Again, you're mischaracterizing and seemingly doing it intentionally to win an argument.
I said in the beginning - teachers write generic teaching plans, they do not individualize. You said that's not true, that they do individualize. Then you said that teachers can't be expected to individualize. You've changed your definition of what teachers do, while I've said the same thing over and over again.
Doctors do not individualize everything they do. They do the same exact thing for most patients. You have strep, I have strep, we are both getting the same antibiotics and being sent on our way. They make changes to that "generic" plan based on individual needs, but not everybody needs a change of plans.
That is how teachers operate, but are forced to do it on a larger scale because of how many students they have.
Doctors meet with an individual patient and treat their specific illness. Teachers meet with 30 kids and give them all the same lesson.
Your analysis keeps failing for a very simple reason - the doctor doesn't decide he's going to treat you for strep throat before he's individually examined you and verified that you need treatment for strep throat. The teacher does.
First of all, Doctors do not always have super individualized treatment plans. They often use a generic plan, and change it to accommodate special needs. Sound familiar?
No, they don't use a generic plan. They don't come up with a plan until after they've individually examined the patient.
So, no, it's not remotely familiar to teachers who set their curriculum before they've met the students that they're teaching and who don't change their curriculum based on individual student needs.
And treating patients one-on-one is not proof that doctors take "far more" responsibility for the outcome, it just proves that they have a more convenient task based on numbers. Go to MD Anderson and you will see people dying on a daily basis. The doctors are not being paid based on whether those people survive.
"Hey Doctor, what percentage of blame to take for that dead cancer patient?"
Good luck with that.
They take more responsibility because they take responsibility on a patient by patient basis. It is not more convenient - if doing it individually was more convenient then education would have gone in that direction and we wouldn't have a doctor shortage.
And of course you will see people dying on a regular basis. Just like you see kids who supposedly got taught failing basic exams even though the teachers gave them passing grades in that material.
Teachers do teach to students as a group and individually. You think teachers do not spend a significant portion of their day directly next to individual students helping them learn? Breaking down tasks based on their own strengths and ability level?
Yes, they spend a significant portion of their day next to individual students teaching their generic lesson plan before moving on to the next lesson the next day regardless of if the student is still struggling. Or leaving the student to twiddle their thumbs if they've mastered the generic lesson plan so that the teacher can spend 10 minutes with 1 of 30 kids during a 60 minute session.
I mean, I guess since the teacher is spending a few minutes with a handful of the 30 kids the teacher might call that great but I'd guess that all 30 kids would probably like individual attention every day in every subject and, frankly, the teacher does not have the time to provide it. Which is unlike when you visit your doctor and you get 100% of the doctor's attention during your appointment.
They are individualized to the greatest extent that is possible for one person to achieve, or for a team of them to achieve.
No one's arguing otherwise. It's just a fairly low level of individualization.
Who does this? Who claimed that they did?
you did when you said that doctors and teachers do almost exactly the same thing. Well, a doctor bringing 30 patients into a room and telling everyone to go home and do the same thing is what teachers are doing. They bring 30 students into a room and then send them home to do the same thing as everyone else that was in the room. When you actually compare how they do things, the 2 professions do not do almost exactly the same thing.
This is incredibly flawed. The prognosis that a doctor gives is assuming the patient takes the medicine, goes through the treatments, etc. If the patient does not, then the doctor's best guess does not mean shit. Same with teachers.
You literally just said that doctors can, on an individual by individual basis, give an educated guess at how much of an impact they can have on a patient if the patient does everything they are responsible to do as well. They are still often completely wrong, of course.
Then you go on to say teachers can't do that. Yes, they can. Ask a teacher about an individual student, and they will give an educated guess as to how they can effect that individual student if that student does everything they say.
That's not what we're talking about here. We are not talking about individual students, their individual willingness to do everything the teacher asks, and their eventual outcomes. We are talking about an entire school's test results, with 1,000 different students and a thousand different situations.
Ask a doctor how much responsibility he takes for a patient who refuses to take their medicine.
You missed the point. I'll state it differently. If you have cancer, the doctor will tell you your chances of survival based on the prescribed treatment. If you have a cold, the doctor will tell you your chances of recovery based on the prescribed treatment. They tell you the individual, the chance that this treatment will solve this specific type of problem.
So if a student walks into a classroom, the teacher can tell him the chance of passing the state test based on the teacher's lesson plan and their individual circumstances? And if the answer is "yes", then what's the issue with judging teachers against those outcomes? If the lesson plan guarantees that the student will pass the exam then the best teachers who best teach the lesson plan will have higher passage rates amongst their students than bad teachers.
And if the response is that the lesson plan can be outweighed by non-teacher related events then that's fine too. Teachers can then determine just what role their teaching plays in those outcomes. And they can still be evaluated by actual student outcomes.
Complete nonsense. Police officers offer odds when asked if they will solve a case? Or they give a percentage when asked how much of a role they play? No they don't. That's completely absurd.
Doctors can guess, based on their experience. That is what teachers can do too.
Actually doctors and cops don't have to guess. There's a huge body of research that tells them. Maybe some doctors and some cops don't familiarize themselves with the hard numbers but there are hard numbers. So you can judge the profession and thus judge if individual professionals are in line with their professional averages.
But doctors would never, ever, agree to have their pay based on the outcomes of their patients. They would never, ever allow doctors at MD Anderson to be paid based on whether or not patients were recovering or dying. That is absurd. Patients die every single day. Imagine the outrage if at the end of every year, somebody counted up how many patients lived and died, and paid the doctors based on that.
But they do so all of the time. It's why they agree to let insurances set the compensation rates. It's why insurance companies deny treatments that they consider ineffective or experimental or a variety of other reasons.
Doctors have agreed to have their pay set based on patient outcomes. It's a slightly more complex economic relationship because insurance companies act as the evaluator, not the doctors themselves.
You have unfortunately simplified it down to life vs. death but doctor compensation is far more complex than that and patient outcomes are a huge driver of the compensation model they operate under.
A teacher can certainly give an educated guess as to what will happen if a student has a certain IQ, is given a certain amount of study time, has proper nutrition, is not abused, and gives full effort on their assignments. That is not reality though.
Ask your dad how different his prognosis is if he has absolutely no idea whether a patient is going to take his medicine on a consistent basis, go through the therapy he needs, eat the food he's supposed to, etc.
But my dad doesn't give an educated guess. He gives the researched recovery rates based on the treatment. And if he knows that a patient won't take pills, he might prescribe a liquid. If the patient doesn't like surgery, he'll prescribe some alternative method. And for every change, there is a recovery percentage associated with it. He's not out there guessing.
Laproscopic surgery has 95% success rate 1 year out with this specific complication occurring in 4% of patients, hypothetically. That's not guess work, that's recorded research across a range of patients, some of whom follow directions, some of who do not. So if a doctor doing laproscopic surgery has an 85% success rate, everyone knows that the doctor isn't very good. And the market will decrease his compensation accordingly. Insurances will drop him, he will be sued. His malpractice insurance will increase. He'll still make more money than average non-doctor but he won't make more than the really good doctors.
Teachers refuse to give you the success rate for their specific lessons plans and they refuse to be held accountable when the outcomes don't match.
But to come back to my query - are you saying that, at best, teachers can only offer an educated guess about how effective their teaching methods are?[/QUOTE]