It always amazes me to hear about "Teacher Performance Ratings" especially when you consider the criteria used, the questions asked, qualifications and or the agendas of the evaluators.
I like to use professional baseball statistics as a basis for comparisons. Baseball statistics are usually very simple to understand.
The batter goes to the plate and is presented with a number of pitches or opportunities. We can use pitches and students as the base unit.
There is the "wild pitch" that is dangerous to the batter, catcher, umpire, spectators and without proper safety equipment or reflexes can lead to serious injury or even death. We have all read the headlines when the students murder teachers and students.
The lead hitters are placed early in the batting order to take advantage of their established performance rankings. Many of them are baseball's best and yet they fail over 70% of the time they are at bat.
We know that statistics from medical sources, psychology sources, IQ testing and academic potential testing sources show that only 40 to 60% of the population can actually graduate from high school. These can be compared to baseballs "balls" and we know them as the generally "un-hitable" pitches that come our way.
Many unrealistic politicians, new age consultants and self-deluded idealists say that teachers have to bat 100% with all of their students.
Can you imagine any politician trying to make a rule that pro baseball players have to hit 100% of the pitches or successfully hit 100% of the time that they are up at bat. These politicians would be laughed out of the stadium, laughed out of office, made fun of by Stone, Jay, David and Conan.
To properly evaluate teachers we have to use a real criteria that evaluates what the teacher starts with, what the potential of the student is, what learning actually took place.
It would be nice to see teachers properly credited with helping students over achieve and perform at 110% of their potential or even turn students from being chronic underachievers at 20% up to 80% of their potential as students.
Teachers need a new Commissioner, a new league and trained umpires to protect the integrity of their game.
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ESL in Canada Blog URL
http://eslincanada.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Saturday, August 19, 2006
War between Agents and Schools creates Shrinking Revenue
War between Agents and Schools creates Shrinking Revenue
Once upon a time there was a happy balance between the agents and the language schools. The agents provided admission services and translations and the schools taught the students. The average commission of 10 percent was paid to the agents. Almost all of the students stayed at the university residences. Everyone was happy.
Some schools viewed the benefits of the longer term exchange programs and said "we should offer homestay - live with a Canadian family for the two or three months and enjoy your trip to Canada even more". The schools thought their stealing the exchange program housing was so brilliant that they decided to keep all of the commission. Now the agents had to work twice as hard selling the school and homestay and only got commission on half of the revenue.
The agents decided that they should charge fees for this extra work so created service fees that the students had to pay in advance for forms processing, airline ticket reservations and homestay applications.
The schools realized that the agents were making more money from service fees than commissions so they created direct registration internet forms and hired their own staff of foreign speaking sales reps to compete with the foreign located agents.
The foreign agents then decided that since the schools were competing against them as agents then they should set up their own language schools and compete with the schools.
As the marketing wars heated up between agent-schools and school-agents they drove up the cost of trade fairs, coop advertising, brochures, media advertising and sales commissions and they created some "noise".
There were many observers of this "noise" that decided they should join into the marketplace. There are now ex-agents, ex-students and ex-school reps located locally offering tuition discounts, no service fees, free baseball tickets and other incentives to students.
The foreign agent-schools then decided that they had to increase sales and advertising spending and demanded higher commissions. They then reduced the cost of teachers, books and educational materials to better compete with the local schools and local agents.
The local schools went in two directions some cuts costs and became babysitting schools with no standards no qualifications and no educational value and some attempted to set professional standards and operate with ethics.
The local discount agents unable to distinguish between good or bad schools started to just quote prices stating that all the schools were the same.
The schools decided to fight the local discounters with summer specials and "special walk-in pricing" offered if you buy first time in the school.
The foreign located agencies are fighting the local agents by claiming they will only represent schools if they have exclusive ethnic contracts. The foreign agents are trying to use exclusivity and monopoly contracts to prevent certain ethnic groups from exercising their freedoms and rights while in countries such as Australia, the USA and Canada.
The local agents are now organizing small private schools and language classes disguised as special conversation clubs. To keep costs low they are offering a combination salary and sales commission to the salesman disguised as a teacher.
Wait for our next report to see what happens.
This war between agents and schools is over money. Just like all the other wars that humans engage in. The Agent & School War victims are the students who think they have purchased professional language lessons but instead attend stripped down, gutted useless babysitting sessions with idiots.
ESL in Canada Blog URL
http://eslincanada.blogspot.com/
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