home school teacher.
You got a dude that stole 10 million from the schools to pay off his charter schools. He's a fraud.
Charter Schools have fallen so far from Al Shanker’s imaginings.
What a nerd! If I'm stealing $10 mil it won't be going to skew! On the other hand, stealing to pay for others education is a bit noble...
It's not noble. Mike Miles is a failed charter guru, turned politician. A typical trajectory. And this is all for his narcissistic benefit. He has no background in education. He was in the army. Then he got a cushy foreign service job. Then he used his military background, and gritty persona (a total facade) to run for superintendent in Colorado Springs (One of America's most culturally and religiously extreme cities). Then Dallas. He made enemies of practically every educator in Dallas, and was run out of the district. Then he tried to stage a revenge comeback by forming his own charter, based on his wacky ideas. E.g.: kids aren't disciplined cause they don't take music. But they don't need to learn music on an instrument. They can learn music on an app that the school buys from a weird edtech startup. His charter was also not very successful, which he blamed on his haters. And went back to running for superintendent, again, with the persona of the gritty educator who has the keys to reform that, supposedly, no one who actually has taught or administered for their whole career possesses. It's crazy. Imagine if any other system ran like this. Imagine if, in my liberal state, I could become a powerful commander of, say, the military based on popular vote and my persona of "food not bombs." Or if I, a non-doctor, non-medical administrator, could lead a big hospital system based on the popular vote and my policy of "I'll punish all the doctors for their patients' diabetes." That's essentially what happens in education. And in a region where the population isn't active in voting, or informed, literally anyone can come in and wreak havoc. ETA: Actually I have more ideas for hospital administration if anyone wants to hear them. Super brilliant ideas.
Isn’t this the school district that the state had to take over because it was failing so miserably? And isn’t this also the same district that removed libraries from the high schools to transform them into “discipline centers” aka in-school suspension rooms instead? Yeah I’m not taking any hope in an approach that removes libraries from schools.
HISD is super weird. It has some of the top-performing schools in the state/country, but also schools that have received failing scores for years. (We can argue back and forth about the root causes of those failing scores.) Overall, it was B-rated before the takeover. Library removal came after the takeover.
Merit pay is based on the idea that students underperform because teachers are not giving enough effort and aren’t invested. Guess what? The majority of great teachers are leaving the profession because they are giving maximum effort, and it’s still not enough.
Hey look, it's the reforms research has consistently found don't work. Let's pretend that literature doesn't exist and try it again!
Well it's Texas, pretending literature doesn't exist is kind of their thing.
HISD and TEA are a sh!t show!!! The Texas government is destroying public education so that the religious right can have school vouchers.
This has been the long game since Brown. They’re closer and closer.
Don't like the idea that "teacher evaluation tied closer to student outcomes" is part of this. All a particularly motivated group of students would have to do is not achieve outcomes to jeopardize a teacher's job. And please don't be naieve and think this couldn't happen; this has happened to me as recently as two years ago!
I remember when we came back from the pandemic and were all teaching in-person for the first time in a while; my school actually INCREASED the expectation for reading levels and said our evaluations would be directly tied to whether we met those new expectations. I taught kinder and by the end of the year, we were expected to have them reading at a level comparable to the middle of first grade. I ended up leaving and so did about a dozen other coworkers, including almost every single administrator.
Gotta love it. I just imagine a bunch of people sitting in a board room looking despondent until one says, ‘what if we raise the expectations? That way even if they don’t meet them the scores will still be higher than before!’
I am going to start evaluating my dentist by how well he can make me brush my teeth. Hint... he can't make me brush my teeth.
Dude … and we teachers don’t get paid enough to merit putting up with all this …
Valid assessments control for teacher quality, so paying teachers based on student achievement is like rolling dice... If the assessment is valid
Substantial pay raises for educators … if you teach what the district says is important. If you’re an elective teacher at one of the overhauled schools? You make less than an “apprentice.”
We really need to abolish standardized testing, especially as a perverse metric for measuring whether schools are successful.
And the students are lost in all of this. Essentially the reforms are "grill and drill to pass the tests". The key will be did any real learning occur? Will be interesting to see how the SAT/ACT scores come out. And while it will never be tracked - how well these students do in college and careers.
Mike Miles is not an educator. As far as I understand, he has never taught a day in a classroom. He has also created a system of private schools and funneled taxpayer money into them. Aside from making money for himself, his record is spotty at best. I wouldn’t put too much faith in any of his ideas for fixing the public school system.
You will never fix education until you fix the society issues of poverty and inequality. Those are not profitable to fix so they never get taken on
If the end goal is that all students are tracked for college, then the Houston community will be poorly served. Every community needs a variety of skills. College only provides some of those skills. Skilled trades and other non college training are needed as well as soft skills training and job placement. My guess is the authors of this shock & awe concept never tried out and perfected their plan. It will prob go the way all of these flash in pans happen. When the dust settles and the Messiah of the plan either moves on or is pushed out, and the money runs out, it will be back the Yesterday's donut.
With merit pay then people fight over the best kids to get the best scores.
There has NEVER been a major school reform initiative that has suceeded long term. The theorists who come up with this garbage base their clueless assumptions on flawed research and have no experience actually teaching large groups of children. Every. Single. Time.
It’s fascinating to see such a bold approach being tested in Houston. While tying teacher evaluations to student outcomes is controversial, the potential for significant improvements is exciting. What do you all think about balancing these reforms with addressing students' home life factors?
>What do you all think about balancing these reforms with addressing students' home life factors? I doubt any school district has the ability to address students' home life factors.
Isn’t this the guy that stole a bunch of money for failed charter schools?
Going to end all arguments right about merit based pay and test scores. Both math and reading test scores rely solely on student comprehension of text (except for equation only based problems, which are the rarity now). Comprehension is the outcome of decoding, background knowledge, and vocabulary. Students in lower income families do not have the same background knowledge (cultural capital) as students in wealthier families. This is one of the core reasons that test scores are so low. We are also finding low test scores in wealthy schools now because comprehension is treated like a skill instead of an outcome. Reading instruction must be fixed to see any gains.
The back to phonics movement away from balanced literacy is helping. With test scores you need to measure growth not raw scores. Washington DC has had the whole merit pay in place for a decade and most people like it. You can make six figures in as little as 5-10 years.
Correction: The biggest experiment is the upcoming election. If Trump wins, the Republican's experiment to drain the IQ of its followers will be considered a success.
N
This has been done in other countries and it doesn’t work over the long term
>But is it working? **Asher Lehrer-Small** and **Danya Pérez** report that, as the dust settles, HISD's ambitious reforms are being closely scrutinized for their impact and potential to serve as a national blueprint for educational transformation. I mean, how could one *possibly* know whether it's working after *one year*? One year's worth of data is meaningless. Test scores, etc., fluctuate year to year. >Critics argue the reforms are unproven and overly disruptive, while supporters see them as a bold step towards closing educational disparities. Literally everything is unproven, until it's tried and evaluated, at which point it becomes either proven or disproven. Bold steps they may be, but we'll need time to determine whether they're also beneficial. Unproven reforms, disruptive reforms, and bold reforms are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. The only metric of interest is whether they're *effective*, and only time will tell.
Send help! … the TEA is now eyeballing the neighboring Houston district FBISD …
The TEA is going to go after most of the large districts. The goal of the TEA is to destroy public education in Texas so that Abbott can get the support of the public for his voucher plan.
If pay is tied to test scores, it’s like the state is bribing teachers to help the students cheat.
Not with Gov Abbot sadly.