Frankly, I'm surprised he even found a .24 correlation from that mess.

Conservatives always argue that you never get results by just dumping money into a problem. But isn't that how their hero Reagan "won" the cold war? By just dumping money into the military?

Any high school teacher can tell you any given lesson plan, strategy, approach can inspire a wonderful reaction in first period and a disasterous reaction with another group of kids in sixth period. Units of study that are dazzling one year, lose their luster in other years. Teaching is part science and part art. Not always with consistent or predictable results. But reformers who have never been in the classroom always think they know best and that coprorate models should be applied.

Of course these results don't surprise us. Unfortunately, this battle, or war, is not being waged with logic and facts. It is being waged with money. I have the same right to try to influence my elected representatives as Mr. Gates, but somehow, he has so much more clout with the entire legislature. The question in not the facts, but how to get someone to listen to them. Can you send a copy of THe Stranger to 140 policy makers in Olympia, and while you're at it, ask them to kill SB 6442 which would throw teachers into the same health care system as the other state employees, with greater cost, worse benefits, and the loss of local bargaining rights as well.

Absolutely brilliant.

Maybe, and maybe only by definition, only the very best and very worst teachers get consistent result, and that otherwise---as mentioned above---the variability of the students dominates the outcome.

In further news, C.E.O.s seem not to really matter all that much to companies, with the exception of the very best and the very worst, and feeding random noise to a bad classifier will show you all _sorts_ of unreal relationships.

I think it better to admit ignorance than to cling to a bad source of "knowledge", but people seem to prefer a foolish certainty---primate band politics hardwired-in.

Great. We just adopted a new "reform" teacher evaluation system that is exactly as accurate as a random number generator. Good job, legislature!

I'm sure that will be much more effective than, you know, actually fully funding education.

/sarcasm

According to the data, basically two illusions are shattered.

The first is that there are no "better" ways to teach a class. But the second is that given the first, it would seem any reasonably trained person could in fact run a class.

So it is not that charter schools are superior -- it is that they are no worse, and so then the issue is cost.

@9: No, what this data shows is that NYC's value-added model does not accurately measure teacher performance.

I'm a math teacher. When I saw that graph, I laughed pretty hard. Then again, I laugh pretty hard at pretty much everything our legislature has done to teachers recently. I can't wait to pay more for less health care, have my salary and teaching status based on ineffective assessments of students (I mean, data), and basically have my profession continually attacked for the sake of blame.

I guess that even when students graduate, they still don't respect their teachers.

@10

Or, it's spectacularly accurate, and what it is saying is the effect of a particular teacher on a class is nil...given that they simply perform the basics of the task.

#11

Maybe you're asking too much.

Do you have an "exceptional" service tech at Jiffy Lube?

Does it make a difference?

Warren Buffet said that the exceptional business can have mediocre management.

Maybe a school is such a good system, any reasonable person can fill the slot. There is no "exceptional teacher".

If only Bill Gates had just bought dozens of yachts like other billionaires.

I would have loved if the last paragraph had ended like this:

"...easier to blame teachers (and their unions) for our schools' problems than to advocate for the parent involvement, student responsibility, and teacher respect that are necessary to solve the larger problem of American society's gross undervaluing of education."

Universal pre-school and full-day kindergarten are lovely, but they are not solutions for the day in day out degradation of education happening for all ages and at all levels of society. There is a massive societal component that must be addressed here, period. No amount of spending or testing or teacher training will solve anything if parents, students, and society in general continue to treat education like a trip to Nordstroms. Teachers are not here to serve your whims, we are not here to babysit your children, and you don't get a free replacement education when you spill wine all over it.

Respect teachers, respect yourself, LEARN (whether you think you're teacher is an idiot or not) and take part in your own or your children's education.

And the real beauty is; that's all free.

@15: There's a kernel of truth in what you write, unfortunately it's wrapped up in some elitist bullshit.

There are a lot of great public school districts, and many of them are in affluent suburbs. What do this districts have in common? Lots of money, and well-educated professional class parents who are both steeped in a culture of education, and who possess the tools to steep their children in the same.

So yes: a student's family life plays a huge factor in predicting a student's academic success.

But you seem to frame it as some kind of moral failing on the part of the parents, as opposed to the result of a cycle of poverty and unequal opportunity. And even if we could blame some sort of cultural "degradation" as you imply, how can we blame the children?

The fact is, great schools cost a lot of money, and educationally disadvantaged children require even more money to try to make up for what they're lacking at home. You can't make up for all of it, but intensive, round the clock social services can help some children excel academically and rise out of poverty.

The alternative is to just give up on the vast majority of children whose families are unable to support them academically.

Here we go, back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the robber baron days when those wonderfully nice people of wealth donated their riches to us poor people in the form of scholarships and music halls. All of which is unattainable for us poor, but which bears their name in the form of 'generosity'. This completely ignores the REAL social issues we face today in our society, again. Instead, it places the teachers in the scapegoat position, and we all know that SOMEONE has to take the fall for the inept leadership our legislative body has provided us over the last 40+ years. Systematically defunding social and educational programs or spending money on frivolous programs that fail. When will we learn? What can we do to fight back? Go to StandUP-America.us