> By the time they take the eighth-grade tests in the spring of the year, they already know which high school they will be attending, and their scores on the test have no consequences. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott said. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids.

Anytime anyone makes an argument that teachers should be evaluated based on their kids' test scores I have to explain about the problems of misaligned incentives. If the kids are not motivated to do their best, it's not going to be a fair evaluation of the teacher even if you manage to solve ALL the many other problems with high-stakes testing. And a lot of students aren't motivated to do their best on these kinds of tests, for a variety of reasons.

For example: during our standardized testing this year, the school put in huge amounts of effort to align student incentives, most of which were silly and clearly ineffective. (My personal favorite? Disallowing students to bring their own books to read after they finished the test to "encourage" them to check their work instead of hurrying through so they could read the next chapter of The Hunger Games. Talk about easy ways to incite student frustration and contempt!)

I can attest to students finishing a test in less than 10 minutes despite being given more than an hour, or refusing to do any of the test at all. I've heard horror stories of students using the multiple-choice answer documents to make pictures by filling in the bubbles, or simply choosing to color in bubbles so lightly that they can't possibly be read. I know of examples in prior years wherein students chose to write essays about how much they hate testing on the essay portion instead of addressing the infantile tripe they were assigned.

Now, these are obviously exceptions to the rule (I'm a bit biased, but I think our students are almost uniformly excellent), but it is amazing how much damage one student can do by choosing not to care. (Or, in some cases, using their answers to vent their frustration).

And why should they? As far as I know, rewarding students for higher performance is disallowed, leaving teachers with very few tools with which to convince students that these tests matter. Sure, you can go on and on about how their scores will be "important" in their future (which, to my knowledge, isn't always true), but that only goes so far. Sometime during the 2 weeks of intensive testing, the kids just don't care anymore.

I'm all for assessing the performance of teachers, and I'm not sure how to fix the problem (or even if it can be fixed), but one thing seems clear to me: they're doing it wrong.

[Updated to fix punctuation errors]

The incentive for the person grading is just disconnected from the supposed meaning of the rating itself.

Schools need to implement a standard performance-based path for skipping grade levels so that students can get out sooner.

I was reading Hawking, Nietzsche, and college-level humanities books in my free time in 8th grade because I was bored out of my gourd with my classes. In 12th grade, I was forced to take classes that taught, for example, how to balance your check book.

I'm pretty sure that when he's older, I'm going to encourage my son to get a GED when he's 16 yo or so, just so that he doesn't have to put up with all of the bullcrap classes.

And, I don't care about your socialization arguments. My son is 2 yo and already has great table manners, is polite, shares, and is quite empathetic. Most of the "normal" young people I meet these days behave either like wild Indians (feather not dot) or slovenly Barbarians.

Thanks for saying that because it brings up a problem that HN has that I've been thinking about for awhile. HN seems to be stuck in an upper to upper-middle class/Leftist/Politally-Correct viewpoint, and I think that is to its detriment. Why do so many HNer's startups focus on things like iPod Apps, whose chances for profitability are very questionable, instead of markets like industrial sales software, which is very under-served?

Shouting "That's racist!" every time someone expresses a non-Leftist opinion here is a symptom of your limited viewpoint, and frankly is embarrassing for you.

Would you express the same righteous indignation if I was trying to distinguish between groups of Europeans and had said "lederhosen not shamrock"?

I used to live in an Alaskan Native tribal village, and my friends there would be some of the first ones to tell you that some Indians are wild while some are not. (Note, in my comment, I am not saying all Indians are wild, I am only specifically referencing the wild ones.) And, by wild, I mean those who stereotypically disregard personal and communal property rights and engage in harmful activities like thievery and poaching for the fun of it.

hnhg, I don't know if my point will get through to you or not. I can only hope that you will actually go out and experience the greater world sometime.

If you're angry, please go ahead and downvote me. I've been voted down to -80 karma before. It is close-minded people like you who are the reason why PG no longer shows karma scores for users.

2. Indian people in the United States do not identify themselves as "dot Indians". Perhaps it is easy to differentiate between different peoples who are called "Indians" by whether or not they stereotypically wear a bindi, but it also, unfortunately, propagates the notion that "them Indian people over there with them dots." It's yet another stereotype people have to deal with on a daily basis when trying to fit into society, and it takes away the focus from treating people as, well, as people, and focusing on the work they do or the value they bring.

3. Similarly, by speaking of "wild Indians" it does indeed marginalize a people and shoehorn them into a stereotype of being uncouth individuals. There are thieves and poachers in all parts of the world, and to say that Native American poachers are any worse than any others is, again, a stereotype and probably untrue.

4. In that light, I never really grew up in a society where rampant poaching by Native Americans was a problem. Perhaps living in a native tribal village, where everyone was part of an Alaskan Native tribe, the only people around to do any poaching were natives. But there is no reason to believe that they would be any more despicable than poachers of any other ethnicity.

This isn't about politics. It's about treating people fairly and equitably, and since that is something that we often do a poor job of doing, well, the things we write and say help form our culture.

And since we're on hacker news, where we tend to value correctness, the presuppositions that your comments make are unfounded and lack truthiness. That isn't being "politically correct"; merely "correct".

So, you're not racist, because of course you weren't talking about all Native Americans. But if not all 'feather indians' are wild, and not all of those that are wild are 'feather indians' then what was the point of comparing certain kids to them? The only purpose I see is in reinforcing a stereotype that does not apply.

Because Barbarian isn't a racial or ethnic group. It's a term basically meaning "the savage foreigner." It's demeaning to call someone a barbarian, but there's no Barbarian peoples that are offended by the use of the term.

edit: Gonna go ahead and disagree with this point too:

"Simply using existing stereotypes is not racism. I have neither commented on the superiority-level of Indians..."

Your interpretation of this definition seems to be that using a negative stereotype is not racist because it's not a direct value-judgement. That is wrong.

Even if you're not passing judgement, it is very much racist to say that (for example) Asians are all martial-artists and computer experts, or that Jews control the world, or that Native Americans are wild savages.

Why is that racist? Because it pigeonholes these people into weird and untrue stereotypes, and is therefore offensive to them.

If it's offensive to a racial group, it's probably racist.

> Did you immediately understand what set of behaviors I implied by saying "wild Indian" and "slovenly Barbarian"?

No, actually, I still have no idea. My guess was that those behaviors do not include "great table manners, is polite, shares, and is quite empathetic" but beyond that, I can barely guess.

> (Why isn't anyone upset that I included the Barbarians?)

Who are "the Barbarians"?

> Simply using existing stereotypes is not racism.

Response a) So what, only new stereotypes is racism? b) Yes, it is, when those stereotypes are based on race.

> I have neither commented on the superiority-level of Indians and Barbarians

Um, you said your kid is well-behaved, unlike those other people. That directly implies your kid is superior to them. And I guess your Alaskan Native friends are superior to the "wild" ones. Also, 'positive' racism (e.g. "asians are good at math") is just as bad,

> or have I modified their access to resources and opportunities.

Not directly, but racism is hardly so overt these days.

> In fact, stereotypes can be quite useful, for example, when you are trying to determine which VC to impress or what demographic is most likely to use your kitten-photo sharing Facebook App.

What?! I would never invest in someone that makes business decisions based on stereotypes rather than data, or that approached me because of stereotype they had about me.

hnhg seems correct here your arguments can definitely be 'distilled'. In that distillation process the references to 'Indians', 'Shamrocks' and 'Barbarians' would be the first to go as they add no support to your material point.

Of course, hnhg's comment approaches Ad Hominem. It could also be better worded.

Just trying to be fair.

I agree that I could have merely said something like, "...wild and slovenly behavior, such as x,y,and z...." At the time, I was trying to create a vivid verbal picture that conveyed additional concepts such as the Barbarian's penchant for tattoos and piercings. Maybe next time I should just spell it all out instead of refactoring it for the sake of brevity.

I think what he was trying to get across by using the term is this: http://vimeo.com/25239728

Edit Never Mind: missed the "Dot" part. Yes that was clearly over the line.

You are drastically missing the point. This has nothing to do with Left vs Right at all. In fact I agreed with you completely up until this point in your rant.

You're implicitly calling all Native Americans (a racial group) "wild" and comparing them to barbarians. That's dictionary-definition racism, plain and simple.

EDIT: keeping this short as I don't want to get into a slanging match but my for the record politics aren't on the left, I don't have the belief that cultures are morally equivalent, etc, etc.

My parents disregarded this, and I got enrolled in classes. Once I was there, I was enjoying school much more than I was at the high school, and I often did better than the regular college students...

I would like to think that this sort of promotion out of drudgery would be common-place by now, but I have no idea.

From what I understand, many school districts in the USA have rules against this. Or, they have no advertised route for early completion, which is effectively the same thing.

This was at a small, elite private school.

I hope you realize this is incredibly racist.

I didn't take that option. I knew a lot of the kids in my neighborhood and they were all 1-2 years older. They would all know that I had skipped ahead and many were bullies. That was definitely a fear of mine if I stayed in the same school district.

Thus my parents looked at private schools. All the private schools were willing to let me skip to high school as well. Unfortunately they were expensive (my parents didn't make an issue of this, but I was aware of it). I also didn't really want to leave my friends and a lot of the kids at the private school seemed more stuck up.

So I ended up staying with my normal grade and the public school jumped me ahead with a lot independet study stuff as much as possible. It helped a bit. What helped a lot more was the principal telling the teachers that I was allowed to read during their classes so long as I wasn't getting in trouble. I basically spent middle school as one giant independent study reading books from the town library.

Thankfully when I got to high school, the classes got massively better. I ended up basically finding 3 teachers that really pushed me to go above and beyond the regular curriculum. I took 3 history classes from one of the best teachers I've ever had. I had 2 years of science from a guy with a chemical engineering phD and who powered through MIT in 3 years. And I had a drafting/wood shop/stage craft teacher who let me build and draw stuff as much as I wanted. Those three guys helped me to learn an enormous amount in high school and have a great time.

Once I got to college, I was really glad I didn't skip ahead.

I'm very thankful that my parents pushed the school to let me move ahead when I made it clear I wanted that. I'm also glad they didn't force me to do it after they fought so hard to get the school to let me. They were very supportive, but not over bearing.

If your kid wants to move ahead, help him. If he doesn't, don't force him. One of my dad's coworkers forced his daughter through school ahead of schedule like you want to. She graduated high school at an early age, went to Princeton, and was out by age 18. She went to med school and was a doctor by 22.

She can't get any patients. Nobody actually wants a doctor who is 22. She is depressed, doing research (that she doesn't want to do) and is pissed off about missing out on high school, college, etc. For what?

The end result was his coworker getting divorced and barely ever seeing his daughter.

On the other hand, I worked with a guy who graduated high school early, graduated college by the time he was 20, and he's one of the smartest, nicest, most succesful people I know.

My personal experience is that the BS is late elementary and middle school. If your parents teach you simple math and reading at home you can jump ahead 2-3 years. By high school the availability of AP classes, independent study, and better electives (music, stagecraft, architecture, art, etc) make it far more enjoyable. I don't think shortening high school makes as much sense as shortening middle school.

I also think you have to listen to what your kid wants to do, not go based on what you want them to do.

My wife is a doctor who often gets mistaken for a high-schooler. Has your friend tried different marketing and service packages as a way to obtain and retain patients? Medicine is a business like any other.

Really? It was an inappropriate remark, I was surprised to read it and even more surprised to see it lauded by someone else.

I was under the impression that it was an acceptable short-hand for distinguishing which culture/ethnicity is being referenced when either is equally likely. Do the PC-police now disagree?

[obligatory] It is inappropriate and morally reprehensible. [/obligatory]

Can you not look at nuclear reactions and separate that they are used to make a nuclear bomb?

It was a succinct phrase. It is visually and connotatively arresting. As is evinced by the amount of ire it has provoked.

As a side note, I still read the phrase 'wild Indians' with an image of children misbehaving, especially as it is paralleled later by Barbarians, a generic term for uncivilized behavior. So to me the phrase 'feather not dot' was a preemptive defense against moral grandstanding; what's more, to me it conjured up (in just three words) the very history of the name 'indian' (which when googled on my browser, despite having no interest in baseball, only returns the Cleveland team) - a name misapplied by foreigners.

Now, reading the poster's later defenses[1], I can see that he in fact had no such thoughts when using it...but I am a relativist when it comes to art and believe the perception of the audience supersedes the intent of the artist, and so for me, the phrase still stands as evocative without being ugly.

1.http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3987141 : "Note, in my comment, I am not saying all Indians are wild, I am only specifically referencing the wild ones."

It's (basically) acceptable, but most likely not if used by you. It's not that sensitivities to the phrase have changed; it's that you're not a "safe" speaker in this regard.

To briefly recap the positive aspect of "PC" norms: speech which disparages or generalizes about racial/sex groups communicates to others a willingness to disrespect the members of those groups categorically. This creates a sense of acceptability[1] for outright oppression. Oppression continues to happen, routinely, though generally it is secret.

Compare PC-norms to the Byzantine Generals' Problem[2]: racial minorities and those who seek racial harmony are in the middle. The attacking generals are attempting to coordinate with each other to attack the harmonists. But if the generals are inhibited from coordinating attacks using public speech forums, the harmonists stand a better chance of success. So even "coded" or minor messages should be stamped out, because they are the foundation of coordination.

Now, if you're a member of the minority in question, your use of offensive generalizations does not usually suggest an attack, which potentially changes the acceptability and meaning[3]. "Feather-not-dot" is a particularly interesting example, since it symmetrically stereotypes two groups. I've heard it many times and it generally gives me pause. When spoken by a Native American or East Indian, it's generally fine, but really only when a high level of mutual regard is quite clear.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

Would you want your employees to seriously disrespect tasks they morally disagree with, like sabotaging your advertising system because they think advertising is harmful to society, or changing your website to admit how you're raiding people's pensions? Telling off your big corporate/military customers? (If you did, you probably wouldn't last long in your position.)

I don't know many bosses who want their subordinates to rush through their tasks, in order to read some book of personal interest, or to build a competing company with better service.

Would you want your employees to hack the current process, because they morally disagree or are bored, or simply curious.

Maybe not. But someone will. Welcome to Schumpter's law.

In the world where you studied for 0 hours and got $45k in merit-based scholarships, what was your hourly return to studying?

[To answer what I think is an obvious question, I doubt the overall utility of my hundred hours spent studying. However, it wasn't like CWRU was going to give me the same scholarship for having done something more useful instead.]

I realize the test prep helps some people tremendously, but I think the ACT at least does a decent job of testing what you actually know (or at least how good you are at taking tests) than how well you prepared.

But I also took the SAT 2 subject area tests which I felt were much more accurate assessments of my abilities where I scored 670 in writing and 680 in math without studying at all and only one exposure to the test.

I never really cared about those scores so much, but it definitely makes me question the value of the SAT for much of anything.

> “They’re not accepting answers that are mathematically correct,” Abbott notes, “and accepting answers that aren’t mathematically correct.”

The test just seems to be a retarded thing designed by a clueless bureaucrat.

For a few months I mucked about, went to parties, chased girls, cycled.... it was awesome.

When I went to university I knew I had to start working hard again and I got a First and won a year prize and went on to do post-grad research work - although I did leave in the final year of my PhD to co-found a startup because I had realised that I didn't want to work in academia.

Both teachers at school and my PhD supervisor told me I'd regret my decisions - and I haven't and it's nearly 30 years since I left high school and 17 years since I dropped my PhD work.

It was still some of the best years of my life and would recommend anyone to go, but I dont think a thirst for university prescribed knowledge is the only valid reason to go.

Plus there is all the stuff I have to keep on top of professionally as a programmer, which is an inexaustable and ever growing list of often arbitrary methods and technologies.

As for university, turns out I disliked it almost as much as I disliked school, so I dropped out and went into industry for a while.

Dropped out of that too for ages as I got bored of all the corporate nonsense, although I have been back into it in the past few years to try and raise some cold hard cash for a few projects I've got going.

Am considering going back to university at some point however, as I wouldn't mind doing either nanotechnology or neurology and most of the equipment involved in those is out of my current price range.

To be honest though, most of my heroes are dead philosophers of one form or another, so I am pretty happy with a roof, food, clean clothes, regular showers, access to the internet and a large pile of books.

Besides, in my experience the majority of people at university aren't there because they want to learn, but rather because they are expected to go by their parents. The people who are there purely for the pursuit of knowledge and without being pushed are the exception rather than the rule.

Give me a better metric for success that you can measure over the course of a year.

To address your specific fallacy, the output of coding is heterogeneous while the output of teaching is homogeneous. If I code today, it's a realtime optimization system. Tomorrow it might be a search product. When I taught, the output was always the same: students who understand calculus.

It appears you are claiming that when you taught the output was the same each day. Each day you taught your students learned calculus and understood it. Each day you may have taught an aspect of calculus but the topics varied from day to day. Furthermore, assuming undergrad level, it can't be believed that each of your students understood each topic you taught.

The dichotomy you've laid out between programming and teaching is not apt.

Not every student understood every topic. So what?

Your statements here strengthen the parody. Merge sort is the same for everyone, right? So let's just go by lines of code. The outcome is the same.

Two different people don't teach the same way even if the curriclumn is the same.

So what? The goal is the same. It is meaningful to measure whether my students know more or less calculus than yours.

If the goal of programming were to re-implement merge sort over and over then it would be an effective metric to count the number of correct merge sort implementations.

The inability to compare a realtime monitoring system to a web scraper is what makes programming harder to measure.

But in many cases one can measure programmers by output. For example, at Styloot, one task we have is building web scrapers. They all have a pretty straightforward (and identical) goal. An effective metric for programmer performance on this task would be to measure the # of scrapers written or (better) the # of items correctly scraped.

See also quant traders - the goal is homogeneous (increase profit, adjusted for risk), and your code is measured by how well it achieves that goal.

Yes.

That was, to some extent, my point :-)

That and the fact that many HN folk will have encountered management doing dumb things like equating velocity or cycle time or lines of code with productivity. Which may explain their aversion to simplistic metrics like this.

To address your specific fallacy, the output of coding is heterogeneous while the output of teaching is homogeneous. If I code today, it's a realtime optimization system. Tomorrow it might be a search product. When I taught, the output was always the same: students who understand calculus.

Really? I can easily see it from the opposite point of view. When I code I'm just delivering running-tested-features. When I teach (which I have done, and still do) every student is different - they often start from radically different positions of attitude, aptitude and existing knowledge.

And measuring 'teaching quality' is not a simple as counting ad click-throughs. Education is at least as much about helping people learn about their role in the world, as it is about learning facts, concepts, and tools. Just measuring the increase of students' scores on standardized tests misses a lot of the impact teachers have on their students' minds.

Nobody in his right mind would judge a developer solely on the amount of features he has implemented during the previous year, but also on how robust and maintainable the code is. I you want to take these factors into account, you have to actually read the code, understand it, and ideally talk to the developer about it. Unless you do this, you can not judge the quality of the code.

The same holds true for evaluating teachers, imho. Administrators need to talk to students, parents and teachers and form a comprehensive image of a teacher's ability. I really think it is that simple. Certainly not perfect. But not less perfect than standardized testing.

As a German, maybe I am misunderstanding some properties of the US educational system.

The whole reason that test results are being used as opposed to manual assesment, is that test results have proven to be a better predictor of long term outcomes. Test results aren't perfect but they're better than what was previously used.

i'm not sure what long term outcomes you're referring to and how they were measured, but if they're education related the measurement was probably more test results. Yes, test results are a good predictor of future test results.

Addendum:

My understanding is, that in the United States anyone can relatively easy train to be a school teacher. In Germany they are tenured civil servants with at least 3-4 years of study.

Could you explain what this means more precisely? Specifically, how can I differentiate a student who knows "about their role in the world" from one who doesn't?

https://iandravid.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/carl-sagan-dragon...

How can I know a calculus test exists? Very easily. I look at it, feel it, etc. How can I know calculus ability exists? Again, very easily - it predicts outcomes on a set of correlated exams, the existence of which I verify with sight, touch, etc.

You seem to want to argue that education only produces vague, immaterial and unmeasurable outcomes. Lets take that as a given - in that case, why not just eliminate education spending and save $900B/year?

You seem to confuse physical existence and idea. Presumably a physical object can be painted but ideas can't. Lot's of things exist that can't be verified by sight, touch, etc. In my opinion being a good teacher is not something that can be reasonably measured. I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong but have seen no evidence that I am.

The Life of Samuel Johnson (James Boswell)

You're actually better off with no information than with bad information.

A better analogy would be a medicine that typically leaves patients worse off than they were before treatment.

I'm not saying they should give up the search for something that works, but they absolutely should not cause harm just for the sake of doing something.

Define success.

If one gets the best score but has no social skills, no friends, no fun and no creativity then is that success.

This (only considering a test score) is like doing A/B testing but only looking at impressions and not at conversions, or only looking at conversion rates and not at conversion value. In web terms you can succeed by reducing both your impressions and conversion rates (by taking more money of less people and only attracting motivated customers).

Sorry that's more destructive than constructive WRT what the right course of action is.

Are there [large scale] education systems that consider happiness of pupils, reduction in bullying, positive social interaction and such to be metrics to assess and improve?

Nobody is arguing against testing. They're arguing about doing tests where you know the results will be deeply flawed.

He was pretty firm that this method would be better—he'd spent years thinking about it—but we both agreed that it required a level of intervention by the administrator that although it could reasonably be expected was unlikely. Using just the test data is the lazy way, which means it's the method most will use.

Still, I believe _some_ standardized testing is important. ... but there are two types of tests: norm testing and standards testing, and both types have their uses.

This is assuming that the net effect of the tests is positive, thus we should keep them until we find something better. But a lot of comments are pointing at the harm caused by standardized testing. For people who think the net effect is negative, the rational thing to do is get rid of them until we find something better.

If your rank the teachers in a strict order, you have to make someone the worst and someone else the best teacher. But is the administration going to check how much worse the worst teacher really is? I doubt it.

There is no simple fix. There are bad teachers (and I'm leaving the term undefined - it's a bit like porn - undefinable, but recognisable) who get good test results and glowing evaluations, and there are superb teachers who get mediocre test results and undistinguished evaluations.

It's easy from the outside or from a limited perspective to suggest "obvious" methods of assessment or "obvious" actions to improve the situation, but in the end, no one has really defined what they mean by "good teaching," so proposing assessments of something undefined will just result in more proxies to be distorted.

Why should test scores improve year over year? If everyone is getting a 2/6 then yes, but students in the same grade are not going to get smarter every year. There is the major flaw in using student tests to measure teachers IMO. You are going to get a bell curve around 4/6 from the test results for majority of the teachers. When you don't, it is really hard to tell whether the reason is the teaching, the curriculum, the students or the test and its grading.

http://www.ps334school.org/admissions/anderson-school-7th-gr...

The school accepts new applicants for sixth grade or seventh grade, but not for eighth grade.)

But, really, the problem with the system is not mostly about how teachers are rated, but how little power most parents have to shop. If a teacher is doing a good job for a particular learner, most parents will be glad to seek that teacher's instruction. And if the parents are shopping, the hard-to-measure things in the aggregate that are crucially important at the individual level, for example whether or not a teacher encourages a child to do his or her personal best, will be given proper weight among all the trade-offs involved in choosing one teacher over another. But right now the great majority of pupils, in New York City and elsewhere, are mostly assigned to teachers without parental power to shop, and teacher advancement in the profession is based mostly on seniority and degrees attained

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html

rather than on the basis of the teachers meeting learner needs better than other teachers. The best way to promote system reform is to let the parents have more power to shop. They will ask for the information they need and weigh it in appropriate ways.

I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice.

Signed,

A victim of the evil socialist Canadian public school system.

While I agree that it's introduced some problems in states where I've lived (Utah, for example), it's also allowed parents to move their children around a bit more easily, and there are some benefits to that.

On the flip side, I'm now in Georgia. We live on the boundary between a poor school district (98% "minority" district-wide) and a rich one (10-50% "minority" depending on the school). I can only "shop" for schools in my poorer district, which are typically around the bottom quintile of schools in the state. The kicker is, because of the geographic boundaries, the bus stop for the "richer" district stops on either side of our subdivision, and our kids pass withing 1 mile of five different elementary schools in the "rich" district on their way to their assigned "poor" one. Shop for schools? I'd love to. I'd even like for my kids to go to a school close to their home. But a long history of bussing (which in our area has reinforced segregation rather than combat it) and civil rights policies perversely means it's more difficult to move to the better schools.

But in all seriousness, while there are exceptions for arts schools, you generally cannot choose where to send your kids except by moving. Some people "rent a room" in a desirable district so their kids can go to a better school, but really all that happens is that housing prices skyrocket in the "right" areas.

There's no way to avoid it, even in principle. What if you move?

In the US, home prices are elevated in certain areas because people who live at that address get to go to a good school. So there's still school shopping, when it comes to deciding where to live (it's often a key factor in that decision).

I think that's how it is most places, actually. At least where I grew up in California, I was assigned to a certain high school based on where I live. We could have applied for a transfer, but those aren't often granted. This is all for the public school system, of course. There are private schools as well, which operate differently, but I think for the most part people go to public schools.

If you give the parents the ability to "shop", what happens when everyone thinks that teacher X is the best English teacher for 7th grade and they ALL want their kids in her class?

For me, this is not a theoretical question, because I live in a state of the United States where there is actual "power to shop." In the entire state of Minnesota in the United States, there is public school open enrollment,

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

and the school district for the neighborhood in which I live includes open-enrolled students from the territories of more than forty other Minnesota school districts, with funding following the students on a per-capita basis.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

Aspects of the system in Minnesota that are rigid and suboptimal as they are in many other states include

lock-step union seniority pay and promotion systems for nearly all public school teachers,

http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2012/05/03/seniority-still-rul...

but parents with power to shop and funding that follows students allows school districts with the better programs, overall, to thrive and produce innovative new programs (e.g., language immersion programs, specialized fine arts programs, and school-within-a-school programs for highly gifted learners) and the schools that are forced to lay off teachers (alas, by seniority rather than by effectiveness) are the schools with laggard overall programs.

the evil socialist Canadian public school system

This is from your comment. I'm not aware what province you grew up in, but it's my understanding that there have been elements of school choice in some Canadian provinces in our liftime,

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/11/school-choi...

http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/parents/canada-cho...

although just what is going on in Canada in comparison to other countries receives different degrees of emphasis even in Canadian sources

http://educhatter.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/school-choice-and...

and perhaps right now when Canada is in the world news

http://www.startribune.com/world/151854375.html

we might conclude that there are some difficulties with the system in some Canadian provinces.

Anyway, Canada provides an example, through its system of provincially administered health insurance programs,

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hcs-sss/medi-assur/index-eng.php

of a general public subsidy program that still allows much user choice. Patients get to choose their doctors in Canada.

http://www.cwhn.ca/node/40789

In principle, as already observed in reality, it is perfectly possible for there to be a general public subsidy for some service that is deemed to have a positive externality, while still allowing user choice of the provider of the service.

There are other international examples of school choice. I particularly like the example of the Netherlands with its very wide array of choices for parents, all at equal publicly subsidized expense,

http://www.denhaag.nl/en/residents/to/Want-to-send-your-chil...

which has been studied for years as part of broader studies of parental choice in schooling.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_...

http://books.google.com/books/about/Choice_of_schools_in_six...

By the OECD testing program called PISA, the Netherlands does as well as or outperforms other countries both as to helping students from disadvantaged families

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/5/5/49603617.pdf

and as to getting educational achievement results per unit of money spent by the school system.

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf

I'm not opposed in principle to the idea of statistically ranking teachers and giving the power of choice to parents, but you guys have royally fucked it up in practice.

I'll heartily agree with you and with other comments here that the current state testing systems, which vary state by state, but which are mostly poorly designed, are a weak basis for publishing ratings of schoolteachers, but as you correctly point out, that's not to prove that a better system of assessing students and their academic progress has NO value in helping parents shop for schools. What I don't want to go back to is the day in which no one had any idea how well any teacher was teaching, because no one was looking, and no one was looking because parents couldn't shop for schools anyhow. If parents can make global evaluations of what is good for each of their children, better incentives exist to improve teaching, improve school administration, and improve all other aspects of the school experience.

Returning to the other comment's thoughtful question,

If you give the parents the ability to "shop", what happens when everyone thinks that teacher X is the best English teacher for 7th grade and they ALL want their kids in her class?

that is precisely the kind of situation that builds curiosity among other teachers about "What is that teacher doing that I'm not doing?" and among administrators about, "What value do families perceive in that class that they don't perceive in our classes?"

As other comments have already pointed out, parents in all countries of the world shop for schools at least by how they choose their residence addresses. But decoupling school choices from residence choices allows schools and families to respond more efficiently to their own mix of trade-offs. When many shoppers prefer one grocery store to another, and take their business to the better grocery store, what usually happens is that the worse grocery store changes the way it does business and improves its overall customer value proposition for shoppers. As I noted above, one HUGE problem with schools all over the United States, even schools in states that do not formally have "union shops" with mandatory schoolteacher union membership, is that administrators have little flexibility in reassigning teachers to the work that they do the best. So today is a somewhat slow process at the margins for schools to improve (by realigning staff assignments) as families shop for the best classrooms. But I've seen what Minnesota school districts have been able to do even within the limitations of the current system, and I'm confident that adding incentive for school improvement by giving learners more power to shop makes as much sense (as a matter of basic public policy) as it does for providing most other services.

AFTER EDIT: Commentary on the link submitted here by a blogger based in New York City,

http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2012/05/carolyn-ab...

which I learned about from a Facebook friend who lives in New York State and has been following the controversy on school testing in New York State closely.

I'm not opposed to choice. I love it. I myself went to an out-of-catchment school so I could participate in the challenge program there (3 years of certain classes in 2, makes AP easier to take in gr 12). My point is that, as implemented, you guys borked it.

It's far too simplistic to say, "let's reward the good schools and punish the bad ones, and the market sort itself out". It results in schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods getting even worse, and the least well-to-do segments of society being put even further into a hole from which they can't escape. It results in idiotic "teach to the test" systems, instead of good teachers teaching creatively.

It might be possible that a truly free market school system would give better results than the norm, but we've seen what your first forays into it have brought: unmitigated disaster. The US seems particularly poor at political innovation, so why not simply imitate those countries that do education well like Korea, Finland, and the like?

Take a look at this list [1] (pdf, pg8) and tell me which of the top scoring countries have achieved educational success by adopting policies that share the same principles as NCLB.

[1] http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/60/46619703.pdf

These value-added statistics, which on a per-teacher basis must be incredibly noisy (they measure a difference, the "value added", of two already-noisy performance numbers) resulted in the suicide of a low-ranked teacher:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39404037/ns/us_news-life/t/la-te...

I've been surprised to hear the credence placed in these statistics when I listen to presentations by principals and superintendents.

The evaluations of the same teachers teaching the same subjects in two different classes are almost completely uncorrelated. The distribution of the scores on the scatterplots look almost random.

It's a travesty that perfectly fine teachers are being publicly shamed based on these unreliable metrics.

See my previous post on the topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749530

I don't believe that 'the professionals' setting up, promoting and administering a system like this can possibly be ignorant of this fact and/or well meaning.

Of course Abbott had to be eliminated as a teacher. She was interfering with the program of deliberate dumbing down.

I bought a K'NEX roller coaster kit and helped him put it together. At first, he didn't grok the pseudo 3D instructions or the way the pieces fit together. However, after an hour or so, he was rotating our partially assembled segments in his head to compare them to the illustrations. But, this doesn't count as rigorous seat work. Oh well.

Our school actually does an excellent job of avoiding the binary incentives of No-Child-Left-Behind and attempts to provide somewhat individualized instruction to students. Ohio has yet to adopt a value-added measurement scheme, and I wonder how our district would fare, especially if achievement was normalized for socio-economic status (the average household income is over $100K, a high number for Ohio).

We hope that the Montessori school's motivated teachers can use their freedom from mandated curriculum requirements, standardized testing, etc. to facilitate our son's exploration of what interests him. I don't care if his education is seen as incomplete, unbalanced, or otherwise non-standard so long as he grows to become a curious, thoughtful, and creative person. When has someone with these qualities ever failed because he had some perceived weakness in his childhood education?

Define "failed". Failed to get a job, too right. Failed to fit in to society, check. Failed to be happy, seems to go with the territory(!?).

Will you excuse a short aside:I'm interested in the diagnosis of a 6yo as having ADHD - what procedures and tests were performed to come to that decision. In my, albeit limited, experience of primary aged (4-11yo) boys if they're not running around half the time like some sort of sugar rushing lunatic then they're the exception to the rule. Can he sit and watch a TV show for 20 minutes without leaving to do something else?

It is not generally a problem of too much energy and lack of focus. Rather it is a problem of inappropriate focus, frequently very intense. For instance my nephew would get so interested in whatever he was doing that he would fail to realize that he needed to pee, and then after he peed his pants he would get very upset that people were making him change his pants when he wanted to do something else.

It becomes a problem in school when children are unable to follow repeated directions because they are unaware that directions have been given, because their interest has been caught by something - anything - else.

Disclaimer: I am the parent of a 7 year old who has been identified as likely having ADHD, though I have not yet done the official screening.

>identified as likely having ADHD //

Yes this is the part I'm interested in, what's the diagnostic process you've gone through?

My understanding is that an important part of that screening is a patient history and impressions from caregivers. Every caregiver has identified the same thing. He's plenty smart and has a great attention span for what interests him, but simply doesn't follow direction. Not in a, "kids don't listen" sort of way. But in the kind of way which causes the teacher in parent-teacher conferences to get all serious and spend the session talking about how she has more problems with him than with the rest of a class of 24 kids.

Having talked with my sister, whose son had very severe ADHD, I've been forced to admit that the symptoms fit. (My son is clearly not as severe though.) But it isn't official until he gets the official screening for it.

As for what to do about it, my sister spoke highly of cognitive therapy. She understands our resistance to drugs, had the same herself, but points out that drugs are optional and only needed as a temporary stopgap to give therapy a chance. If you don't need them to make therapy work, you don't do them. If you do need them, once therapy has progressed far enough, you can drop the drugs.

Do you recognise yourself in the symptoms your son has, does it look like an inherited trait to you (I know that's not at all scientific). Do you have any suspicions for why this affliction might appear to be so prevalent amongst children now (other than observer bias or similar discrepancies).

My suspicion is that over time we're adjusting to having fewer kids and more attention/kid, and so are noticing and diagnosing problems that in previous generations went unnoticed.

ADHD causes __attention_regulation__ difficulties. Many mistakenly see it as a simple lack-of-attention, but fail to realize that hyper-focus is also a common symptom.

I suggest reading the first few chapters of ``More Attention, Less Deficit'' to gain a basic understanding of ADHD.

I was specifically interested in the TV part rather than trying to suggest that if they could concentrate [on TV] that was asymptomatic of any disorder that might have been diagnosed.

Thanks for the reading suggestion.

At what point does ignoring people (or bodily needs, or whatever) because you're focussed [which is genuinely something I do] become "hyper focus" and how is one differentiated from the other diagnostically?

We need to seriously rethink education and how we are testing students and teachers.

Yes, the politicians are clearly in the pockets of test makers. After all, the test makers are the #5 and #10 biggest politicals donors ever.

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?order=A

Oops, my mistake - it's actually teachers (generally opposed to accountability) who are the big political donors, not the test makers.

There is no way around this fact.

I'd guess that this means they understand 8th grade curricular, but the test isn't testing deep understanding, just speed and accuracy of the basic skills. Most tests are badly flawed like this, and create a misaligned incentive for teachers to grill students on a very narrow subset of the syllabus.

Politicians won't say this because they answer to voters and telling parents it's their fault wins no votes. It's the great fat elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. Forget incentives for children and bad teacher witch hunts. Better education for parents about how to meet their responsibilities is the way to go.

There are plenty of books on good parenting and how to raise happy and motivated kids. I know this because I have read several of them. In this, and other public forums we aren't beholden to political constraints. We can tell it like it is. There are no excuses.

I'd really love to have more autonomy, as a parent, in teaching my child. My preference would be for a mixture of homeschooling and regular school. That way, for example, I wouldn't be trying to jam a reasonable maths education in to the margins.

My ideals don't align with the school my child goes to, which is fine to some extent, excepting that they therefore think that I don't want to educate my children properly; ergo that I'm an irresponsible parent. With the budget they have I could do so much more.

I don't think those designing the curricula have a clue what they're educating the children for.

To get parents on side this needs to be addressed. Indeed does the assumption of long-term (4-18 in this country) structured education need to be challenged.

By the way, care to share a list of the books on parenting you found more useful or interesting?

Raising Happy Children - Jan Parker, Jan Stimpson, Dorothy Rowe

Playful Parenting - Lawrence J. Cohen

The Well-Trained Mind - Jessie Wise, Susan Wise Wise Bauer

I don't agree with everything they say, but they are pointed in the right direction. I don't home school our kids, but we do homework with them and I go out of my way to talk to them about anything they're interested in and look things up with them.

It does help that my mother was head teacher of a primary school and did an Open University degree in child psychology when I was a teenager.

We're engineers, right? When you've got a new piece of equipment or software or a new language to get to grips with we read the manuals and find out about best practices. It's the same with kids.

The teacher discussed in this article was not a teacher of students with poor home environment. Home environment and past test results suggested her students should perform at the 97'th percentile. They actually scored considerably lower, at the 89'th.

What the the statistical chances that a particular group of students with those backgrounds would turn out to yield a performance at the 89th percentile? I've no idea, but say it's 1% for the sake of argument. That would mean that 1% of similar classes with averagely competent teachers would achieve that score, all other things being equal. That's many thousands of classes at the national level.

It's like the argument made in a UK court not long ago that someone must be guilty because the chances of the evidence being a coincidence were millions to one. Of course in a population of millions such a coincidence becomes almost inevitable.

I've no idea if this teacher was good or bad, but that's something that should be determined by expert, informed evaluation not mindless statistical witch hunt.

I've no idea if this teacher was good or bad, but that's something that should be determined by expert, informed evaluation...

Why do you believe this method has an error rate lower than VAM? I agree the error rate is harder to characterize, but that isn't the same thing.

Clearly, the metric is far from perfect -- you can tell that without his analysis. Year-over-year variation is high, indicating that there's likely a lot of noise in the measure. That said, year-to-year scores do correlate. This means that the measure is at least a little bit reliable in the sense that if you measure the same thing twice you'll get an answer that's close to the original.

All he's shown is that these are "noisy". There's no reason not to use a noisy metric, you just need to know that's what you've got, and make responsible decisions.

For example, don't fire teachers who rank poorly, but do review their performance. In that case, we'd find that the "Worst Teacher" is underperforming on this metric because it wasn't designed to test great students, and we can move on. Another example of the same phenomena in education is looking for teachers who help students cheat exams. When there are suspicious correlations found, administrators investigate.

One last thing: What he doesn't investigate -- and this is much more important -- is the (lack of a) correlation between value added ratings and other metrics (say, peer evaluations).

First off, I don't think that a teacher's performance eval should be entirely rooted in state tests, nor do I believe that the current method of testing is by any means perfect, but I think value-added measurement is a decent measure of how teachers are performing and how much knowledge students have gained.

What we're looking at here is an extreme case where that value added measure has no more meaning and the actual evaluation has no statistical meaning (the students performance was already top notch, they were probably more likely to score a little worse.)

What SHOULD have happened is that they should have been evaluated using a more rigorous / advanced curriculum that was aligned to what the teacher was teaching (ie, high school algebra). The system is not perfect, but it's not terrible--they just need to evaluate the system, adjust, and iterate, something many here are plenty familiar with.

(Disclosure: I teach at a charter school)

Right now it sounds like they are awarding the teachers based on the percentile level of their students compared to other students in the same class level, which is pretty much guaranteed to be useless noise if your students all start at the 98th percentile. It would be much more meaningful to be able to say, "Each of your students clearly knows more algebra than he did last year."

The other issue is how to motivate the children to actually want to do well on the test. Somehow rewarding a kid who does better than he did the previous time he took the test seems like a good first step...

The other problem is that this is a problem at which we should be throwing our best data scientists, and in many cases we're lucky if those involved have an intro stats course under their belt. Evaluating student performance is no trivial task (ESPECIALLY when trying to create some accurate measure of reading level), but we're not putting the brainpower behind it to figure out. And as much as I love it, I don't think Khan Academy will be solving those problems, but I'd love to be wrong.

What's sad is our over reliance on these statistics. First thing you have to do when using stats is setup checks and balances to verify you are getting what you expect. This is a counter example that might indicate you aren't measuring the right thing. Does this value add measurement of prior year improvement even predict anything about the students comprehension? It's like the BCS system of education where you just scratch your head over the outcomes.

America has a long time fascination with measurement and quantifying. We created Scientific Management Theory dating back to 1880s, but it ended mostly because workers rebelled. However, its influence is still felt everywhere in American society so much so I have a hard time understanding how the Finish model achieves its results without measuring. I know its better, but I can't explain it.

I think you can, it's just that the Teacher Data Report doesn't seem to be doing a good job of it. It's a broken model, not a broken idea.

The standards of Walmart, P&G, and similar companies help the companies achieve economies of scale. They allow C level performers to overachieve. But... You don't want to be the only free thinker in Mayberry.

Similarly, standardizing education may help the masses, but it's not for the best students or teachers.

I don't mean to be flip, I'm thinking about trying to teach the same lesson to 15 or 30 people and how some of them won't need the lesson and some of them won't have the base knowledge to understand it.