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March 10, 2010 04:46 PM UTC

Wednesday Open Thread

  • 126 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

–Blaise Pascal

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126 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

  1. from Newsweek

    “The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover,” …

    In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability. The responsibility does not just fall on the unions. Many principals don’t even try to weed out the poor performers (or they transfer them to other schools in what’s been dubbed the “dance of the lemons”). Year after year, about 99 percent of all teachers in the United States are rated “satisfactory” by their school systems; firing a teacher invites a costly court battle with the local union.

    More at The Future of Colorado but yes, while removing incompetent teachers does not solve every last problem in education, as study after study is showing – it alone will do more than every other proposed remedy put together.

    1. The presupposition is that there’s a great teacher sitting around with no job waiting to replace this person and the only barrier to switching a “bad” teacher for a “good” teacher is firing the first.  Can anyone explain where the “good” teachers come from?  Can you show where the “good” unemployed teachers in the same number as those you want to fire are?  Keeping talented young people in the profession is already hard, and lest we forget not long ago you were on this blog advocating balancing budgets by cutting their already comparatively low salaries.  Education would be a lot easier if there were an endless supply of bright, dedicated teachers who are willing to dedicate their lives to their jobs no matter how little they’re paid. But real world education policy has to acknowledge that isn’t true. Tell me where you’re going to find the “good” replacement for each “bad” teacher and then you can at least claim to have found any sort of remedy at all with a straight face.  

        1. Additional increases in class size?  Of course not.  I hear what you’re saying and if there’s a way to do it, great.  But don’t confuse that with a solution, it isn’t.  Education will be made worse because of those layoffs not better, and I’ve heard no one argue that, long term, there are chronically unemployed “good” teachers out there that will solve this problem.

          If you want to say that this is one small piece of the puzzle, then that’s fine.  But the idea that firing “alone will do more than every other proposed remedy put together” is simply false.  Firing alone gets you nothing.  Firing only makes a bit of difference if you address the much harder process of recruiting and retaining quality teachers.  So if your ultimate goal is to improve education, you need to attack that with as much zeal as your zeal for firing people.

          1. First off, it is making the best of a bad situation. No argument there.

            But, for the kids that are in the large class with a good teacher as opposed to a smaller class with a bad teacher – for those kids it is a gigantic improvement. So in that respect it is a substantial step forward, a teacher at a time.

            This will make it harder to get some good teachers if only one district does it. But it will also attract many good teachers. Because people who are good at something want to work with others who are equally good. They don’t want to carry slackers. So odds are it could increase the quality teachers applying.

            1. This will make it harder to get some good teachers if only one district does it. But it will also attract many good teachers. Because people who are good at something want to work with others who are equally good. They don’t want to carry slackers. So odds are it could increase the quality teachers applying.

              Do you have a study that says that?  That firing teachers will lead more talented people to want to become teachers?  If so, without sarcasm, I’d love to read it.  But that sounds like a hunch.

              No one is arguing that “good” teachers aren’t better than “bad” teachers.  But firing alone is, at best, half a strategy and championing half a strategy without a plan for the other half is no way to tackle a problem.

              1. It may not hold as well in the public sphere. But companies find that they generally cannot hire people substantially better at a job than the group they already have. In other words, people want to work at Google, Facebook, etc not because they pay is good, but because they will work with other superb programmers, marketers, etc.

                1. Even if it were true that having all great teachers would help keep and retain great teachers, that becomes circular quickly because first you have to have great teachers in every classroom to see if that works.  And right now its simply not the case that there are as many “good” teachers as there are jobs and the only thing stopping them from filling in is bureaucracy.

                  On a side note, I’d imagine there are many people in high tech companies that would make excellent teachers.  Thing is, if you go to a high tech company you know that if you work hard and innovate in many ways you can support yourself and might just become a millionaire. If you go to work at a public school, you know you’ll always be on the low end of college-educated salaries no matter how good you are.  It is what it is, but between the lower upside and the fact we need hundreds of thousands more teachers than software designers, it becomes hard to equate the two.

                  1. Follows the old joke, I’d made enough that I could afford to be a teacher. I wanted to teach High School – preferably history but could have done Physics, Math (those are my degrees), etc.

                    But no teaching certificate. To get in that way would have required a ton of special hoops and taking classes toward the educational certificate. And talking to a bunch of teachers, they all told me that the teaching classes were mind-numbingly worthless and they would drive me insane.

                    In short, I think there’s a lot of professionals out there who would consider teaching – if not for the unnecessary barriers placed in their way.

                    1. The notion that anyone with knowledge of another field could just walk in and start teaching just as well as a professional is ludicrous.  The “special hoops and taking classes” is the process of actually learning how to teach. Like anything, it could be improved, but the idea that teaching requires no particular expertise is insulting. In fact, the people who know how to teach, not just know the subject matter, are those “good” teachers you’re talking about.  And the fact that many people in the professional world think that teaching requires no particular training or ability is one of the many factors that contributes to young, talented people leaving the field.  

                    2. I agree totally that you have to learn to be a good teacher. And if I taught I would want to learn as much as I could about how to do it well.

                      My concern was I was told that the teaching classes did not help you learn how to teach better. So it would be 1½ years of school to no purpose. And at the same time, no useful training.

                    3. And you know all teaching classes everywhere are useless because someone told you so.

                      That does get to the point that it is hard to respond to.  Yes, teaching is a profession, and yes, it is a profession with scholarly discourse and meaningful instruction.  And there’s really no point in you advocating anything about education until you understand that.

                    4. What bothered me was I talked to a number of teachers and they said there was no effective means of teaching you to be a good teacher in place. So it was the combination of wasting 1½ years on wasted effort PLUS not having a way to learn how to be a good teacher other than on the job training and talking to other teachers.

                      I agree it is a profession that takes training to do well. Agree 100%. And I wish they had good training in place.

                    5. …a great surgeon too–if it weren’t for those needless special hoops and classes!  

                    6. You really should read the study that BICora and I linked. It seems like you’re jumping through a lot of hoops not to read it, because it conclusively demonstrates you are totally wrong about this statement. All cited evidence is against you. You’ve never been more obviously wrong. And yet you continue, to use Steve Harvey’s phrase, to stick your fingers in your ears and hum instead of listening to evidence.

                      (If you ever were let into a classroom, I’m sure you’d react very well to a student who told you that you were wrong about something, considering how you behave here.)

                      I know math pretty well, but if I couldn’t also get myself to think like a student, I couldn’t teach well at all. That takes practice and training which has nothing to do with actual mathematics. “Life” doesn’t make you good at teaching. Wanting to do a good job doesn’t make you good at it either. Thinking you’re a genius doesn’t make you good at it either.

                      Just because your mom tells you that you sing well doesn’t mean you can win at American Idol. In addition to everything colorado76 and divad say, of course.

        2. What makes a good teacher?

          And are these qualities intrinsic to a person?

          A good friend of mine “became” a great teacher a few years ago. What did she start doing differently? What changed in her pedagogy? Had she had additional training?

          No. She transferred to a different school. A school where parents bought books. Where parents took their children on vacations all around the country and sometimes out of the country. A school where parents showed up for conferences. Suddenly, her students were excelling. Yet nothing had changed about the teacher.

          This is not to belittle the fact that there are bad teachers. Sure there are. But determining whether or not a teacher is good often is an exercise in tautology (as sxp notes elsewhere).

          So the simple answer is there is no simple answer. Fire some teachers. Fire some parents. Fire some children. Fire a few administrators. Fire a few politicians. Fire half a dozen union plumbers. While you’re at it, fire a few random people on the sidewalk.

          If you do all of this, by tomorrow noon, then I guarantee that education will improve.

    2. But since all other things are not held equal in the real world, both the effectiveness and unintended incidental consequences of any proposed method intended to accomplish this undeniably laudible goal have to be included in the consideration of whether any particular policy proposal will in fact, all things considered, produce the desired outcomes. No one has ever debated the fact that getting rid of bad teachers, and recruiting good teachers, would vastly improve public education.

      Someone can quite reasonably argue that, if you want to turn West onto I70 from I25 Northbound, you should turn left, and only turn left, to accomplish it. Turning left, however, will not yield the desired results, even in something as simple as turning onto one interstate from another. In the case of this example, you have to, in fact, turn East in order to go West. Sometimes, going straight in the direction you wish to go yields results that are the opposite of those intended. When dealing with complex systems this is often the case. When a well-constructed argument is presented that indicates that the empowering of principals to fire teachers more easily, in isolation, might be one such instance, those arguments need to be included in the consideration of the merits of the proposed method to accomplish the undeniably desirable goal.

      Then we will implement not only policies that are emotionally gratifying, but, even better, policies that accomplish what we are trying to accomplish, which is improve education, one important component of which is improving the quality of the teacher pool.

      1. Because unless you can come up with an alternative that has compelling evidence from actual measured results, I’m in favor of what study after study has shown.

        And keep in mind that Obama is taking on one of the central entrenched interests in  the Democratic party over this. He wouldn’t do that unless he found it both critical and that this is the way to improve things.

          1. a) Sure – who can disagree with this. You find an approach that works better, use it.

            b) That’s going on today. Every good teacher & parent does this constantly.

            c) Mexico has something like this where they pay families for the kids doing well in school. Last I read they still don’t know what impact it is having (if any).

            d) If administrators will be fired for a poorly performing school, I think you’ll suddenly see them all in favor of innovative improvement.

            And the point remains, reading Newsweek, reading the NY Times articles, reading all the research out there – who a student gets as a teacher outweighs all of the above items. They’re still good items to do, but they are secondary at best in their impact.

            1. The studies do not show that firing alone improves anything.  They show students to better with “good” teachers than “bad” teachers.  Firing alone does not replace “bad” teachers with “good” teachers, it gets rid of the “bad” teacher and hopes for the best.

              If you aren’t happy with the foundation of a building, its certainly good to have an innovative method of demolition.  But that doesn’t get you a better building, that gets you a pile of rubble.  Before you get started, you ought to have a comprehensive plan.

              1. It requires replacing bad teachers with good teachers. Worst case is you replace them with a random teacher and from those again weed out the bad ones. That still improves things but does so slower.

                I think what is key to all this is not just implement criteria to fire poor performers, it’s to identify what makes a good teacher and offer to train the existing teachers. If a teacher faces training vs being fired, most will opt for the training. And most of those will improve.

                And for when you hire new teachers, either because of firing bad ones or for other reasons, you need to do the best you can to determine which candidates are quality teachers. Sharing data across districts would help a lot for this, especially if it includes results for student teachers so you get everyone.

                1. The remedy of replacing a “bad” teacher will eternally be limited by exactly the number of “good” teachers that are unemployed at that moment.  All the rearranging and randomizing and communication in the world can’t change that.  If there are no available unemployed “good” teachers, firing people does not provide any benefit whatsoever.  In reality, the number of “good” teachers available is the true limiting factor, not the ability to fire the “bad” ones.

                  Unless and until you show me the wave of thousands of willing, “good” teachers who are currently doing anything other than teaching somewhere, there’s not really a solution to be found here.

                    1. I think investing major effort into a minor part of a solution protects the status quo.  The best way to effect change is to understand the real problem. Recruiting and retaining talented teachers takes innovation and also investment.  Ironically efforts like this that publically overemphasize that teachers are bad make matters worse. Teachers know better than anyone that some of their peers are ineffective.  But they also know schools aren’t a few firings from greatness, and they resent getting more blame than they deserve like anyone would.  

                    2. I think that is the crux of the argument – the present system is failing. So arguing to leave things alone and/or wait for a solution everyone loves won’t cut it.

                    3. No, but find a solution at all.  This isn’t a solution, at all.  Its a false choice to say either embrace the entire status quo or become unduly fixated on firing teachers.  Actually figure out what it will take to get more talented teachers who are willing to take the job, which is 80% of the battle, and then worry about how to get rid of any intransigent ineffective teachers standing in their way, which is 2% of the battle.   This is putting the hubcap of the cart in front of the horse and calling it a solution.

                      Firing teachers does not solve the problem of improving teacher quality.  Firing teachers solves the problem of creating openings for talented teachers who are dying to teach but don’t have a job.  Neither you, nor anyone has presented any evidence that those people exist, so you’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist and ignoring those that do, and that is how one protects the status quo.

                    4. If they lay off the 400 least effective instead of the 400 least senior – that eliminates bad teachers and there are no openings that need to be filled.

                      I think that gives you a solution for this case. We can start there.

                2. Worst case isn’t that you replace them with a random teacher. That assumes a new-teacher entry rate that always at least matches the attrition rate. Close to half of all new teachers leave the profession within their first four years. That, compounded by retirement, and, under your regime, one must assume significant termination rates (because otherwise there could be no significant improvement in overall teacher quality), means that the worst case scenario is either ever-growing classroom size and ever shrinking teacher-to-student ratios (a factor which research has also shown, time after time, to be one of the most crucial variables in student performance), or scrapping the bottom of the barrel of would-be entrants to find any warm bodies to put in front of a classroom.  

            2. are non-responses. And “positive behavioral supports” is a state of the art methodology being used in some American schools; it has nothing to do with paying anyone for anything.

              As for your assertions about the research and what it means:

              1) There is no data on the table concerning how many, if any studies have been done on the effects of community involvement on educational performance, and no basis for any presumed comparison between the effects of community involvement and the effects of teacher quality.

              2) The effects of teacher quality may well be local optima within the national trough of poor educational performance resulting from a nation-wide culture of anti-intellectualism. Mechanistic attempts to improve mechanistic measures of mechanistic education do not address that fundamental handicap which, rather than any greater severity toward teachers, is what distinguishes us from other similarly situated developed nations with far higher educational achievement. Community involvement addresses the deep structural problem as well as students’ immediate needs.

              3) As a former social scientist, my personal belief is that social science research is more suggestive than dispositive. The standard of significance in social scientiic statistical analyses is .05, which means that of the tiny fraction of studies that are flawlessly conceptualized and operationalized, the “demonstrated” results are an artifact of chance an average of one time in every twenty. For the vast majority of studies that are imperfectly conceptualized or operationalized, the irrelevance rate ranges upward from there. When you factor in researcher biases and professional motivations to crunch the numbers until any statistically significant correlation is found, you recognize that the noise-to-signal ratio in social science research is extraordinarily high.

              Combine that with the red flags in the study you cited, indicating a reductionist operationalization which could as easily be proof that teaching to the test gives both teachers and students high grades, and you recognize that studies such as these are not, after all, the word of God declaring the One Indisputable Truth.

              And, of course, none of it addresses the actual contention on the table, which has nothing to do with the relative importance of improving the teacher pool, but rather whether a specific proposed policy would actually accomplish that end.

              Despite the flaws of the study (and others like it), I do indeed believe that maximizing the quality of the teacher pool is enormously important to maximizing the quality of educational services that a child receives. And I think that maximizing the quality of the educational services received by a child during the (at most) one fourth of their waking time when they are in school (not all of which is spent in class) is almost as important to a child’s long-term educational success as maximizing the quality of the encouragements, reinforcements, and intellectual stimulation that he or she receives during the three fourths of his or her waking time that he or she is not in school. Teachers really are just that phenomenally important!

        2. I’ve always said that improved procedures for identifying and removing bad teachers is a good idea, especially in ways and in conjunction with complementary policies which mitigate against the unintended consequences. President Obama has been quite assertive at the in-put end (attracting more and better teachers), so his current push falls within the parameters described above.

          Also, to the best of my knowledge, the president has never worked in public education. I suspect that he, like me prior to being a public school teacher, does not fully realize how dysfunctional public school administrative decision-making really is. After decades of diverse work and life experience and few illusions, I was nevertheless amazed to watch, year after year, the best teachers drummed out of the profession and the worst ones retained. It is difficult to invest your faith in increased administrative autocracy after seeing up-close how counterproductively their current degree of authority is often exercised.

          To be fair to David, this adverse selection mechanism is partly (and only partly) due to tenure, since excellent new teachers are routinely booted to retain lousy tenured teachers. Yes, that is one of the dysfunctional threads in the tapestry. But not one that can be surgically removed without consideration of systemic consequences.

          I think raindog hits on precisely the more fundamental challenge: It’s not so much getting the bad ones out as getting good ones in that is most pressing and most difficult. We have to solve the latter to make the former viable and effective. My focus tends to be on solutions to the problems of getting excellent teachers into the profession, and creating a context conducive to their success.

          David is, I believe, wrong that community involvement is a large component of current education strategies. it’s not. A few districts have some programs, more have none. Jefferson County Public Schools, the largest school district in the state and second largest employer, has no such program. The fact that some individual families are supportive of their children’s education is not the problem or the solution; those are the students who already perform well. It’s the students who lack solid family and community support, whether due to lack of the skill-set at home, or lack of will (more often the former).  

        3. 1) “Study after study” has not shown that easier administrative ability to fire allegedly bad teachers improves education. Study after study has shown that good teachers matter, an assertion that no one ever disagreed with. The issue at hand, that you somehow have never been willing to face, is the challenge of reaching that goal, which is far less trivial than you make it out to be. The argument on the table has always been that your suggestion, all other things being equal, accomplishes exactly the opposite, in which case “study after study” supports my position rather than yours.

          2) A critique arguing that a proposal does more harm than good does not need to suggest an alternative to argue that doing more harm than good is a bad idea.

      2. David makes a formally very sound syllogistic argument:

        Premise 1: Improving the quality of the teacher pool improves public education.

        Premise 2: All other things being held equal, empowering principals to more easily fire allegedly bad teachers improves the quality of the teacher pool.

        Conclusion: Therefore, all other things being held equal, empowering principals to more easily fire allegedly bad teachers improves public education.

        David has provided ample support for premise number 1, which has never been challenged, but has never provided any argument supporting premise number 2, which is the one that has been challenged. To complete the syllogism, it is premise 2, not premise 1, that remains to be proven.

        I have argued the inverse syllogism:

        Premise 1: Reducing the quality of the teacher pool reduces the quality of public education.

        Premise 2: All other things being held equal, empowering principals to more easily fire allegedly bad teachers reduces the quality of the teacher pool.

        Conclusion: Therefore, all other things being held equal, empowering principals to more easily fire allegedly bad teachers reduces the quality of public education.

        And I have supported both of my premises.

        1. I don’t care who does the firing or what the process is – I just want the bad teachers out. And I have never proposed giving principals absolute final authority on this.

          My premise has always been that the administrative system needs to have a mechanism to weed out the poor performers. With that said, I do think the point person for that should be the principal. But if it’s someone else – I’m fine with that too.

        2. with your arguments, Steve (there are a number of reasons why an allegedly “bad” teacher might function well in a different system, for instance), I’m reminded of the story of the dead bodies floating down the river.  Until one smart person says they’re tired of hauling the bodies out and why don’t we go upriver and see what’s going on?

          If there are so many bad teachers out there, where did they come from and why are they getting into the system in the first place?  Is it the education they receive (or don’t receive as the case may be)?  Are beginning teachers not appropriately weeded out during their practice work?  Are good teachers becoming bad principals?  Are bad teachers becoming bad principals?  David?  Any answers, other than “let possibly bad principals fire teachers who might be jewels if they had good leadership?”

          1. Does a school district have any reason to even determine which teachers are good ones? No. And they have a major reason to not do so – identifying them would then generate pressure from the community to fire those teachers.

            So most districts purposely avoid identifying how good a job each teacher does. I remember one time at BVSD one of their HR statistics people was walking us through all the numbers they tracked. I asked if they married up two sets (student advancement against the teachers they had) and she looked horrified and said that they would never be allowed to run that.

          2. Actually, as I’ve argued with DT, the quality of the teacher pool is probably higher than would be expected from the combination of supply and demand, and the salary offered. There is a huge demand for teachers, at a non-competitive salary for people with the skills that would make them good teachers (smart, confident, charismatic, great social skills, extreme patience, very politic, and so on. In other words, the skill set that gets you very far in almost any profession). Three things combine, I believe, to attract an inordinate amount of surprisingly talented people into the profession: 1) There is a large pool of intellectuals who really have a passion for teaching, 2) A significant proportion of them (perhaps the same as in the general population; perhaps more due to characteristics associated with intellectualism) are highly risk averse, and 3) Teaching offers unusually high job security. The higher than average job security off-sets the lower than average professional salary, and combines with the rate of risk aversion among potential new teachers (whether a normal rate or a higher than normal rate), to attract a surprising number of incredibly talented people.

            However, the combination of a huge demand for teachers and lower-than-average professional pay means that it will also inevitably attract a large number of fairly untalented people, who enter the profession because they have few alternatives and none that are more attractive. That’s just econonmics at work.

            The more crucial challenge for improving the quality of the teacher pool, before going all Archie Bunker with the chant to fire bad teachers, is to ensure that we recruit and maintain more good teachers. Getting rid of “bad” teachers at a faster rate only increases the problem upstream. It makes no sense to solve a problem downstream in a manner that ensures it will be undone at a faster rate upstream as a result.

            As for working with the human capital that makes itself available, professional training matters, but, frankly, I think natural talent (or whole-life training, if you will) matters more. Teaching is a whole-person job, that some people are inherently good at, some people are inherently bad at, and some people somewhere inbetween. All can be improved, to varying degrees, by training and licensing, but you can’t make silk out of a sow’s ear, and you can’t artificially instill any one member of the set of personalities that are conducive to being a good teacher.

            But context matters, more than training. Plenty of schools have a hostile atmosphere, which stifles and discourages quality teaching. Good administrators lead by inspiring their teachers, and instilling in them a sense of being in a joyful shared mission.

            Bad administrators say things like “there’s a new sheriff in town” (as one did in a staff meeting, with a straight face), and “I’m the most important person in the room” (which she did to an assembly of the students). At the end of the semester in which she began at that school, all but one of the eight other administrators in that building left, all but one by their choice, and three fourths of the teachers applied for transfers. The student population dropped by about 30% in the following two years, and the school, which we had been steadily improving through huge investments of our own time, slipped back into complete dysfunctionality. And the reason this principal (with a career riddled with complaints, including sexual harrassment complaints by subordinate administrators) was assigned to that school was because she was a friend of the superintendent’s, who, I believe, chose what she considered an expendible school to sacrifice to cronyism.

            Yep, there are certainly problems to be addressed. But it’s going to take something quite different from what business-minded people with no experience in education think will work. Schools do not function best as pressure-cookers, where teachers feel on edge. They function best as warm and inviting environments, where people are selected for their talent and passion, and facilitated by an unflagging but non-threatening expectation to go above and beyond the call of duty to deliver the best possible education to our students.

    3. “The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover.”

      Naturally I wondered how “strong” and “weak” were defined; obviously it couldn’t be that they were defined in terms of student performance, because then the statement is a tautology.

      So I looked up the original study here:

      http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWeb…

      In July 2006, for the first time, leaders in every state had to deliver to the Secretary of Education their plans for ensuring that low-income and minority students in their states are not taught disproportionately by inexperienced, out-of-field, or uncertified teachers.

      In other words, teachers who are experienced, knowledgeable about the field, and certified to teach result in better students. I think this study does not support the authors’ conclusions, and it certainly blows a big hole in your proposed solutions (which as I recall are firing teachers and bringing in new ones frequently, in addition to removing certification requirements for new teachers).

      I hate when people cite studies where they obviously haven’t even read the first paragraph of the executive summary.

        1. I had her. Except her name was Mrs Stenson.

          What made her strong in your mind?

          MOre to the oint- could it be measured, quanitifed and replicated or assessed at the time? Or is it more that after the fact with hindsight we can tell she was so much better than the others, and in fact was strong.

          1. and identified which buttons to push to get us to learn.

            She had traveled all over Latin America during her summer breaks.  She made things interesting for us.  It was easy to learn from her.

            Other definitions of strong:

            Mr. Kowalski, 7th grade science.  He saw my interest in science, and INSISTED that my parents buy me a telescope for Christmas that year, even though they could barely afford it.

            Dr. Earley, 7th grade English.  Queer as a 4-dollar bill, but he used to sing and dance the parts of speech.  I can still remember the coordinate conjunctions.

            Mr. Almquist, 11th grade English. A former beatnick; a jazz piano player who gigged in the Village on weekends.  He used to teach his English class in the music room, sitting at the piano.

            Dr. Sobel, either 8th or 9th grade math (that was long ago, don’t remember the grade, just the content).  “The New Math” was just coming out, and he and Dr. Maletsky (another one of my math teachers, different grade) taught the class from an experimental text they were writing.

            You know what?  I can’t remember the weak ones. That means I can’t remember a damned thing they taught me. That’s why we need to weed them out somehow.

            And class size?  Sure it’s important, but we were baby boomers.  Our class sizes were huge too.  I learned more in a class of 31 or 32 kids with a good teacher in front than a class of 24 with a lousy one.

            1. So you don’t know how to spell? You don’t know how to add? Obviously you learned some things even from the ones you didn’t mention.

              But it’s interesting what you liked about the teachers, because I doubt that’s how everyone else felt. I tell jokes in class, and some students really appreciate it, while others just find it annoying. Of course I try to connect with those students in other ways, but it’s just about impossible to be successful with every student. Personality conflicts matter.

              We have to accept, to some extent, that what makes a teacher inspiring is a very subjective thing. As “Gray in Mountains” writes below, even a parent and child can disagree on which teachers are inspiring. I know I had favorite teachers that other students absolutely hated.

              1. And I learned to read because my parents kept books in the house that were always a couple of grades higher than my own grade level.

                As far as I’m concerned, reading is the only way to learn to spell.

                Both of my daughters were educated during the era when kids were allowed to use “invented spelling.”

                It was bullshit.

            2. Although I had an effective educational experience later that was all about negative reinforcement and stress.  Not what I would recommend for most kids, but it worked. My retention was high.

              But my point is can “good” be measured, quanitifed and replicated or assessed at the time? Or is it only that after the fact with hindsight we can tell a teacher was so much better than the others, and in was good for us.

              BTW- I never had a male teacher until high school, and then not many.  I suspect older Americans had even fewer men. The point being that teacher recruitment of the early to mid-20th c. benefitted from the social tradition of women who graduated college and wanted a profession being limited to teaching and nursing.

      2. ED said that they had to have experienced, in-field, certified teachers in low income schools. That does not mean those teachers were necessarily better. I think the odds are they were, but the studies show that a lot of being effective is simple practices in the classroom as well as a certain type of knowledge in the field.

        I’ve yet to see any studies that show certification or experience greater than 2 years makes for a better teacher. Those attributes appear to be irrelevant.

          1. The problem is that David just didn’t even bother to read the one little paragraph in the link, which said that frequently teachers in low-income schools are not certified or experienced, and that leads to poor test performance.

            But I suppose as long as David refuses to click on the link and read that one paragraph, he can honestly say he’s never seen any such study. Kind of a silly way to win an argument though.

            1. it’s the one you linked.

              It seemed like great irony and some fun to link it again just a few posts down thread – since it makes the claim look silly.

            1. You have said you can measure how good a teacher is by how well the students do on standardized tests. This is not an unreasonable definition (although you keep changing your definition).

              You have training as a scientist. You have posted about the scientific method, so I don’t have to remind you how that works. You now face evidence that contradicts your theory. What should you do as a scientist?

              1. They quote numerous studies and they all tend to point to two things:

                1) How a teacher runs the classroom. Good news is this is something than can be easily learned by most teachers.

                2) Subject knowledge. But a key part is how to use it and how to respond to questions on the subject. This requires that subject knowledge plus how best to use it in the classroom.

                I’ve yet to see any studies showing certification or years of experience over 2 years has any impact on how well a teacher does in the classroom. If you are aware of any, please post links.

                1. although they quite dishonestly IMO leave out the actual conclusion of that study, and cite one of the co-authors while making her seem to say the opposite of what her study says. Neat trick.

                  As for this:

                  I’ve yet to see any studies showing certification or years of experience over 2 years has any impact on how well a teacher does in the classroom. If you are aware of any, please post links.

                  Are you joking? Is this a joke? Am I on “punk’d”? Is this going to be your running gag on the site now?

      2. have anything to say about it? Only uninformed opinions matter, and only straw man arguments are legitimate!

        Whoever trained you as a scientist must have been a rather poor teacher.

      3. You should fire “poor” teachers to the extent you have a “good” teacher to replace that person that doesn’t have a job.  Otherwise you’re firing that person for an empty classroom.  

        But the point remains again and again, that you confuse this concept with an actual way to improve education, and standing alone it is not.  It is one small tool and the more it is treated like a panacea, the less the work that really matters will receive any focus.  

        Or put another way, is there anyone here who thinks that firing a bad teacher will do a lick of good if you can’t replace him/her with a good teacher?

        And also, I’m not at all a teacher, but its cute how you think anyone who disagrees with you must be.

          1. I have several siblings. The youngest was the first to have kids (my parents first grandchildren.) For years, and years, she would deflect every conversation about anything and everything, but especially about family and kid issues, with the undeniable well, you don’t have kids, so ….etc

            The implication being that because she did have kids she understood things in a way the rest of us never could, and therefore we were unqualified to even comment.

            Of course she was right- at the time none of us had kids. And she was right that having kids gave her perspective and understanding that was unique to having kids.

            But of course she was also a loon.  Everyone has unique experience and perspective based on that unique experience. Yet the point of civilization is we can all have equal opportunity and life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.  

            My superior experience doesn’t mean I get to be king.

            David is frustrated that education could be better. ANd therefore it should be. I agree.

            He believes that amongst other things one of the problems is the presence of poor teachers. I agree.

            I don’t believe he’s ever claimed that addressing that one problem fixes everything.  If he did- that’s wrong.

            But it is a hot button all the way around. Taxpayers hate to pay for ppoor performance- and we shouldn’t have to.  Teachers don’t wantto be characterized as a poor teacher because she has students whose family’s idea of homework is to watch tv from the time school is out until the kid falls asleep. And whose idea of breakfast is some sugar and fluffy carb. And whose idea of working hard int he classroom is not actually injuring anyone.

            Kids meanwhile still show up.

            The whole thing needs re-thinking.  The calendar has too much free time, the K-12 path is too long (by at least two years). The curriculum needs revision.

            We all agree “poor teachers” is a problem.

            We all agree that the best thing we can do to make things better is give our schools at least adequate teachers, preferably, better than adequate and even excellent.

            the problem isn’t agreeing on that- the problem is the installed base.  And, of course, not enough cowbell.  

      4. 1. What is an unqualified teacher?

        Is it someone who’s kids underperform? or is there some other defintion?  Firing teachers because they have tough social pathologies to deal with will help kids how?  We need to benchmark teachers based on something other than the measures we have now.

        2. Is my option to fire an unqualified teacher replace them with an unqualified teacher?

        If someone is unqualified and I can’t replace them with a qualified teacher, I’d rather keep the one I have and create incentives for them to improve.  Why?  Because at least I know what I got and it will take at least a year to figure out if the replacement is any better (this is also why certifications matter-saves time).  Rehabilitating an underperformer is more effective (and cost effective) than firing and bringing another unqualified teacher.

        I am supportive of improving the quality of teachers through a combination of better incentives, better training, rehabilitation/retraining and yes, the judicial use of termination, but firing bad teachers is not a panacea and will do nothing if we do not have a pool of qualified teachers who want to fill those positions.

        1. Is it measures the improvement of children year by year as they go through a school. They then compare how far they advanced each year by teacher – and they compare teachers in the same school with the same student type against each other over a period of years.

          This way you are comparing apples and apples two ways. It does limit your range to the quality of teachers at the school, but it does provide for clear measures between them.

          You can then go a step further and compare across schools that have kids from a similar SES background. What gets interesting there is that you can then find which schools do better, and look to see what they do different.

          1. Much more workable than “fire ’em all.”

            I am a fan of testing and tracking that properly accounts for the difficulties students and teachers face.

            I think we all agree that we need better teachers, but I believe it will be more effective to improve the ones we already have (with some exceptions), and at the same time we may discover that our teachers are actually better than some people think.

  2. While the Department of Revenue has (finally) given me answers on when I should pay use tax (although for 3 of the 8 cases their reply was “they’re trying to figure that out”), I have yet to receive answers on how we apply sales tax for software sales we make at Windward to Colorado companies.

    Fortunately 99% of our business is out of state so we haven’t faced this yet. But we will soon. And until we get answers, we will have to direct customers to purchase from a distributor who is out of state.

    First off, this means the state doesn’t get sales tax (and probably not use tax as the distributor is unlikely to file anything).

    Second, it means we make less because the distributor gets their percentage. For us, that would probably add up to enough over a year to hire one more person. Not a big deal (unless you are that one person who did not get a job).

    But multiply this across all the software companies in the state, and you’re talking a substantial number of jobs. And these tend to be well paying jobs in a nice environment.

    So the state gets less money, fewer people have jobs – why is the state doing this? Does the Department of Revenue just hate local software companies like OIT does? Maybe we should pretended we’re a green energy company…

    1. …because, it seems, the Veteran Benefit Administration has discovered this newfangled “computer” thing, and they want to use “a computer” to automate the claims process for vets exposed to Agent Orange…

      Secretary Seeks Fast Track to Process Claims

      WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced today an aggressive new initiative to solicit private-sector input on a proposed “fast track” Veterans’ claims process for service-connected presumptive illnesses due to Agent Orange exposure during the Vietnam War.  

      “This will be a new way of doing business and a major step forward in how we process the presumptive claims we expect to receive over the next two years,” Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki said. “With the latest, fastest, and most reliable technology, VA hopes to migrate the manual processing of these claims to an automated process that meets the needs of today’s Veterans in a more timely manner.”

      Over the next two years, about 200,000 Veterans are expected to file disability compensation claims under an historic expansion of three new presumptive illnesses announced last year by Secretary Shinseki.  They affect Veterans who have Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease and B-cell leukemias.  

      In practical terms, Veterans who served in Vietnam during the war and who have one of the illnesses covered by the “presumption of service connection” don’t have to prove an association between their medical problems and military service.  This “presumption” makes it easier for Vietnam Veterans to access disability compensation benefits. Vietnam Veterans are encouraged to submit their claims as soon as possible to begin the important process of compensation.  

      Along with the publication of proposed regulations for the three new presumptives this spring, VA intends to publish a formal request in Federal Business Opportunities for private-sector corporations to propose automated solutions for the parts of the claims process that take the longest amount of time.  VA believes these can be collected in a more streamlined and accurate way.  

      http://www1.va.gov/opa/pressre…  

      1. be prepared to spend $2-$3 million paying a beltway proposal house to write a proposal for you.

        They’ll find you a retired general and a few retired VA SES people to head up the list of key personnel and a couple of others to head up the “red team” that does your review prior to orals.

        I wish I was kidding but I’m not.  And oh, by the way, the specific people I’m thinking about have about a 90 percent short-list rate and a 70 percent win rate.

        1. We could end up in the above system – but if we do what happens is the prime contractor comes to us for the reporting component (because we can get them a solution faster & cheaper). So we don’t have to invest all that money & effort.

          And these fast track ones we do really well on – because they blow off reporting till the end and are then frantic to get it in fast. That pretty much means Windward 🙂

    2. In exchange for agreeing levy and collect new taxes for the State, Democrats negotiated an exemption for your industry.  I’ve cited it before.

      While I think its great your industry got this exemption – you should have had it years ago – its too bad it’s tied to horrible tax policy crammed down in the middle of the night.

  4. I was thinking this through some more last night trying to balance out the players. And I think Amazon may well be doing exactly the right thing here. Doesn’t mean we should like it, but we can at least understand it.

    Lets say you’re a company located in New York that sells Russian music CDs. You may have a total of 1 customer in Colorado. Should that company then be required to put the processes in place to report yearly on that customer’s sales? If so, it’s cheaper for that company to tell their one, super super terrific customer in Colorado – sorry we won’t sell to you anymore.

    Lets also say that a state can compel a company located in another state to perform an action such as reporting sales. Does that mean all 49 other states can then compel a software company located in Colorado (a really really wonderful company), to file reports with all 49 other states? And if the reports can be compelled, can the states then require getting a business license in each of those states ($125.00/year for New Jersey – they told us we “had” to get one).

    And if other states Departments of Revenue are as fucked up as Colorado’s (very likely), the amount of time, money, & labor required of each company would be killer. It would be a horrible barrier to entry for start-ups – we could afford it today, but we couldn’t have afforded it for the first 2 years we were in business.

    Ok, so this is a jobs and small business killer if the other states copy Colorado (and for free money they will). That doesn’t mean it’s illegal.

    However, the law has been clear for a long time that a state cannot compel squat on entities in another state. Utah cannot pass a law requiring wives in Colorado must “submit” to their husband. For the same reason Boulder & Colorado Springs cannot pass laws affecting residents of the other (boy would that be entertaining).

    If Amazon is not in Colorado, then Colorado has no legal grounds to make them do anything. And in the case of Associates, I think Amazon is being very careful to make sure that there is absolutely no grounds for Colorado to claim they have a presence in this state.

    Now if Colorado were to pass a law that stated that having associates in this states absolutely does not in any way count as a presence, then if Amazon continued their policy you could claim they’re being dicks. But at present I think they’re just playing it safe.

    With that said, I wish a reporter would ask Amazon

    There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way…

    What is the right way? I tried but could not get an answer out of them.

    1. Everyone quotes the Quill decision as giving the state the right to make Amazon report sales to Colorado residents. There’s a summation here and I don’t see that.

      The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the North Dakota Supreme Court and ruled Quill was not required to collect and remit use tax on goods sold for initial use in North Dakota.

      Is there some other part of the decision that gives the state some standing?

      1. requiring reporting and requiring collection of taxes.

        Quill requires physical presence for a state to require collection of sales taxes.

          1. concerned whether the state could require a a mail order business to collect taxes, and concluded that requiring collection was not a due process violation but was a commerce clause violation because Quill did not have a physical presence in the state.

            However, it says nothing about requiring reporting of tax information, which is less burdensome than requiring tax collection.  As far as I know, there has not been judicial consideration of this precise question.

              1. I’m just guessing, but whether Amazon is subject to being fined probably turns on whether Amazon has “miminum contacts” with Colorado, which is a much lower standard than the “substantial nexus” required to make Amazon collect sales taxes.

                A Colorado judgment against Amazon could be enforced in any state where Amazon has property.

    2. had a $10,000 threshhold.  So your retailer selling one CD to Colorado would not have been presumed to be a retailer who had to collect tax.

      The new reporting law doesn’t have a threshold for reporting.  So now he might (i) comply and send a letter each year, (ii) decide that his one sale doesn’t constitute minimum contacts under the due process clause, or substantial nexus under the commerce clause, and not comply, or (iii) not sell in Colorado.

  5. I have one child. Before I moved to the mountains he was in a very good school in a very good school district and as usual in elementary school he had only one teacher and paras each year. He excelled.

    Move to the mountains beginning middle school. Did some investigation first but the numbers did not paint an at all accurate picture. All of the students did not get textbooks. I swallowed hard, bought a few of them myself, and told my son that when he got a chance to bring the textbook home he had to use it.

    When a youngster is exposed to 5 or more teachers and a few hundred peers every day a parent really has to be careful about where that kid’s influence comes from. I told my son that I would be happy if he had ONE really, really good teacher every quarter and semester. He always did. The others were not necessarily incompetent, but they definitely did not inspire. ONE inspirational teacher at a time will make a kid work hard in other classes as well.

    My son, after HS grad, got his BA in 3 yrs, cum laude and his MA in 1 yr magna cum laude. Doing very well in his chosen career.

    I have gone to those inspirational teachers and thanked them. I see them all the time. They have become friends. Every time we see each other they ask about him. When I talk to him he will frequently ask whether I have seen them. Interestingly, there is more than one teacher that I thought was not very good. Yet my son remembers them more positively.  

  7. I draw your attention to a comment by Middle of the Road on the thread Colorado Senate Race: Daily Kos, a comment filed today, Wed Mar 10, 2010 at 08:07:43 AM, in which she wrote:

    Hey, JO?

    Just a quick question for you–why do you delete your diaries when they don’t get any comments? Just curious about that. I see you do it quite a bit and I just wondered if we should post recipes in them or something to make you feel better since it seems you delete the ones that no one bothers to read. (Emphasis added)

    That strikes me as a blatant abuse of her editorial privileges–to track diaries that have been deleted–in order to heap scorn and abuse on a poster, nothing to do with the content of any post whatsoever, much less to do with any political issue(s).

    I certainly don’t expect this site to be a neutral place for political discussions, and I am entirely used to ad hominem attacks from people, like Middle of the Road, who aren’t able (I guess) to offer any substantive comment on issues and opinions that I (and others) raise.

    But I do wonder–on behalf of others, not just me, whom this “editor” has attacked personally time and time again–about what privileges and powers your guest editors have, and how they use/abuse them to further their deeply personal crusades. (Doubt me? See her latest “sig” line.) As you  will remember, Middle of the Road has also been been accused, by others, of “outing” some pseudononymous posters, another violation of the site’s nominal standards.

    Four questions:

    1. Are there standards or rules of conduct on the site?

    2. If so, are they enforced?

    3. Do you consider Middle of the Road’s post, mentioned above, to be a legitimate use of editor’s privileges?

    4. As propritor(s) of the site, do you think such personal invective in response to political opinions–not in retaliation for other personal attacks–is in line with the sort of blog you want?

    1. Anyone can notice diaries in the right-hand column and then notice they’ve disappeared. It sounds like there’s a “deeply personal crusade” here, but it isn’t MOTR’s.

    2. But anyone can tell that you delete diaries. If you subscribe to the diaries RSS feed like I do, you can see when they pop up. Conversely, when those diaries are no longer up there, it’s fairly obvious.

      As a former guest FPer on this site, let me say that there is nothing in the powers granted by this site to their guest editors that is anywhere close to what you’re describing here.

      But don’t let me interrupt your paranoid conspiratorial rant.

      1. But you still do get Social Security numbers and cell phone GPS data, right? And I want to thank you again, RSB, for changing the radio station that was playing on the filling in my molar. I was really getting tired of the country station.

        1. Edit diaries (and potentially delete them too, I never tried that,) promote diaries to the top of the FP, and post diaries directly to the FP.

          It would actually be really easy as an FPer to abuse those powers by editing or manipulating content on this site. Somehow though, despite all of the evildoers/shills/staffers/sock puppets posting here, that’s never happened.

          And you’d better not piss me off, RG, or so help me I will change that filling to a looping Lady Gaga playlist.

    3. Yes, MOTR did address the question directly to you. http://www.coloradopols.com/sh…

      So what?

      It took me awhile to figure out why diaries I thought were here were then not until I learned that diaries can be modified and even deleted by the author.  I never thought about it much- I figured people who write diaries should be able to correct them, or delete them if they choose.

      Anyone can track diaries and notice they are deleted. Maybe the FP editors have more ways to do it – but anyone can. Why do you care that MOTR (or anyone else) noticed? Or asked about it?

      And I don’t see how MOTR asking the question could be seen as anything like “heap scorn and abuse” nor “personla invective.”

      I don’t recall MOTR outing anyone, though I haven’t been here all that long and I haven’t read everything even since I have registered.

    5. that ColoPols FP editors have the ability to track all the diaries you’ve considered posting but haven’t yet put online.

      .

      Talk about your misplaced paranoia …

      🙂

    6. JO, maybe you don’t realize how creepy you seem to be being about MOTR, but you really are.

      Why don’t you back off a bit.  The only person in the world that’s gripping about this is you.

        1. But it’s getting fuckin’ stupid.  And trust me, I LOVE this Romanoff/Bennet circular firing squad.

          It just seems to me that JO has crossed a line as far as being a little too obsessed with MOTR and I think it’s inappropriate.

          But who the fuck am I, anyway?

          1. I thought you were the front-page editor who installed that keystroke capture program that had me typing everything FULL OF ERRORS and then backspacing a LOT to confuse things … but maybe that was RSB, my paranoid delusions get muddled sometimes. So sorry if that’s the case.

            1. …as editor, I would lose sleep over editing someone’s diary spatially so it fit above the fold.  I’m sure Middle is the same way, and JO’s nonsense is beyond idiocy and now is in the realm of icky.

                1. are a lot easier to swallow than the temporal ones. You front page editors lording your power over us in every dimension — it gets old, you know? It just gets old.

                  1. How else could someone who had only posted here for 4 1/2 months get to be FP editor? I also brought my sock puppets back in time with me.

                    That’s right, you guessed it, I’m trigaurdian. Actually back then I was monoguardian.

            2. that will backspace the backspaces for you now, giving you a clean keystroke report.  Remind me to never let RG near my computers.

            1. did you happen to catch his interview this a.m. on NPR? It was quite good. (He mentioned regulation but did fail to disclose his secret backing of Colorado Pols.)

          3. That it doesn’t matter whether it’s something real or not. It’s just a shotgun approach, hoping if he/she throws enough against the wall, something is bound to stick.

            And the line wasn’t crossed today. It was crossed a long time ago. JO decided way back to join a long list of people on both sides of the aisle who have a vendetta against Pols, and anyone who posts here on a regular basis.

      2. What I don’t find interesting in the least is the ease with which JO has nebulously accused people of something that is, in JO’s mind, nefarious beyond belief.

        I’ve never seen someone who is either so starved for attention, or so victimized in their own mind, as to engage in the type of games that JO has been playing for over a year.

        JO shouldn’t feel the need to delete the diaries s/he posts because of lack of comment, but s/he shouldn’t be surprised and outraged when someone points out that fact. Was MotR being confrontational? Sure. But it’s hardly worth the outraged. A quick, witty reply would have been JO’s normal response. But JO really thought s/he was on to something.

        I come here for political discussions, not personal crusades against fellow posters. I hope that after this JO will stick to the former, and steer clear of the latter, but I’m not holding my breath.

  8. or was that “only the drug-addled former teen heartthrobs” dying young?

    Yes, folks, Corey Haim (not that Corey, the other one) died this morning at 38.

    His friend, Corey Feldman (the other one — ed note), said he wept when he heard the news.

    “This is a tragic loss of a wonderful, beautiful, tormented soul, who will always be my brother, family and best friend,” he said in a statement. “We must all take this as a lesson in how we treat the people we share this world with while they are still here to make a difference.

    “I hope the art Corey has left behind will be remembered as the passion of that for which he truly lived,” Feldman said.

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