TED Community » Yann Burrett

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• A reply on Conversation: What do you think of merit-based pay for teachers?

  Nov 28 2012: Well, we've gone from a debate to thinly veiled insults, so I'm not sure what use this conversation actually has at this point. When you start referring to yourself as "we of the enlightened persuasion", all I can do is reply as "we of the rational persuasion". That we don't agree doesn't make either of us stupid or ill educated.
  
  Unless you can demonstrate WHY something works and HOW something works, "do it work or don't it" is indistinguishable from magical thinking. Yes, correlation does not rule out causation. I never argued that it did. I argued that if you want to make a point like that, correlation isn't enough. Until we agree that life WAS better FOR those reasons, it's not a solution we agree on. It's what we of the rational persuasion call "thinking".
  
  Anyway, this is getting out of hand fast. The truth is, I do respect your point of view. I don't find it persuasive, but I admit that the reasons I don't find myself persuaded aren't reasons you share. It is, however, not universally recognized that complete privatization of education (or any social system) is to anyone's net benefit. That's not to say that that point of view is false. It's that it's not going to convince everyone, certainly not in the way you're presenting it.
  
  And with that, I need to bow out. Long evening ahead of me.

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think of merit-based pay for teachers?

  Nov 28 2012: Because "obvious" doesn't mean the same thing as "true". One of the prime reasons we use the scientific method is to separate what we know to be true from what seems obvious to us.
  
  So when we see a correlation between smaller government interference in the economic decisions of a country and anything else, we cannot simply state that it must be true that one caused the other without data to demonstrate WHY it did. To do otherwise is to commit the fallacy of causal correlation.
  
  I do thank you for the updated statistic - I'll look into it deeper when I have more time. Either way, until we can agree on the causal connection between "small government" and "better education", it's not really going to convince me.

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think of merit-based pay for teachers?

  Nov 28 2012: Which is what I meant when I said this was going to be a largely ideological conversation, with little to no chance of changing anyone's mind.
  
  I absolutely agree that Healthcare in the US is not really private. But it's about as privatized as I can imagine without removing the need to ensure everyone has access to at least basic emergency needs. But yes, it's a hybrid model that doesn't fit either of our models well.
  
  It is, however, the most privatized system I can think of in that there is no equivalent of the National Health Service. (I'd point out that the UK also has private health insurance companies - though I'm bringing it up mostly because most people seem to see privatization as an either/or solution.) Public healthcare - to continue the tangent - is not a case of government monopoly exploiting the people. It is providing the services for those who cannot afford them.
  
  And so it is with education - I wish public schools could offer the same quality of education as the very best private schools, but at least private schools' existence allows those with the means to educate their offspring while freeing up resources for those who cannot.
  
  If we want to use the scientific method and return to the time when the government did not interfere with economic matters, first we'd need tome hard data that showed that as the unequivocal reason why life got so much better afterwards. That's a tall order. We would also have to explain why Canada currently has a higher standard of living than the US (well, last I checked - admittedly i'm citing a statistic that's almost a decade old)..
  
  We appear to be using very different models of thinking when we examine the world around us. I highly doubt that I'll convince you of the overall benefits of nationalization of public services any more than I don't expect you to be able to convince me of the benign power of the invisible hand. And now I am out of space.

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think of merit-based pay for teachers?

  Nov 28 2012: I've seen it, it's a very interesting video.
  
  I didn't make any arguments because I suspect the majority of the conversation would be ideological. And while that can certainly be informative and interesting, it's not likely to convince anyone to change their minds. For example - a lot of my reservations are based on a concept of "complete free market" as morally suspect, which is a position I realize not everyone agrees with. Some people believe that education is not a human right (it's not in the US constitution for example), and still others believe that you only need to educate the elite of a society (a view I find bizarre, but one that was presented to me in all seriousness during a graduate class.)
  
  But you're right - there should be an argument to back up this gut feeling. The most cogent argument I could make in the space allowed might be to compare public education to public health. I grew up in the UK, moving to the US at age 31. If I examine the US healthcare system (which is currently about as close to fully privatized as I can imagine without removing the need to provide any healthcare at all to people without money), the statistics simply do not point to a free market leading to better service. The US has a pretty poor track record compared to other Westernized nations, and pays around double what the next country pays. I don't really see why we should expect fully privatized education to go the same way.
  
  I do however understand that not everyone feels that comparing US healthcare (or indeed education) to other countries works well, because there are a number of unique factors present or absent in the US that make such direct translation necessary.
  
  Almost every teacher I've ever met is left-leaning politically, which leads me to suspect that most teachers would have problems with full privatization. I don't expect to convince anyone who doesn't agree with me, so the best I can offer is the promise to treat the free-market view with respect.

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think of merit-based pay for teachers?

  Nov 28 2012: That the market value would be more closely scrutinized I agree with. That this would produce better overall results I'm not convinced of. I suspect that it'd produce a small number of highly educated children and a much larger number of very poorly educated children.
  
  I would also argue that you can legislate children into knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that a vast majority of the public can now read. How much knowledge and should that knowledge be counted as understanding or subject mastery is up for debate.
  
  Of course, I have strong biases. I'm not much of a free-market-is-the-answer kind of guy. I tend to believe that some things (health, education, public safety and so on) are more important that the whims of market forces. I DO think that teachers getting rewarded for excellent teaching is a decent idea, and I do feel that while the teaching unions in the US were founded for excellent reasons (to combat things like teachers being fired a week before they retired to stop them claiming their pension), they have become hugely problematic for all concerned. But an all out market force solution doesn't convince me.
  
  But without a clear idea of what it is we want the schools to actually DO, I think any concept of merit based teaching is doomed.

• A reply on Conversation: What do you think of merit-based pay for teachers?

  Nov 28 2012: I don't think that I can agree that privatizing the whole education system is a workable solution. I went to a good private school and count myself extremely lucky for the quality of education I received. I'm also a teacher (albeit a very new one).
  
  The problem I have with the free market approach is that I don't see how it benefits those customers at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. Without the means to pay for a first-rate education, one must rely on inferior instruction, or possibly no education at all. Or if we decide that everyone must have an education and offer loans, we increase the amount of debt a student must acquire.
  
  Even if we look at Charter Schools in the US (private schools working with their own charter within the public school system), the quality of the education is not guaranteed to be better than in a comparable public school. Overall, Charter School students test at a slightly lower rate than public school students (with some exceptions). Of course, Charter Schools are a hybrid model, so I realize it's not really free-market
  
  Merit based pay is something I'd be in favor of as a teacher. But not only is "merit" problematic, so is the concept of assessment. Our current models of assessment tell us who is good at passing exams in bizarre and artificial circumstances and tell us nothing of what the student actually knows or understands. Come to that, we should probably come up with an agreed upon definition of intelligence.
  
  To me, the problem is that we don't really know what we're educating people for. Public Education was founded in the US to create a citizenry who were educated enough to take part in democracy. then it was to instill a sense of citizenry, then to create educated workers, later business people, now to create college-ready students (that is, we are educating people to be able to be educated later). It may be time to rethink what education is for before we can discuss the merits of a teacher.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Isn't it time to eliminate grades in education?

  Jul 28 2011: It strikes me that this really centers on the question of "what are we assessing for".
  
  If the assessment takes place in order to help the student understand how well they've mastered the subject matter, a grade can be a shortcut, which might be useful as part of a more rounded, feedback-based assessment. If the assessment exists to inform future schools, colleges and employers of the students aptitude on a test, the only real benefit to the grade is to show how good a student's short term memory was for that test.
  
  Assessing for the purposes of helping the student improve would require constant feedback (and possibly grading) throughout their education. A grade given at the very end of the course/school year strikes me as comparatively useless.
  
  Even within subjects such as mathematics and the sciences, there is a massive difference between someone who was able to cram the knowledge in a short space of time in order to pass an exam and someone who internalized the knowledge in such a way that they can still recall and use it in later years. A grade of "A" can describe someone who has excelled in both scenarios, but doesn't actually tell us much of any value about what the student actually learned in a meaningful way.
  
  I'm over simplifying, but hopefully my central point comes through.