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Main Paineframe posted:The problem with teacher assessment isn't the standards or methodology, it's the actions taken based on the results of the assessments. The dominant forces in school reform policy right now don't want to assess teachers in order to help them improve, they want to assess teachers so that they can fire a bunch of "bad teachers". It's not too much different from how No Child Left Behind addresses failing schools by cutting their funding and then firing all the staff. As long as reform policy is centered around punishment rather than helping to improve, teachers are going to resist teacher assessment to their dying breath, because it's being pushed in order to hurt them rather than help them. I think the narrative lot union-busting/teacher resentment/etc. is implicitly tied to the idea that the profession of teaching (or medicine or the academy or whatever) has some intrinsic value. But does it? Do teachers really "know what's best for their classroom"? Pro-teacher (and pro-physician) arguments seem to be that "it's not their job" to deal with social problems or "it's not their fault" that their students/patients are more disadvantaged than others. Maybe so, but if we have this population of beneficiaries that needs to be catered to in new ways, why are the professional concerns of teachers/doctors/professors/etc. always paramount? In short, why do we care about professional autonomy so much?
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Jul 29, 2014 01:13
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Main Paineframe posted:Can you explain how firing experienced teachers and replacing them with poorly-trained fresh-faced interns will somehow fix social issues or improve the lot of students? I'm not saying that teachers "know what's best for the classroom"; after all, the original topic of this thread was largely about how teachers are failing to properly adapt to new teaching styles thought to be more effective. I'm saying that rather than addressing those problems and helping teachers to improve their teaching style and fix their problems, most "reform" attempts primarily concern themselves with firing and replacing teachers every year till test scores go up. In addition to completely ignoring the non-teacher-related factors in education and being unlikely to actually have a positive impact on teaching quality, it turns teachers into a reactionary group by teaching them that "education reform" is just a code-word for "screwing over teachers". Okay, without going down the rabbit holes of postmodernism (e.g. measurement of social benefits is impossible, cost-benefit analysis is evil, etc.) or statism (e.g. the state should just expand it's powers to fix any social problem it encounters), I'll try to summarize the situation. The US federal government is currently budget-constrained, and has been so for a while (the idea of a balanced budget was important since at least the mid-80s. During that same period, many of our social services (healthcare, education, prisons, etc.) have been getting shittier. If the federal government had directly control over employees for these services, it could just fire them or raise standards if needed. But it doesn't. The federal government transfers money to the states, but it's powers are greatly constrained by (1) federalism, and (2) in the case of many social services, professionalism. First, federalism: the federal government has very limited powers over state departments of education, school districts, schools, etc. All it can do is threaten these entities with money to force them to adopt whatever standards it thinks are currently the best. And here's where testing comes in -- federal officials do not run schools, so they have to force schools to produce some metric that shows they are performing well. The most common metric is test scores, which everyone hates. But what else could the feds do? More subjective metrics would be very difficult to implement (send inspectors to every school?) or very prone to falsification (have students rate their teachers?). So, so long as we have a federal system where money is transferred from the federal government to state and local entities in a constrained fiscal environment, we will have performance measurement. Next, we have the issue of professionalism. Teachers are direct employees of districts, but they are unionized and individual districts cannot force them to teach a certain way. They are not like employees of a retail business; the line of authority is much more diffuse. Okay, great, teachers have academic freedom, tenure, etc. That's great for them. Maybe great for students, but only if the teacher's freedom leads him or her to teach better than the standards. If not, then the freedom is a net negative for students. Again, the federal government cannot do anything about this anyway, it can only effect teachers through several layers of management by holding funding hostage at the school-, district-, and state-level. How would you run things differently, given these constraints? It would be as if you ran Subway at the corporate-level and franchisees were free to use your branding and products, but turn down certain directives as they saw fit. Obviously, this would lead to some Subway locations being shittier than others, and the brand might sag as a whole. Maybe great for certain franchisees, but not for the whole company. Same thing happens with US education as a whole and the individual schools that is composed of.
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Jul 29, 2014 21:05
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Main Paineframe posted:How about increasing the amount of federally-provided mandatory training to go along with the new curriculums being sent out? Regardless of which Subway location you work at, Subway requires all newly-hired franchise employees to go through a corporate-run online training program. Subway employees are also required to follow certain procedures and policies, and inspectors from both Subway corporate and the government are regularly sent to Subway locations to ensure that employees are following government rules and Subway policies, ranging from "wash your hands after you take out the trash" to "put the right amounts of food on people's sandwiches and follow the corporate recipes". It's not at all difficult for a centralized authority to influence semi-autonomous locations not under their direct control. I think the issue here is that the federal government has no legal way to regulate teachers. It can force institutions that accept federal money to institute new curriculum/rules, but teachers are licensed by each individual state. I don't know as much about education as I do about healthcare, but I do know that the federal government has a ton of opportunity to regulate doctors and hospitals because it runs the largest insurer, Medicare. The government can just add pile on regulations to docs/hospitals as a condition of Medicare participation. In terms of education, I'm pretty sure the feds would have to blackmail all the states like it did with the drinking age or speed limits.
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Jul 30, 2014 22:21
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