I’ll use all the rhetorical tricks that are used to discuss teachers. I hope you’ll see that this little spiel has a great deal of what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness” and yet, somehow, is neither a fair nor accurate portrayal of the profession. And what evidence exactly could you use to counter it?

A few points:

- Although not made publicly available, accountants do often have their performance formally measured within the companies that they work which is a basis for their salary increases and performance pay. I don’t believe there is a call for individual teacher assessments (which should be a lot more than just results of standardised tests) to be made public. I think some performance information should be released - eg charities report on how much of the dontations are overhead and how much actually reaches the people they are meant to help.

- Imagine the situation for accountants where the government told you that you weren’t allowed to go to any accountant you wanted, but only those near where you lived?

Sam said:

Marlin @ 79 you then have the problem of teachers teaching to the test to get better pay rather than allowing the tests to indicate which schools need extra resources. Teacher pay and school resources should not be traded off against each other.

I don’t see how its possible to really separate the two. The government really only has one bucket of money, even if they split it artificially into different lumps. Teacher pay gets traded off against nursing pay which gets traded off against investment for more public transport which gets traded off against tax cuts.

At some point you need to decide whether paying that extra dollar to attract/retain better teachers is more important than spending money on classrooms, books etc. And I think in most cases these decisions are best made at the school level.

Mercurius @ 84. I think you’re being a bit tough. You counter my anecdote based on my experiences with your anecdote based on your experiences. I would think your experience as an education student would be at least as biased as mine working with teachers seeking to improve their teaching.

I also don’t think that saying there seems to an increasing proption of new teachers experiencing literacy and numeracy difficulties, perhaps because we are taking more students from lower achievement bands than we used to, is really the same as declaring all new teachers “semi-literate dunderheads”. I know you don’t think I should be allowed to same that because some people could infer that that means all new teachers are hopless but I think you should give people more credit. Once parents see the quality of a good teacher they will be that teacher’s biggest supporter.

“Everyone says they support good teachers but they still focus all their time and energy and public discussion on ‘the problem’.” I think there is more to supporting good teachers than refusing to admit that there are poor teachers and hoping no-one notices.

I think this anecdote vs. anecdote again. You could use the PISA as evidence that it probably isn’t true on entry to university. However, it would be very surprising if standards had not declined at the exit — most universities have 50% or so less staff per student than a decade or so ago, and hence students simply get helped less (and probably worse staff too given the decline of relative pay in that sector too). There are also other factors I could mention that making teaching worse at the university level, like more administrivia and complaince tasks (there used to be a nice survey on the DEST site showing how bad it was). There are also political problems due to lack of funding which means very few people get failed in any course (lest they leave, complain, or give you bad teaching marks. Note that no-one wants complaints as they take time to resolve). Its easy to see why at the most coarse level. Lets assume 25:1 staff-student ratios and lets assume each student does 10 assignments each semester (fairly realistic assumptions). This means that each staff member has to mark 250 assignments. If each staff member spent a mere 30 minutes helping each student on each assignment (e.g., showing them what they had done wrong etc.), then that means you would have 125 hours (i.e., three full weeks in 12) of simply helping students learn how to write etc. Given all the other priorities people have — many which come above helping Australian undergraduates (e.g., chasing money from here there and everywhere, doing science etc.) this simply isn’t going to happen. So universities are in a situation where they are not helping poorer students a great deal (some with quite reasonable TER scores) nor failing them or holding them back much (where I work, for example, which isn’t education, the number of people that do a course and meet all the submission requirements that get failed is probably less than 5%. The number of people I consider have serious basic literacy problems is probably around 30-40%. Many students also don’t expect to fail these days (nor for that matter do much work), and are often outraged when they do, and hence you get official complaints, threats, and so on — many people, myself included, find having to why deal with all this more problematic than simply passing people).

I’ll use all the rhetorical tricks that are used to discuss teachers. I hope you’ll see that this little spiel has a great deal of what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness” and yet, somehow, is neither a fair nor accurate portrayal of the profession. And what evidence exactly could you use to counter it?

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Accountants? Don’t talk to me about accountants. The ones we have today aren’t a patch on 30 years ago. Now those were real accountants who understood what accounting’s all about. I wouldn’t trust today’s accountants with my grocery bill. Did you know one of mine mis-filed an ASIC paper and I copped a $900 fine for it? Of course, there’s no use complaining, it’s always somebody else’s fault. The trouble is that the young ones know nothing and the old ones are too burnt out to be any use. They just grumble away about “that’s not my job” and “give me more money”.

But what really worries me is that accountants are the people we entrust to ensure that our businesses are running properly. Our whole society is going to hell in a handbasket because today’s accountants are such a motley bunch of ne’er-do-wells.

They have all these laws that favour them, and then they complain that all the administration and regulations take all their time away from the real work of accounting. Whingers.

And try to find a good one? Forget it! You just have to rely on what your friends tell you about who’s good and who isn’t. Why can’t there be a way to compare them publicly? Rank them from best to worst? Who made how many mistakes on the tax form? Who filed the most papers last year? That way we could really see who’s doing their job properly. But of course, they won’t even agree to such a simple, reasonable performance measure. Because they’re unwilling to really be held to account. Ironic isn’t it?

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Such ‘criteria’ as you allude to is a glaring example of their bullshit. It would be much harder to treat some kid with severe problems how to be functionally literate then to do some faux Dead Poet’s Society schtick at St Leafygreen’s School For Tomorrow’s Oligarchs.

Wasn’t that exactly what I was saying? I’ve read your comment over and over and I still don’t know whether you’re agreeing with me or attempting to rebut me. As a general rule I think that should be more easily ascertained from a comment.

In response, I see a lot of confirmation bias in your own pronouncements of teaching. I’ve actually throughout this thread provided a fair bit of current empirical measurement of what is going on in the system, if you’d care to register it. I haven’t cited things as an academic to be sure, but this is a blog thread, and the material I’ve referred to is in the published literature. But you continue to discount that against your anecdotal experience. It’s a pretty normal human tendency to do that, but it s***s me to tears because such perceptions are basically unshiftable. I know I’ll be dealing with them for the entirety of my teaching career, and no amount of contrary evidence will change the perception.

marlin, who works with teachers in need of remediation, can’t be relied to produce anything other than doom ‘n gloom either. I’m currently seeking work in a US school where most of the kids are about 3 years behind in reading age - but I’m not about to suggest that my experience with them relates to the whole country.

The trouble is, people do. They see one little line and generalise and extrapolate, and no amount of contrary data really shifts the perception.

And no, I don’t believe ‘literacy standards are falling’ because a few oldies meet some kids they think are illiterate. I refer you to the NSW Deputy Director General’s remarks of (I think) 1946, who declared in a departmental memo that the matriculating class of that year for the NSW leaving certificate were so woefully inarticulate and ill-equipped with decent literacy standards, that he didn’t see how they would ever amount to anything. Well, that was the generation that worked to build Australia’s post-war prosperity.

Whatever ‘preciousness’ I exhibit arises from the fact that I just spent 4 years in the company of hundreds of young student teachers, all of whom have busted their tails to get into teaching, all of whom when they started in first year seemed to me to be a bunch of clueless wannabees and nearly all of whom had, by the end of fourth year, through the grueling process of prac, study, dozens of assignments, working two jobs and eating two-minute noodles, had somehow magically transformed into fine, competent, knowledgeable, passionate and committed young teachers.

But all this counts for nothing against the wisdom and experience of yours and Marlin’s anecdotes, and all the other Statlers and Waldorfs out there. My ‘preciousness’ arises because when I think of what those young teachers have gone through to get their qualifications, and when I think of all the people who, from the comfort of an established career or semi-retirement, are quite prepared to s**t on them from a great height and declare them to be semi-literate dunderheads before they’ve even had a chance to get into a classroom and demonstrate what they can do - well, yeah, I do think that’s unfair and unethical.

I understand a thing or two about how public perception works from my previous career in marketing, I know that an untruth gets half-way around the world before the truth has got it boots on. All this collective hand-wringing about the terrible trouble that teachers are in just makes it harder for good teachers to do their job, and undermines them in the classroom. But what the hey, I’m whistling into the wind. Everyone says they support good teachers but they still focus all their time and energy and public discussion on ‘the problem’.

Just try this thought experiment: for every assertion you see printed about teachers in this thread, substitute your own profession in place of ‘teacher’. Little closer to home now? Anything strike you as unfair? Little harder to maintain a ‘cool and distant’ demeanour about it?

performance assessment models …based purely on student test results but without taking into account which teachers had been assigned high-ability students and which had been assigned less academically able students

That’s Tory hypocrisy. Liberals tend to talk about competition etc but they really want a return to the old days were you couldn’t get a degree unless you were in Strangely Brown’s cricket team. Such ‘criteria’ as you allude to is a glaring example of their bullshit. It would be much harder to treat some kid with severe problems how to be functionally literate then to do some faux Dead Poet’s Society schtick at St Leafygreen’s School For Tomorrow’s Oligarchs.
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The ‘performance pay’ thing was an excuse to pay teachers even less perchance? Or maybe just more parliamentary idiocy. It’s hard to tell.

Is droppin’ your Gs a sign of the general deterioration of the education system?

Nah. More a sign that I’m a tosser. I can’t deny the charges.

Is droppin’ your Gs a sign of the general deterioration of the education system?

Maybe teachers could do extra training and coaching roles. In some states they are supposed to do that to get the extra pay but it’s really just considered another step on the pay scale and the accountability is less than rigorous.

I know that in America they have to write about their teaching, video a lesson, prepare documentation, get references from supervisors and colleagues.

I believe that something needs to be done because it’s not fair that you get paid the same amount for being a 9-3 teacher and yes they do exist, as the teacher who works extremely hard and gets great outcomes with the students. We can’t keep relying on the goodwill and work ethic of good teachers because eventually it will run out.

That’s a really interesting point. I hadn’t thought of it like that. I believe that you can’t take out all of the variables in order to measure the value-addedness of the teacher but your point makes sense. If I believe there are more effective teachers than others on what basis do I make my decision? I must be basing it on something. I have to do more thinking. Thanks for that.

I’d be interested to hear what your thoughts are. Commonsense tells me that there must be a difference in teaching effectiveness and I would guess that in most cases peers at least intuitively know who are the really good and bad ones they work with. And many parents know which teachers their child responds to well and which ones they don’t.

tigtog said:

That’s an overly-simplified misrepresentation: the teacher’s unions were criticising various proposed performance assessment models which were to be based purely on student test results but without taking into account which teachers had been assigned high-ability students and which had been assigned less academically able students etc etc. That’s a very reasonable criticism of such an overly simplistic performance rating system.

Yes in retrospect it was probably a bit inflammatory. My understanding was that there was just blanket opposition to performance pay because it is impossible to measure performance reasonably and fairly (among some other reasons) - am happy to be corrected if this is not the case! I agree the issue of performance is not straightforward - nor is it simple in many other professions, but people generally just accept that no system is perfect. Can you get a system that gets the measurement correct most of the time?

More generally I would be very interested to hear what they believe would be appropriate ways to measure actual performance (as opposed to just measurements based on training/qualifications or years of service).

if I’m to believe the teachers unions its impossible to reasonably and fairly measure a teacher’s performance

That’s an overly-simplified misrepresentation: the teacher’s unions were criticising various proposed performance assessment models which were to be based purely on student test results but without taking into account which teachers had been assigned high-ability students and which had been assigned less academically able students etc etc. That’s a very reasonable criticism of such an overly simplistic performance rating system.

That’s a really interesting point. I hadn’t thought of it like that. I believe that you can’t take out all of the variables in order to measure the value-addedness of the teacher but your point makes sense. If I believe there are more effective teachers than others on what basis do I make my decision? I must be basing it on something. I have to do more thinking. Thanks for that.

That said: USQ (closing numerous departments and axing courses) If that’s an argument against USQ, you might want to take another look.

But hey, from a selfish level I can’t complain too much. If they’d kept my reason to stay in Brisbane open, I’d be doing Honours there rather than a Masters at ANU.

As for Qld’s OP scores, they’re bell-curved with a mean score of 13. 1 is the highest, 25 is the lowest and if you’re offering uni courses where you accept the lower half of school leavers you’re going to have a lot of dropouts. The exception to that being if it’s not a particularly challenging course. These sort of factors determine how much your degree is worth to your employer. Someone from USQ with a Physics degree versus someone with a UQ Physics degree being a perfect example.

As for QUT not being a major uni, it is probably the second best uni in the state for a lot of things. Other unis involve USQ (closing numerous departments and axing courses), Central Queensland University (who have got a bad reputation for overcharging foreign students and hiring casual academics with no specialty in the field they’re teaching), Bond, James Cook, University of Canberra’s Brisbane Campus, Southern Cross University, University of the Sunshine Coast and Australian Catholic University (they have decent courses in Nursing, Education and Business but not much else). The only one which could possibly challenge QUT for 2nd place is Griffith for their micro-electronics, Medicine and Law courses.

QUT’s not one of the best in Australia but it’s certainly one of the best in Queensland.

Can we talk about the elephant in the room here? If for example, we lifted the TER required to get into a teaching course, what would happen? why, the entrants with qualifying TERs would mostly opt for other professions with high TER requirements where they are paid properly.

Agreed that TER’s are a symptom rather than a cause of the problem and in the long term you need to raise wages to change it. But it will take many years to see the change, just like its taken quite a few years to reach this point. The teachers who are doing a really good job should be paid a lot more.

One of the problems I have with the current debate generally is that if I’m to believe the teachers unions its impossible to reasonably and fairly measure a teacher’s performance. Which if true, implies it doesn’t really matter who ends up going into teaching because you won’t be able to tell the difference anyway!