Leading Off
1) The more layers they peel back of the TYC scandal onion, the more it looks like Gitmo or something. And this is the guy they brought in to reform the system. Good work, Dimitria Pope. “Pepper spray. You know, for kids.”
2) I wanna see Mrs. Leppert doing this. Awe. Some.
3) Why is it so many public school teachers — or at least, their lobbyists — are so averse to living in the real world and getting pay based on performance?
18 Comments to “Leading Off”
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In an ideal school, better teachers would have the tougher students, and those tougher students may not do as well as on tests as other students, who could have a lesser teacher. Should the lesser teachers (who have better students), be paid more for an “easier” job?
I agree that merit pay is a good idea (and I am married to a teacher), but it is more complicated than paying teachers strictly based on test results.
Agreed, Rev. This has always been my problem with merit pay. The best teachers should be teaching the toughest students. Merit pay should be based on the level of improvement that a student makes under the tutelage of that teacher. At the very least, this would require tracking test results for individual students from year to year.
Trey, if you want to live in a world where education is defined by the ability to pass standardized tests that have no releveance to actually being educated . . . then you are welcome to it. The reason that teacher’s rail against this form of pay based on performance is that they are still holding out hope that actual education can be resurrected as opposed to this pile cottage industry of standardized tests that have become the target as opposed to actual learning. Additionally, teaching is not like building widgets where the faster you go the more money you make.
Im sure any teacher would be glad for you to provide 18 Stepford Children, all clean and shiny, well rested, well fed, eager to learn every morning, without this one’s father having been put in jail last night, or that one having been beaten by a step-mother before she came to school, or these 5 with ADHD that the parents think will just go away the minute they walk into the classroom. And then do away with the 50 percent of the time spent on adminstrative tasks that have nothing to do with teaching and add to that adminstrators with a little backbone who will deal with kids that are exceedingly disruptive in the classroom and you. Then my friend, maybe teachers will be a little more ready to talk about pay for performance. In the meantime Trey, please go to the whiteboard and write one hundred times . . . “Dear boss, I’m quitting to become a teacher.”
Dear Teacher’s Spouse, right on, watched my wife working last night until after 10:00 p.m.
I get your point Trey, but as Teacher’s Spouse points out it’s very difficult to measure performance, especially with so many variables totally out of the teacher’s control. I suppose that’s true in other careers too. Now, while we’re at it, why don’t we introduce merit pay for politicians?
Along with merit pay for politicians, how about we start that for police officers as well. The DPD officers who patrol Preston Hollow have somehow made that place much safer to live than South Dallas, so they should get raises.
When there are so many variables at play, you can’t base a teacher’s value on his students’ test scores.
These anti-merit-pay arguments all sound very logical and convincing, but in the end they all come down to this: The system is so very complicated, it’s probably best just to leave it as it is. Total rubbish–and a big reason why, when it comes to education, the Chinas and Indias of the world seem destined to clean our clocks.
“The system is so very complicated, it’s probably best just to leave it as it is.”
Really, Glenn? You’re gonna to try to slip that massive strawman past everyone in broad daylight?
If you applied this system to the pResident of the US of A, we could save around a trillion bucks.
Jackson
Actually, most responses have so many built-in assumptions it’s like they’re answers to questions on a different test.
So long as we’re locked into the 19th Century Prussian, government monopoly model that presumes education is something other than a service, we’ll never see any true change or serious improvement.
I’m with Rev. Hayter’s first comment. There’s nothing wrong with merit pay in concept, the problem comes in defining “merit” by tying it to testing. I grew up in a family of teachers and there are plenty of other ways to measure “merit.” As BP suggests, one could attempt to measure the improvement of individual students from year to year. One could also measure things like preparation (are lesson plans complete and timely submitted); involvement in school activities/events; etc. Administrators might even observe teachers from time to time to determine how well those teachers are performing (subjective, yes, but so many “merit” evaluations necessarily are).
BP, I’m disturbed by your statement that the best teachers should be teaching the toughest students. Who, then, should be teaching the smartest students — the worst teachers?
how about instead of meaningless test scores, you let students (graduating only) vote on which teachers deserve merit pay. or are high standardized test scores more important than making a positive impact on somebody’s life?
Daniel, in many schools teachers are assigned precisely as per your question. Those perceived as the “best” teachers get the kids who need the most help; the kids who need less help get those teachers who are not so highly regarded. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are the “worst,” it may simply indicate that they may have the least experience, or lesser qualifications. That’s really not such a bad system, if you think about it. The “best” teachers may well lift those students out of the remedial ranks; doing the opposite could well condemn them to continued struggles.
Well John, it’s a Catch-22. On the other hand, it seems excellence would be better fostered by challenging the bright kids. The system you describe seems to “condemn” them to mediocrity.
Trey that 19th Century Prussian, government monopoly model got us to the moon and created the internet…. something which will be highly questionable in the future given our eagerness to teach kids how to take THE TEST as opposed to educating them… the real problem is that education reform has made things worse, not better.
As to your claim of built-in assumptions, you must be lining up with the people who say the fix is not to throw more money at it…. if education were adequately funded in the first place I would agree, we have done a pitiful job of funding education from the very beginning. The only thing that is less of a funding priority in Texas is mental health, but we’ve got plenty of money to build prisons.
Daniel: I don’t think so. Bright, self-motivated kids tend to do well even under less than ideal circumstances. The reverse — giving the excellent teachers to the excellent kids, and not so hot teachers to the not so smart kids — almost certainly assures an ever-widening gap between the excellent and the not so much.
Teacher’s spouse, the reliance on that dated model is like thinking all businesses should follow the 1948 IBM model. There’s just no need given available resources, technology, new organizational paradigms and a little free market innovation. Horace Mann’s day is way past.
Trey I have to tell you that new organizational paradigms and free market innovation have not moved us ahead. When we let free market innovators get involved what we get is No Child Left Behind which has been a miserable failure because it was just one more unfunded mandate.
The problem is that too many like you would rather buy into the false notion that our edcuation system is terribly broken as opposed to looking at how well it works in so many areas… or failing to demand that the education bureaucracy actually put some money into making the effort to address the drop out problem as opposed to noodling the books to hide it.