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Merit Pay for Teachers?Posted Friday, September 11, 2009, at 10:35 AM
President Obama has made public statements favoring merit pay for teachers, even though many in the Democratic Party are opposed to this practice. One of the best lists of the pros and cons of the issue that I have found is at http://k6educators.about.com/od/assessme.... My question is how we implement a merit pay system for teachers, if we ever have the funds, in such a way that the practice would accentuate and reinforce the pros, both from the reference and from the commenter's own opinions, and minimize or eliminate the cons.
As to why, I'm going to quote my grandmother. "A good teacher is worth more than their weight in gold, but a poor teacher ain't worth spit." So, how do we sort them out? Will the sorting destroy the "team effort" that is needed in education? I have been talking to teachers within the Clay Community Schools Corporation since the early 1990s. I have yet to meet one that did not appear genuinely concerned about the student. I have heard of some, secondhand, and I know that they must exist, but I have never met one of these "poor" teachers in a situation where they revealed themselves. I did have an incident where a teacher said something that she should not have said to a student in front of a class, but she was apologetic, realized that she had made a mistake, and I realized that the student had pushed her to her limit before it happened. Teachers are human. Over the years, I have recommended several teachers for WTHI's Golden Apple Award. If I recall correctly, one of them actually received it. Great for recognition, but that award and $1.25 is still what it would take to buy a cup of coffee at most places. Merit pay is a more tangible reward. In the comments on another of my blog entries, a discussion began of some of the things that teachers are said to have done that would not be tolerated in any other workplace. I'm not going to say that they have or have not happened, but it is reasonable to expect that an employee show up, be on the job, and be doing the job. If a teacher is not doing these things, they are a poor employee and need to be disciplined, as would an employee anywhere. How do you sort out a "poor" teacher who appears to be a "good" employee, a person who is always there, always working, but just cannot teach? Do we have any? One of the comments made has been that we do not teach "paper" students. We do have paper teachers and you will find them in most classrooms, they are called textbooks. Between them and the students, we have a living breathing soul who translates and reinforces what is written in the text and who adapts the lesson to the class or student. How do we rate that person's effectiveness, given that every student is a unique individual whose only indication that they did not understand was not even a raised hand and an asked question but only a change in facial expression that was a signal to the teacher that more explanation was needed? How do you rate a teacher from the student's standardized test scores, even by comparing scores that show improvement over a period of time? Those scores are "snapshots" of the student's knowledge and can decline with a headache on test day the same way that a photograph can be ruined by an eye blink. While I passed Algebra in high school and my first year of college, some twenty-five years later, I never understood what it was about until my second-year professor made a statement that none of my previous instructors had never made that made it make sense to me. I don't know if what she said is even true, it doesn't appear to be from any definition I can find, but it helped me understand what I was doing instead of just going through the motions. So, of the four or five instructors I've had, which is the best teacher? Is it the ones that taught me to go through the motions or the one who helped me understand? While I can isolate that person in this instance, I cannot tell you which of my son's teachers brought him to the realization that the words of a sentence transmit an idea. I know that he now knows this, but I cannot isolate the person to reward for him having the knowledge. Who do we expect to rate our teacher's performance? Most likely, the principal is who would be looked to rate the teachers they WORK WITH! Another possibility would be a peer-rating system. In any case, the rating would not be the deciding factor, it would be a preliminary qualifier for consideration by a, hopefully, objective decision maker or board of decision makers. How do we designate that person or body in a school system, or even from the area served by the corporation, full of friends, neighbors, and relatives so that there is no way for a person to lobby for a reward and no way for personal prejudice or favoritism to play a part in a decision? While I would dearly love to give the outstanding teacher the reward they so richly deserve, I just do not see how it can be done. What Say You? Comments Showing comments in chronological order [Show most recent comments first] |
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Leo: I can only speak from local experience, merit pay and/or more effort on disciplinary action for inferior work habits are a way to improve education with time and not money investment. we could do it here and it would increase learning opportunities for students and provide better moral for the good teachers in the corporation so the way they are treated would be different from those teachers who are inferior;especially when a good teacher get a student who was prepared properly, they will most likely have to put in extra effort to bring them up to speed.
Now someone is likely to come on this forum and say that Clay has wonderful teachers who do a wonderful job...Yes very true BUT like in every work environment there are those who pull their weight, those who don't and those who pull more than their share. It's time we face that fact and fix the problem. It's a missed opportunity and is perpetually cheating both the students and the good teachers.
Syllibi need to be documented and broken into weekly lesson plans that include all what is supposed to be taught in that semester and teachers held to it. I don't think it should be rated on students grades and test scores but do think that like in colleges, some student evaluations should be looked at by teacher's supervisors and when multiple people have the same complaint, further investigation should be made. Now I am not saying that a student can rail on a teacher because they don't like them, but an obscan sheet with questions about course material coverage compared to what the course outline [that needs to be handed out at start of course]indicates, and issues about how a teacher addresses a question in class, how frequently teacher leaves room during class, etc etc are all big issues that are not being dealt with. I would even be happy to give a hand in creating one so it is careful not to include personality conflict issues but in certain cases issues of gender/religous/sexual orientation/nationality discrimination have also been issues. Not always initiated by the teacher but not corrected when it goes on in classroom.
The teacher is the mentor. they set the tone in the class. If the teacher does not have good work habits and is not performing their job, the kids loose out many fold. 1] They don't learn as much course material as they should be leaning, and 2] they are not seeing good work habits in their mentor.3] They are taking away from other teachers their time for teaching course material as they are constantly having to play catch up with part of the class.
If this were done, merit pay can work. If it is not done properly it's a waste.
Some of what Jenny suggests might work at the high school level, but I fail to see how to have students comment on the performance of an elementary school teacher in such a way to derive any factual information about performance from the report.
Given a sufficient quantity of information, a graph of that information will match a probability curve, the "bell" curve. How do we implement a rating system that rewards those teachers who are determined to be on the far right of that curve and improve the far left? How do we determine fact from opinion as to the teaching performance of a specific teacher? Opinions vary from day to day and would vary from reports from different people daily. How do we find the facts?
How do you prove that education is effective? I sat at a school board meeting when the report was given, last year, on full day kindergarten was given. In describing the situation, it was stated that many children in the corporation start kindergarten behind their peers on the state or national level yet make significant gains even in classrooms of over twenty-five students. My thought was that that was great, but what would have been the case if the classroom had had only fifteen students as is recommended by several organizations interested in the improvement of education. This doesn't even address the effectiveness of the teacher in that classroom, but poses a problem of comparing an effective teacher in an overcrowded classroom to a marginally effective teacher in a small class.
Over the past decade, I have heard, in my opinion, some outstanding elementary teachers complain of a lack of time to spend one-on-one with students, yet in the corporate data our student to teacher ratio always seem to indicate a value between 17 to 1 and 18 to 1. Most of our elementary classrooms consistently have more than that number of students, but also have teaching aides to help the teachers. So, is it a lack of effectiveness on the part of the teacher, lack of time due to lack of staff, or the caliber of student that that particular teacher received to work with that determines the outcome, and that doesn't consider in any way the major factors of parental involvement or the student's determination to succeed? This question continues in every classroom in every grade throughout the course of a student's attendance.
The question of how to determine what is meritorious educational performance so that it can be rewarded from facts that are isolated from changing or conflicting opinions and that are unaffected by internal politics or any semblance of favoritism and/or nepotism and those teachers who wish to improve to reap this reward will know what is expected of them still remains unanswered?
I still contend that there needs to be a minimal amount of material covered per period of time so as to live up to what is supposed to be taught in each course/grade. This all needs to be kept on file and sent home so both administrators and parents of those younger children can keep track [if they care] of what their kids are supposed to be exposed to as compared to what material is actually being covered. Granted all the over crowding does not help but if data shows that less gets covered in those larger classes, aides or no aides, it's obvious that the class is too big for the needs of the children in it. I think aides are dangerously being over used as a budget stretcher and it is lowering the time the teacher has face to face with students. While many aides are well meaning and hard workers, they just don't have the knowledge that is needed many times and quite frequently in this locale at least their English skills are quite poor. This does not give the student who is trying to learn grammar a good example to follow if the aides are not catching and correcting their spoken mistakes. The student needs to hear sentences spoken correctly over and over in order for them to become the norm. The level of spoken English here is so poor that even some of the teachers and administrators leave out the "to be" in many sentences and actually don't realize how UN educated they sound. I believe one of our graduates went on to teach English and now is here repeating what he learned most likely from a well meaning aide to his students.
Aides are a band aid and really do not cover the shortage of teachers. They need "to be" replaced by bona fide teachers.
Merit pay or no, the local problem goes much deeper. There is not a community support of literacy and education here as the "grandpa" generation here made a good living in yesterday's world of farming and mining. They don't realize that this is a new world with new rules and to be equipped to play, a much higher level of education is needed by ALL the players. There is competition for the garage mechanic position as much as there is for the manager of the local stores and fast food restaurants. When times such as these are finding college graduates taking positions at McDonalds, where are the high school graduates going to go?
Each preschooler needs that weekly pile of books from the library in order to find the one type that will spark their interest in reading and then later in learning about other subjects so that they will stay in school and be all they can be. Each teacher needs to be on their toes so that each student has every opportunity to go as high as they possibly can.
Our academic ceiling is just too low compared to surrounding communities and this is not simply because poor teachers are not dealt with. It's because the public citizen does not consider education a priority when they vote or go into their pocket to pay for it. This is putting their heads in the sand however as when a community is sub standard in education and literacy areas it also has a substandard socioeconomic level as fewer individuals and businesses want to come in and invest their funds into a community that gives such a poor return. The want their kids to have that higher academic ceiling, that access to that new pile of books each week from the library, the good roads, the building and zoning standards that protect their investment so there isn't a junk yard in the next yard. They want running water. they want a community that takes care of the earth and pushes recycling so those who are reluctant will pay a premium for NOT recycling.
This community has nice people in it but it is living in the past and the rest of the world is leaving them behind. There is nothing wrong with nostalgia but being in denial that more investment is needed is.
Until the Clay Community voters DEMAND that our schools be brought up to par with surrounding schools and they are willing to pay for it with their personal tax investment, I am convinced that nothing will change here and that merit pay will be a waste of money. The good teachers will gradually find better rewards elsewhere and the bell curve will move down farther and farther with each generation as those who DO get the message are not going to stay here and bring their kids up where it is such a battle to get them educated as in other areas.
Now several readers will really take offense to what I just wrote but if they look at property values and corporation test scores in surrounding counties as well as the commitment from the taxpayers to have those things, they will not be able to deny it. Have to face the problem before you can correct it.