I didn't want to derail the Wisconsin thread, and I figured this was worthy of it's own thread now that the bills have passed the house. Key Parts:

School employment and tenure
Charter school expansion
Private school vouchers for certain public school students
For more cliffs:

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.s...ation_ove.html

Since 44% of Lousiana's schools have a D or F rating, this is pretty much a movement to privatize K-12 education in Lousiana. This article is a few weeks old, so a few things might have been changed. The biggest one I see is that it doesn't mention getting rid of teacher pay schedules. Teachers under this plan would get paid on performance, not on years of service.

There hasn't been any mainstream media coverage of this. There are several places that canceled school last week so that teachers could protest. It's not the official reason why school was canceled though. There won't be recalls, dems leaving the state, etc and I doubt protests will get any where near the size of Wisconsin. The majority of Lousiana supports this plan, not to mention the majority of teachers aren't in unions here.

Personally I like where this is going. Lousiana's education system is easily one of the worst in the nation. I have seen this called an attack on teachers, unions, and racist, but nothing about how this is bad for student.

Thoughts? Rants? Praise? Jindal for VP?

i'm all for this

I have been following this as I have a child entering pre-k this fall. I live in New Orleans and the reforms that have been made here seem very popular.

this seems awesome wish we could do it here.

Sorry about the spelling, my i key is screwed. Missed the Louisiana's when I edited.

Performance based pay for teachers is probably the single most stupid thing politicians keep bringing up.

Teachers do not control what kids enter their class. Teachers in schools with low incomes are at a disadvantage to teachers in higher income schools.

If you truly want to reform education... quit with standardize tests... quit blaming teachers... Look at why some kids don't learn. It starts with parents.

I feel like the performance stuff is only going to lead to even more glorification of standardized tests (dont get me wrong, they definitely have their place, but I think its getting out of hand in elementary school right now). I used to volunteer at a low performing school and I felt so bad for the teachers, instead of actually getting to try to teach the kids they spent all their time having to be solely concerned about the standardized tests.

In fairness to the teachers, if they are going to use student performance they need to do the comparisons the way you would do a medical study or something, and compare each kid's percentile performance in a given year to some sort of weighted average of their previous years. (I would hope they are already doing this, but I suspect there is a good chance they just take the average of the class or something)

Most sensible proposals for performance-based pay are not based purely on performance, but on, to borrow from baseball, Value Over Replacement Teacher. If a teacher gets a student who finished in the Xth percentile on a standardized test one year, you'd expect him to be in the Xth percentile on another exam a few years later, on average. That's our baseline for replacement level teachers. However, if the students who attended Ms. Smith's class significantly boosted their test scores on average on their next exam relative to their previous scores, then it's a decent bet that Ms. Smith is a good teacher.

sry paul but the rest of the world gets paid on performance. teachers need to produce or hit the bricks. slightly nsfw

You actually believe this is true? Most of the world gets paid on doing their job to the minimum threshold that prevents their employer from facing litigation.

But these evaluations are complete garbage. The variance is so high that you literally can't tell if a teacher is good or bad from them. I mean, we're talking std devs of like 20-30 percentile points for relatively good sample sizes. And for ridiculously small samples, from which teachers are still evaluated, std devs of like 90 percentile points.

Plus teachers cheating on these tests is especially problematic. It doesn't just reward dishonest teachers, it actively punishes honest ones. An honest 5th grade teacher gets worse evaluations if the 4th grade teacher is artificially inflating his scores.

For state-wide standardized tests, the 4th grade teacher has no power to inflate scores on his or her own. Those scores are measured independently. And, while I could be convinced by a citation, I estimate it to be unlikely that students regularly jump/drop 30 percentile points between exams within a few years from each other (at least due to random chance. I could perhaps believe that a horrible/amazing teacher could drop/raise scores in that range, but even then, 30 points seems like a stretch).

perhaps logistically individual teachers dont have the capacity to cheat the tests, but comprehensively a school does. Any inflation of scores will punish subsequent teachers that are not also beneficiaries of the same inflation (eg students going from middle school to high school). There been documented cases of DC schools cheating these test yet amazingly they are still used to evaluate teachers. I'll round up some citations for you tomorrow (might be late, going to a spring training game tomorrow afternoon). It really is surprising how terrible these metrics are. I know how shocked I was when I first saw the numbers.

Oh god not this performance pay **** again.

Huge lols to Leo for saying the world gets paid by performance. You're either on the 1st level or the 4th can't tell which.

You are foolish if you actually think what you just said is true.

you guys must have cushy freaking jobs. i no longer hire i dont want employees but when i did if you didnt produce results i had to let you go.

where can you work get raises/keep your job while not producing results.

you think glengarry glen ross is pretend? ive worked places where that was the meeting twice a week.

I worked at a fortune 500 company where about half of the engineering and laboratory supervisors had "gentleman's agreements" with people the supervised that they would just check "Exceeds expectations" all the way down the quarterly evaluations and write awesome evaluations so that they employees could get the maximum holiday bonus and max yearly raise for someone staying in their current position. (Coincidentally these supervisors also got some pretty nice Christmas gifts from their underlings....)

I rounded up some good review article type sources for this data. The problems in these metrics are far more than individual student variation in score and I think these references spell out most of the difficulties.

These first three a good overviews of the problem (WARNING: these are looooong. The first contains the data for my 30 percentile std dev claim. I was off quite a bit for small sample sizes though. It's more like 60 rather than 90)

http://annenberginstitute.org/public...alue-added-mea
http://www.ams.org/notices/201105/rtx110500667p.pdf
http://epi.3cdn.net/b9667271ee6c154195_t9m6iij8k.pdf

These next four are fairly short but contain good stuff analyzing the recent NYC dump of teacher evaluations. Some pretty striking graphs.

http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org...d-data-part-1/
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org...d-data-part-2/
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org...data-part-iii/
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org...d-data-part-4/

Last one about the DC cheating (also long).

http://www.usatoday.com/news/educati...ing28_CV_N.htm

I don't mind some of the protections going (some not all), but I'm not really a fan of performance based pay for the reasons stated above. Maybe get rid of some of the degree based bonuses and add some bonuses for goals set at the beginning of the year at a school/ school system level. Imo, State or Nation wide doesn't make sense as communities are going to be so diverse as far as educational levels.

Side Bar: I am coaching a JV lacrosse team in a plurality minority school and I think it would be pretty hard to see if my kids were improving more or less than a replacement level coach. They are all, save 1, first year players. They compete against players with multiple years of experience who generally have better resources to instruction available to them (owning their equipment, summer camps, personal trainers...). How would my supervisor (the AD) determine value above replacement coach? There may eventually be someway to quantify improvement, but right now there just are too many factors. This is, obv, only dealing with sports so I can imagine trying to evaluate a kid on his entire academic life would be much more difficult.

Recall petitions ordered for Jindal, Kleckley(House Speaker)

You can use a system of value added to compensate for different starting abilities and cultural factors.

This performance based evaluations is going to be great once the charter schools soak up all the kids who give a **** and ditch the unwanteds on the public school system.

Maybe not, but having worked on the leadership team of a large school (in the UK) no one can under-perform (relative to other staff members) like a teacher can and stay in a job. Though this might also be true across other highly unionised public sector industries that I have no experience of. I have seen incompetent staff in Private industry, but when there gig is blown, bam they are gone. In this School it was just accepted that X was incompetent and the only strategy was damage limitation, as firing them was virtually impossible.

Also this is judging relative to the same student cohort so external factors do not apply.

The way performance related pay works best for teachers is if you are allowed to pay the good ones by giving them jobs and not pay the bad ones by making them easy to sack.

Bad teachers aren't some hard to identify species everybody who has any involvement in a school knows who they are.

I work in a middle school. my mom works in an inner city school and has been in education for like 25 years. my dad is the assistant principal of a high school. my girlfriend is studying to be a teacher at a top LA program right now.

all of us agree that using standardized test results is the wrong way to evaluate teachers, for a number of reasons.

i absolutely agree that there are a number of bad teachers and there is a lot wrong with the education system. but i can tell you that an emphasis on standardized testing is one of the biggest problems, not a solution.