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My wife is an elementary gifted teacher. Best teaching job there is in my opinion. Those are the kids who are actually eager to learn and she asks me to do cool things like build a trebuchet for her Middle Ages unit. The kids come to my wife one day a week, like 2nd on Mondays, 5th on Wednesdays, etc. She works with them 1 day a week and the kids are scattered among 3 or 4 classes per grade level. The gifted kids may make up 5% to 10% of the entire school.
She is on one committee in the school dealing with test scores. The scores for each class are published in the local paper as an average of all the students in a class. Each kids gets a score from 1 to 5 on some test. The other members of the committee were pressuring my wife to work more with her kids to make sure they all got fives because that would raise the score, instead of focusing on the majority of the kids who were making 1's and 2's to get them up to 3's and 4's. 
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MarkTJohnson wrote: The other members of the committee were pressuring my wife to work more with her kids to make sure they all got fives because that would raise the score, instead of focusing on the majority of the kids who were making 1's and 2's to get them up to 3's and 4's.
But, for her personal appraisal, it doesn't matter if she took 3s and 4s and made them 5s, or 1s and 2s and made them 3s.
Either way, if she managed to do it with a lot of them, she did a good job, so her personal appraisal, based on how much children learned, should be a good one.
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My point was that they were focused on the small percentage of gifted kids who my wife sees one day out of 5 rather than the other 90% of the school that those teachers have all 5 days of the week.
Being the gifted teacher my wife's name does not get reported in the paper since she isn't one of the grade level teachers. Her kids were going to be 4's and 5's anyway.
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MarkTJohnson wrote: My point was that they were focused on the small percentage of gifted kids
That's what happens when the results are used as a political football, which is about as ethical as everything else in politics.
Good teachers should be rewarded and trusted, and the only real way to judge if a teacher has done a good job is by looking at the children they teach -- but that should be local, not national, the same way everyone has their personal performance assessed.
Children's results are personal, and can be used as indicators of how well they've been taught; using them as statistics to push political agendas stinks.
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OriginalGriff wrote: a ghetto school in Bedford-Stuyvesantis going to need a different type of teacher to a private school teacher near the Upper West Side
Sure, but a personal appraisal is about "Did this one person do a good job?", so that will scale according to the expectation of the school as a whole.
A good teacher will teach more, regardless how high or low the baseline, and how much is considered "more" and how much "less".
You can't blame the teachers if a school in a bad area gets poor national results, but you can tell which of the individual teachers is better by how much they manage to teach to the students.
"How much our students learn doesn't matter" is a crock of sh1t, because it's the only thing that matters.
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OriginalGriff wrote: they know that a good proportion of them are poor teachers
Any group of people that has any real numbers in the group is going to have a "good proportion" of them that are poor is some aspect or even many of necessary aspects.
And the more people in the group the more that it is guaranteed that it is not possible for the excellent performers to be any more than a small percentage as well (same percentage was the poor performers actually.)
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Mark_Wallace wrote: How do you test a teacher's performance? Not by seeing if his students have learned anything, obviously.
Well, no you don't.
My sister, for example, teaches at an inner city school where over 90% of the kids don't speak English as a first language and a fair portion arrive barely speaking English at all. Most of them come from broken homes, their parents are often in prison and they get little or no support from home. She often has to pay for their breakfast. Surprisingly enough, their SATs results are rarely particularly good - just a good site better than they might be without her in[put.
She could, if she so desired, teach in a nice middle-class school in leafy suburbia where her pupils (with supportive parents and additional private tuition) would sail through the SATs blindfold.
In what way would that unchallenging environment make her a better teacher?
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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It is the same as in programming: The ones paying you are measuring you performance, and ability to deliver what they ordered. In both cases they may (or definitely won't) care about the quality of the input you're getting, be it requirement documents or children - In the end you're the one in the misery even if it's not your fault, or ifyou did a really good job behind the scenes (paying for breakfast or a nice architecture) - If you fail to match expectations you're f***ed.
Is it fair? No.
Should a society exist where teachers need to pay for their pupils breakfast? Hell NO - That's f***ed up - Three options there: 1) State pays 2) Place kids with parents who are doing their job 3) Grow a pair and call it by what it is: euthanasia by starvation, which it is if it weren't for your sister.
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Marco Bertschi wrote: It is the same as in programming:
Not in any job that I have worked or even heard about.
The analogy might be that they have an independent company come in, determine what caused the bugs in the code for the last year, and then fire the 10% of those that had the most bugs.
And for example with no examination of what stresses management inflicted on individuals, no impact on changing company goals, no measurement of changing customer guidelines and certainly no evaluation of the difficulty of what each individual developer was attempting at the time.
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I bet your sister feel called to those kids too, doesn't she?
My wife's school is in a low income area, over 90% Free Lunch. She would not change schools for anything. She feels that she was put in that school not only to teach but to love on those kids and lift them up.
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Yes, my brother also works ion an inner-city school.
When the sister started in teaching I remember asking her whether she would like to work at Mallory Towers (old idyllic fictional school from Enid Blyton books) or the sort of c***-hole the brother worked in. She said "Mallory Towers, every time!"
After doing a training period at a posh school and one at her present one (trainee teachers in the UK do on the job training at two schools, usually selected for contrast), she did a 180 and said she preferred the one where she was making a real difference, so that's where she went.
Or as the brother puts it: "I can't imagine the complete and utter tedium of working at a school where there aren't serious problems to be solved."
Hats off to both of them, it's a tough job and I certainly couldn't do it.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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PeejayAdams wrote: Or as the brother puts it: "I can't imagine the complete and utter tedium of working at a school where there aren't serious problems to be solved."
LOL, no such thing.
Just because kids go to a better school doesn't mean they always do well
... translates to guess who the parents blame when the kid fails (or sometimes, Asian-like cultures, doesn't score A's)
and for more then the last few years many 'entitled parents' have taken to threatening teachers - physically or/and [usually] through pressuring the school management (principals and BOD both).
less well off schools the kids are the biggest problem (often as mentioned parents MIA), but that often can be managed (albeit good or bad) and teachers can get help.
In "well-off" schools the parents are the biggest problem, and nobody trains (and rarely support) teachers to handle that.
Hell, these days for example almost all bus drivers are protected from abuse, teachers rarely are.
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Very true. Another sibling quit teaching in an altogether posher school for that precise reason.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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I've no argument against anything you've said, but the main point, from the perspective of personal appraisal, is the last sentence of your first paragraph:
PeejayAdams wrote: just a good site better than they might be without her in[put
This isn't about appraising the school, but of the personal appraisals of each teacher.
You can rest assured that there are teachers about whom you would not say that. Should those teachers be treated the same as your sister, be given the respect and trust that your sister is given, and be put forward for promotion the same, just because the school as a whole is a bad place to work, or gets bad results?
That's what personal appraisals are for.
(And it's "sight", not "site", so forget your Christmas bonus)
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Oops! Yes, I've failed my year-six grammar test. The sister would be giving me her best "teacher stare" for that one. 
Absolutely, assessments should be made, but not on the basis of things like exam results where there are so many external factors at work.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Now that my youngest is finishing her junior year in high school, I can look back through 35 years of teaching my children. For a very long time, we home schooled. The last two went off to private school for an assortment of reasons. Watching how much my children varied in their learning styles, I have come to a number of conclusions:
- Do no harm. Children start wanting to learn. Adults elephant it up.
- Stay with what works, tweak it on the edges - the Toyota model.
- If you want education to improve - IT'S A MANAGEMENT PROBLEM.
The current state of government education in the US is abhorrent. It's an incestuous system where more and more money is poured into it, and less and less comes out. And it's a management problem. I only cite the common-core debacle now being inflicted on students. In an argument with a teacher, I was dismissed as not understanding. The reason no results are seen is because it takes 12 years. So now we have to wait for 12 years, and if it doesn't work, we have another generation of math challenged individuals. Even so, the top 25% will learn in spite of the best efforts to prevent it. You now have standardized tests being skewed for the common core curriculum. Tainted data.
About standardized tests - years ago, the entire point of these tests was not to judge the performance of the teacher or student (that should have happened long before). The point was to see if a student or class had a statistically significant gap in knowledge. All of our children learned to read using phonics. Inherently, we needed to work on spelling, but as we tested them, we also saw interesting results. One child could not capitalize to save his life. We fixed it.
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Keep in mind that in public school systems, teachers are little more than drones to the state and federal regulations of how they should teach and to the publishing industry of what they should teach.
And what other people have posted: lack of resources, home environment, peer environment, these are all factors that are outside of the control of the teacher as well. Basically, if you're a teacher in the public school system in this country, you're f***ed.
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Marc Clifton wrote: Basically, if you're a teacher in the public school system in this country, you're f***ed.
I was going to reply that it's as bad in the UK, but I browsed a bit, and found that it can be quite a bit worse, over there.
Good teachers should be honoured and respected, or they'll lose their incentive for being good teachers.
Some states impose ridiculous requirements (and even belief systems!), and the amount of corporate interference would never be tolerated, over here. I can understand why some people move huge distances, after having children.
I find it sad that children should be victim to such things. You can't get back any of the times that have gone past, but that's especially poignant for childhood times.
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In Texas, standsardized tests were used for some time, not sure about now. The problem was that teachers taught the kids the answers to the standardized tests, but they never learned anything except how to take that test.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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Yes, that's a problem I've seen a few times, especially in university -- which made a travesty of the whole thing, because two guys in particular should never have got even close to getting a degree walked away with one.
The solution would be to prevent teachers knowing what's in the papers beforehand (except that it will all be on the syllabus), but I imagine it would be pretty tricky to enforce that, especially in schools with lots of rich kids.
I know that people in China can get prison sentences for that kind of cheating in schools, but that's probably harsher than I'd go for.
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M son excells in math, but his teacher complained to me that he was having trouble keeping up with the class. I asked him about it and he showed me his notebook. He had already worked every problem in the textbook and was less than halfway through the course. The teacher had no idea she couldn't communicate with him.
I'm sure he would have scored high on the standardized tests, but should the teacher be rewarded based on his results, when in effect he figured it out on his own and the teacher did nothing but complain about him.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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That was me, when I was a kid; Maths came naturally to me, so they could have put a plank of wood at the front of the Maths class.
Luckily, I had pretty good teachers to encourage and help me in some of the other subjects, so I managed to get a more rounded early education.
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Mark_Wallace wrote: So our suffering at finding that highly-qualified programmers don't know how to code will be shared among other professions
Did you have a profession in mind that doesn't have problems like that?
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Do you like to obcusfate your code?
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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I prefer to obcusfate the desing instead.
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