More anti-teacher bullshit from the NYT:
Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions. The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.
That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”
The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance.
Fucking unbelievable yet not surprising the media fall for this bullshit. The problem isn't "shitty"
teachers; it is with rotten administrators who are not held accountable to ANYBODY. Besides, there are TOO MANY TEACHERS right now; if more students realize just how crappy this occupation has become, they will avoid it like the plague.
And there is little that can be done about poverty and other factors affecting students at least as it pertains to what teachers and school districts can do, but fat chance these billionaires give a shit.
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