Thursday, September 22, 2005

Measuring teacher's quality

The Romanian minister of education proposed recently that teacher's salaries should be linked to their performance in teaching. But how would you measure teaching quality? Clearly not by the grades pupils receive, cause in this case everybody would start giving 10 grades (in Romania grades are from 1 to 10). Instead you should measure the (improvement in the) scores pupils receive at national standardized tests, but this is also not trivial. Here's an article about a study made in US on this topic, measuring teacher's quality. Note that in US a teacher is hired by a school, and after a few years his performance is evaluated and he can get a tenure, i.e. a permanent appointment. In Romania, to obtain a permanent position (i.e. titular) you have to pass a contest, without any proof of your real teaching capabilities.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Summer is gone

It rained all day today in Bucharest, probably fall wanted us to notice her.
Maybe this will mean more time for reading, as I started a couple of books and didn't finish them.
Currently I read "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. It's funny how a non-techie describes all the technological changes that took place in the last decade and changed the world.