This is a gigantic assumption which you have tossed out there without any support whatsoever. You are basically making an assumption which encompasses the entire issue in question, and then just blithely assuming you are correct.

In fact, the evidence which is staring us in the face indicates that you are not correct, and that we were far better off before we decided to let No Child Left Behind and a group of for-profit "education" companies co-opt our system and turn it into a giant standardized-test machine.

You want an alternative that works better? No problem. Go back to doing things the way we did them before January 2001. By the way, this would emphatically NOT mean that we had "no metric at all", of course...we had testing before 2001. We just didn't structure our entire system around constant standardized testing and force teachers to teach to those tests, that's all. We also had other metrics, such as observing how students do in college.

Also, NCLB passed with bipartisan support at the beginning of Bush's term, it wasn't his fault, but it was symptomatic of the simplistic shallow thinking that he would use the rest of his term. States are finally able to opt out, thank god, and you can bet I will make sure my kids are educated in one of those states.

The US educational system is evaluated against other countries, and we've only gotten worse in our rankings despite paying those testing companies all that money. Does Finland have standardized tests? No, they kick our butt simply by treating teachers as professionals and paying the, accordingly.

They are also nearly worthless scientifically - they are incomparable (how do you compare the opinion of teacher A to that of teacher B) and non-reproducible (how can one repeat an observation).

(And I say this having spent my career in the physical sciences. There's too much noise induced by people who present statistically solid analyses of numbers whose connection to the core questions is much more tenuous...)

Why do you feel we don't care about that? What information should we care about?

In that sense, NCLB created a race to the bottom; schools that performed below-average got less funding, so if any schools successfully "taught to the test", they all had too or face budget cuts (that's my understanding, IANAT).

Is there evidence that these partial measures reveal and/or necessarily lead to a more general understanding?

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/documents/cstrtqmath7.pdf

Please explain why you feel it doesn't adequately measure the ability of students to "read, write, and compare rational numbers in scientific notation (positive and negative powers of 10) with approximate numbers using scientific notation" (as well as the other topics listed).

Or, similarly, can you explain specifically what "teaching to the test" means and why it is suboptimal for learning the aforementoined topics?

I'm not from California, nor have I studied their tests, nor did I claim that standardized tests themselves are flawed, so your first demand is misleading, at best. I will grant that, having done further research, my first examples of teaching to the test were flawed; I'll try to summarize it (and my position) below.

Teaching for the test is explained pretty well here: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/teaching-test and on wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test ]. Note that this definition of teaching to the test isn't necessarily bad, only when applied wrong. Punishing/rewarding schools based on student performance on a small set of tests creates an incentive to have student "learn" by mercilessly practicing on those tests, to the exclusion of other approaches. As per the sources on wikipedia, this doesn't impart a "general understanding," nor does it necessarily raise test scores. Other people here have linked stories where teachers and schools actually helped their students cheat on standardized tests. Standardized tests themselves aren't the problem; we've had them for decades, and they can provide valuable insights in some cases. The problem is when we focus on standardized tests to the exclusion of all else, putting a perverse pressure on schools. I believe you previously supported evaluating by standardized tests because they're the only quantitative measure we have; maybe this means we can't reliably quantitatively evaluate the impact of a single teacher on a small set of heterogeneous subjects. Demonstrate we can, then I'll reconsider NCLB.

edit to add another thought: I'd liken this to the problem of overfitting in machine learning. You have a way of measuring the performance of your system, and try to improve the system via that feedback. It's easy to overfit it, making it work beautifully on the provided data, but lack generality. The problem isn't in how we measure "fitness," necessarily, it is in how we update the system based on that result. That is, standardized tests may be a fine measure among students with that "generalized understanding"; I've not been convinced we are using those results intelligently.

I suppose our probable point of disagreement is fundamentally that I don't think classes will ever impart a "general understanding". I consider the purpose of a class to be imparting a specific skillset, and most of the skillsets taught in school are quite amenable to testing.

You are also correct that my arguments in favor of testing implicitly assume teacher quality matters in a significant enough way to measure - if it doesn't, measuring them is pointless. (Then again, so is trying to use teacher quality as a lever to improve outcomes.)

Yesterday: 23 schools penalized for helping cheat tests http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/10/29/schools-stripped-o...

Last March: the head of the School District's test security program reported more than a dozen testing violations at the school. http://thenotebook.org/blog/125270/wagner-cheating-follow

Last Year: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta http://news.yahoo.com/americas-biggest-teacher-principal-che... http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/07/11/teachers-cheating-in-scho...

I remember hearing about a school where the teachers assigned a letter to each corner of the room and would stand in the corner of the room that corresponded to the correct answer to each question.

In Atlanta they were having "grading parties" where teachers were getting together on the weekend to erase incorrect answers and fill in the correct ones. They got sloppy.

ITs ok, this types of train wrecks have their own logic - after a while people will cotton onto this part, and then there will be spot checks to ensure that students aren't being given the question paper.

After that they will realize that all tests should come from one standardized system, lets say Pearsons.

Then pearson will conduct tests for all 10th graders and then all high schoolers and so on.

Kids will start spending time coming up with creative ways to cheat and beat the system.

Its happened before in other countries and will happen again.

At the end of this, expect people to enter the test center after going through a metal detector and removing any metallic object.

While I think you read it as "What's a better way to run schools?"

Your answer, roll back to before NCLB.

That could be true, but we still wouldn't have an answer to the other question. Absent standardized tests, how can we measure school quality? Hopefully something slightly more rigorous than testimonials from stakeholders... (ie, teachers claiming they like or dislike their school).

If there's a better way to get some standardized measure of student / teacher performance, I'm curious to hear it. I'm not pro-test, I just don't know the alternative metrics advocated by the anti-test community.

My personal opinion is that good teachers make bad politicians and thus bad teachers (or even better, people who never were teachers) make the rules.

We're discarding some of our most valuable data. In most schools, student evaluations of teachers aren't even administered, let alone analyzed and weighted in teacher assessment. Skeptical? See the research below. Properly-constructed surveys yield very accurate results; students are surprisingly honest in their responses, and students truly value a hard, fair teacher who actually teaches his students over an "easy A" teacher.

Take a look at Ronald Ferguson's work and the MET Project [1]. I can't find the original article, but this New York Times article [2] is a decent summary.

[1] http://www.metproject.org/downloads/met-framing-paper.pdf [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/education/11education.html

Maybe we should institute some standardized tests?

And if you're gonna complain about how measuring KLOC doesn't make any sense, well, it's not enough to just point out problems. You've gotta point out solutions. Be a team player.

The cost of software has been going up while the output has not been improving? Um, what?

Maybe we should institute some standardized tests?

Big companies already do this. They typically have very rigid processes for evaluating consultants/outsourcers and pretty much just follow the numbers. For higher end work it's trickier, but for standard stuff (build X screens in Y CRUD app) it works well.

The only real difficulty in measuring the output of individual developers is heterogeneity. Last year I built a search engine, this year I'm building a realtime data framework (and other stuff). That's not a problem for teaching, since the output of teaching is homogeneous (and is defined by the syllabus).

The syllabus is typically defined politically, which is anything but homegeneous. In fact, pretty much everything surrounding the teacher is defined by politics, which makes it a huge problem.

Until we're mature enough to get rid of the politics surrounding the teaching of even core subjects, like science, we're screwed.

And I don't blame the teachers one bit for walking away.

Without tenure, for have a factual enriching conversation with her students she would have been fired. She's going to retire soon, and is worried about teaching because "her generation" only went into it because they didn't fight to get what at the time were men's jobs. Today a 4.0 college grad with a biology degree would never teach 2nd grade.

Please look up the definition of homogeneous - being defined politically has nothing to do with it. All calc 1 classes are the same, and some politician demanding that pi=3 doesn't change this.

Additionally, the modern teacher has to deal with and put up with rather a lot of things that aren't directly related to their subject areas, but are politically determined.

FYI, denotatively, homogenous and homegeneous have different meanings. Connotatively, they are somewhat interchangeable. I suggest you look up the meaning of "thesaurus" and "pedantic". Or skip that and ask yourself, did you understand what I meant?

I do agree with you that people who dislike politics should not work for the government (which is, by it's very nature, political).

Large companies generally have very low standards for software quality and employee productivity, so they are hardly proof that the problem is easy.

Some obvious factors that make it hard to evaluate both developers and teachers:

- An important part of the output is in effects on the team - The true test of the output often comes years down the line - The work is done out of sight of the evaluators - There are many confounding historical factors - The profession is subtle and hard for outsiders to evaluate - Poor management often limits worker effectiveness

And in many ways, teachers have it worse. Teaching is much less like writing software than it is like management.

A) I see no evidence for either of these

B) If teachers are doing a worse job, shouldn't the new generation of developers be worse than their forebears?

C) We could argue both points all day. Both jobs are hard to measure. That's my point.

Perhaps you would like to contribute something to the discussion instead of pointless sarcasm.

Are you sure about that? How do you know that a bad metric is better than no metric? It sounds a lot more like "We should be doing something. This is something. Therefore we should do it."

Testing isn't wrong, it's just not as correlated to the things we would actually like to measure as we would like it to be. This is an open problem in the world, and solving it (besides potentially making the inventor fabulously wealthy) would dramatically change the world.

How do you decide if someone is qualified for a job, or will be successful at a university? In reality we don't have a very solid way to figure that out, so lots of people that would have done well are passed over and lots of people get into universities and hired for jobs and end up failing.

Testing is correlated to lots of things, and is quite nicely correlated to the quality of the training a student was given. I'm sure there is a better solution out there in the aether, but mankind hasn't discovered it yet.

http://official-asvab.com/validity_res.htm

How do you know clinical trials are better than observational methods? How do you know controlled experiments are better than post-hoc reasoning and logical deduction?

Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here.

But if you are asking for an empirical method to compare the scientific method to "other ways of knowing", there isn't one.

That's not true in any way.

The purpose of the education system is to create a well-informed citizenry prepared for a productive life and for the duty of running a country.

The goal of standardized testing is to get some very rough metrics about superficial, easy-to-observe aspects of some basic parts of the apparatus.

The two are very tenuously related.

If we were applying the scientific method, we wouldn't be doing things like national, uncontrolled experiments that assume that basing major decisions on those rough metrics will result in improvements along the axes we actually care about. And then acting as if those metrics tell us everything about one aspect of the system, teachers, because that's where the political focus is.

Applying the scientific method would involve formulating hypotheses and then testing them through lab work and field trials. That's what we do with medicine, at least some of the time.

Heck, we could start by testing the hypothesis that getting everybody to focus lots of classroom time on standardized tests improves actual education.

It's been done.

A quick Google found me this: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/study-finds-standardize...

Which is from 1992. I'm sure if I put some effort into it, I could find more, or at least demonstrate that standardized testing has not meaningfully changed in the last 20 years.

Could you be specific? In particular, how do I measure whether a citizen is prepared for a productive life or not?

Heck, we could start by testing the hypothesis that getting everybody to focus lots of classroom time on standardized tests improves actual education.

How would you set up the experiment? In particular, how would you compare group A (no tests) to group B (with tests)?

I like that you ignored the latter half.

You don't measure the citizen. You measure the rate at which the country is liberalizing. That is, the rate at which its core philosophical attitude is becoming more individualist, egalitarian, meliorist, and universalist. The purpose of public education is to shift us from the medieval era into the modern era. (And to be clear, being conservative is the opposite of being radical; it does not contradict being liberal. Many things that belong on the political Right are legitimately liberal but not Left.)

How many people are concerned with individual rights? How many people demonstrate equal moral worth and status to all individuals? How many people have a positive outlook on the future? How many people recognize universal qualities in all human beings? The rate at which these indicators are moving is positive, but that rate should be increasing in a country with a strong educational system; you'd ask the questions differently in a different era.

Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc?

Education is a way of ensuring a more advanced and productive society through imparting certain knowledge and ideas to its children. The best metric for measuring the performance of an education system is rates of criminality. If a society has high crime rates then its education system is failing to produce productive members.

(See, e.g., Einstein displaying knowledge of quantum mechanics without actually believing it, or assorted creationists who actually understand evolution.)

I think your claim that criminality is the best measure of knowledge is interesting. Among other things, it suggests that the best way to increase knowledge might be to shut down the education system and implement a police state. (For the cost of the current education system we could increase the number of cops/courts/prisons by a factor of 6.)

Actually, an easier way to reduce the crime rate to zero is to repeal all categories of crime. Make it legal to steal and murder. Then all you have are existential crimes: "How could you let this happen!?" types: where crime is a metaphor rather than a fact.

> (For the cost of the current education system we could increase the number of cops/courts/prisons by a factor of 6.)

Citation needed.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total

We spend a lot on education, not so much on cops.

What did you think it was?

> Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc?

Uh, polling?

Can you tell me why these are good things to prepare people for?

I don't disagree with you, mind. It's just that accusations of indoctrination are responded to in kind.

It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system (conveying knowledge/skills rather than indoctrination).

No, it's not. Polling is an analysis of a large population through sampling. Standardized testing, in the context we're talking about, is an evaluation of performance based on the performance of a different group.

> It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system

Here's the funny part. The goals are expressed through the school system. The kind of reform I'd like to see (read: infeasible in the short-term, at least) involve societal upheaval. I can talk about it, as long as you recognize that I've been working for the past few months on trying to figure out a good way of capturing my thoughts and have yet to succeed to my satisfaction.

I can't speak for wpietri, but my opposition to standardized testing is multifarious. For instance, I've experienced its detrimental effects on education firsthand. (In high school, there were a number of interesting topics that we had no time to cover because it was more important to teach to the test. My desire for education reform was born right there.) For the same reason, I dislike grading and GPAs and such. I don't consider this opposition very important, though, because I think we're teaching the wrong things to begin with.

> conveying knowledge/skills

The decision of which pieces of knowledge and which skills to focus on is a political decision and a form of indoctrination. Otherwise, you're not actually conveying anything so much as facilitating the ability to discover/develop knowledge/skills.

I'm confused - what group of people should we be measuring, if not the students exiting the education system?

...there were a number of interesting topics that we had no time to cover because it was more important to teach to the test.

Again, I stand by my claim that your problem is not with standardized tests, but with the goals of the school system. You wanted schools to cover topic B, but the political system decided they must cover A.

The only role the tests played in this story is that they are an effective mechanism for making sure teachers actually do their job.

I am having trouble finding a word in that sentence that isn't wrong.

That's not the only role the play. E.g., they also cause people to spend more time on test prep and less on education.

There isn't just one story here, despite your attempts to pretend that teachers are the only problem and tests are the only solution. Which is the political angle you aim to work.

They are not a particularly effective mechanism. Which is why nobody sane uses standardized tests forevaluating, say, which developers to hire.

They are not an effective mechanism for making sure that teachers actually do their jobs. They could only theoretically cover a small part of the teacher's job, and it's not clear how well they cover that. And they lump together all of the other factors that go into even that small slice of a student's performance.

Can you be specific about what "test prep" means and how it differs from "education"?

Again, many larger companies (e.g., Google, Goldman, MS, DE Shaw) do attempt to standardize their hiring procedures and evaluation methods. But I suppose they are all "insane", right?

If not, I don't see what your point is.

I also don't believe you really don't understand where education and test prep diverge. I think that's a rhetorical technique.

They have collections of questions they ask on interviews, each assigned relative difficulties, and a standardized way to evaluate answers. They ask interviewers to stick to a certain structure, and discard results if an interviewer goes rogue. Standardization is about making sure results are objective and comparable to each other - "fill in the bubbles" is just one particular easy-to-grade method of accomplishing that.

In the past companies (pre Griggs v. Duke Power) did use even more standardized methods, which included "fill in the bubbles", they just don't get too close to completely objective standardized tests due to lawsuit risk.

I also don't believe you really don't understand where education and test prep diverge. I think that's a rhetorical technique.

For a decently designed test (such as the one I linked to) I don't believe they diverge significantly. As I suspected, you are unable to justify your claim that they do.

As to the difference between education and test prep, I'm not unable to justify my position; I'm unwilling to try to do so to you. I don't think you're a serious conversational participant here, by which I mean one who's actually willing to learn anything.

But as a hint, your basic claim is that a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test is a perfect leading indicator for the decades-long effect we expect education to have. And that it can't be manipulated to diverge from that.

That's a very strong claim, and you're obviously smart enough to find the holes in that. You won't, though, because your whole MO on HN is as relentless debater on a pretty narrow set of political points.

You really only care about those standardized tests, don't you? Any other point of interest just sort of gets ignored.

My point is that NCLB is scientific in the same way Taylorism was: it's a cargo cult activity that takes on the trappings of science and looks for something easy to measure. And then uses those measures in ways that aren't scientifically validated at all.

That's fine - you've just adopted a different philosophy, one of the "other ways of knowing" rather than science.

My point is that NCLB...

I'm not arguing for NCLB, I'm arguing that objective, comparable and reproducible measurements are the only viable way to optimize a system.

If you want to argue some specific metric is flawed, do it. Explain what should be measured and how the particular metric differs from it (i.e., details). So far, not a single person in this thread has actually done that - the closest we came was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713558

I would love it if we did proper science with education. I would love it if we did it with software development. In neither case has anybody put forward sufficient resources to do real science in these realms. Not science sufficient to replace human judgment.

Until we can, I don't think cargo cult science is the way to go. Half-assed studies on software development methods, counting simple metrics for developers, measuring teachers through simple standardized tests: all cargo cult science.

For now, I'd much rather rely explicitly on human judgment. It's not as good as actual science, but it's much better than pseudoscience.

But more crucially, the subjects (both teachers and students) in those studies are not rewarded based on the outcome of the study. Even if there is a correlation between the test and what we want schools to achieve (whatever that is), making teachers jobs contingent on that outcome will select for teachers who are good at achieving those results, which increasingly will diverge from your desired outcome. It's an example of dangers of "optimization by proxy" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_...).

Sorry, what's the null hypothesis here, and where's the control group?

Longitudinal data would be difficult to find, but surely countries differ in their respective levels of standardized testing.

In other words, do people really believe that Americans are great at being programmers or fire fighters or lawyers but that we just suck at being teachers?

Maybe I'm biased because there are a lot of teachers in my family, but my impression from hearing them discuss it is that the problem is much larger than whether teachers are good enough or not. Many teachers, like the one who wrote the linked article, are working under incredible pressure, essentially in conditions under which is is very easy to fail. Huge class sizes, inadequate funding, etc.

I think we should stop blaming teachers and assume like we do with so many other workers that most of them are smart and capable and will do well if we give them the support they need. And it would probably be wise to ask teachers how we can improve education and give them the authority and resources to implement their ideas.

I had a few stars, most were just getting by, some actively sucked. From everything I've ever heard, most people had the same experience.

It's not like we're talking about something none of us know anything about. We've been there, seen it.

We don't trust 16 year olds to make decisions on what they do and do not want to study, so we force them to study some things we know they won't like. And why?

Also, experiences can be really variable for different people. Some students might have many great teachers and be in a position where school is very positive for them. Other students could be facing an entirely different picture about the kind of schools and teachers available to them, esp. given the variances in local and state politics, class levels, income, and attitudes towards teaching.

I've never met anyone who said this about her public high school education. In university, many people said this about their educations in private schools, so I assume such a positive experience is possible. I'm convinced it's rare in public-funded secondary schools in the USA.

Of course, we software developers, understanding the complexity of our profession, know that would be idiocy. "But hey," says the MBA, "Some metric is better than no metric."

I'm not sure what you're advocating, but it seems to be wish-based education.

That would explain why you'd cling to cargo-cult science rather than admit that the current use of standardized testing is not scientific in any way.

Do that successfully, and I'll happily give you a good metric for teachers.

The places I have worked have all emphasized goal-based metrics. The software developer lays out what they think their responsibilities should be and how they'll be measured on them. The manager then reviews the list with the developer and confirms the responsibilities and the measurements. The developer is then later graded upon his or her ability to meet the predetermined requirements.

I think the same thing could be used for teachers. Seems workable to me.

You argue in one place that scientific metrics are the only way to evaluate educators. And then here you are arguing that managerial judgment is a serious metric. Even though it's entirely non-numeric, personal, unstandardized, unrepeatable, and unreliable.

The same thing was used for teachers: it's called the judgment of their employers. If you're happy with that, then there's no particular need for all the NCLB standardized testing.

It's a very different proposition.

As for measuring performance, there are ton of ways to do it (some of which incorporate tests) without mandating standardized testing.

I wonder what teachers who currently "teach to the test" would teach if they had no test to teach to. I seriously doubt that they would suddenly become paragons of pedagogy, that it was somehow the existence of standardized tests was the cause of their deficient teaching.

Of course it could be argued that tests offer a shelter to such teachers; in standardized test's absence, they would be replaced by better teachers. I also think this is an unlikely scenario. The absence of standardization would result in non-uniform results, some districts might come up with good measures of teacher performance and successfully replace teachers, but I suspect most would not. Instead, the formerly "teach to the test" teachers would stay on, and that their teaching would not improve as a result of their new-found lack of accountability.

No doubt some replacement for standardized testing could be invented, but that is irrelevant if we are arguing that such tests are worse than useless. I.e. that doing nothing is better than doing these tests.

Standardized testing bears exactly the same relationship to the outcome we actually care about in education.

In both realms, there is no easy single metric you can turn to. In the end, you hire great people and get out of their way. The best measurements come from multi-dimensional feedback from managers, peers, and customers. No it doesn't scale very well but it's the only thing that works.

Teachers are actually some of the highest paid people in society. When you don't include benefits teachers make about $40/hr while engineers make $42/hr. If you do include benefits, a teachers compensation far exceeds that of an engineer due to their pensions. Source, BLS via Forbes.

North Carolina teachers start around $37k, averaging out later to $46k. Some counties are higher, some lower.

The pension plans are problematic, because many of them are under funded. For an older teacher about to retire this might not be an issue, but if you're 30 this seems like a much less certain deal.

Teachers are rarely compensated on an hourly basis, and when they are it probably doesn't count half of their hours.

Would your attorney charge you (in 5 minute increments) for a call at 7pm? You bet they would! But a call with a parent at 7pm nets a teacher nothing. Nor does preparation in the evening. Many teachers have exceedingly low classroom budgets as well, and are often forced to purchase supplies out of pocket.

The High School theatre teacher who is working on a play with students until 11pm every night for weeks and weekends isn't compensated on an hourly basis; or given overtime. Its just part of the gig. And that sucks.

I wouldn't mind being a teacher some day, as I love teaching; but unless I hit the startup lottery there's no way i can accept that level of compensation given my background, experience and skills. And even then, in a state like North Carolina that is more about rules than education, I can't see myself being able to last 3 days in that environment.

According to BLS, the median pay is $53,230 per year, which would be closer to $26.50 an hour, assuming a 40-hour work week.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-s...

Maybe the Forbes article you're referring to about is only counting classroom hours, which is a pretty absurd notion. Teaching is a full-time job, and any figure based on an assumption to the contrary is going to be flawed. Not meaning to straw-man you, it's just that without a link to the article in question, I can only speculate where your figures come from.

Even if they don't work all 12 months of the year, is it feasible for a teacher to take another similar-paying job during the off months? If not, then hourly pay is not a good indicator of income. I can't imagine a person who is only going to be available for 2-3 months, and who has split responsibilities with classroom preparation, would be able to get a non-menial job to fill in the gaps, somewhere along the lines of $15/hour.

So taking $15/hr * 40 hours (optimistic) gives $600 per week, multiplied by 13 weeks gives $7800 for the summer. Add that to the $52000 estimate from BLS, and you get $59,800 per year, which averages about $28 per hour on average.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

That's about $33.5/hour for wages alone. It also ignores the value of gold plated health care + pensions, etc.

Tuck in your pants. Your bias is peeking out.

(Edit after being downvoted, in an attempt to be more constructive): Seriously, you seem to have an animus against teachers having decent health care. What's your problem with that, and why do you feel it's appropriate to label their quite average health care plans as "gold plated", as if they were unfairly receiving more health care than they are entitled to?

Sorry, I have to get back to believing whatever the 1% wants me to believe.

http://www.nea.org/home/12661.htm

That certainly matches the teachers I've known; they put in a ton of non-classroom hours, and often put in a fair bit of their own money.

A Gates Foundation survey puts it at 53 hours per week:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey...

And for teachers involved in extracurricular activities, the average is over 11 hours a day.

You'd have known all this if you bothered to read even the introduction.

And since the Gates Foundation numbers better match what every teacher I've ever talked to says, I'm going to run with them.

Since the source is Forbes I would strongly recommend scrutinizing the original data to see how they cherry-picked it. A disturbingly common deception tactic is to only count actual teaching time, which is akin to reporting a software developer's hours by focusing on time typing new code and ignoring testing, documentation, meetings, research, HN, etc. Similarly, you frequently hear "3 months vacation" bandied about when it's typically closer to 2 months and ignores weeks of district/school professional development, pre/post-year planning & prep, mandatory continuing education, etc. We typically have only one or two options for a two-week vacation during the entire summer break.

The other issue is that value-added testing should be used in evaluating teachers, but only a single component of a larger evaluation process. On its own, it's almost as pernicious as the system we have now.

For more on these subjects, see

* "What Makes a Great Teacher?": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...

* "Why Kids Should Grade Teachers": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/why-kids...

* The collection of articles I listed here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-... .

>It's easy to point out problems. It's useful and important that people find flaws and fault.

The largest issue isn't identifying problems—it's that the people who benefit most from the status quo (teachers, unions) derive very concentrated benefits, while the solutions to the status quo are diffuse (students, parents, society). One sees this pattern in many fields (farm subsidies are the canonical example), and there's an extensive economics literature on it.

But hey - that might be ridiculously easy to game - every which way.

(Personally I would get my whole class pissed out of their brains on the first test, and teach normally for the rest of the year. With any luck I will see an improvement)

And finally - testing is supposed to be about testing the students. Not the teachers. Every Head knows which ones are good and which ones are crap.

At this point, I'd also note that the people running the numbers tend to have very limited math skills – a great way to recoup some of the money we're pouring into standardized testing would be for each district to hire expert statisticians, scientists, etc. so the comparisons could be done by people who understand how to avoid measurement and analysis errors.

Terrible at what, exactly?

I can tell you about my experience in the 90's. There were exceptions, but generally teachers I had would hand out worksheets and assignments, and then class time would be spent doing what was effectively homework. Very rarely would there be an actual lecture. I had several completely incompetent teachers as well, who were completely tolerated by the schools administration.

One teacher, Mrs. Rushing, was completely incompetent. During the lesson on vector addition, she claimed that if you added a bunch of vectors together, it was the same as taking a vector from the beginning of the first vector to the end of the last vector, if you put the source of each vector at the end of the previous one. Well, that's what she was meant to say, she actually insisted that the length of the paths was the same, and she argued for it despite it being obviously wrong. She had at best a weak and often incorrect understanding of the material she was meant to be teaching. She also used her entire planning period each day to sell Avon or Mary Kay or something, which I witnessed every day as I was an aid in the math department and was in the planning room during her planning period. Every day some random lady would come in to the school and chat with her for an hour and try cosmetics during the time she was meant to be preparing for classes. During class she would often get stuck and go ask other teachers questions mid class.

So it would have been great if they had tested the outcomes of the students who were in her class, and compared them to the several wonderful teachers teaching the same subject at the same school. Instead, she is still there.

This is largely the fault of our notion that teachers are explanation delivery devices and students explanation receptacles, where the only improvements can be found in better explanations and better student engagement. The notion is wrong. Students need to actively test their understanding by making predictions and failing, and no courses I've ever experienced attempt to do this.

If you're interested in the mounds of research:

http://www.refsmmat.com/articles/shutup.html

Shouldn't a good teacher prod students in this direction?

Standardized testing pushes in the opposite direction, alas. It encourages teachers to push for the sort of rote learning that is instantly forgotten when the test is past.

Imagine what would happen if you evaluated software engineers by lines of code written, and you get some idea of the potential downside.

Other potential ways to assess teacher effectiveness: - auditing classes & lesson plans - feedback from peers, parents, students and principals