> Anything that threatens that status quo is usually immediately dismissed. For instance, the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.

Its kryptonite to union leadership because student outcomes involve more than just what teachers control, including what administrators control and how administrators interact with the individual students. No one wants to be held accountable for outcomes when someone else -- particularly their counterparty in the relevant contract -- has the ability to interfere with their ability to influence the outcome.

>the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.

My initial reaction to that was "but surely teacher quality isn't a major issue, when there are so many other problems to solve", but then I noticed that the arguments my brain was marshalling didn't reflect my true objection. At about the same time, I thought back to high school and how I stopped taking Spanish after having a particularly awful teacher for third semester.

That's when I realized that my objection was actually about fairness, not the importance of teacher quality. It's not fair that someone can dream of helping kids learn, study for years in college to achieve that goal, accumulate student loan debt, and then in the end, when they finally stand up in front of a classroom ... be so terrible that they cause kids to drop the subject entirely. It's downright tragic, but it's also true.

I do have some qualms about the idea of evaluating "student outcomes". It sounds difficult to do well (how would they have measured my dropping the teacher's subject?), and prone to unintended consequences. There are a few absolutely phenomenal teachers out there, and not all of the results of that are easy to quantify. If a set of evaluation guidelines axed 70% of bad teachers (optimistic) but also reduced or shackled 20% of the really good teachers, I'm not sure that would be worth it.

Those are some practical issues related to the proposed solution. But I think a lot of people, like me, initially flinch away from considering the problem. I've probably thought about this specific concept at least a dozen times, and I only just now noticed the flinch.

Aside from how do you do it, and unintended consequences, a third issue is anyone who's ever worked in a large bureaucracy knows that the mapping between people who generate results and people who generate great numbers is never 1:1 and in toxic environment (like K12 .edu?) its often -1 correlation.

Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district.

Its a near universal that smart people focusing on turning in good metrics will turn in good metrics rather than doing their job... after all, they're not being paid to teach, but to generate good numbers. So you'll get good numbers. Pity the kids won't learn anything, but ...

>Its entirely possible that with some dedicated pencil whipping your legendarily bad Spanish teacher was turning in the best metric scores in the district.

Not unlikely. And she's a good example in that she wasn't particularly bad with the material (except insofar as all foreign language education is kind of broken, but that wasn't her fault). But one of the most important things (if not the most important) teachers can do is cultivate in their students a genuine interest in learning about their subject. Instead, I came away with associations of being shamed for not getting things wrong, and of being accused of cheating for trying to extrapolate. This is, to put it mildly, averse to language acquisition.

Anyway, the point is that you're absolutely right. Most of us in her class knew the material at the end of the semester. But knowledge is not very useful in and of itself. Unfortunately, I think that simple fact may be a very big piece of the puzzle, and it's one that the general public seems very far from flipping over.

..not to mention that this is itself an issue caused by poor education. there is nothing quite like 'on the job' learning and evaluation to weed out competence, caring, and understanding from mere intelligence.

looking back, there was no single defining feature of bad teachers I had, but every one of my good teachers were over the age of 40, had previous careers/jobs, and not a single one had a degree (in teaching)..

edit: I think the issue with home schooling is a societal one, we want to set a minimum standard and encourage a minimum level of interaction. I agree that a couple of good teachers make up for a whole lot of mediocre ones.

The strictures of institutional schooling in mandating same-age classes, teaching to test score metrics, and preventing interaction between schools (public/private/home) unfortunately also have the effect of turning this minimum standard into a maximum standard.

>looking back, there was no single defining feature of bad teachers I had, but every one of my good teachers were over the age of 40, had previous careers/jobs, and not a single one had a degree (in teaching)..

One of my favorite teachers my drama teacher, probably somewhere on the younger side of 25-35. The year I quit taking drama classes was the year that she was forced to go back to school because she "wasn't qualified" to teach permanently, having not completed a teaching degree.

It's an interesting matter of perspective. I've been on the teacher's union side of things for a long time and our main complaint has been how the school board is change adverse and is the greatest impediment to fixing the schools.

For instance, back in the eighties, a local district did implement a performance based system for teachers. High performing teachers were rewarded with salary bonuses, while poor performing teachers did not even get raises to match inflation. Then, after a couple of years, the school fired all of the high performing teachers as a cost cutting measure. The incompetent teachers, whose salaries were much lower, were kept on and promoted to fill the departmental roles previously filled by the competent.

As much as you hate lazy, incompetent teachers, we hate them even more. After they waste a year teaching the students nothing and handing out the As like candy, we're the ones stuck teaching all their material on top of our own curriculum to get the students up to speed. We want these idiots to get fired.

Our problem is that the school board never fires them. They give As to all the rich kids, Cs to all the fat kids, and Bs to everyone else. This makes the parents happy, so the idiots keep their jobs year after year. When the competent teachers then grade the students on the little they've actually learned, they're the first on the chopping block.

This is similar to the aversion to non-certified teachers. I knew a brilliant teacher who taught French for twenty years. During the summer, she'd do consulting work for the french consulate. You couldn't ask for a better French teacher. Unfortunately, this isn't a story about the quality of her French. Instead, this is a story about lowering qualification standards. One year, the state lowered the certification requirements for foreign language education. Initially, this seemed like a great plan. Until the day came that this incredible French teacher was told that she would now be teaching Spanish. The new, lower licensing requirements qualified her as a Spanish teacher, despite her not having even spoken the language in twenty years. Due to her professional pride and dedication, she spent her own money on a three month summer immersion plan to gain some proficiency, but she still wasn't at the level of competence required by her professional pride and she resigned at the end of the year. The teacher who replaced her was just as (un)qualified to teach Spanish, but didn't have the professional pride and is still teaching. While changing the certification requirements has the potential to bring in some brilliant teachers from industry backgrounds, its mostly used to hire a whole new class of idiot.

Granted, I'm not naive enough to believe that it's this way at every district. I've heard the horror stories of teacher union defending complete monsters. I don't want that to happen any more than you do. However, reading a proposal from the school board is like reading an e-mail from a Nigerian prince: no matter how great the plan seems, you know that it's all part of a larger scheme to screw you over.

As much as I dislike teachers for carrying out the orders of their bosses on children, it is nevertheless the case that the whole framework is set up by those at the top; the bottom are naturally employees who do their jobs and are least empowered.

Bosses naturally hate unions because even a weak union carries the possibility of underlings saying "No" to their commands — and getting away with it. A form of defiance.

Evaluating teachers "based on student outcomes" is obviously a trap against teachers, if bosses are the one who define "student outcomes". That means teachers will do awful things like teach to tests. (Clearly, education management isn't about to check "student outcomes" in any reasonable manner.)

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards." -- Mark Twain

My mother is a retired teacher. My sister is currently a teacher. They also have issues with teacher's unions. We are in an urban school district.

I don't exactly know how you go from "Teacher's Unions are stifling to innovation" into "...teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes..." and straight into "...strange aversion to letting anyone other than state-certified teachers do any teaching." So somehow innovative teaching is connected to teacher evaluations, but you will only accept evaluations that link student results to teachers (apparently ignoring things like the impact a student's home life or economic situation will have, regardless of how good the teacher is) but ignore the idea that the state-certified teachers have been evaluated, at least at a basic level, in order to become state-certified? Because requiring a teacher that teaches at the most needy schools to be evaluated on the same criteria as a teacher that teaches at the richest school seems pretty unfair--why would I want that job? The students are more likely to be difficult, the parents are more likely to be absent or adversarial (as opposed to constructive with their child's education), and I'm less likely to get higher raises because my students are less likely to do as well? Particularly in a profession that often requires working late nights and early mornings for relatively little pay? Wooo, where do I sign!

As a side note, I'm curious to see this brochure. Is it possible that the brochure was saying parents shouldn't correct their child's improper spelling or pronunciation because, in education, one of the parent's prime roles would be as their child's cheerleader, whereas the child's teacher should be the one to correct their child's improper spelling and pronunciation? It's hard to say, of course; context is key.

I have two teachers in the family. The primary observation is their management is intensely toxic. So "changing the rules" is primarily oriented around, well, basically screwing over management's enemies using some new rules. It has nothing to do with punishing the "bad" teachers and everything to do with punishing the ones who don't kiss up or are in certain protected or unprotected demographic groups.

Student outcomes is ridiculous because given a reasonably small class size all you're doing is grading the randomness of the kid distribution aka you'll be rewarding / punishing teachers based on which specific kids they get that year. Sometimes a good year, sometimes bad. Statistically its far more valid to grade folks at a higher level aka a larger sample size, so obviously this should be implemented to grade district leaders and principals first... LOL that will never happen because it'll only exist as a weapon.

Making it an even worse weapon, most of the people doing the coaching are the ones in charge of assigning kids to teachers. So you can't fire a teacher for being a black woman, even if you hate black women. But if coincidentally you hate black women and are in charge of assigning kids and the 24 year old single hottie white woman just happens to "randomly" get all the angelic gifted and talented wonderkids, and the uppity black woman happens to have assigned to her all the village morons and wannabe gang members, well I guess the black woman's numbers are going to suck. And thats how, if you hate black women, you legally fire black woman teachers. There's a thin veneer of BS about accountability as a marketing technique to deploy the weapon, but its all about another weapon for toxic management.

Your reading example is ridiculous as I recently completed the same age range with my kids. The argument is that English as a language is completely screwed up with innumerable exceptions. So when the teacher is trying to teach basic phonic sound #17 or whatever, its not helping matters if you confuse the kid with peculiar exception 34 B subsection W item 6.

I understand there are perfectly phonetic languages where what you see is what you get. And there are languages situations where you just have to memorize Kanji. But at least in theory you can teach English to most kids successfully by gradually piling on first basic rules and later weird rules and finally shoveling exceptions on.

Frankly I learned how to read English from pure raw memorization and lots of reading. That's not how kids are taught today. There seems to be little point in blaming teachers or unions for the decision of middle managers in the admin building who selected a particular curriculum. You can homeschool kids using this curriculum you're making fun of if you want, it's a policy decision that has nothing to do with licensing the front line workers or their union or frankly even their immediate supervisors...

>I learned how to read English from pure raw memorization and lots of reading. That's not how kids are taught today

How are kids taught today? I don't remember how I learned English (it is my native language) but I think I know how I mastered it, lots of practice. Writing, reading, reading, and more reading.

I feel compelled to respond as I have been involved with a teachers' union to some extent, albeit as an outsider, and have also studied education.

leadership of the teachers' unions are very, very change adverse [sic]. They are first and foremost a union and trade organization that exists to protect jobs and the status quo. Anything that threatens that status quo is usually immediately dismissed.

Teachers' unions, like any organization or interest group, are at once agents of change and agents of conservativism. Which side of the line they fall on fully depends on the issue at hand and the will of their members. It is interesting to note that unlike organizations with typical top-down mandates for decision making (governments, corporations), teachers' unions like many other unions tend to vote referendum-style on current issues in a democratic way. Such votes are sourced from teachers who actually have the practical in-the-field experience within current era systems, not the "Why don't you do it my way? [but I have little to no experience with the issue at hand, except for my own kids Alice & Bob]" general public.

the idea that teachers should be evaluated based on student outcomes is like kryptonite to union leadership.

You understand that the primary purpose of a union as with many commercially engaged interest groups is to collectively bargain, though they also perform other functions such as information sharing and legal defense. The notion of constantly evaluating teachers based upon student outcomes is clearly difficult to justify to such a group, because it is basically targeting removing the capacity for teachers to collectively bargain. The assumption behind this assertion is that large scale, standardized, test-based assessments are a valid and useful way to validate teacher performance, which itself is based upon the assumption that they are useful to validate student performance. These assertions are certainly being questioned (some would say demolished) in today's pedagogical research literature.

a strange aversion to letting anyone other than state-certified teachers do any teaching

As well as a venue for basic learning, schools are significantly a tool of the state for communicating normalized perspectives on the nation, the environment, and other areas. As such, most states have some restrictions on replacements for these organs by private parties. Some of these are based on valid concerns (children locked at home exposed to weird perspectives), some are probably not (eg. learning from people from non-pedagogical backgrounds). This is the state's resistance, not teachers' resistance.

I can't imagine that most teachers or teachers' unions would support the notion that parents (who in any sane case clearly teach far more to their children than schools ever can!) should neglect to teach their own kids in favour of the state.