More Public Pension Woes—Constructive Suggestions Wanted

[Texas Proud]

I have been a volcano refugee in Frankfurt for the last 5 days. I have a flight and hopefully an airplane I will leave you the field with these comments.

1) Subjective evaluations such as you describe are not the TESTS people want to use. They are the process the TEST TEST TEST folks want to get rid of.

2) I've graded students for 35 years. It's not the same thing.

3) Everyone always asks why Harvard law graduates get the best jobs. The answer is that they take the best students and even three years of Harvard Law School can't ruin them. Harvard's expertise is in picking these winners. No one knows what the faculty contributes.

4) I stand on the bottom line. We have no demonstrated test that links long term student achievement to specific teachers.

I hope you do get out soon!!! Must be horrible to be stuck without anything to do...

I agree with Westerskies.... how can you measure 'me' as a student.. you give me a test of the subject matter and either I know it or I do not... you are not testing my ability to apply this to something else... I either know the answer or I do not..

But you CAN measure what level I was at prior to coming into your class... and measure what level I am after leaving... or couse, it all might not be your 'fault' or if I improved a lot your ability... but when we do it with 20 or 30 students we can get a feel if your class improved... and over a few years we can see if you are at the top of moving people up or at the bottom... just because you might not like the results because there are a lot of variable that you as a teacher can not control.... but we are not saying that if you get a 51 you stay, but a 50 you are fired... we are saying that we can rank teachers in such a way that we reward success and punish failure...

And I bet the professors at Harvard would have a different view of what knowledge they pass on to their students...

 

[Spanky]

But you don't find them by testing the students using the kind of tests we have available.

Do a student survey about the class. The students will tell you how good or lousy is the course, the professor or the teacher.

 

[kyounge1956]

Happy to go back to the pure pension issue

Major problems with government pension funds
1) cyclical not counter cyclical. When times are good investments tend to create "income" so governments reduce funding . This is simply stupid. Funding should be increased in flush times as a rainy day against bad times.

Agreed. As mentioned above, Seattle's pension plan has a piece of (IMO) poorly-conceived benefit increase legislation attached to it.

2) ludicrous benefits for high paid not in danger police and fire managers. I have no problem at all with proper extra benefits for front liners , but when you put on the tie and ride a desk you don't get it any more.

This seems to be another case of objecting to late-career upgrades, as was the aide-to-teacher example earlier in the thread. The more I think about this, the less objectionable I find it. If someone upgrades their qualifications late in their career, why shouldn't they get a larger pension than they would have if they had just coasted until retirement? They pay more into the fund than an employee who doesn't upgrade, and less than someone who held the higher position through an entire career, and their pension reflects that. In this specific case, do police or fire department management jobs pay about the same as equivalent management positions in, say, the library or the public works department? Then IMO, the pension should also be equivalent.

3) gaming the system with overtime and other payments in the last year

I agree with you here also, but this isn't applicable to my specific question as the Seattle retirement system does not include overtime in the calculation of the "average salary" on which the pension is based. I don't think there is any way to apply "other payments" either, except possibly to buy equivalent time for military service (?) or temporary employment with the City prior to hiring as a permanent employee (during which time retirement fund contributions were not deducted).

4) get all the economies of scale. small funds tend to have excessive admin costs.

The Seattle retirement system is reciprocal with a few other cities, but I wonder if it would be beneficial to extend this and combine with e.g. the county employees, the local school district and possibly adjoining counties to the north and south. I wonder if a bigger system would make for more stable pension funding.

 

[Leonidas]

2) ludicrous benefits for high paid not in danger police and fire managers. I have no problem at all with proper extra benefits for front liners , but when you put on the tie and ride a desk you don't get it any more.

I have a number of points of disagreement with this.

First, the primary thing about adequate compensation for fire and police is to be sure that you attract qualified applicants and retain personnel. You're paying people to do a job and you want the right people doing it. If you accomplish that - the compensation is basically fair.

Second, I don't know of any way to fairly compute compensation for dangerous jobs - other than my first point. There were days when my job was so easy I felt like I was stealing my paycheck, and there were days when you could have given me the city's budget for the year and it would not have been enough money.

Third, and this can be just theoretical at times because I've known some great managers and some miserable idiots, you pay police managers not for any danger they face (few do), but for their role in managing operations and implementing policies that keep their subordinates alive, protect the lives and rights of all the non-combatants, and protect the city coffers from lawsuits. [/QUOTE]

 

[ziggy29]

The Seattle retirement system is reciprocal with a few other cities, but I wonder if it would be beneficial to extend this and combine with e.g. the county employees, the local school district and possibly adjoining counties to the north and south. I wonder if a bigger system would make for more stable pension funding.

Question here. If by "reciprocal" you mean that each of these entities recognize the years of service with the others on this list in terms of pension calculation -- that if you worked for the city for 10 years and the school district for 5 and the county for 10, you'd get one pension based on 25 years of service -- doesn't that more or less negate the argument that a primary goal of pensions is to encourage retention of experienced staff?

Obviously, if I've misunderstood the meaning of "reciprocal" here, consider the question withdrawn.

 

[ERD50]

I must strongly disagree with part of your post and you misunderstood another part.

Imperfect measures are not better than no measure e.g.
I give you a pot of hot water and you get to measure it with a yardstick
you report the temperature as 14 inches.

Taking another approach to this assertion:

Actually, you could use a yardstick to measure the temperature of water. The volume of water increases with temperature, and therefore the depth of water in the pot would increase with temperature. I could look it up, but as I recall from my beer brewing experience, water increases about 4% in volume from room temperature to boiling. This is one of the reasons that global warming is associated with rising sea levels.

So the take away is - there are many tools we can use to measure something. We need to apply some intelligence in which tools we choose, how we use those tools, and what we infer from those measurements. And who should be better at that than educators themselves? Aren't they intelligent enough to measure something?

And the type of measurement we are asking for is the easiest of all - relative change. It becomes very difficult and involved to measure absolutes (is that piece of metal exactly 1 meter long?). But we are asking, did X get better, relative to Y. It is much easier to say that piece of metal A is longer than piece of metal B, a piece of string is all you need. So measurement should be able to tell us if teacher A is better than teacher B.

It isn't that hard, really.

-ERD50

 

[kyounge1956]

Question here. If by "reciprocal" you mean that each of these entities recognize the years of service with the others on this list in terms of pension calculation -- that if you worked for the city for 10 years and the school district for 5 and the county for 10, you'd get one pension based on 25 years of service -- doesn't that more or less negate the argument that a primary goal of pensions is to encourage retention of experienced staff?

Obviously, if I've misunderstood the meaning of "reciprocal" here, consider the question withdrawn.

AFAIK, that is the correct meaning of reciprocity between Seattle and other pension funds, but I don't know any of the details of the arrangement because I've only worked in one of the systems.

I think a pension would probably tend to encourage staff retention, and if there were reciprocity between Seattle and the major cities and three counties of the Seattle metropolitan area as I imagined, it would tend to keep people in this region, even if not with exactly the same governmental entity. If an experienced employee, say an engineer, goes from the City of Seattle to Snohomish County, to the Port of Tacoma, in the course of a career, the people of Western Washington on the whole benefit from keeping that local expertise in the general area. OTOH, if an employee switches repeatedly from one job to another, all the while staying with the City, I don't know that there is much benefit to the citizenry from that. It doesn't strike me as a particularly strong argument, and it's not one I've made myself.

I don't claim to know why the City has a pension system, I'm just glad that it does.

 

[Emeritus]

I made it home

Several of the posters seem to continuously confuse two totally different things.

The first is the ability to measure something e.g. How can I evaluate a student's paper.
This is difficult but not impossible. I am measuring the paper not the student.

The second is how do you develop a standardized instrument to evaluate the influence of an external force i.e. a teacher (or anything else) on the rate of change of the observed object with regard to some ultimate effect. i.e. using standardized tests to evaluate a teacher relative to the rate of change in the student in a testable metric that tracks the ultimate goal of education. This is simply an unbelievably more complex task

 

[Emeritus]

Taking another approach to this assertion:

Actually, you could use a yardstick to measure the temperature of water. The volume of water increases with temperature, and therefore the depth of water in the pot would increase with temperature. I could look it up, but as I recall from my beer brewing experience, water increases about 4% in volume from room temperature to boiling. This is one of the reasons that global warming is associated with rising sea levels.

So the take away is - there are many tools we can use to measure something. We need to apply some intelligence in which tools we choose, how we use those tools, and what we infer from those measurements. And who should be better at that than educators themselves? Aren't they intelligent enough to measure something?

And the type of measurement we are asking for is the easiest of all - relative change. It becomes very difficult and involved to measure absolutes (is that piece of metal exactly 1 meter long?). But we are asking, did X get better, relative to Y. It is much easier to say that piece of metal A is longer than piece of metal B, a piece of string is all you need. So measurement should be able to tell us if teacher A is better than teacher B.

It isn't that hard, really.

-ERD50

You post confirms the point I made
1) you are making a vast number of assumptions in saying you can measure temperature with a yardstick. in particular that you have know the volume and you are making separate measurements over time. In fact your example goes to the delta, the change in a measurement You cant do a point measurement. and you have no reference point so you cant tell the temperature..

2) we have an underlying physical law that relates volume to temperature. we have no such physical law on education.

There is simply is no research base that shows that can use student performance on standardized tests to demonstrate individual teacher influence on long term educational goals.

 

[ERD50]

Welcome back, (bold mine):

The second is how do you develop a standardized instrument to evaluate the influence of an external force i.e. a teacher ... This is simply an unbelievably more complex task

The odd thing here is that I seem to have more faith in the capability of educators than you do. I believe they are smart enough and creative enough to come up with reasonable measurements. I think your comments sell them short.

You post confirms the point I made

1) you are making a vast number of assumptions....

Of course I made assumptions. You didn't give every detail of the situation. But it was meant as an example of how one can be creative in obtaining a measurement, even with imperfect tools. Something tells me you understood that perfectly.

In fact your example goes to the delta, the change in a measurement You cant do a point measurement. and you have no reference point so you cant tell the temperature..

Of course I would need another data point for this extreme case you formulated. Which is a good analogy to what we have been discussing. How much does a group of kids improve over time, how do those improvements compare to other groups? Those are all relative measurements. And they can be done. And it would be hard for the reasonable person to think that the quality of the teacher would not affect those outcomes.

There is simply is no research base that shows that can use student performance on standardized tests to demonstrate individual teacher influence on long term educational goals.

I am struggling to understand what this means in the broader sense. The wording is pretty specific - 'long term educational goals'. Why not 'on the performance of the kids regarding the material that was taught'? But if what you are saying applies more generally, then it seems that are you saying teachers make no difference at all? There is no such thing as a good or bad teacher? If the data and research absolutely cannot parse out any difference from teacher to teacher, then I guess there is no meaningful difference. I guess we ought to drop the requirements for a Bachelors degree or certifications or anything. What's the point? We could hire day laborers at a low rate, and they won't expect any (getting back on topic here!) pensions at all. That would solve some of these pension problems, and the kids would just go on to college just the same, your studies say so.

You really make me wonder - how did the teaching profession ever come to be? I mean, if you can't measure results, how do you know if what you are doing is helping, hurting, or if there are better ways to do it? Can it even be called a 'profession' based on your views? The general term I'd apply to people who charge you to provide results, but are unwilling to allow anyone to measure those results is 'scam artist'. And I certainly would not use that term to describe the vast, vast majority of concerned, dedicated educators.

Can't be measured? Where there is a will there is a way. When there is no will (or a will to avoid) there seems to be no limit to the excuses why something can't be done. Personally, I think your comments reflect poorly on educators, and I find that sad.

-ERD50

 

[Emeritus]

Welcome back, (bold mine):



Can't be measured? Where there is a will there is a way. When there is no will (or a will to avoid) there seems to be no limit to the excuses why something can't be done. Personally, I think your comments reflect poorly on educators, and I find that sad.

-ERD50

How many of you choose your financial advisor based on his or her scores on the standardized "financial advisors" test? If measurement based on such tests was easy everyone would do it.

 

[ziggy29]

How many of you choose your financial advisor based on his or her scores on the standardized "financial advisors" test? If measurement based on such tests was easy everyone would do it.

I think most of us don't *have* financial advisors. But if you wanted to equate it to, say, index funds, the "test" is the expense ratio versus other funds in its asset class, and for an actively managed fund you can look at the manager's long-term track record compared to the relevant benchmark (after fees).

Not sure what resemblance this thread has to public pension woes at this point. I know threads can be hijacked and drift, but wow...

 

[Emeritus]

I think most of us don't *have* financial advisors. But if you wanted to equate it to, say, index funds, the "test" is the expense ratio versus other funds in its asset class, and for an actively managed fund you can look at the manager's long-term track record compared to the relevant benchmark (after fees).

Not sure what resemblance this thread has to public pension woes at this point. I know threads can be hijacked and drift, but wow...

No NO NO , you don't get to look at the track record
you only get to look at a score on a standardized test

lets put up or shut up

how many think that pension advisors should be picked base on their score on a standardized test ?
If tests prove anything, this one should be easy since obviously there has to be a correlation between the score and their future performance (not past)
Who is willing to bet their retirement on a test score?

 

[ziggy29]

No NO NO , you don't get to look at the track record
you only get to look at a score on a standardized test

False dichotomy. There's no reason we *have* to keep looking at standardized test results as the one and only performance metric. It doesn't have to be standardized tests or nothing. There's no reason why one can't develop and consider other metrics as well. The outright hostility and determined opposition to any suggestions that educators be "measured" in terms of performance is, IMO, somewhat telling.

 

[FinanceDude]

How many of you choose your financial advisor based on his or her scores on the standardized "financial advisors" test? If measurement based on such tests was easy everyone would do it.

You can defend educators all you want, but by just saying there's no way to measure the performance of teachers is a copout. There is a reason teachers unions across the country fight this tooth and nail, it would bring to light those teachers that are NOT up to par, and then the union and school districts would have to deal with that, and they don't want to go down that path.........

 

[Bestwifeever]

Sometimes it doesn't seem that some people in the teaching profession understand that in other professions all jobs are measured and all performance is evaluated. Not perfectly, not fairly, in many cases, but most of the rest of us are subject to it and most of us have no control over the quality of the resources we are given. Somehow our management was able to quantify that this employee got the worst project to deal with (comparable to the worst lowest-performing incoming class in the history of PS129) and this employee got the best, and is able to adjust the evaluation accordingly.

To claim that one profession deserves to be exempt from that is what raises people's hackles, especially when that claim is made by someone who is in that profession and therefore has a vested interest in not being evaluated. There is nothing sacred about any profession (okay, maybe the clergy--no, scratch that when the Pope is named in a lawsuit: Pope Benedict and the Vatican Sued In Catholic Sex Abuse Case - ABC News) but most of us like to think what we do (or did) was just as important as what anyone else does. Not everyone could be a teacher, but not everyone could do what I did for a living, or Leonidas, or Martha, or REWahoo, either.

 

[Texas Proud]

You can defend educators all you want, but by just saying there's no way to measure the performance of teachers is a copout. There is a reason teachers unions across the country fight this tooth and nail, it would bring to light those teachers that are NOT up to par, and then the union and school districts would have to deal with that, and they don't want to go down that path.........

True, True, True... I am very surprised how much Emeritus continues to try and say teachers can not be measured... most of what I read from him is that teacher measurments are inaccurate... or are so flawed that they have not meaning. I disagree.

He also seems to think that the measure has to be so precise that we know exactly what was done (if I take a test on math, I get a number grade which I can compare to everybody else in class)... I also disagree... we do not need 'precision'...


I will go back to my days at working at one of the Big 8 firms (yes, I am that old)... when I was a advanced staff, I had to RANK every staff member from 1 to whatever... when I was a senior, all advanced staff and staff... so there could be 50 people I had to rank... It was not easy to say John was better than Sue... but I had to do it... the result... it really was easy to rank the top and the bottom... much harder to rank the middle..

But, when they put all the senior rankings and averaged them out... and also with the managers etc... the top were easily identified and also the 'bad'... the 'bad' got counseling or were asked to go find another place to work...

I think that bad teachers should be asked to go find another place to work... and as I have said... I KNOW when I had a good teacher or a bad teacher... Emeritus seem to think that every teacher I had was the same... (yes, putting words in your mouth... because if they are NOT the same, then we SHOULD be able to come up with something to say Sue is better than George)...

But... we digress and I do not think we will ever get him to admit that it might be a good thing to get rid of bad teachers...

 

[ziggy29]

He also seems to think that the measure has to be so precise that we know exactly what was done (if I take a test on math, I get a number grade which I can compare to everybody else in class)... I also disagree... we do not need 'precision'...

A single measurement on a single metric can well be fatally flawed, but measuring several different things over a period of time -- looking for trends and patterns in the data -- are far less likely to be fatally flawed. If someone consistently "scores" high or low on a number of metrics over a period of time, I don't think it's an accident or a random thing. It tells you something regardless of your occupation.

 

[REWahoo]

According to a recent national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers in grades pre-K to 12, there are at least two best indicators of teacher performance:

Student engagement and year over year progress of students are by far viewed as the most accurate indicators of teacher performance measures...

Now if we can only agree on how to accurately measure these two indicators, we'll have a solution.

 

[HsiaoChu]

False dichotomy. There's no reason we *have* to keep looking at standardized test results as the one and only performance metric. It doesn't have to be standardized tests or nothing. There's no reason why one can't develop and consider other metrics as well. The outright hostility and determined opposition to any suggestions that educators be "measured" in terms of performance is, IMO, somewhat telling.

The problem with measuring teacher performance is not that teacher's don't want to have their performance measured. The problem with measuring teacher performance based on student performance in standardized tests is that we measure student on a very narrow window of time, on a very narrow set of subjects, with no way of having a baseline of what we can reasonably expect from the human beings that we are measuring. We don't even have a measure of how many of them are even able to perform well on standardized tests, just because they are standardized tests. It would be interesting to look at the data on the four Myers-Briggs temperament types as to how they generally perform on such tests. I would bet that the 38% that are in the SP category are uniformily lower no matter what their IQ is or other data is there.

Measuring a child's performance in school is not like measuring a car's performance on a track. Every teacher I ever knew tries to measure their performance, and I've been in this business for 40 years, and listened to my parents talk about it since I was 6 in 1955 since they were teachers too. There are huge numbers of not addressed variables in measuring a child's performance consistently, and then using those measures to measure a teacher's performance when they all mesh and interact together. Its very much like the debacle of measuring for global warming using tools that assume a linear progression in change when the change is not linear at all. Believe me when i tell you that change in human beings is not linear. And just like measuring a stock broker's performance is impacted by things outside of his manipulation of the numbers, there are so many variables that impact student performance that the teacher has no control over, and are not accounted for, that using student performance on standardized tests is just a bad joke that no real scientist would ever even consider. The non-science oriented or the politician doesn't seem to understand this.

For a time we had some measure that helped. We used to give mental ability tests. This at least gave us some measure of baseline what we had to work with. Its reasonable to assume that you could raise a child's performance to one standard deviation above the mean. Its not reasonable to assume that you can do more.

Much research has shown that you can raise the IQ on standardized tests of children from 100 to 115(one standard deviation). There is no research to show ANY WAY THAT YOU CAN RAISE IT TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS TO 130.

I think that using student performance on tests as a way of measuring teacher performance is not unrealistic. But you have to have some way of measuring it using individual change in student performance, not whole class performance, making sure that there are not elements in a child's life that simply blow it all away(a divorce, moving to a new school, a death), and accounting for simple variation of the classes themselves from year to year. If you look at measurements, including more than just the tests, and look at them over a span of at least three years, it easy to see which teachers are doing better than others.

But like emeritus says, using one test of math in the spring of one year without knowing the individual abilities of the students, and many many other variables, is totally unfair.

Teachers that I know would welcome some objective way using multiple data to measure their performance.

Z

 

[HsiaoChu]

According to a recent national survey of more than 40,000 public school teachers in grades pre-K to 12, there are at least two best indicators of teacher performance:

Now if we can only agree on how to accurately measure these two indicators, we'll have a solution.

Oh golly do I wish it was that simple.

 

[REWahoo]

Don't call me golly...

 

[MichaelB]

There is simply is no research base that shows that can use student performance on standardized tests to demonstrate individual teacher influence on long term educational goals.

This measurement isn’t necessary. How about using student performance on standardized tests to measure school effectiveness and then rank teachers within the school based performance criteria specific to that school. This should make it easier to identify the lowest performing teachers.

 

[Westernskies]

What is being missed is that most of us here on the board have 20+ years in the working world (business or professional) in measured performance-based work environments, in addition to 12-20 years of educational experience, in a measured performance based- learning environment. We have the real-world perspective that a lifetime in a cloistered educational environment lapping up NEA pablum cannot match.

To say we can't evaluate treachers and weed out the bottom feeders smacks of academic arrogance, protects the worst at the expense of the best, stifles growth, and is a big part of what is wrong in our educational system today. THe reason we are falling behind other developed nations isn't because our kids are genetically studiper, it's a top-down failiure to adapt, IMO.

 

[ziggy29]

This measurement isn’t necessary. How about using student performance on standardized tests to measure school effectiveness and then rank teachers within the school based performance criteria specific to that school. This should make it easier to identify the lowest performing teachers.

OK, here I will defend the teachers a bit here. There are a lot of cultural and environmental factors that influence the effectiveness of a school and are thus largely out of the control of the teachers.

I will start with the suggestion that parents taking an active role and interest in their children's education are likely to have higher performing students than those who are disengaged with it.

A wealthier suburban school is much more likely to have parents who are engaged in their children's education, provide them with resources outside of school to help them achieve academically, and are probably going to push their kids (with carrots and sticks) to perform well.

In contrast, poorer districts are more likely to have lot of broken and single-parent households where the one parent is not engaged with their kid's education and the other parent is absent. I don't think it's fair to compare this school with the affluent suburban school because there are huge external socioeconomic factors which are likely to reflect poorly on the school in the troubled neighborhood. And I don't think you can extrapolate from those results and conclude that the teachers are less "competent" in the poor school (in the aggregate).

Having said that, it should be possible to measure progress or improvements within any given school. You may not be able to compare a poor inner-city school with a wealthy suburban school, but you should be able to compare any school with its own past history.