GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE. Hundred we're running a little bit late, so we're going straight away with the first panel which is on textual studies. Each panelist has got about half an hour and there's gonna be questions at the end of each paper. So hopefully they won't completely fill up the half hour with each slot. We're gonna start with Paul Dundas from the University of Edinburgh. There's a handout that goes with his paper so I hope you've got a copy of that. ond yw'n cael ei ddifo am Y Tantra i'r Ytantrwynt, y Quatidion Ddau'r Maen, ac yn ddifo'r Cymysaidd Sema Bortarrach. Mae'n gofio i'r ffordd yma, rhaed i'n gwybod i'r byd i'r gwaith o'i Lans Cossens oherwydd ym Niferthys. Dwi'n dechrau'n ddau'r ffordd o gweithio'r ddechrau Dwi'n gallu wirio, yn yr unigol yw'r fel'r unigol, a'r unigol yn iddynt arall, wedi'i gyd-diwadau. Mae'n ymdechtyn o'r ffordd i'w tliferhyn uchelol, yn gyfwyrd, neu'n typod o'u gwahaniaeth I changed the topic, my idea for the topic, at least twice since November. I was originally projecting talking about divination and I thought better about that in the new year. So the handout will make clear as I go through it what I'm going to be talking about but the overall presentation will take its cue from the 17th century de Gumbra, Soma Sena Bataraca, who I'll refer to just in a moment. This presentation is a combination of specifics and some general musings as it were and I'd like to start by referring to John Cort's pioneering paper on medieval giant goddess traditions, which was written in 1987. It seems the other day to be honest to me, I can remember quite clearly a sensation of reading it at the time. John convincingly suggests in this paper that Tantra never became a central religious idiom in giantism oing to the fact that the tradition could not entertain the possibility of a leap soteriology as opposed to step by step progress to deliverance, with liberation being viewed by giant teachings as a path or at least the end product of a path and not a single saving event. I would not descend from this view, indeed I can hardly imagine it being better put, but I would amplify it by pointing out some further areas which differentiate giantantra without actually defining tantra at this stage from its Hindu and Buddhist equivalents. Firstly I would suggest that giantism has always issued, has always rejected the possibility of any initiatory ritual which transcends or undercuts renunciatory diksha. So while there may be quasi-initiatory rituals in the surimantra literature, they are not regarded as in any way subverting renunciation, subverting diksha. Secondly, there exists no body of giant texts functioning as an alternative or esoteric revelation fitted out with systematic exegesis equivalent to what can be found in Hinduism or Buddhism. There is a resilient tradition, the giant mantra shastra has its origins in the purva texts, but as we all know these texts are lost if indeed they actually existed. One may note in passing here that among the variety of meanings assigned to the word tantra in Haimachandras Sanskrit Dictionary, the Abhidhana Chintamani, not one of these definitions he gives corresponds to text whether ritual or otherwise. And thirdly I would point out that while it's clear that some giant tantric texts do describe rituals by which powers akin to omniscience can be obtained and the practitioner made temporarily the equivalent of an omniscient kavelin, revealingly there does not exist, at least to my knowledge, any giant tantric text purporting to affect some sort of speeded-up ritual transformation whereby the identity of a jinnah can be assumed. On that basis I want to follow on from John's observation about the lack of overt soteriological implications of tantra and jainism and say something about what might be regarded as one of its potentially perplexing aspects namely the Shatkarmani, the six ritual actions and the difficulties which this phenomenon has caused for some medieval and modern giant scholars. I commence by adducing evidence from the Trivernicachara which can be approximately translated as the appropriate behaviour of the three giant classes. This is the last significant pre-modern Shravakachara or description of idealised giant social behaviour. The work was written at the beginning of the 17th century in Gwalior by the Gumbara Bhittaraka of Karanja called Somasena. I've seen in Karanja what I could identify as the autograph manuscript of this text and Somasena describes how he, although he's based in Karanja, he actually wrote the text in Gopala Chala that is Gwalior. Further information about Somasena Bhittaraka can be gained from my paper listed in the bibliography. As with many other Shravakacharas Somasena structures his work around the description of the typical ritual day for the lay giant. He starts his account with the awakening layman being enjoined to engage in dhyana, in meditation, whose characteristics Somasena specifies can be understood from Shubachandra's 11th century Nyanarnava, a work we'll hear more about today. So this is Somasena's source for meditation.  Somasena land proceeds to subsume meditation under the heading of the Avashika Samayaka, which he defines as a kind of general equanimity, which we all know. He then goes on to say that if the layman cannot engage in Samayaka at the beginning of the morning he should engage in a contemplative regime of recitation of mantras, which Somasena refers to as the most appropriate form of practice in the Kali Yuga, in the world age in which we're living. He then gives a list of mantras of various lengths, large-scale and small-scale, paying homage to the Parameshtans, the central authority figures in Jainism, and then he moves on, rather disconcertingly, to a discussion of the Shatkarmani. Now here I would draw your attention to the handout and I'll be talking to the material there over the next few minutes. This is section one of the handout and I'm drawing on verses 90 to 110 from the Trivernica Chara. The Shatkarmani are well documented in Tantric literature of all sorts, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain. The six magic actions are here presented as eight, so the term Shatkarmani is a kind of generic one. The Benayn Shantaka and Paustaka actions supplement a core list of six, so you can see them as they're laid out there. Vasya overpowering, Kristi attracting, Stamba immobilising, and then the fourth one, which is called by Somasena, Nisheda, the forbidden action, which is the equivalent of elsewhere, Marana killing or elimination, then Vidwesha bringing about hatred, Uchata driving away by magic, Shanti, and Paustaka. The structure that Somasena gives in the Trivernica Chara is similar to one in an earlier Dgumbara Tantric text, the 11th century Bhairava Padmavedi Kalpa of Malashena Suri, which Alexis Sanderson mentioned last night. Somasena proceeds to describe the ritual involved in the performance of the Shatkarmani, the Mandala associated with each action, the direction associated with each action, the seed syllables associated with each action, the colours associated with each action, and so on. With reference to colours, I'll be referring to this in passing in a moment, but a very detailed treatment of this is given by Ellen Goff in a very important paper, which I've listed on the bibliography about entitled Shades of Enlightenment. Somasena gives a ritual for each of these actions, and he then provides a list of eight mantras, which I've included on the handout, which you can see there, and he in fact starts out with a mantra for those aspiring to gain liberation, which is basically the mantra Namaskaramantra in Sanskrit with Bija syllables and the word Pataka, or Patakebio, substituted for the more normal Upajaya. Then we have a ritual for Homa, a mantra for Homa ritual, and then we are given a succession of rituals of mantras for the various of the six magic acts, ending up with what he in fact calls a mantra for Marana, for killing. He uses the term, he's avoided it before, but now he's used the term the shader before, but now he uses the actual term Marana, and the mantra I've highlighted in black, and it ends with the Bija syllables, gay, and it's homage to the Urhats. Somasena then goes on to give a brief typology of mantras in verse 111 in which as you can see he identifies three types of mantra and three places where a mantra can be performed, and he says that a mantra aimed at an evil result should be recited in the funeral ground. He then gives a verse, this is 113, in which he provides what you might call a metaphorical interpretation of the six magic acts in which they are interpreted in a doctrinal way. So, for example, Uchathana, which means driving away by magic power, driving away enemies, is described as meaning dispelling dangers arising from the four main states of rebirth. And instead of including Marana or the Forbidden Act, Somasena includes in fact Mohana instead, and Mohana is described, I've picked it out in black, as daily confusing confusion. Now I'm leaving aside the noteworthy fact that Somasena's fairly lengthy discussion locates mantric practice and meditative activity at the very beginning of the ritual day. These topics are usually bespwned in Shravagacharas. Somasena starts off with these. It will be reasonable to conclude from this evidence that he evinces a certain degree of ambivalence about the nature and status of Lushak Karamani, and in particular this highly controversial one of Marana, of killing of destruction, which is both there and not there. He names the mantra as the Marana mantra, but then he leaves it out of his metaphorical typology, his metaphorical interpretation of Lushak Karamani. But he also refers to the funeral ground as a place where one should perform rituals which have an evil outcome. There's a degree of ambivalence here, and I want to amplify this over the next few minutes by reference to some Shwetambara texts. So if you look at section two, I've given a brief quotation from Haimachandras Yogashastra. Again we heard about Haimachandras Yogashastra last night from Alexis. Haimachandra deals very cursorily with the Shatkaramani, the six magic actions, and he gives what one might regard as a standard explanation when he deals with the equivalent of Marana because he doesn't actually name it. He says that this action involves destruction of karma, so it involves a type of destruction, but it's destruction of karma, and you should meditate on the white colour of Ong. I'm drawing on Uli Karnström's translation here. Jayaet Karamaghate Shashi Prabham. But if you want another cursory account of Marana, Nishatkaramani, then in section three I've given a quotation from Singh Hatilaka Suri's Mantra Raja Rajasya, which is written after the Yogashastra, an extremely influential text in the giant Tantric tradition, a little studied so far, although there's a perfectly serviceable edition by Jinovijaya listed on the handout as the sources I refer to are all listed. In this text he gives a highly condensed description of the Shatkaramani, as I say. He gives, for example, an account of how one wins women through the Akhristi ritual of the Shatkaramani, and also how one can bring death to an enemy. I've given the Sanskrit there without translating it. At the end it says, Shatr or Dhruvamritu, if you meditate on this mantra which is black coloured, and not white, as Hemachandra said earlier for the equivalent one, then there is Shatr or Dhruvamritu. Certainly it comes about death for an enemy. So two slightly conflicting interpretations of the Marana action. Moving on into section four one, I hear adduce evidence from a teacher who is mysterious to me in terms of chronology, Badragutachaya, who may have lived in the 14th or 15th century. Several occasions in what I've read by him invokes Kalikunda Nata, who is a version of Parshwa at the Shrine of Kalikunda, which is mentioned in Jina Prabasuri's Viva da Tirta-Kalpa. Perhaps Steve Osmight throw some light on this particular shrine. I don't know much about it, to be honest, and this may be some collateral way of dating Badragutachaya. To any rate, his Anubhava Siddha Mantra Duatrinchika, 32 verses on Mantra's master through practice, is in fact a kind of textbook about the performance of the Shatkarmani, the six magic rituals. It's not actually 32 verses, that's just a title that's meant to be reminiscent of Siddhasena Divakara's famous Duatrinchika text, so it's in fact in five chapters, and it's about 300 verses long. He describes a mantra which is connected with killing. Over the page in fact you can see, inflicting death, and I've highlighted the relevant bits. Here he describes the mantra as taking the form of an enemy and being Mritu Dham, dealing out death. In another text by Badragutachaya, the Panchanamaskara Chakrodharavidhi, which is a ritual text for the performance of mantric ritual largely centring around the Panchanamaskara, we have rituals given for several of the Shatkarmani, but in the addition that I've used of this, which occurs in the volume that will be known to some of you Namaskar Swadhyay, the two potentially controversial Shatkarmani, that is Uchathana and Marana, are omitted, and there's a square bracket intervention, in fact by the editors. They say, te niratigatwan na nirdishte. These two have not been described because they are well pointless, meaningless. In other words, the text has been censored by the editors, and this is fairly striking if you move on with the text because the text then goes on to describe and the editors have left it in. The actual rituals involved Uchathana and Marana in terms of how they are performed in mandalas. So there's been a degree of ambivalence on the part of editors towards these actions, and in particular Marana. My final block of information comes from Manatunga Suri, who was perhaps writing around the 11th century, I'm not sure about this, I'm not sure whether he is or is not the author of the celebrated Bhaktamara stortra, he may be or it may be another teacher of the same name. In his Nawakara Saratawana, which is a procreate work, he connects some of the Shatkarmani with the Parameshtins, the authority figures in Jainism, the objects of homage in the Panchanamaskara. And as you can see from the handout, the liberated souls are regarded as bringing the universe into their power, so Vashi Karana is treated in the doctrinal way. Confusion is regarded as bringing about confusion for worldly things. Teachers neutralise the effects of water and fire, so in other words this is a fairly ethical and doctrinal interpretation of the Shatkarmani, or at least some of them. But Manatunga Suri also wrote a commentary on his Nawakara Saratawana, which is in Sanskrit. It's an expansion of it, it's quite a long text, and it's quite a difficult text. And this text is really quite odd if you have certain presuppositions about what Jainism ought to be about, and what it should not be about. And I've just given you some kind of sense of some of the material that's in it. He discusses the Shatkarmani at some length, sometimes as being curative rituals, but sometimes as really quite aggressive rituals. And here we find something which is very rare in Jainism, the use of mortuary-derived symbols and mortuary-derived symbolism. So he refers to bringing divine women into one's power through inscribing a yntra on a female skull, affecting the untimely death of an enemy by inscribing a seed syllable on a human skin with a mixture of poison and blood, driving away enemies located in a funeral ground by means of a ritual involving skulls. I'm just reading out what you can read on the handout. There's a lot more of this material in that text. It's a rather difficult text, in fact, I would have to say. And I might explain why the editors of Namaskar Swadhyaya, the volume from which I'm taking this text, which is an extremely important collection of giant mantric material edited by three extremely prominent Shwetambara scholar monks, runs in tandem with a Gujarati translation. But for a list text, the Gujarati translation is omitted. No reference to this is made. The reason, quite simply, it's assumed that loads of read sounds can read this and draw their own conclusions. So what I'm drawing attention to here is a degree of ambivalence about the Shatkaramani both historically and in scholarship. The most recent discussion I know of the Shatkaramani is to be found in Sagramal Jain's Hindi synopsis of Jain Durn or Tantric Sadna of 1997. It's on the bibliography, which provides a largely descriptive, non-analytical account of an extensive repertoire of Jain mantras and Jantras and Mandalas and so on. It's a really very interesting book, but for those of you who know Sagramal's scholarship, you won't be surprised to learn. It has no footnotes and the referencing is rather awkward at times. Sagramal reaffirms what one might call the orthodox position that the Shatkaramani were understood historically by Jain's and spiritual nonviolent terms relating to the attainment of liberation. He says that the Shatkaramani perceived from what one might say is a generalized non-Jain perspective are a kind of perverse equivalent of the six avashikas, the obligatory ritual actions which lie at the core of Jain renunciant and lay disciplinary behavior. Jain monastic teachers, so Sagramal asserts, never prescribed engagement with the, as it were, Tantric Shatkaramani, always preaching against rituals such as marna. And he says that the Shatkaramani entered into Jainism through blind imitation, his expression is undano karam of Hinduism, a fact that can be gauged from the Shatkaramani mantras being framed in Sanskrit rather than Prakrit as in fact you can see from the handout. He furthermore asserts that as a rule mantras composed in the Jain tradition relating to marna and such like are actually not found. He says well we've got descriptions of marna but if you actually look around Jain teachers never formulated mantras relating to it. Well there's at least one mantra that I've given you on the handout which is a mantra for marna. Sagramal's got an explanation for who was responsible for this and this echoes what Alexis said at the end of his lecture last night. The agent's responsible for the appearance of the Tantric Shatkaramani in Jainism are not real Jain acharyas, he takes a purest line here, they're a domesticated renunciance and he's got a kind of rogues gallery here. It's the Chaitiyavasans who get blamed for an awful lot of things in Jainism up to about the 13th century, the domesticated temple dwelling Shwetambra ascetics and then more recently it's the Yates, the kind of modern alloforms of the Chaitiyavasans and then I'm sorry to say he also invokes Digambra Batarakas as being responsible for the perpetuation of this sort of activity, quasi-renunciant figures and this is a kind of rerun of the enlightenment critique of the debasement of true religion by corrupt priestly class. In concentrating on the Shatkaramani in this presentation I'm about to finish, I've no intention of attempting to reveal a suppressed dark side of Jainism or to dismay those who would feel that Jain ethics insulate the tradition from any possibility of engaging in potentially frivolous or malevolent ritual practices. Rather we might recall the observation by Hudrian in what remains the best study of the Shatkaramani in Hinduism and Buddhism at any rate in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra that quote, the Shatkaramani system is not merely a group of cruel or magic acts but it comprises the whole range of human effort and objectives as reflected in ritual. I would conclude ever so whimsically by suggesting that the ambivalence or reticence in the part of many medieval and modern Jain authorities about the nature of the Shatkaramani and in particular the status of Marana it exists and it doesn't exist it's not really important one can explain it away is perhaps analogous to the broader position of Tantra in Jainism as represented in much scholarship on the tradition it's there but it's not really there there does exist something which can be called Jain Tantra but it's not really Jain Tantrism so I'm looking forward to hearing more about this today and possibly hearing some of these questions answered thank you thank you very much so the next on the panel is Jagatran Bhattacharya from Shanti Niketan who's going to give a paper on the Tantric elements in the original Prashnaviya Karana a study. Good morning the topic is Tantric elements in the original Prashnaviya Karana as we know that Prashnaviya Karana is known as the 10th Anga Canon of Jain Shutambara text at the same time we know that the subject matter of Prashnaviya Karana what we have today is artificially inserted as the Prashnaviya Karana these days the subject matter what we read these days that is the asrava and sangbara but it is considered that the original text the Prashnaviya Karana has been lost or had been kept in unknown zone that is in the sense of that that it should not go to wrong hand and to prevent misuse of the supernatural powers supernatural things omens and these materials what are written in the Prashnaviya Karana fortunately I had the manuscript from Nepal archives and I have tried to edit that text and what I found I want to present before you that it is it was lost or it was kept in dark in the sense that it should not go in the wrong hand till now I don't consider myself a proper person to hold this text and so it is not in proper hand so I don't have any handouts Jain scriptures are focused on different facets of spiritual practices though apparently it seems contradictory with each other when referred to its basic standpoint a sociological sociohistorical study better explains how a demand arises with a phase of time and practices tend to accept foreign elements and the whole factor leaves its impression on the main theory this particular phenomenon is evidently seen in some of the scriptures of which Prashnaviya Karana is very important the subject matter of the scriptures basically deals with ethics epistemology metaphysics and cosmology in this reference the name Prashnaviya Karana does not correspond to the scriptural phenomenon in Indian perspective every term or word has particular meaning to get that meaning three main methods are taken into consideration such as Bhipatti, Nirvachana and Lakshana therefore Prashnaviya Karana has two words Prashnaviya Karana this compound word has a simple meaning that question in grammar in this sense a particular scripture cannot correspond to the spiritual purpose does the above said meaning leaves a scope of other options into it Bhya Karana has its different explanation that does not stand for grammar alone Karana means sadhana an instrument and Bhya is explanation or elucidation now Prashna stands for question but here it is related to the word Bhya Karana and after this Prashna holds another meaning when relatively applied and that meaning is where Prashna is the instrument of explanation or exposition this meaning seems to be more significant in reference to spirituality in reference to tantra in the first chapter it is Vargarachana the verse number three an exposition on the word Prashna has been given by raising a question the answer has been given it is written in prakrit this is again to be described as jinnaprakrita the exposition of jiva bhoginn jiva bhoginn is the commentator of this text goes thus the activities those are going on within the three worlds including deba loka and patala loka are subject to excessive virtue the knowledge of these activities is the source of excellence in the intelligence and that is to be called prashna in other way which is to be called in the name of jinnaprakrita so this verse clearly says about the subject matter of the scripture when explaining prashna again the virtuous knowledge is being explained thus di kala putikanga vidhyang tarka angsakaddhyom anjala di nam etc here putikanga vidhya means the enveloped past knowledge of directions or dimensions a diam then tarka angsakaddhyom anjala di nam gianam means forming the past or past of debate as the resource of well-being and the knowledge of that does your knowledge means the erudition which is the past of hindered activities in reference to direction and the time frame and also the resource of imparted debate or logic meant for the state of wellness that is here meant as excessive virtuous in keeping with the tradition this scripture has described anubandha chatushtaya in the beginning of the work along with the benedict reverse so with explanation of prashna the subject matter or bishaya has been mentioned which is one of the fourfold anubandhas though the present text has been written or compiled by an acharya who is undoubtedly belong who undoubtedly belonged to the digambara sect and he composed the main phrase in shawrashani prakrit but the reference of a prashna is rarely seen in the original digambara texts most importantly the meaning of a prashna is completely different and it does not even correspond to the scripture in this respect a shwetambara texts made the sense of prashna as it is presented in the manuscript the shwetambara text goes thus it is in samavayanga commentary here it means that mantra which which can tell the merits and demerits after the study of one's thumbs and arms on the other hand shatabhangi tarangini which is one of the digambara texts describes prashna as prashnika nistha jighiyasa prathipadakam wakiyang hi prashna ityuchate that sentence which corroborates the queries as it emerges in the mind of the person who puts the query prashna also represents the meaning of a problem as it is seen in dhavala all the shwetambara canons are commonly acknowledged by the digambara sect so being one of these canons prashna vyakarana is also equally counted by the digambara so digambara have referred this as the 10th book of the 12th fold angus this much mention has been found in srutag giana where as in nandi the passage goes on the introduction to the prashna vyakarana dhaals panhavagara nesu hannang athut tarang pasina sayang athut tarang apasina sayang athut tarang pasina pasina sayang anni cia bicitta dibba bija sayang nagasubad nehing dibba samabaya agavijan agavijanthi senang agavitai dasame anghe sankhe jaanang payasahasaing payag genang etc here the subject matter of the text prashna vyakarana has been described it says in prashna vyakarana 108 fold each prashna or prashna and prashna prashna and many more varieties of divine erythens of excellence with with serpentines and super medities the divine dialogues between each other and that is the 10th out of angus which has been of volume of thousands of fathers in this verse the candidature of a person who asks a question has been mentioned here it is stated that annang panhang tu baas manus and annyad grahane na suswagataad anantaram prichaka charia bastu sangsu chaka wachanam parigrihyate the whole passage is concentrated on the meaning of annya here annya means ignorant women and children therefore prashna is considered to be those statements which are raised by the ignorant women and children this verse corresponds to well with the bhagavati aradhana where it goes does i am just escaping the text the meaning is that e niriyapaka charia in his research after asking or enquiring chaita moni ariaka sravaka bala madhyama and briddha this is told in some different context which is again related with the subject of prashna here it is told in the context of defining a prashna kushala sadhu an expert ascetic asking about other queries what is more important here to mention that what kind of prashna has been meant here the answer is found in the context of niriyapaka niriyapaka is stated to be that acharia or a competent mendicant who help in performing bau's taken by renouncer especially when in sanlekhana niriyapaka can help an advancement of spirituality by holding others right usness in right spirit and does helps in self purification as also swtambad tradition bewa harabhashia goes on the definition of niriyapaka does the definition refers to the context of different fashons of accepting death with righteous purpose the meaning is that that sage who has expertise in purification especially through the phase of observing bau of accepting righteous death with fasting etc and penance so this is the quality of a prashna kushala sadhu it is now clear that what is a prashna and who is a competent person of putting a prashna or query here it is very important to understand the significance of prashna in reference to prashna beakarana in the verse number three two more on wonders have been discussed such as sambandha and prayo jana there is a term jina payadam mentioned in this verse in this in its explanation jibabhogin named kebali naama maharasi this has a special reference in this scripture all other anga canons are delineated by the ganadharas but prashna beakarana is the only anga canon which was depicted by a kebalin this is a significant difference of the source of compilation of the 12 fold canons so it is related to the kebalin and omniscient in respect to the source of knowledge that which is counted to be the bishaya as per prior discussion therefore sambandha is found to be in the to be in between the source the knowledge of kebalin and the bishaya another point may be mentioned here that whatever means are used in the above practice but the mind is the essential medium of producing the answer for which a prashna was put that is why nimiti i just point out the name of naimitika nimitaka on that part this person i'm just reading out but the mind is the essential meeting of medium of producing the answer for which a prashna was put that is why nimiti represents the meaning of matiman and buddhiman etc the mentions of sthita biparitam aditya brantimca gyatwa and prattach sresu patchakha bachya sresu ba are the instances of special kind of calculations actually in the tradition of nimitaka gyanna and naimitika etc discussed under supernatural activities eight types of nimitaka gyannas are mentioned here the person who practices is called naimitika dusudang cheiva dudithang aggahetung sadabhabe sadithang sasudang cheiva gahidabang kamein adu the merits and demerits of the prashna has been described when discussing the candidate with honest purpose and with the righteous purpose as a prashnak prashnakarta among them the person who puts question with righteous purpose should not be entertained with unrighteous purpose should not be entertained he should not be counted to be a competent candidate for asking question the ignorable demerits and the useful merits of a naimitika are the main object of verse number seven and eight among the ignorable parts it is told that to be a naimitika one should not be inclined to the other school and practices so a term ananna manasa has been used in the same meaning jiva bhogan has explained it in this manner na nesu sastresu manasa sakting koriart the answer is this it is not possible to have a clear vision and right knowledge in the scripture if one has interest in other scriptures which are meant to be the other schools or practices then a question has been raised in the explanation now in terms of defining the eligibility which makes one naimitika the verse number eight goes us that person who puts his thought with indifferent mindfulness in the particulars of the direction and the symptoms the activities taken place and things and their situation and the symbols and signs and the person who asks the question in all these things which is meant to produce the result again raising question why the term madhya seina has been used here the answer is that indifferent mindfulness the expected outcome is possible to forecast not only that the probable cause of violation or variation in difference is also mentioned in the exposition it is said when forecasting or delineating something one should not be under control of inadvertence attachment or aversion so it is not only bare concentration along with indifference and expected naimitika now we see a naimitika does not represent a simple intelligent person but who has the knowledge or extrasensory power to forecast unseen aspects of life as it is seen in the verse number nine and in its supplements therefore a naimitika is better to define as a knower of nimitta sastra because without knowledge practice is not possible so only knowledge has been referred to here while practice is not emphasized here so it was told in the verse number three madhimaham upadah etc etc now onwards the verse put forth an account of the letters and the process of conjunction and the variety in detail the name of the chapter is vargarachana here it comes the subject matter of the chapter vargarachana also non-conjunct letters have been discussed in the verse number 10 now there is a chart table there is it is called that that all the alphabets vowels and consonants are arranged in a system it is called ostobargika and panchobargika ostobargika that eight columns and five rows here also that there is the due to the bija mantra these letters have great implications so first that vargika ostobargika it is that ah a ka cha ta ta pa ya sha etc etc second is ah aika cha ta ta fa ra sha i o ga ja da da ba la sha next i au ga ja da da ba ha ha next u u u wang ya na ma ang ah etc etc so i am not going to read out the whole text first thing is that there are 34 chapters rather 35 chapters including the parisista the first chapter it is vargarachana there are so many things that although it is prashnau vakarana it is said prashnau vakarana the prashnau vakarana it corresponds to the the the grammar part as well as these all alphabets all letters or phonemes those were related with the nimit the sastra with the with the supernatural with the aspects and it is written here also it is very difficult to waifarkate that it is a grammatical part is discussed here or the bija mantras or something like that is very much related to nimit the sastra is there we have a very quick look of the other chapters the matter materials of other chapters the second chapter is a yoni nirdesha and it is the drabbas of dhatu mula and jivas and the category of nastamusti and cinta etc and in this chapter all the sounds based on vowels and consonants are placed in numbers the quantity of vowels is also mentioned and there are certain certain terminology are there which is not we find in Sanskrit grammar or the paninian system so lagu akshara guru akshara and varga akshara tiriyant matra ordha matra urdha matra et cetera et cetera discussed in the second chapter third chapter is a siksha prakadana and here it is dealt with the articulation the place of articulation in in paninian grammar the word the sound the place of articulation is something different and here it is mentioned that such as ura ura means from the chest contour jiva mulia talabria and ostha et cetera okay i'll just five minutes okay i'll finish this the fourth chapter is sankata bicata and some letters are denoted as sankata like that vowels are e and the seventh a and some letters these are called bicata this chapter is called sankata bicata next fifth chapter is uttara dhara uttara dhara it is the description of gradually descending form of all substances and the sounds both vowels and consonants and the terminology such as uttara adhara laghu guru abhi hata anabhi hata form of sounds uh these are we can find in in the fifth chapter sixth chapter is abhigata abhigata is based on the sound of letters that is alingita antara didha abhidhu mitha dagdha charimasara et cetera are used for these vowels and consonants and the seventh chapter it is jiva sangha bhedha and there is ashtabargika and panchabargika what i told now and eighth is jiva chinta based on uh that bipades quadrophates humans subhumans and gods and specially uh description of human characteristics with the with the sounds and vice versa ninth chapter is jiva chinta it is description and relation of sounds with other creatures such as insects birds and animals the tenth chapter is dhatu chinta and this this is of course the metals gold silver copper lead iron and interestingly that dhatu the metal has the gender also so gender feminine gender and and masculine gender there are some some some metals are there anyway and mule sangha the description of vegetation body creepers bush and tree and mule chinta is 12th chapter discussion on the trees and fruits 13th chapter musti gyana it is uh it is bija mantra and the direct result of this bija mantra is discussed here and 14th chapter is sankata bighata it is the supplement of the fourth chapter and 15th chapter is sansthana bivhaga it is quantity of vowels breath didgha triashra triashra chatusra et cetera et cetera these are very new and we cannot find infinite grammar so uh and in consonants also apart from breath didgha triashra chatusra we find ayata and mishra and uh there is the word na bivhaga description of the colors of sounds so such as ah e and ah it is a smoky blue smoky color and oo is black yellow and smoky and e is white i is smoky blue et cetera et cetera the the vowels those who have colors here and the consonants also the colors and then the 17th chapter is ghanachydra bivhaga it is some ghanah some words some phonemes some sounds are very solid some are flexible and it has some sub chapters gandha bivhaga rasha parimana nastika swagriham kanda et cetera gianna kanda that is swagianna swajana parijana that is the related family members and the and the outsiders and the guests and happening in the house and the outside and uh ori about uh that fear from death et cetera uh written here sankhya the 19th chapter sounds both vowels and consonants identified with numbers has the specific implications used to calculation permutation and combination and the lifespan it is related with the lifespan kala anayana uh it is uh the time that the day wake month and et cetera et cetera okay so nakshatra anayana and there is uh some 34 chapters and i have written here the subject matter only i have not discussed elaborately and it is very herculian dusk to do that and to be very frank i am not a competent authority i am not a uh student of tantra so to to decide for all that not all the uh subject matters is very difficult for me and it is written in sorosini prakrit the commentary is in Sanskrit mixed with prakrit so it is the very first time i am just dealing with this subject and okay thank you


Thank you, Sue, for the invitation, and thank you to the folks in the Ford School who have hosted me today. I'm going to be talking about how schools respond to differences in teacher effectiveness. We now have at least a decade of tons and tons of research indicating that teachers are the most important in school contributors to student achievement. That's probably not a finding that your grandmother would have needed a decade of research to tell you. This idea that some teachers are better at their jobs than other teachers. But we now have measures, however imperfect, or proxies for how much teachers contribute to their students' achievement. But there's widespread concern that the rigidities of the public school system make it unresponsive to teacher quality. So even though there are these differences, and we now have can identify them based on test scores, and we probably could have identified them before based on things like principal observations, that things like collective bargaining agreements and the structure of the public school system mean that it's not going to respond to those differences even when they are apparent. So the policy, where policy is now is that a lot of districts in many states are thinking about changes to their teacher evaluation systems to take into account effectiveness. But we don't know a whole lot about how schools sort of under existing systems over the last five or ten years already respond to differences in teacher effectiveness. Are they really constrained? And when they're not constrained, do we see some responses? So I'm going to talk about three research questions today. The first is how are attrition and mobility, so leaving the teaching profession entirely and moving from one school to another, how are those things related to effectiveness among early career teachers, people who have just started out as teachers? Second, how is effectiveness related to promotions and strengths? I'm going to show you some data indicating that a lot of mobility out of teaching is actually into other jobs in public schools. So how does that relate to effectiveness in the classroom? And finally, how is effectiveness related to compensation both inside and outside of teaching? You can probably guess the answer to the first part of that about the relationship between compensation and the salaries that teachers earn in the classroom. But I'm going to show you some new evidence on the relationship between effectiveness and earnings of former teachers once they've left the classroom. So these three studies all exploit unique features. Florida's a very rich longitudinal data system, pre-K to 20 education data warehouse. It's based on three papers, all of which are joint work with Marty West from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And there's some titles there. If you want to learn more about these papers, the details are in those papers. So I'm going to give basically a quick overview of each of these three papers and talk a little bit about how they tie together. Then I'll look forward to questions and discussion. So the research design is pretty straightforward. We measure teacher effectiveness for the purpose of these three studies as value added to math and reading scores in grades forced to rate. As anyone who knows anything about value added knows, these are not perfect measures of teacher effectiveness. They're noisy, bounce around from one year to the next. We try to mitigate that by averaging over years and over multiple tests. But there's no perfect solution to that problem. And we know there's not a random sorting of teachers and students. So these measures are limited, but for research purposes, I think they're pretty good. So we're going to look at the relationship between those estimated effectiveness measures, which is these value added to test scores. So when I say effectiveness, I'm talking about value added to test scores. And mobility across schools and out of teaching, changes in job assignments within public schools, and wages outside of teaching. Just to sort of start out with a simple descriptive picture of what the career paths of new fourth to eighth grade math and reading teachers look like in Florida over during the first decade of the 2000s. So we start out with teachers, new teachers. They are in these high stakes classrooms. These are tested grades and subjects in Florida, fourth to eighth grade. In their first year, we look at the second year. And after just one year, three quarters are still in the same school that they started out in. About 18% are in a different school, and 7% have left the public schools entirely. And then some small slivers, the purple and red there are, they're non-teachers in a different school or they're a non-teacher in the same school. So a non-teacher could be a principal, or a guidance counselor, or librarian, or bus driver, any number of things. And you go out, after the fourth year, a majority are no longer in their initial school. And you go out to say six or seven years, and 23, 28% are in the same school. So most teachers don't stay in the same school that they started out in. And in fact, a larger number move on to a different school and a substantial share leave the public schools entirely. So this seems to create some potential for responses to teacher effectiveness. Maybe the folks who are less effective in one school move to another, or maybe they exit the teaching profession entirely. But that's not the case. That's what this chart shows you. So what this shows you is the share of new teachers remaining in the same school over this seven year period by the quartile of their value added. So what this shows you is that over time, teachers leave their initial school. But it bears little relationship to their value added. So among teachers who are estimated to be in the top quarter of effectiveness, based on a value added, 26% are still around in that school after seven years. And in the bottom quarter, it's 23%, and in the middle quarters, it's about 22%. So is this good news or bad news? So if you came into this really worried that the best teachers were all going running from the classroom to do other things, to make more money and other professions, or they were going and running to other schools. Well then this is good news for you, because that's not the case. They're not leaving any more than anyone else is. And in fact, they're actually a little bit more likely to stay. But if you're thinking about, if you're the principal of a school with numbers that look like this, I think maybe you'd be a little bit disappointed, because in any industry you'd probably hope that your best performers would be more likely to stick around over time. And your worst performers would be weeded out. And the initial thing you could say, well, after three, four years, teachers get tenure, principals really don't have authority to do that. But these are new teachers. So you look between the third and fourth year, or even just the first three years here, this is a period when principals are not constrained by tenure loss. They can get rid of people without a whole lot of difficulty. Yet even when they're not constrained, you don't see any evidence of significant behavior, especially between the third and fourth year, where tenure occurs, that there's some kind of weeding out process that's related to quality. Now you might worry, well, this is the picture overall. What about schools that serve a high proportion of disadvantaged students? Those of the schools were really worried about the best teachers. They're all running off maybe not to jobs outside of public education, but to jobs in schools that serve more advantaged students, where maybe the working conditions are better, where maybe the salary structure is a little better. So if you're worried about that, this is once again sort of good news the way the other one was good news. If you compare the high SCS schools and the low SCS schools, and this is just defined in terms of the share of kids eligible for free lunch at those schools, you see that the share remaining is higher at the higher SCS schools. So the school serving disadvantaged kids are more likely to lose their teachers. It's not a huge difference, something like 10 percentage points. But at the same time, the difference between the top quarter and bottom quarter of teachers in terms of their value added isn't all that different. So it's true that people leave and the people who are more effective, are a little more likely to stay. But that pattern isn't all that different at the high SCS and low SCS schools. So there doesn't seem to be too much sort of systematically behind this fear that the best teachers rather are leaving the schools that need them the most. So now this turns from the share of new teachers remaining in the first school where they started out to the share of new teachers remaining in the Florida public schools overall. So maybe you take a look at a chart like this and you say, well, people are leaving their school, but maybe the top quartile, the best people they're leaving and going somewhere else because they got a better opportunity or something more desirable for them. And the people at the bottom, they left this school but then they didn't find any other opportunities because they couldn't get a good reference from their first school because their performance wasn't so great. This shows that's not the case. There doesn't seem to be any sort of weeding out of low performers or higher retention of high performers in the public school system in Florida as a whole. After seven years, 74% of the top quarter are still teaching somewhere in the Florida public schools as compared to 71% of the bottom quarter, 69% of the third quarter. They're pretty tightly clustered together and it suggests a story of, for the low performers of sort of a dance to the lemons where you can't, you leave one place, you can still get a job somewhere else, even if things weren't so great at the first place. So that's a picture of sort of these overall patterns of movement across schools and movement out of the profession. But a lot of that movement within the profession occurs across jobs within the public school system.  So this next study I'm gonna talk about looks at those promotion reassignment patterns. And it's motivated by this evidence we have from low-stakes surveys and from formal evaluation programs, which indicates that administrators, usually school principals and assistant principals, can reliably identify their most and least effective teachers. So they know something about teacher effectiveness, even independent of this value added information that I have as part of this study. But the concern here is that policy rigidities related to compensation and dismissal, things like tenure and the salary structure, constrained administrators ability to respond to differences in effectiveness. At least later on in their careers. But it's possible that administrators will exercise more control over job placements within school districts. So maybe they don't feel like they either can or want to get rid of someone who's not doing such a great job as a fourth grade teacher. But maybe they'll move them to an area where they'll do less harm or maybe the person genuinely feels that person will be more effective, a better match for them. At the same time, maybe the higher performers will be promoted into positions of greater responsibility. So we look at this descriptively in Florida by looking at the relationship between effectiveness for these, for a cohort of about 25,000 teachers in grades four to eight math and reading. So they're starting out in four to eight math and reading so we can measure their value added. And then we see where they go over a number of years from 2001 to 2008, 2009. And we divide their subsequent positions into six groups. So first is on the principal track, which means that they're either in assistant or an interim principal, or in some cases, principals over the short period of time. Usually they're just, they're getting started on that track. So they're assistant principals. Two, working as instructional coaches and reading and math. Three, teaching in high stakes classrooms. So that means they're either staying in the classroom they're already in, which is fourth to eighth grade math and reading. Or they're in math and reading in grades three, nine, or ten, which are also tested in Florida, and science in five, eight, and eleven. Fourth, they've moved to teaching in low stakes classroom positions. So low stakes just means a grade and subject that's not a subject to testing under the state accountability system. So if you're a seventh grade science teacher, that's for that year, it's low stakes. If you're a second grade teacher, that's low stakes in the sense that second grade isn't tested in Florida. Fifth, working in Florida school districts, but not as a teacher of record. So that includes teachers who are assigned to assist special education students, things like that, but you're not in the course records. We're finally no longer employed by Florida school districts, which I showed you before is a substantial number of teachers over time. So this just shows you what happens to this cohort of teachers from when they start in 2002 to when our data end in 2009. So about half after those seven years are still in a high stakes classroom. And then about 19% are not in the public schools. 15% have moved to low stakes classroom. So I guess that's the biggest group among those who have left the high stakes classroom but are still in the public schools. 9% not a teacher of record, 4% on the principal track, and 2% reading and math coaches. So what this does is it looks at people who move to these different positions and shows you their average value added by position. And these are presented in teacher level standard deviations. So for example, that first bar shows you is that the 830 teachers in these data, who started out in a fourth, eighth grade math and reading classroom, ended up at some point on the principal track. We're on average 13% of a teacher level standard deviation above average in terms of their effectiveness as compared to the average teacher. So principal track math and meeting coach looks similar. So what this suggests is that there's something going on here where teachers who are more effective in the classroom are more likely to be what we call promoted and that they're moving to positions of greater responsibility in terms of being a principal or a coach focusing on assisting students with instruction and reading and math. The teachers who stay in high stakes classrooms are modestly above average. And then where you really see this big negative bar, teachers who move to the low stakes classrooms. It's a pretty big group, about 7,000 teachers. So they are below average by about as much as teachers who become principals or assistant principals are above average. And the teachers who are not a teacher of record or not in the public schools are just modestly below average. So because this low stakes classroom group is so important, because these are often courses taken by students, academic courses. And that's where a bunch of teachers seem to be moving who are below average. We split that up further into different low stakes positions. And where the least effective teachers seem to be moving is to academic courses in grades pre-kated to. So these are things like first and second grade classrooms. I think this is a troubling finding because if someone is not particularly effective at teaching fourth grade, and we move them to second grade, because that's not tested, clearly the second grade students will just in one year become third grade students who are tested. So it's in the short run, it may be a strategy to improve test scores or maximize test scores. But in the long run, it's not such a great strategy. Not too much of a deviation from average in terms of the teachers who become high school academic teachers, grades 11 and 12. Science teachers, so these are low stakes science grades are modestly below average in terms of effectiveness. And it looks similar for teachers who go to other positions or to some combination of these positions. So this is all talking about movement within the public school system to different jobs. So the final research question here looks outside of teaching and looks at what happens to teachers after they leave the classroom in terms of their earnings. And how we're able to do this is we merge statewide databases on education from the Florida Education Warehouse and then from earnings records which are tracked as part of the unemployment insurance system in Florida to track former classroom teachers into new jobs. So we have a sample of 130,000 K-12 teachers. A number of whom left public schools during the period that we observed them from 2002 to 2007. And these unemployment compensation records give us the quarterly earnings of each current and former teacher working in Florida from 2001 through 2008. So we know we have a consistent measure of earnings for these teachers both while they're our teachers in the classroom, but also after they leave the classroom and either, in some cases, many of them stay in the public schools. And some of them go into other industries. And what we do is we compare the relationship between effectiveness and earnings for the same group of teachers while those teachers are in fact teachers and when they're former teachers. They've left the classroom for a job outside of public education. So what this figure shows you is the average annual earnings for this group of 9,000 teachers who eventually left the classroom. And it's their earnings while they're teaching and while they're not teaching. So it's probably not too surprising that earnings while teaching are more compressed because these teachers are all in the same industry. And we probably expected it to be more wage compression and teaching than in other industries. So the median salary of this group while they were in the classroom was about $38,000 and it fell actually a little bit to $35,000 when they left the classroom. So it wasn't the case that this group of 9,000 teachers who left the classroom were on average leaving for significantly higher paying jobs. Some of them did. If you see that the red line in that tail of the distribution there is higher than the dashed blue line, what that shows you is that there were some teachers who were able to earn more. But on average, they earned about the same or maybe a little bit less. Actually, if you split it by gender, you see I think men do a little better and women do a little worse when they leave the classroom. And you can see how much more spread out the distribution is. The ratio between the 90th and the 50th percentile is 1.3 for this group while they're in the classroom and 1.8 for the same group after they left the classroom. So now if you look at the relationship between the quarters of the value added measure that I was talking about before and earnings while in the classroom, you don't see too much of a relationship. And this is exactly what you'd expect given what we know about how teacher salary structure works. Teachers receive a salary that in most places is based on whether or not they have a master's degree and their number of years of experience as a teacher in that district or in that state. So we wouldn't expect there's a weak relationship between experience and effectiveness. We might see a small relationship, but we don't see a whole lot, right? Compared to the bottom quartile, which is left out of this chart, second and third quartile teachers make about 1% less. Top quartile teachers in terms of their effectiveness make about 3% more. So pretty small differences. Now when we turn to the same exact group of teachers after they've left the classroom, we found that those who were more effective in the classroom earn more outside of teaching than those who were less effective in the classroom when they become former teachers. So now among the same group of teachers when they become former teachers, the second quarter makes 6% more than the bottom quarter. Third quarter makes 9% more the bottom quarter. And the top quarter makes 19% more than the bottom quarter. So I think it's a pretty strong relationship and it indicates that some part of the skill that makes for an effective teacher is valued economically in the non-teaching labor market, even though there's no reward to it in terms of salary while in the classroom. So just to outline a couple conclusions, bringing these three pieces of research together indicates the school system is largely unresponsive to teacher effectiveness as many are concerned about. And what's really concerning is that even when the system is not constrained, we still see this issue. So the example I gave before was when we look at the period when principals make tenure decisions. It's a period when they're not constrained and they still make these decisions. So if you look at all the complaints out there that schools don't do enough to respond to teacher quality, on one hand they're warranted in these data support that. But at the same time it doesn't appear that enough of them are doing as much as they could do within the constraints that they have. Second, schools can respond to effectiveness in the wrong ways. This was most clear when we saw the movement of ineffective teachers from high stakes classroom positions to low stakes classroom positions. And because low stakes doesn't mean unimportant in the world, it just means not tested as part of the accountability system. Third, teacher effectiveness is related to earnings in other industries but not to earnings while teaching. So that suggests that more effective teachers have better earnings opportunities outside of teaching, higher opportunity wages than less effective teachers. So what this suggests is that, sure, there's a need to relax constraints but that alone is not going to be sufficient. Because we saw even when there weren't constraints, the behavior was maybe not what we'd like it to be. So a couple of policy implications here. I mean there's no individual policy that comes out of this as schools should do X or states should do X tomorrow. But it certainly suggests some potential strategies to make schools and districts more responsive to differences in teacher effectiveness than they currently are. So the first is to improve teacher evaluation systems and encourage their use in personnel decisions. There are efforts along those lines underway in many districts in states across the country, particularly those that promise to do so as part of the Race to the Top competition. Of course, there's concerns about the need to get those right and to do that in a responsible way. But taking advantage of this information and incorporating it into those decisions does seem to have potential for changing some of the patterns that are documented in the data from Florida. Second is to make tenure more meaningful and more flexible. So as I showed you, the issue isn't just that tenure is this very inflexible thing where once teachers get it, you can't get rid of them. You also have this problem that it's not meaningful, that it seems to be handed out more or less to anyone who sticks around for a while in many schools. Third is to continue to experiment with all alternative compensation plans to account for these differences and opportunities outside of education that some teachers have. Fourth is to end last in first out layoffs that has implications for retaining the most effective teachers and removing the least effective teachers. And finally is to improve teacher retention in high poverty schools as a strategy to improve teacher effectiveness. So don't just think about we need to reduce attrition, we need to reduce turnover, but think about what we'd want those charts to look like. We don't want low turnover where everyone stays. We want high turnover over the least effective teachers. We want them to move on and do something else. And we want low turnover, high retention among those who are the most effective. So if we could do that, that could be a strategy to improve teacher effectiveness and focusing on it in that way would be, I think, a more promising strategy than just focusing on keeping around everyone who we possibly can. So look forward to your questions and to discussion and thank you for your attention. Most striking things I thought in the graphs that you presented was the fact that to first approximation at least, if I remember the graphs right and if I interpret them right, teachers were not really responding in a very big way to the opportunity costs of staying as teachers. That is that exit from teaching wasn't dramatically higher amongst the more effective teachers, although you're- It was lower. It was lower amongst the more effective teachers even though there are opportunity costs in terms of the outside of teaching wages were higher. Which actually, I mean, that suggests that basically incentives are not gonna keep. I mean, some of the models or ways we have of thinking about how do you keep the good teachers in the public schools is you pay them better. This is saying that they're not responding to the financial incentives. Obviously it doesn't say that there's no response to this but it's saying that's not the big deal somehow. So there's something, I don't know, not complete in this picture. Right, I think it's a great question and it's hard to disentangle the response to financial rewards versus non-financial rewards. And it could be that good teachers, they also, because they're good at it, they really like doing it. So as a result, you don't need to pay them all of that opportunity wage to keep them around at the same time, it could be the case that if there was some return in the classroom, we'd see even more of them staying, right? And that there's differences in responses to both financial and non-financial incentives that we can't disentangle in these data. So I'm not sure, I'd rule out the possibility that paying more effective teachers more would have some effect on retention but I think you're right that there's a whole a number of other factors at play that are potentially important and possibly more important. But it's your reaction to people who say that the rewards and incentives should be by the building in order to increase teamwork within the building and also create an atmosphere where the teachers in the building want to get rid of the bad teachers you're creating because they're getting in the way of the bonus rather than focus on individual teacher rewards and incentives. Right, great question. So clearly to the extent you can encourage teamwork, that's a great thing. I mean, whether you design performance pay plans as group-based incentives or individual incentives is a sort of a more complicated policy question than these data can answer. And one thing to think about is sort of how large the groups are. I think that's sort of seen as the key piece here. If it's a group of two or three fifth grade teachers working together, I think you're absolutely right. There's gonna be all of a sudden if one of them isn't pulling his or her weight, they're gonna want to get rid of that person. If instead you have a school-wide plan where it's 50 different teachers, well then maybe it's hard to figure out which one person is not pulling their own weight. So I think there are trade-offs to be managed there between having incentives for individuals to perform but also incentives for teamwork and certainly not having incentives that discourage teamwork. Any difference in differential rates of attrition but then also differential, like you showed how some teachers will become coaches and others will go on principal tracks by what kind of district it is, whether it's a really large urban district in Florida or whether it's a more rural district, does that actually change the picture? That's a great question. That's not something we took a look at in these data. How much these kinds of patterns vary in different kinds of districts but it's something we should take a look at in future work. Thanks. So when you present the results that the least effective teachers are kind of put into the, or end up in the grades that are not tested, I think it kind of makes us think maybe these principals are acting deviously in some way but I was just gonna throw two potential alternatives to give the principals some credit then see if you think maybe they might be likely or see if you think they're likely. So the first people who have had more experience than me in the classroom might laugh at me about this but do you think that perhaps not that grades one and two are less important to student learning than grades four and six but do you think, is there any evidence to show that teachers might have less impact? Like there's less, if there was value added there there might be less variation in teacher effectiveness on value added in those grades. And the second might be that teachers can be good at things that increase value added scores but or don't increase value added scores but increase maybe non-cognitive skills like persistence and stuff and that might be more important in those grades. So I was wondering if you think either of those explanations could be possible? I mean anything's possible, right? I mean it's hard to tell, right? What you'd really hope is that principals are trying to maximize student achievement or student learning and one way they do that is by trying to improve the match quality between the teachers that they have and the jobs that those teachers do. So you would certainly hope that maybe oh someone's not so good at fourth grade math and reading but maybe this person is just not great with that age and really they're gonna be better with little kids in second grade. So you certainly can't rule stories like that out and some of them are pretty plausible. So I think the overall, those differences in effectiveness by those different positions, it doesn't so much say that oh the sky is falling in Florida but that these are things that I would be concerned about and would want to try and learn more about to try and tease out what kind of story is it? Is it just principals saying well I want to maximize my scores and this is the best way to do it or is it something more subtle and it's probably makes those things. I'm from charter schools. So I know for example Florida has roughly 34% of their charter schools are managed by for profit management companies. Do you find that they're more like savvy when it comes to assigning and promoting teachers or is there really no difference between a traditional public school and a charter school? Good question. The Florida data do include charter schools and at some point it's not in any of these papers. At some point I think we started to try and think about this question. You might think that charter schools that these patterns would look different, that there'd be more weeding out of the least effective teachers and more retention of the higher performing teachers. And my recollection just like I said this is unpublished work that we just did in the data was that you didn't see any big startling differences like that. But that was a while ago when charters were somewhat newer in Florida we didn't differentiate by different kinds of charters like the for profit versus the not for profit operators. So it could be that there's more there than we found but there was certainly nothing that jumped off the page the last time I took a look. So one of the things I was wondering about is that you make some of these inferences off of the earnings differences between the well they're teaching and those who leave and have an outside wage. And I think maybe comparing wage offers would be a more appropriate measure if there are some teachers who are gonna leave and just because they're not gonna work anymore like somebody might have stayed home to raise children would underestimate the difference between how much more they're gonna earn when they leave the teaching world. Right, so if we had wage offers that would certainly be really nice. Right, so we know what they made but I mean to address sort of the second part of your question about teachers who leave and raise a family or something like that. So if you look in the unadjusted earnings data which I didn't show you today you see a huge bump at low levels of earnings. So what you see is a pretty significant substantial number of people who seem to have gone into part-time work. So what we do, I mean and those results are in the paper but so what we do for our preferred results is we estimate a teacher's probability of working full-time based on their earnings and their gender and we re-weight the data by that. So we weight our results away from people who seem to have gone into part-time work or maybe worked for a part of a year and then left to raise kids or something like that. So the idea is they should reflect to the best extent we can what people who were ostensibly working full-time were making and are not overly affected by decisions to work part-time which you rightly point out wouldn't tell you their opportunity wage it would just tell you something about a decision they made. The value added of teachers of different grades and subjects and then those labor market premiums. So a high value added first grade reading teacher versus a high value added fifth grade math teacher. You might think that the opportunity costs look very different for work outside of teaching and is there a more nuanced story or did that average premium hold? Not really, I mean in terms of there's not really a more nuanced story the best we can tell. It's not the number of teachers for whom we can do value added who then leave the classroom we have earnings data on during this period of time isn't that large. So that's why I showed you that result for everyone put together. But if we split it out so we can do we can do value added for fourth to eighth grade because the testing starts in third grade so that's your baseline. So we split it out fourth and fifth grade math and reading fourth fifth grade math fourth fifth grade reading six to eight reading six to eight math and the numbers move around but obviously there's more noise in those estimates because of being a fewer number of teachers. So in some cases maybe it looks a little smaller for the reading value added but it's really, there's no really compelling story in there that those averages mask. So I have a question about the policy implications that you recommended two policy implications. One was to improve teacher compensation and the second was to end LIFO. And I think I'm just wondering if you could comment on sort of those two policy recommendations because what I see a lot in the literature is that they tend to be talked about as two separate policy recommendations but it seems to me that some of the resistance amongst teachers and amongst unions for ending LIFO is that the fear is that what will happen is that if schools are not also at the same time given more money to compensate teachers that what LIFO will lead to is just keeping the cheapest teachers essentially which are the newest teachers and so I'm wondering if you could talk about just sort of what you think about those two together and do you see them as separate or do you see them together? I think you're right that they're absolutely linked or should be linked. So if you want to think about sort of a more evidence-based salary schedule, Jake Vigdor had a nice paper about this in Education Next a couple of years back. If you instead of having the salary schedule go up every year you made it look more like what the effectiveness curve looks like which is bigger increases in the first couple of years maybe five years depending on who you ask and then more of a leveling out after that. I think that would make the incentives around LIFO much better because now you don't face these, you face trade-offs and salary that are more closely tied to effectiveness. You're paying your fifth year teacher more than your first year teacher because you know your fifth year teacher is more effective through that experience but the pay between your fifth year teacher and your 20 year teacher isn't that different. So now your incentives aren't just to keep the cheapest people around, it's to do something that's more closely tied to effectiveness. I was also curious to know if the teachers that you did look at, what were their education backgrounds in terms of those with maybe of just the bachelors or those with maybe a master's degree or even those that chose to teach and that you tested. I mean, those with the bachelors did they maybe emphasize in mathematics or did they have sort of a general education degree? I mean, was that also looked at? So for these studies we didn't look too much at like that. I have another paper that Paul Peterson and I wrote a couple years ago looking at different correlates of teacher effectiveness using some of the same data from Florida. So revisiting some findings that a lot of other folks have looked at such as that there's not a big difference between teachers with a bachelor's degree, teachers with a master's degree. We also looked at backgrounds in terms of preparation programs and found that there wasn't a big difference in value added depending on the teacher preparation program you came from in Florida. So if you went to the University of Florida or Florida A&M or Florida International University that didn't seem to be related on average to how effective you are in the classroom. I have two kind of questions. I guess one is about the concept of value added you kind of alluded to in the beginning of your presentation. There are some issues and challenges especially in the short term like I've heard that there's like quite a bit of shuffling from year to year in terms of which quartile teachers can appear. And you sort of saying that it takes maybe a long period of time to identify who's a good teacher by this metric. And I just kind of wondered first like if you feel that's actually a long term like viable metric to use in policy because if it takes six, seven years to identify who's a good teacher hasn't largely the damage been done and they're filtering out of the system naturally anyway is it actually going to do anything? And then two alternatives to value added in terms of how we evaluate teachers as students we're currently like going through course evaluations. So like as a consumer of education I feel like we can identify very quickly who's a good teacher. It could take us probably a month and we could tell you who the best professors are. If you have any insight about whether teachers are being evaluated through student feedback metrics and how effective that seems to be. Schroes are great questions. So on the first one, you're absolutely right that these measures are noisiest when you only have one year of data and they get better. The more years of data you have, the better. In the work that I talked about today we averaged over all the years of data we had Florida actually administers both a high stakes test, the F-CAT and until 2008 they administered a low stakes test called the Stanford achievement test. So we averaged across both those two to try and deal with these errors and make the measures a little more accurate. So if anything those sorts of errors should bias or findings toward it not finding some of the relationships that we do. So some of these relationships I've showed you may understate the true relationships because of that imprecision in the data. In terms of using these measures for high stakes purposes I would sort of, I think I would sort of book end that conversation. So on one hand I don't think we want to go back to 10 years ago when there really was no evaluation at all. When everyone got observed once in a while and almost 95 to 100% of teachers got a high rating, a satisfactory rating and no one really got any meaningful feedback. There was no responsiveness to teacher effectiveness. For sure we don't want to go back there. And then on the other end we certainly don't want to have a value added measure and if it's above a certain number you get a bonus and if it's below a certain number you get fired because that would be crazy because we know that these measures are just too imprecise to ever be able to do that even with seven years of data. So I think it's a matter of thinking about how to use this information in a responsible way. And I think designing the perfect teacher evaluation system is probably beyond the scope of I'm not gonna come up with in the next 30 seconds. But I think there are sort of clear tensions between flexibility and transparency. So you think about a lot of these valuation systems that are being developed today that are 50% value added and 30% principal observations and 20% expert evaluations. To me they look like a bureaucratic solution for a bureaucratic public education system. If we're not willing to trust principles to make these sorts of decisions. And these data suggests that maybe we should be careful about putting that trust in them. When they had opportunities to respond, they didn't. So if we're not gonna put that trust in them then we need to have some kind of bureaucratic check all the boxes evaluation system that's gonna produce dumb outcomes some of the time. It's gonna make mistakes. It's gonna make different kinds of mistakes than we made before though. In the past we never got rid of anyone who we shouldn't have. But we also never got rid of anyone we should have. So clearly if we implement some kind of valuation system that bears some relationship to effectiveness we are now going to make fewer of the mistakes that we made in the past which was keeping people who should have gone. But we're gonna make more of the mistakes that we never made in the past. We're gonna get rid of people by mistake. So I think there are real challenges in managing these trade-offs between something that's fair to teachers that still makes it an attractive profession and at the same time making it a profession that's more responsive to quality than it's been previously. I'm wondering how much the results might look different particularly for the very first graph with the teachers leaving the teaching market. If we were looking at people who had background in an education degree versus people with degrees in other fields, a non-traditional certification route, whatever. Because I can see a person on that margin making the decision, okay I have this education degree. I don't think I do well in the labor market. Your results show they would but they believe they wouldn't. That's a person who ends up on the principal or on the reading coach track. The person who has a degree that they believe would give them value in the outside labor market. They're the person who leaves and winds up with the increase in wages. So I don't know if you have anything on that. Yeah, it's a great question. It would be interesting, we haven't looked at it. It'd be interesting to look at it to the extent we can. The key limitation of the Florida data in this regard is that they only indicate the college attended by teachers for those that went to a public university in the state and then we'd have the major for those teachers and only since 1995. So the share of this group of, depending on how many years we need to look at, but five to 20,000 teachers that we'd have that information for is smaller. But I think it would be worth looking at for those for whom we can do it. So I had a sort of question about the earnings announced in the chapter. I was very surprised that it was so striking how different this is. So did you, or could you be, could you basically look at what industries and what jobs you're going to, particularly industry, I imagine? Can that be used to say anything about what actually we are measuring when we're measuring value added? And I'm sorry, people in other context. So I ever said value added is sort of your ability to produce test scores. But what does that mean if you go and work in business? What skill does that have? Right, right. It's a great question. I don't think it's something we can get up particularly well with these data. We do, from the UI data, have the NAICS codes. So we have a couple, I think we have a table in the paper. Looking at that, there aren't any numbers on that that really jump out at you. So most people stay in the public schools. And the results I showed you are for the people who do not stay in public education. So the kinds of categories therein are a very small number in private schools, health services, professional services. And it's just sort of a few here and there. It's not like oh they all go and become into one category. So it's hard to know what to make of that because the categories are pretty broad and they're sort of spread out across them. So it would be nice to know what it is. Is it their ability to work towards this goal of improving the test score? Is it just something, some general cognitive skill? It would be really nice if we had something like SAT scores or just some general measure of teachers' skills just to see whether it's a piece of that that's related to value added that's driving this or it's something independent of that. So I don't know. With doing this, but I would just be curious to see if you sort of split the sample into students or into teachers that went into industries that are I think in some way kind of related to education or at least the skills required of teaching versus people that went into completely unrelated sectors. If you saw the same kind of earnings impact of value added. Yes, a good idea. We should see. So what industries would, so private schools obviously would be related. Yeah, right, that's a good idea. Right, right, that's a good idea. So the sort of standard labor economics model of earnings over the work life or that when you first get out of school, employers don't know who's productive and who isn't, all you have is where they went to school. But over time you learn about people's productivity and you might think that information starts to percolate and that principles talk to each other and so forth. So I'm wondering if you see any trajectory in the sorting. If you look at where people were gonna find out or eventually good workers start, do you then see over time they're sorting into jobs that are on some measure more desirable and earnings are not gonna be the only thing just because earnings are so compressed in this sector.  One question might be what's the rank look like? Does it look like people are starting to rank by what their value added is? And the second is if you did some sort of index of the desirability of a job. I mean teachers seem to have a sense of what's a tough place to work and what's a more desirable place to work. And if we use that observed distribution we use that to sort of add on to the earnings measure, some measure of the non-financial returns to different jobs and see if we see the better teachers are ending up in those places. So within education or outside? Or both? Within education. So within education if you look at, a lot of this movement is to other schools. After by the fifth year there's more people that have moved to a different school that are in the same school but are still teachers. So if you look at the characteristics of those schools teachers are moving to schools with higher average test scores with fewer disadvantaged kids and the like. Even though the difference, the changes in salary aren't that big. Is that by the teachers? No. So it seems to, I mean, well everyone moved to the better schools. So I guess that the story is that new people start out in the worst schools, right? And then as people retire and leave the better schools with better just meaning, you know, more desirable at working conditions, you could have some kind of movement like that. So in a, this is updated but in the earlier version in the published version of this paper, we look at that by sort of, I think we do thirds of value added because it's a relatively small number of teachers. If anything it looks like there's bigger differences for the least effective teachers in terms of the changes. But it's not, the evidence isn't that compelling. The story really is that everyone is making moves like that and it's not just one group and not another. I guess I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about the magnitudes of actually maybe the next slide. I mean, you're sort of saying, I mean, your punchline was that there isn't a huge difference, but I guess I don't know what a big difference would be in this context given how much measurement error there is about with value added. I mean, is the difference between 26, you could say 26 and 22 are pretty similar or you could say there's 4 percentage point difference and 4% over 22 is 25% or something. I don't know, I guess I didn't know what to expect on what would be a big or small difference between the groups. Right, I think you're right that it is complicated by measurement error. So, I mean, the way I think about this is so a lot of some of the previous literature wouldn't show you, wouldn't look at this. They would say the difference is 4 percentage points and oh look, we thought that the top people were gonna be leaving in droves but they're actually more likely to stay. Great, so if there weren't measurement error and I was the principal of the school or I was, this is for the state, I was the state superintendent in Florida, I think I would wanna see big differences, right? I would wanna see the top teacher staying at high rates and the bottom teachers staying at much lower rates. How much I should expect to sort of compress what I would like based on measurement error and value added, I think is a sort of harder adjustment to make. But I mean, my gut is more than this but it's not based on much. So, a lot of your policy implications and a lot of what you presented really focuses on the top and the bottom. What does your research mean for the average teacher, the teacher in the middle that's not at risk of leaving or staying or being in a high stakes or low stakes classroom or grade? That's a great question. So, I've sort of talked about teacher quality as this immutable thing and of course that's wrong, right? So, it's an oversimplification. And clearly you want people have opportunities to get better and I think one of the real problems of some of these new evaluation systems is providing targeted feedback and providing opportunities to get better. There's a nice paper by John Tyler and a colleague looking at the implementation of a evaluation system in I think Cincinnati and they find that teachers who get evaluated under this, not just you give them a value added score but they're observed by these master teachers and they get targeted feedback that it actually has significant impacts on the quality of their own teaching. So, that's a piece that's really been left out of this. I think by focusing on the top and bottom you can kind of say, well, the top people are already good so we definitely want to hold on to them and the bottom people, quartile, maybe include some teachers who just need some help and some support but probably also include some people who just aren't cut out for this. So, we want to see differences there but I think you're absolutely right about the need to think not just about hiring and firing but about training and giving folks opportunities for improvement. Ever broke the norm of no double dipping, so. This is, another thing I found interesting in your talk was that you emphasized some of this behavior or what these patterns are not behavior that are constrained and that strikes me as given my personal experience, not my research experience as being valid in the sense that, and this is at the end of one but it is supporting your results so you might take it. The, by far the worst teacher that two of my children ever had was a teacher in a selective private school which was, we were paying more than taxpayer money to send them to. I've heard about this for the rest of my life, I mean, so far, but the principles of that school even though this individual actually endangered my children in things that she did was, had been retained by the school and I can't believe that I was the first parent whoever was over the top about her and it wasn't just that she endangered them but she misunderstood acceleration and she was a science teacher and she patronized me when I tried to bring this up to her saying that if only I understood calculus she could really explain to me why she was right. This was just kind of, as you can tell, 10 years later I'm still totally infuriated but the suggestion is that it's not, and I guess the flip side again, this is a very different circumstance, there was no union protecting her, some other forces were. The flip side is that best school experienced by same two children had was in a public school where the teachers were all unionized so it does suggest that, I mean, to me, it suggests there are lots of forces at work that go beyond the literal. The show that Gephardt was all unionized. Yes, yes, and I think that's another message here that I'm not trying to say there's no effect there at unions but I think sometimes at least the public rhetoric suggests that it's there to culprits and if we only would have removed them that wouldn't be true and that doesn't correspond to my anecdotal experience and it doesn't correspond to your quantitative results. You can't have it. We can't require it. Nice, nice, jeez, all right. So in that blank, oh, so here I wonder if, so education is one of the few places, if not the only place as far as I can tell where we have these fine measures of productivity and so we can show these shocking pictures. Has anyone done this in any other industry? Athletics, athletics. Athletics, great. Okay. How about something else that matters for my social welfare? The military. The military, okay, so and what's the evidence there? And in the military? And I wonder if this is possible in healthcare where we actually are developing some fairly good measures of quality across doctors, HMOs and so forth. But I just wonder if teaching is getting beat up on because the researchers have done such a good job of pulling the data together and that a lot of this stuff, for example, is being attributed to the particular structure of employment and education but perhaps it's true in all sorts of employment. The Peter Principle was written 40 years ago and it wasn't about education. And so I would love to see people applying these tools to other industries so we can start to get some sense of whether it is about the institutional structure of teaching or perhaps using, could we do cross-state analyses of this sort in which there are institutional differences across states in some of the constraints that we're hypothesizing. I don't know, in Florida there are places that are where unions are stronger than other places. Tenure laws differ. Do we see that this sort of stuff varies across contexts? Well, I guess one important point of context for Florida during this period is during most of the period covered by these data, Florida was implementing a statewide class size reduction policy, so they were hiring people. So there may have been constraints on their ability to get rid of people simply because they needed more embodies and just couldn't afford to pay attention to stuff like this. But at the same time, I think some similar findings have been found in the Texas data, so it's not like these findings are so much of an outlier.


Sales Learning Curve. As the entrepreneurs products are new and developing, emerging and shaping and reshaping. So, there is a specific learning curve through which the salespeople learn by themselves about the requirement of the market and keep shaping and reshaping their presentations and bringing new ideas, new knowledge from the market. So, to develop customer relationships, falling steps are usually required. The ability to listen to customer objections and understand issues about the product, presentation or pricing etc. That is a fluid situation where nothing is concrete. So, the salespeople go to the market, give presentation, talk about the product and maybe on the daily basis or on a regular basis, they have to keep some new elements into the presentation or the question which has been asked by the potential buyers, they had to bring the answers to those questions into the presentation as well. So, they should also be having the ability to changes in presentations for customers and products on a daily basis and ability to make changes required in product features, schedules and functions. So, the characteristics of the product, the features of the product are also possible when you talk about your product, when you present the potential customers, what are the features and what products can be produced, there are some issues that are necessary for the product to be changed. So, this information, because the salesperson is working as a broker, the information is given to the production team. Accordingly, there can be changes in product features or the characteristics that you have decided. Sale learning starts through experimentation with different market segments and prototypes and getting valuable customer feedback. The product that you have made, the sales team with the prototype, the venturist customers who initially want to use the product, you show them the product along with that, you show them the functioning of that product and it is quite possible that they may suggest some more changes or they may be satisfied with the product. So, discuss with customers to validate the product. The initial customers, the initial potential customers and the sales team should be satisfied with the validation and satisfaction of the product regarding the usage of the product and if they want to use it, they should validate it. So, in the validation stage, if enough paying customers are not found in the selected segment, start over again to identify and rediscover unsolved problems. In the initial stage, we need customers who buy the product and pay for the product's sales procedure. So, when we are showing our potential venturist customers the product and convincing them to adopt and acquire this product in their production process, for example, we want to see how many of them are ready to adopt the product and to include it in their production process. If their number is sufficient and our targeted sales are in accordance with that, then it is a win-win situation. If it is not, then we have to sit down again and rethink or maybe in some cases redesign and try to find out maybe a new segment, a sub-segment who can really adopt this product in the start and so that we could have handsome sales proceeds. So, the moment sales accelerate, you need to expand and build a sales force. Initially, in initial stages, when we do not get the validation of the product, in initial stages when we do not get the sizeable customer base, we won't be spending a lot on our marketing and sales efforts. Rather, the initial sales force and the marketing team are limited, we try to work with them. As soon as we see that sales are expanding and our segment is increasing and our sales proceeds are increasing, so this is the time to hire more people to market and sell the product in a better fashion to a bigger segment of customers.