W.A.R., Part 2, Building a Stats List

In developing WAST (Wins Above Substitute Teacher), it is important to remember that WAR (baseball’s Wins Above Replacement) is a composite statistic. This means that it isn’t a simple matter of measuring one area of performance and calling that the whole picture. Imagine the uproar we could cause in the baseball community if we established that the only viable statistic to judge a player is the number of triples he hit. You’d have an awful lot of slow power hitters chasing you. But, at least you’ve pissed off the slow ones and have a shot at escaping…

Anyways! In order to develop an accurate WAST we need to take the same composite approach. To do this, however, we first have to develop a set of statistics that can be used to show some aspect of teacher performance.

I have begun a list of statistics below, but need help. Please suggest whatever statistics you would use to measure a teacher in the comments field. Keep in mind, though, a good statistic must be measurable and replicable. Weighting of various stats will be debated once the list is created.

The list below is a list of ideas, not my personal feelings on what are appropriate statistics or not, that discussion can come later.

Experience
Years Teaching (YT) – Number of years the teacher has spent actually teaching in the classroom.
Years in Related Field (YR) – Number of years the teacher has spent involved in their field outside of direct teaching (research, professional experience, etc.).
Courses Taught (CT) – Number of actual courses taught, not just length of time teaching them.
Years in Courses Taught (YCT) – CT/YT – Designed to show the amount of career time dedicated to each subject.

Classroom Engagement
Course Drops (CD) – Percentage of students in class that drop the course after the first day.
Disciplinary Referrals (DR) – Percentage of class that receives disciplinary referrals (detention, principal’s office, etc.) due to disruptive behavior in the classroom.
Time as Teacher (TT) – Percentage of class days that are spent watching movies, documentaries, or other multimedia that allows the teacher to disengage.

Academic Success
Standardized Test Results (STR) – The average scores of the teacher’s classes on related standardized testing.
Matriculation Rate (MR) – The average success rate at moving students on to the next grade level at the completion of the year.
Preparation Rate (PR) – Percentage of students who fail the subsequent course.
College Enrollment Rate (CER) – Percentage of students who go on to enroll in post-secondary education.
College Graduation Rate (CGR) – Percentage of students who obtain a post-secondary degree.

Continuing Education
Bachelor’s Degree (BD) – Recognition for holding a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
Master’s Degree (MD) – Recognition for holding a Master’s degree in a related field.
Doctoral Degree (DD) – Recognition for holding a Doctoral degree in a related field.
Professional Degree (PD) – Recognition for holding a Professional degree in a related field.
Continuing Courses Taken (CCT) – Number of related courses taken, outside of degree requirements.

That is my list so far, I’m sure there’s a lot more to add. Please send me your suggestions and comments!

Wins Above Replacement, Part 1

What makes you the best?

It is incredible how difficult that simple question is.

For many professions, the answer does seem simple. The best businessmen make the most money. The best lawyers win the most cases. The best engineers produce the simplest, most cost-effective solutions. For nearly any profession, the best are rewarded with the best contracts, the best opportunities, the most fame. Of course, there really is no profession that works quite as hard at identifying and rewarding the best than professional sports. In particular, professional baseball.

Baseball is the statistician’s dream. Every little action in baseball is calculated, quantified, accumulated, averaged, and dissected. I guess there’s something to be said for a sport that not only provides sample sizes so huge that margins of error diminish to negligence (who else plays a game almost half of the days of the calendar year?) but also provides so frequent pauses in the action that you literally have nothing better to do than math? Scoring a baseball game during the actual event is a time honored tradition passed down from father to son for generations. When was the last time you saw a young boy at a basketball or football stadium calculating the results of each play? But I digress…

In the world of baseball statistics, there are calculations of nearly every action taken on, and sometimes even off of the field. Yet, the sole point of all of these statistics, all of the innumerable hours of calculating, are designed to answer one simple question: who is the best? ERA (Earned Run Average) tells you which pitcher is able to give up the least runs, certainly a useful skill for the guy holding the ball at the start of each play. But, is a pitcher really that good if he has to rely on amazing defensive plays by those around him to keep everyone from scoring? We look to DICE (Defense-Independent Component ERA) to show how well the pitcher pitches without the help of his teammates. Still, a pitcher that gets a lot of double plays is a pitcher that can get a ground ball in the right situation, and that’s got to be a valuable skill, right? So, why don’t we compare that pitcher to all the other pitchers in the league who’ve benefited or been hindered by the unique dimensions and quirks of a certain ballpark or league? No problem! Just use ERA+. And this is only a few of the stats kept on one of 10 baseball positions (9 in the National League, of course)!

With all this, there is one statistic that stands out to me above all others. WAR. Huh? Yeah. Good god, ya’ll, what is it good for? Well, it is good for trying to measure one player against the imaginary guy who could take his job at any minute. WAR, or Wins Against Replacement, is essentially a statistic that pits your real flesh and blood player’s statistics against a fictitious “replacement.” This statistical chimera is given a set of statistics considered to be slightly below average for a big league player, and then, through the magic of fuzzy math, you find out if your real life player is helping your team to win more games or less than some bum you just pulled out of the minors would.

What a fascinating concept! Could you imagine it being applied to any other field? I have to say that there is a small part of me that would love to slip into Dunder Mifflin and explain to Dwight that his attitude is costing his company six sales per season over the other employee they could’ve hired. Something tells me this wouldn’t sit too well on the Schrute Beet Farm.

Fortunately for us all, there really aren’t those kind of statistics out there. We don’t necessarily have the data to say to a teacher, “Your replacement would have brought three less students all the way to graduation, congrats!” But for discussion’s sake, the question of how we could ever measure that is valid. Shoot, in today’s political climate, it seems to be more important than ever to prove that a teacher is doing their job “above replacement.”

So, this is the beginning of a series of discussions about, essentially, creating a WAR for teachers, and how to stay on the positive end of the results. What statistics could be used? Where can teachers be measured, and what measurement is desirable? Are the best teachers like pornography, or can we actually find a way to define it before we see it? How do you measure the best teacher, and more importantly, how do you live up to those measurements.

A good baseball player will go to his batting coach and take some extra practice swings when he sees his batting average turn south. Is there a tool, or tools out there, that can warn a teacher when they’re off their game? Is there a teaching cage to go to for practice? Is there a coach in the wings?

This is what I want to know: what makes the “best” teacher? How do I get there? How do I stay there once I do? How can I help others along the same path?

First Step Taken!

Well, I am back from my interview, and it went quite well. Upon arriving at the school I met the department chair and was given a brief tour of the facilities. Area High School* has quite nice facilities, I was impressed with the size of the classrooms all around (even though the math and science labs are much larger than the humanities). While we were walking around we had a chance to chat a bit an I was amused to learn that what attracted her to my resume was not what I consider to be the "exciting" parts of my background (international experience, college admissions, etc.) but in fact, the more mundane aspects like the fact that I went to college near where her family was from. It struck me that you never can completely project your own idea of "interesting" onto someone else. More on that to come.

Following the tour, she showed me the Social Studies office. Yep, they have an actual office for the department, complete with cubicles for each teacher and a large table for meetings and lunch. Pretty sweet. There I got the chance to meet with several members of the department and was getting some positive vibes from the group as a whole. They seemed serious about their work, but not overwhelmed. Considering that this is AP exam season, I take that as a good sign of the overall tension level in the office.

It was now time for me to meet with Tom*, the teacher who stood the greatest chance of being my mentor-teacher for the next year. Tom moved to teaching later in his career and has only been in the profession for about five years, but he seems to have hit the ground running and certainly held the respect of his colleagues. He currently teaches American Studies, International Relations, and Current Events. I was thrilled to get the chance to join him for his morning Current Events group and the afternoon IR class.

The Current Events class was just as he had initially described: additional instruction time without strict course mandates. It was actually a bit refreshing to see high school students having the time to delve into the news and gain even a modicum of understanding of whats happening around them. As can be expected from such an open-ended class, there was a variety of interests present and it was nearly a fool's errand to expect every student to pay attention to every word. I was impressed by Tom's ability to allow some inattention from the students without feeling the need to interrupt his own instruction to reprimand what wasn't really that disruptive. By not singling out the students, he left the door open for them to reengage with the class when the topic changed to one more up their alley.

Which brings me to my first real observation. We discussed three topics: the death of Osama bin Laden, the electronic security breach at Sony, and a set of political art pieces taken from an article in the New York Times supplement for teens. I expected students to be very interested in the bin Laden story because of its presence at the top of the news right now, and some certainly were. But some of the students begged out because they were too young to properly grasp the emotions on 9/11. Conversely, the stealing of credit card data from Sony seemed dry and uninteresting to me, but every student was facing forward and participating for the entirety of that discussion. While some of that may be attributed to the nature ebb and flow of teenage attention spans, it is important for me to remember that students may be interested in topics that bore me, and vice versa.

Following the Current Events course, Tom I returned to the staff room and worked on a simple lesson plan for his International Relations course. I got a bit lucky in that the topic was an introduction to theories of armed aggression, right in my wheelhouse. I was able to put forward a few helpful suggestions and then got the pleasure of watching Tom those into an effective class for some very bright and motivated students. I know that a lot of that image reflects on the teacher's ability to capture and hold the interest of the class, but I can still hope that I find students that willing to engage in the material thoughtfully.

Finally, I parted ways with Area High School and returned home. After sending a thank you note to the department chair, I received a fairly quick response saying that they would love to have me and that Tom like to be my mentor! What luck!

So, it looks like I'll be spending the next academic cycle as a student at Education University and a student-teacher in the Social Studies department of Area High School! Huzzah!

By the way, thanks to everyone who provided their suggestions regarding my last post. I wore a suit and think that it was the right choice. I was certainly more dressed up than the staff, but nobody batted an eye at my formality and if anything I may have scored points for professionalism. Thanks!!!!

*Names changed to protect identities.