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Thus, a master's degree actually hurts performance, and seniority was irrelevant as a factor. But master's degree and seniority are the only two factors that will increase a teacher's pay.
Now, Gates is pushing a lot for gathering and analyzing data. So there might be opportunities for those interested in doing research in education to get grants from the Gates foundation.
I wonder if those are partial correlations or simple correlations. Unless the master's degree is brand new, it probably effects lagged performance too, so it would be like controlling for an intermediate outcome, right?
Great post!
I think that what Bill Gates is trying to achieve is to shakeup the commonly held beliefs about seniority and better performance. It is a shame that teaching community is not willing to adapt to research based and performance based promotion system. As long as seniority remains the main mechanism to get promotions, the young and bright will shy away from the teaching profession. having said that, there are great teachers who have consistently improved with seniority.
Let us see where this debate leads to!
http://www.gatesandclinton.blogspot.com
Teacher's aren't assigned to classes randomly and pupils aren't put into classes randomly.
If you have to improve the *average* scores of a hard to teach class and an easy to teach class and have a new teacher and a seasoned veteran then it's obious who is going to teach where.
That makes the new teacher look good and the veteran look bad.
So I an not overly conviced by the results presented.
As misguided as Bill Gates may be I still give him credit for at least trying. So many people over look the issues in education.
while good-intentioned, this is not the first time that the Gates Foundation makes a bit of a mess of statistics. Seek out Howard Wainer's take-down of the "small schools" fallacy.
Kaiser was too modest to point to his blog post on the topic: A dangerous equation