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Nornagest comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong
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Comments (318)
As I understand it, it's exceptionally hard to fire teachers within the American school system -- it takes evidence of sexual misconduct or something similarly precipitous, and it's expensive, time-consuming, and legally hazardous. Even those charges aren't a sure bet. A teacher of mine in high school was suspended on sexual harassment charges -- well-founded ones from what I heard, although I have no direct knowledge -- leading to a lengthy punitive process that involved, among other things, investigators taking students out of their classes and interrogating them about the allegations. He was back in his classroom before the year was out.
Needless to say, ordinary incompetence won't do it. I don't think implicit racism would either, as long as it stayed implicit -- wearing a KKK hood into the classroom would probably be beyond the pale. Probably.
I understand that it next to impossible to fire teachers, unless you hit on extreme hot button issues.
Sex with students is number 1. But I'd expect the long knives to come out for racism/sexism/homophobia as well, at least in some jurisdictions. Likely not in others. That's why I was asking about what region of the country we're talking about.
In all but the most liberal districts, and maybe even then depending on how cynical you are, I think I'd expect any of that to get a pass as long as plausible deniability existed. Unfortunately, that's plausible deniability from the standpoint of parents and administrators who generally aren't statistically literate nor inclined to take student impressions all that seriously, and that leaves quite a bit of leeway as long as the teacher in question is bright enough to couch their objections in the right terms.
You know and I know that if the bell curve on expected achievement is shaped such that 30% of the student population from some minority group should be admitted to an advanced math class, and 0% actually is, then after a couple of years that's as good as admitting racial prejudice. But I think that'd be a much harder sell to a review board, especially one that doesn't want to incur the wrath of the teachers' union or any further investigative costs.
If you have 20 teachers who are fair, it would not be surprising for a statistical analysis to show that one of them is 95% likely to be unfair.
Quite. If I was in a position to be firing people, though, I'd be shooting for considerably more than 95% confidence -- a level of confidence that should be achievable with the kind of data sets that the OP was talking about.
What proportion of false positives would you shoot for? The current status quo seems to be towards 0% false positive, and it appears that some areas might actually reach that goal.
Well, that's a fairly complicated ethical question, isn't it? The general answer is "the point at which additional effort to reduce the number of false positives does more damage than it'd prevent"; I don't have the data to say exactly where that point is, but it's almost certainly higher than zero or epsilon.
So you would fire good teachers at random if you could also fire some disproportionate amount of bad teachers? That's strictly rationally better if we care only about student outcomes, but is worse if you care only about fairness to teachers.
The school system (ostensibly) exists to educate students, not to provide teachers with jobs. Fairness to teachers matters insofar as job security prospects affect the baseline quality of teachers; being able to get rid of the worst ones isn't necessarily a good thing if you bring down the average in the process. But it's not ultimately what we're trying to maximize.
That's my true objection, I think. But there's a couple others you could raise if you prefer a more moderate approach. Firstly, if we're looking to factor in teachers' outcomes it doesn't make much sense to use a binary fair/unfair criterion; it'd make more sense to work out the consequential weight of the lost teaching jobs at an n% false positive rate and do the same for the problems caused by the incompetent or abusive teachers that end up remaining in the system, and calibrate according to where the curves cross.
Finally, a negligible false positive rate is really a rather unusual thing to be aiming for, and needs to be justified as such. Almost no other jobs carry that kind of security, of course, but we don't even aim that low in the criminal justice system; I'd think that if "beyond a reasonable doubt" is good enough for a murder trial with life imprisonment on the line, it ought to be good enough when a single job is at stake. The tenure system in higher education is supposed to insulate professors from political fashions, but that shouldn't matter as much in primary or secondary.
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a harder standard than the FDA uses to approve drugs; it's the standard that let O.J. Simpson go free. It's significantly harder than can be reached with Bayesian Rationality, because it requires that it be impossible for a reasonable person to have a theory consistent with the evidence that isn't also consistent with the charges.
And it STILL isn't a hard enough standard to meet that innocent people aren't executed.
Keep in mind that when we fire a teacher for cause, we are destroying quite a few person-years of educator training; if the educator in question is irredeemable, that is a sunk cost. But if the person in question can be made into a qualified, competent, moral educator with less resources than training a new one from scratch, it is more cost-effective (as a society) to reprogram the individual in question rather than put them into the unskilled labor pool.
Why?
I'd think that normally the problem is you don't have the data, and just have anecdotes.
Particularly for admittance to class, I think you've got a problem. Generally disparate selection outcomes are treated as prima facie evidence of prejudice. Something as well controlled as this - when I picture the scenario, it's either the guy in trouble, or everyone circling the wagons and chanting the tribal truth because they don't want to open the door to routine measurement of what they do.
If a teacher is incompetent and can't teach anyone he won't get fired, but if he only can't teach blacks? Maybe they'll circle the wagons there too. I could see it going either way, but relatively more likely trouble for the teacher compared to most non sexual transgressions.