Comments on: Hard Facts: Teaching

By: Generator Rentals

Generator Rentals — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:12:15 +0000

Incentive pay for teachers will do the same thing that the state exams have started doing. Teachers now have to teach to the tests that the students have to take instead of the subjects and alternative thinking that promotes true education. Nothing more than zombie generators.

School-children are being turned into mini-encyclopedias that can only regurgitate the smallest facts that have been stuffed into them. Kids also now understand that they can google anything and have an answer, or find someplace to ask it.

Our education system is seriously lacking.

By: David Salamon

David Salamon — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 07:50:19 +0000

There’s a difference between being required to learn something and having that learning graded relative to those in your immediate physical vicinity.

By: Boris

Boris — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:32:27 +0000

For me the “end of unit” exams were one last chance to consolidate what I had learned, and the marking of these exams showed me what I (mis)understood. Useful for teachers to know what the classes were struggling with or learning easily.

These exams were possibly the most educational day of the unit of work we were studying.

By: Josh

Josh — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:18:44 +0000

As another person who works at a school with no grades, I third it.

However, we go a bit further and also have no pre-determined curricula, grade levels, power hierarchy or institutional expectations of what they should do or learn other than that they should know that they are individually responsible, now and forever, for what they do and learn.

And, while I don’t know about “results” in the current test-results sense because we don’t test, I can say that our graduates over the years have gone on to college at a higher rate than your typical traditional school in this region (rural, central WV) and have become doctors, entrepreneurs, and stay-at-home moms. No judgment.

Just saying, it takes a lot of trust, but humans are self-motivated their whole lives if they are in an environment where they are free and responsible for what they do. Isn’t that what a democracy is supposed to be anyways?

By: colin

colin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:22:19 +0000

I haven’t read the book so I don’t know the methodology. What type of schools were they getting their data from? Was it mostly public schools? Did they have a controlled study of just private or even charter+private?

My point being, if the incentive pay programs are implemented in public schools, which essentially have monopoly control over education, and whose teachers generally belong to a strong union, then I’d expect to see mass grade inflation without any improved learning. There’d be no incentive NOT to just juice up the grades.

Whereas if incentives were provided in a system where school choice was more open and the disciplining (and firing/hiring process) of teachers weren’t so costly, we might see real benefit.

If they’re not controlling the data for the vast majority of our ed sector being a public monopoly, then the data isn’t really all that informative.

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:28:11 +0000

Conditional on not making even more dramatic changes to the hiring and compensation of teachers, further experimentation with merit pay is warranted. If Robin disagrees I would really like to hear why.

By: Paul Crowley

Paul Crowley — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:37:44 +0000

I don’t know the details of the system – if there are schools which have absolutely rigid criteria, you could compare the people who fell very close to the boundary on either side, whereas if there’s a discretionary component, that could still correlate with a number of factors for success which they haven’t managed to control for.

By: Phil Goetz

Phil Goetz — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:08:21 +0000

“At least 55 studies show that when flunked students are compared to socially promoted students, flunked students perform worse and drop out of school at higher rates.”

This is a surprise? Is this supposed to imply that flunking students causes them to perform worse and drop out of school?

I have an alternate hypothesis: Students who perform worse and know they are likely to drop out of school, are more likely to be flunked.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:42:04 +0000

“Though we still have no clear results after all this time and money, further study is warranted; send your check to our address below.”

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:38:50 +0000

It is interesting that we trust schools to evaluate themselves here, rather than having independent evaluators of their effectiveness.