But high schools have been reporting rising grade point averages. Regardless of whether grade inflation is to blame, or an ineffectuality on the part of standardized testing to adequately measure student achievement, this points to another difficulty of using either higher grades or higher test scores to measure student success and thus take into consideration 'teacher quality' and variables that play into assessing teacher quality when hiring new staff members or retaining existing staff members. (Daily Policy Digest, 2001) If measuring student achievement is difficult, and thus coming to terms with an adequate assessment of teaching 'quality,' then how does one improve teacher quality. Perhaps, suggests educational researcher Victor Lavy, the real question is not the assessment of incoming teachers or outgoing students. Rather, administrators should ask the question, how to increase existing teacher's incentives to improve the quality of teaching, and once this is determined, make such incentive based-programs an ingrained part of modern education. Lavy has examined performance-related incentive pay for teachers, which has being introduced in many countries. Lavy evaluated a rank-order tournament among teachers of English, Hebrew, and mathematics in Israel. Over the course of the study, teachers were rewarded with cash bonuses for improving their students' performance on high-school matriculation exams. Two identification strategies were used to estimate the program effects, a regression discontinuity design and propensity score matching. "The regression discontinuity method exploits both a natural experiment stemming from measurement error in the assignment variable and a sharp discontinuity in the assignment-to-treatment variable. The results suggest that performance incentives have a significant effect on directly affected students with some minor spillover effects on untreated subjects," in other words, the teachers seemed to exhibit more efforts if they were given merit-based cash bonuses, and the students, although not rewarded with monetary incentives, showed a minor improvement in their efforts. According to Lavy, the improvements recorded in the survey appeared to derive from more varied and student-tailored teaching methods, an increased incentive on the part of teachers to offer after-school tutoring and mentoring, and an overall "increased responsiveness to students' needs. No evidence found for teachers' manipulation of test scores. The program appears to have been more cost-effective than school-group cash...
Standardized tests may prove difficult to use as a measurement of success, given that students taking the tests come from a variety of backgrounds, and the tests measure aptitude on some level as well as purely quality of education -- they do not take into consideration how far a student has come. Merely getting more intelligent people into the profession of teaching is not necessarily an answer either. What are needed are teachers who are more competent and more motivated to teach, regardless of student ability and motivation, to create better quality of teaching overall. Thus, increasing availability of continuing education and financial bonuses may be the most cost-effective and motivational techniques at most district's hands to increase overall teacher quality.
Education I support most of what Robinson is saying that video. The core of his argument is that the education system geared more towards creating workers than thinkers, and that does seem to be the natural outcome of a lot of decisions in the education system. Schools that remove arts, physical education and other such classes to focus on standardized test subjects are being economically motivated to churn out workers. This
" (Hurtado et al., p. 1) This idea of a structural change is further girded in the article by Hiebert & Morris (2012), which agues in favor of altering the fundamental strategy of instruction. To the authors, the focus on improving the characteristics of educators rather than the educational resources and parameters given to these educators if wrongheaded and problematic. Hiebert & Morris "expose the assumptions on which this logic is
School Voucher System WHY WAS IT WRITTEN? Proponents - believe voucher systems increase parent choice regarding school attendance for their children. (AFT, accessed 2002b). Opponents - voucher systems do not give parents full choice - they are limited by size of tuition and fact that private and parochial schools can choose their students and may not admit the child in question AFT Position - Supports the right to use private schools; opposes the use
Education Advocacy Issues Massive institutional racism and structural inequalities still exist in the United States, especially in housing, public education and the criminal justice system in inner city areas. In every urban area, the quality of education available to poor and minority students is demonstrably worse by any measure than that of their white peers in the suburbs. This type of institutional discrimination is not caused by genetic or cultural deprivation
Annotated Bibliography Introduction Children involved in the systems of education and child welfare systems experience a great deal of obstacles that hinder their ability to become successful in their studies. This implies that there is a need for collaboration between these systems in order to improve the status and ability of these children. The purpose of this annotated bibliography is to outline articles that explain the significance of child welfare and education
Education: Social Foundation Brown v. The Board of Education (1954) was a landmark ruling that not only marked the beginning of the era of desegregation in the school environment, but also served as a frontal attack on the practice and doctrine of white supremacy in the overall society. Many viewed it as a reprieve for the Black-American community, but as Justice William Douglas revealed in 1971, the de jure segregation ruling
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