The naivety of teacher merit pay arguments.

[Lost in CT]

I think opponents of teacher merit pay are honestly going about this the wrong way.

The people in favor of merit pay tend to be the consumers... ie the parents of school age children.

These consumers have their own 12 year experience with the public school system as well as dealing with their children's teachers.

There opinion is based on their own experiences. They have dealt with teachers with poor language skills, horrific grammar and on the sleeve emotional issues. They naturally feel that these teachers, if they should be employed at all, should receive less rewards than the teachers who are more competent.

The counter argument is that there is no way to measure teacher performance (a debatable argument at best) and any way to measure it is unfair to some teachers.

Well guess what. In every company I have worked people get promotions and raises. These judgment calls are often unfair and sometimes senseless. I myself for many years have been in a position to hire and fire people and much of it honestly is gut feeling and guesswork. That's real life.

Saying that a principal or superintendent may use favoritism to give out merit bonus is simply stating the obvious. Thats how other organizations do it as well. Are teachers so divorced from reality that they find this shocking?

Perfection is the enemy of progress... If you are against merit pay for teachers you honestly have to find a more compelling argument then some people may get raises they don't deserve while others may not get rewarded.

I think teachers should make more money and have smaller class sizes... I also think they should be tested for basic language and grammar skills (among other things) and be let go if they are not up to snuff.

As for merit pay I believe it should be up to the principal, the school board and the teachers union on how it is distributed.

[ananda]

1. The relative merits of teacher merit pay.

Picture a snarky smiley here.

OK. If you get the bonus pay, you love it ...

If you don't get it, the whole policy sucks.

[polmaven]

2. Well,another argument, apparently,

is what I was just "accused" of. Evidently, because I have a Hillary avatar, I am a DLCer, therefore I am in management and/or in the upper-class, ruling over the "little people".

The arrogance of that is absolutely astonishing to me!

[Sarah Ibarruri]

3. When kids aren't learning, why do Americans always blame teachers?

The problem is not in the teachers. In Spain, there's no such thing as teacher merit pay, nor do parents blame teachers when their kids refuse to do homework, spend no time studying, sit playing games all day, whine, goof off, etc.

If your kid is a disaster, and you are allowing him to goof off so that it takes a F 2x4 and merit pay for a teacher to SMASH information into the spoiled brat's brain, it's not the teacher's fault. It's the parents' fault and SOCIETY's fault for exposing kids to shit on TV, shit in computer games, shit in movies, shit in magazines, and giving them all kinds of equipment whose sole purpose is to goof off and learning nothing, like cell phones so they can text their asses off the whole time they're in class.

I don't have kids, but I CANNOT BELIEVE the shit parents allow their kids to do, watch, and get away with. It's a shock.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

15. Spain is ranked lower than the US in every category. (nt)

[Sarah Ibarruri]

52. Where are you gettting that? My brother's daughter came here to do 1 year and

she was 3 grades ahead of everyone else, and in Spain she's not what I'd call a genius. In fact, she's average there.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

53. I'm sorry, but I don't buy your anecdote.

There is far, far too much statistical evidence that proves you wrong. Go to www.oecd.org or nces.ed.gov/timss for further details.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

54. What specific section of that website are you referring to?

I'd like to look at what specific stats you have been guided by.

[KittyWampus]

57. when people point out there are crappy teachers, why do some INSIST there are none and it's not

a problem?

No, it's not the whole problem.

It's a fraction of it.

But pretending it isn't an issue. That's it has no import makes zero sense and actually works against teachers in general.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

61. Of course there are crappy teachers - there are crappy everythings everywhere

So what? Shall we put everyone on merit pay? What if everyone on DU had a job that involved merit pay ? Guaranteed, the proponents of merit pay for teachers would stfu faster than you can bat an eyelash. But it's easy to flap lips when it's not your salary being subjected to merit pay.

[brentspeak]

4. The key word in your post is "consumers"

The powers-that-be who have been pushing for "merit" pay have been deliberately pushing a corporate-management model for education. Parents of students are not "consumers"; they are parents. There is no merit pay or standardized testing in Finland, but it has the highest-rated public education system in the world.

[CTyankee]

47. Our society is vastly different from Finland's I would guess.

I don't think Finland has the enormous gap in wealth we have among their citizens. They have an homogenous society which we assuredly do not have. That, I think, counts for a great deal. When you have the same expectations from others as you do for yourselves you have an easier time keeping an educational system functioning well. Plus, with a great deal of government assistance and playing a much larger role, you have less decentralization and more "alikeness."

I am no expert on Finland but it just seems to me that homogeneity has a great deal to do with the success of their system. If everyone pretty much agrees on what is merit then you have a merit system already built in, right?

[mike_c]

5. merit pay plans erode solidarity, setting coworkers into competition with one another....

There is no place for that sort of thing in academia, IMO. Teaching, learning, and scholarship are at their best when they're cooperative enterprises.

Your corporate experience is simply not relevant in education, despite all the misguided attempts to force education into a corporate management model. Our primary "product" is opportunity. Until someone devises a way to accurately measure educators' and institutions' ability to provide learning opportunities, rather than students' cooperation and willingness to accept those opportunities, outcomes assessment and merit pay decisions will be distorted and unrealistic-- and the corporate management model cannot easily accommodate intangible outcomes in cost/benefit analysis.

We have had merit pay "incentive" systems in the California State University several times under several guises during my tenure here. They've never worked well-- and I say that as someone who benefited markedly from them-- and have always been opposed by our union and a majority of our faculty.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

14. There is no evidence whatsoever for your statement.

In fact, quite the opposite - teachers know that they are reliant on their colleagues to raise student performance. They don't teach in bubbles, so in order for them all to do their job better and achieve higher wages, they have to work together. It's flawed logic, at best, to say that merit pay erodes cooperation.

[mike_c]

16. nor is there any evidence that merit incentive programs improve...

...educational outcomes. None whatsoever.

My comments about eroding solidarity stem from a lengthy email exchange in my own department almost ten years ago, during which one senior faculty member offered to give up any merit increase offered to him in order to maintain equitability in compensation. I can't speak for others, of course, but that debate did occur in my department.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

18. How can there be evidence when it hasn't really been tried? (nt)

[mike_c]

20. it has been tried twice during my CSU tenure....

The first program was abbreviated PSSI and universally known as "pissy incentives." The second program, abbreviated FMI, was appropriately called the "F me" program. Here's what one of my colleagues had to say about them:

MERIT PAY:
Why It Seems Like a Good Idea
That’s Really a Bad Idea

By Susan Meisenhelder, CSU San Bernardino

(Insider’s Guide to Collective Bargaining, May 2005)

The caution that those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it
certainly seems appropriate as CFA and the CSU administration go to the table
to bargain a new contract. The collective groan from faculty heard when the CSU
Trustees approved bargaining proposals that included merit pay is a reminder of
just how strong faculty reaction to past merit pay programs has been.

Significantly, the unusually strong faculty consensus holds about the two very
different merit programs we have had in the CSU during the last decade. The
PSSI program, in place from 1995-99, offered very large awards to a very small
number of people and gave the administration total control over final decisions
with no avenue of redress for a faculty member who felt wronged. It was hated
because it left out so many obviously meritorious faculty and because it so baldly
made administrators the sole arbiters of merit.

Under the more recent FMI program, more faculty were able to receive awards
(because they were smaller) and faculty could appeal negative decisions to a
faculty panel whose decision was binding on the administration. Even these
significant improvements did not result in positive faculty feelings.

What to make of such a negative reaction from people who’ve committed their
lives to a profession driven by “merit”? The reasons are many and complex.
A significant number of faculty have been opposed in principle to merit pay as it
has been framed by the CSU administration. Many bristled at the “businessmodel”
rhetoric the administration used to legitimate merit pay in a pre-Enron era.
Others found the competition central to CSU’s version of merit pay offensive. The
CSU has never agreed to fund awards for all faculty deemed to be meritorious
(as many institutions do); rather, it has said, “Here’s the merit pot of money now
compete for it.” For significant numbers of faculty, this notion of merit pay
threatens the very heart of the university as a collegial, professional environment.

Other faculty in the CSU, however, are not opposed to the concept of merit pay
and have pointed out (rightly) that promotion, for example, is merit pay. Still,
many in this group have argued (as has much research) that merit pay can only
be successful in the CSU after faculty salaries overall have been brought up to
an acceptable level. Those who have argued in the past that the CPEC salary
gap (the lag between our salaries and those of comparable universities) should
be closed before merit pay is considered would undoubtedly make the same
argument today since that gap has widened considerably of late.

Finally, often the most vocal opponents of merit pay are now found among CSU
faculty who initially approached the prospect with optimism: they knew they were
working hard, and they were confident they would be rewarded. After 10 years,
two programs, countless hours of faculty and administrative time to develop
procedures and evaluate faculty (yet again!), many in this group were
disillusioned by experiences with the many “devils” that lurk in any merit pay
system.

What faculty learned is how much more complicated merit pay is in practice than
in theory. Questions like “What is merit?” seem relatively straightforward, for
example, in the context of retention, promotion, and tenure; since everyone who
is “meritorious” can be rewarded, there is no need to compare different kinds of
achievement. In our merit pay systems, those comparisons were required, and
as faculty discovered, problematic: there was a clear trend, for example, towards
rewarding accomplishments that were readily quantifiable rather than activities
like superior teaching or advising.

“What is merit” is, of course, closely connected with “Who decides merit?” and
this question has sparked some of the hottest disagreements between the
administration and faculty. At the bargaining table, the administration has argued
for administrative control over merit pay decisions, and faculty have consistently
felt that such control undermined shared governance and had the potential to
reward faculty who carried a dean’s agenda rather than their own professional
one. Despite improvements in providing checks and balances on administrative
control of merit in the FMI program, there were still countless stories of politics,
rather than professional merit, appearing to be the deciding factor in awards.
At the end of the day, when funding for FMIs was finally eliminated, there
seemed to be no faculty member (or campus administrator involved in
implementing our programs) prepared to say that merit pay had helped improve
faculty “performance” or made the university a better place in any way.

What we heard instead was: faculty demoralized by fractured relationships within
departments and strained relations between faculty and administrators; faculty
frustrated at the enormous time commitments involved in careful administration
of merit pay on top of an already mushrooming workload; faculty dismayed that
they didn’t feel like they had been rewarded even if they got money; and faculty
finally convinced that the entire exercise had never really been about “merit” at
all.

Administrative actions that resulted in grievances being filed afterwards only
increased this cynicism. Perhaps the most telling involved a widespread practice
of denying SSIs to faculty who received FMIs and were later promoted. As CFA
argued, such a practice actually punished those who had been deemed
meritorious and was a clear violation of a contract provision that reads “the award
of a Faculty Merit Increase...shall not diminish a faculty member’s eligibility for
remaining Service Salary Increases.” (Art 31.11) Grievances are now before
arbitrators to remedy this blatant violation, but the hundreds of affected faculty
around the system have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars over their careers
and gained one more demoralizing, distasteful experience with merit pay.

As is the case with this last example, bad experiences with and bad feelings
about merit pay are common to faculty who didn’t receive awards and to those
who did. That fact alone should tell us something and it should tell the Chancellor
something as well. It’s not clear at this point what he plans to propose on merit
pay, but the faculty consensus about where we’ve been must surely play a major
role in where we go from here.

Prepared by the California Faculty Association
400 Capitol Mall, Suite 1950
Sacramento, CA 95814
916-441-4848
www.calfac.org

[Bill McBlueState]

26. thanks for the post

That's a really good distillation of the problems associated with merit pay from an organization that tried it twice.

I'll admit I was a little naive about the issue before the traction it's gotten on DU this week.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

33. First of all, at the postsecondary level, there is no clear way to establish merit through data.

Students do not take even a remotely standardized set of courses, so I'm not sure how merit pay would even work at that level. We have no adequate means for comparing how schools perform against one another, much less how their faculties perform. So if your argument is at that level, I would argue that we need to find a way to establish accountability at the postsecondary level first that goes beyond asinine U.S. News rankings.

That merit pay would fall entirely apart at the postsecondary level due to these reasons is not exactly unforeseen, however, there are more than enough "merit" based portions of higher education that exist currently, such as obtaining tenure. I don't see faculty beating down the door to eliminate those kinds of merit systems either, typically because the faculty with any kind of say-so already have achieved these things and don't care about people like adjunct faculty that try to make a living on meager pay.

Ultimately though, we're discussing merit pay at the elementary and secondary education levels. If done properly, there are very clear ways you can appropriately measure the value a teacher adds to a student. Again, it has to be done properly, and that's where I join with the teachers - in many cases, those systems are not currently in place. They should be instituted, however, not because of merit pay but because they are more informative and diagnostic in determining where a student's achievement level is and what they need going forward.

[mike_c]

40. I'm simply not convinced that elementary, secondary, and postsecondary ed...

...are so different that wholly different management models are appropriate for them. Frankly, I like the arguments that elementary and secondary institutions should be run MORE like postsecondary schools, rather than less. I'm also dubious about the reality of being able to objectively measure educational outcomes-- accountability and outcomes assessment have become corporate buzz words in education, but I don't think they map well onto the shifting playing field of intellectual development. Maybe they can be applied to standardized lists of knowledge content, but even that's shaky-- we can only assess what students are willing to be forthright about-- and in any event, they totally miss the mark for assessing intellectual development beyond content acquisition, which is far more important, IMO.

Anyway, I've got to run to class. :hi:

[readmoreoften]

17. The evidence is that the idea is repugnant in every top tier university in American on those very

grounds. Coming from another academic, Mike is correct.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

19. So the idea should be discredited because the people that have eroded our education standing...

don't like it?

That's like saying capping CEO pay for bailout execs is a bad idea because they don't like it. Where do you stand on that issue?

[mike_c]

21. "the people that have eroded our education standing...?"

Now your agenda becomes clear-- blame the teachers for systemic failure of American education.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

25. No, I blame the system of academia for not tending to matters themselves.

Teachers are a part of that, for sure. They share responsibility with university presidents, superintendents, principals, administrators, chief state school officers, and pretty much everyone outside of the janitors and lunchladies.

However, if you want to dispute the erosion of our education standing, I can toss out PISA, TIMSS, dropping graduation rates, persistent achievement gaps, stagnant growth in obtainment of bachelors and advanced degrees, and a host of other metrics to prove the point. Feel free to attempt it.

And if you can't blame the people, I don't know, actually in charge of the education system for our poor standard in all of those metrics, whom, exactly, can you blame?

[Jakes Progress]

22. Way to toss out some good old republican

talking points here on DU. Gingrich would like it.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

29. Is Obama on Gingrich's side, too?

I've said nothing he hasn't.

[mike_c]

30. and Obama is equally wrong about this issue, IMO....

As I've pointed out up thread, my university-- the largest university in the world-- has tried merit pay twice since the mid-1990s, three times if you count failed collective bargaining attempts to shove it down our thoats, and it simply has not worked in any measurable sense that I'm aware of. It has been broadly reviled by the faculty, who stood to benefit from it but rejected it nonetheless.

Maybe merit pay makes sense for assembly line workers. It doesn't make sense in education. Obama is flat wrong on this issue.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

34. If you agree that Obama says it too, please apologize for putting me in line with Gingrich.

It was very offensive, unless you want to call Obama Gingrich as well.

[mike_c]

35. huh?

Perhaps you should go back and re-read my comments. I have been nothing but courteous and respectful to you.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

36. My apologies - thought you were the one that essentially calling me Gingrich.

Got confused there - and I apologize.

[mike_c]

37. no worries....

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this issue.

[Jakes Progress]

51. You weren't called Gingrich.

I said Gingrich would like what you said. I heard him say the same things about colleges.

My comment was based on the standard neocon rhetoric that colleges were ruining America, educators lacked the sense to be businessmen, teachers and their ideas are the base of all the faults in American society, blah, blah, blah. Standard fare at the country club.

Later in the thread you say that Obama has said the same thing. I have not heard him say that college professors have eroded our educational standing (whatever that means). That idea was yours here. Not the president's. My comment was that it was standard boilerplate republican claptrap and that Gingrich has followed those talking points. Both of my statements are true.

[aikoaiko]

60. At my university, all we have is merit pay and it works fine.

In fact the biggest problem with merit pay is that there isn't enough of it. When the top performers and lowest performers get similar raises (less than 5% difference), the top performers become demoralized or leave for greener pastures.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

55. I get the feeling you are in govt. and it's to your advantage to push this agenda thru

If not, provide some actual, specific stats proving your point.

[XemaSab]

39. I am familiar with your department

and as far as I can tell, there is little or no solidarity, or at least there wasn't when I was there. :shrug:

[mike_c]

41. that's because we never let you look behind the curtain....

:rofl:

You'd be surprised, actually. We have LOTS of disagreements, but we're pretty solid about performance issues and the like.

[XemaSab]

42. Maybe it's just the group that starts in B and ends in

otany. :hide:

[JerseygirlCT]

45. Isn't that the case in our institutes of higher learning?

And somehow, they manage to work together. They manage to compete, without having that competition harm their students, by and large.

Who's going to get that permanent position? Who will get published? Who does the president have dinner with?

All happens, doesn't it?

I don't understand why it should be any different with teaching. Or why in this world, healthy competition is a bad thing, not an incentive to work even harder.

[MadHound]

6. Ah yes, another proponent of the corporate model

Hmm, how has that worked out in the corporate world? Shall we ask Bear Stearns? Merril Lynch. Hell, even you yourself find it lacking.

Tell you what, until you come up with a fair and honest way to assess teachers, then any discussion of merit pay is off the table. The teaching profession, much like the legal and medical profession, is one where competence and excellence are hard to measure. That is why those professions have things like pay raises, fire or hire done by boards, teams, with lots of input. What you're proposing is one person, the principle, should do this. Sorry, but that doesn't fly.

I'm not looking for perfect, I'm not looking for fair. And if you don't like me looking for fair because it's not available in your workaday world, tough shit, that lack is your problem, perhaps you should correct that rather than trying to bring me down to your crappy standard.

[bluestateguy]

7. All other professions have merit evaluations, including in government

I would oppose using standardized tests as part of that evaluation, but I think there should be an evaluation process that is flexible enough to appreciate that students in a wealthy suburb are not the same as students in the inner city.

I'm uncomfortable with this relativistic argument that says you can't define competence, you can't define improvement, you can't define a good teacher, and therefore there should be no merit evaluation at all.

Well, then why bother even having any standards at all for a K-12 teacher? Why even require a college degree and a certification? After all, who are you to say what qualifications are required for a job that you say cannot be defined by any standards of performance at all?

[EFerrari]

32. What makes you think teaching isn't evaluated?

I was constantly reviewed by my students, my peers and my supervisors.

What doesn't work is to base "merit pay" on an outcome that a teacher only has limited control over.

[KamaAina]

38. That's more like it!

but I think there should be an evaluation process that is flexible enough to appreciate that students in a wealthy suburb are not the same as students in the inner city.

Without that, good teachers who would expect to qualify for the merit raises would gravitate to the wealthier, better-performing schools -- precisely where they are not needed.

And if the evaluation is based solely (or largely) on standardized test scores, all teachers would have a financial incentive to "teach to the test", essentially turning schools into an imitation of afterschool programs like Kaplan.

edit: gotta watch those typos in the edumacation threads :dunce:

[WhollyHeretic]

64. Teachers are evaluated numerous times every year. My wife just had her 4th evaluation

this school year and still has at least one more.

[JCMach1]

8. There is NO good way to do this... have been in multiple situations

that use a merit pay system... Principals, higher-ed admins... NO ONE can get it right.

Merit pay is a very bad private sector idea for something that is an absolutely non-capitalistic system.

Obama and his advisors are flat wrong on this...

[iamjoy]

9. The Idea of Merit Pay is Naive

Let's take a chain restaurant. Corporate decides it will reward managers based on restaurant performance - revenue, profits, loss prevention, etc. Now, one unit is in a really great location and another is in a lousy location. So, the manager of the "good location" has an unfair advantage. Yes, it happens. And the manager of the lousy location will quit or be fired for poor performance (even if circumstances are beyond his/her control). The company may bring in several managers to try to turn the restaurant around, losing what would otherwise be good managers because of incorrect expectations and inadequate support.

But what if instead, the company found its best performing manager and offered them an incentive to help the under-performing unit? What if the company realized they couldn't treat this unit like the others, but had to do things differently - maybe different menu items or policies? Maybe the unit needed additional staffing.

Of course, the corporation can decide to close that unit, the school system can't really do that.

You have areas where kids enter kindergarten not knowing their letters, numbers or colors. Should that teacher be evaluated the same as one who gets a kindergarten with several kids who already know how to read? You have kids going to school without breakfast (not by choice). You have kids living in chaos and discomfort because of poverty and/or dysfunctional families. Should their teacher be judged the same as one who teaches kids who have a stable home situation with their own television and computer in their own bedroom? Personally, I think we ought to take the high performing teachers and offer them incentives to go to a low-performing school, not reward ones who got lucky enough to land a job in a rich neighborhood.

Education is too important. For some kids, it's the only shot they have at breaking out of a cycle of poverty. I'm not prepared to just throw up my hands and say "Oh well, life is unfair." Not on this.

[anigbrowl]

24. No it isn't

You could measure relative rather than absolute performance, for example. Thus, significant improvement of students who started out poorly would be valued as much as higher overall progression among students who entered a grade at a higher level.

So rather than just handing out rewards for students who get As, you could work towards rewarding teachers who consistently lift Ds to Cs.

[CTyankee]

48. You make my essential point.

It amuses me when repukes say "You can't just throw money at a problem."

Sure you can. If you believe it is OK that corporate managers and CEOs make obscene salaries and bonuses even if their companies fail, you can make the case for having special categories for teachers who teach in themost awful schools with the most disadvantaged students. If we like to say that the money CEOs get is the reward for their great talent, why don't we say the same things about teachers? After all, we entrust our CHILDREN to them for their education. But then, when did repukes ever really care about children...

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. There are two problems with merit pay, I think, neither necessarily insurmountable.

The first is that teachers don't want it, so any good it does in terms of incentivising good teaching and thus getting the state more education per dollar spent has to be offset against the harm it does in loss of morale.

The second is that it is very hard to set up an incentive system that rewards the things you want to reward - in particular, if you reward test results, you're encouraging teachers to teach to the test, which is only a good thing if your test really does measure everything you want children to be able to do, and at present they don't.

Finding ways around the second problem might also help with the first - one of the main reason teachers oppose "merit pay" is that they don't trust the government to define "merit" well, I suspect.

[LeftishBrit]

12. I think you are absolutely right, especially in your last sentence!

[ourbluenation]

58. that is exactly right. well done. n/t

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. Merit Pay would fortify H.L. Mencken's assesment of American education.

"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps." H.L. Mencken

Teachers don't manufacture widgets. Neither are children raw materials to be molded into satisfactory widgets graded by bureaucrats as acceptable little future workers.

Demanding that teachers earn their pay based on production standard ratings reduces both students and teachers to robots without humanity.

[anigbrowl]

27. I grew up with standardized testing in Europe

And while it involved a certain amount of stress, it certainly didn't turn me into a conformist little robot.

[WilmywoodNCparalegal]

43. Same here!

Educated in Italy up until high school.

I can assure you, the State exam I had at the end of Junior High, at age 13, would frighten even most college students.

It is 4 straight days.

Day 1: Italian literature and composition. You can choose one of 4-5 themes (usually along the lines of, "Discuss Aristotle, Kant and Primo Levi in the context of the Prussian War" - I am making it up, but the themes are not easy stuff you can BS through; you have to make a logical argument, show command of vocabulary and grammar, as well as knowledge of literature and a variety of disciplines). This whole thing is 5-6 hours.

Day 2: mathematics. A four-hour exercise with a bunch of word problems of varying complexity, some of which require knowledge of physics and others of logic.

Day 3: foreign language. A four-hour exercise. You must write a piece in the foreign language you studied (in my case it was French)

Day 4: oral exam. In front of all your teachers, you discuss a topic of your own choosing (I chose the Industrial Revolution). Your discussion must encompass all the subjects you studied, which are all compulsory in Italy (you cannot choose electives) - math, science, history, politics, fine arts, design, architecture, literature, etc. You even have to say a few things in the foreign language.

I argue this kind of examination certainly requires a degree of creativity.

[Nevernose]

62. But they don't all have to meet the same standard, do they?

When we compare the US's scores against Great Britain's, for instance, we're really comparing all of our kids against their top 25%. The rest are shunted off someplace else or just graded differently. It's the American ideal of equality that makes us look so bad when compared internationally, ironically.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

13. Nice post.

For a group of people dying to be treated as professionals, they certainly don't act the part, nor do they want the responsibility that comes along with being a professional.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

56. Whom did you vote for, for president? nt

[Name removed]

63. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

23. I'm Torn On The Issue. But I Don't Find Merit Pay Any More Unfair Than Pay Based Simply On

longevity and level of education. That's always been one of my sore points with unions is that the payscale is rarely fair as it relates to performance. I absolutely think a teacher who puts in twice the effort and gets significantly better results out of her caring, methods and skills but has only been there for 2 years, should get paid more than some medial doesn't care all that much, minimal effort, run of the mill hack who has been there for 7. Doesn't work that way though. But I do see a problem with how to grade merit or what to base it off of, but the end result would still be highly unlikely to be any more unfair than a fixed pay scale that has nothing to do with the educator's actual VALUE.

[anigbrowl]

28. Good points there.

[EFerrari]

31. The word is "naivete" and your model isn't accurate.

Parents aren't "consumers". They are partners in community. They were partners as students and later, they are partners as parents.

You can't run a school like IBM. It doesn't work. You can't motivate teachers and students to take the risks that must be taken if learning is to happen by forcing their classrooms into some bogus corporate model.

[tjwash]

44. "by forcing their classrooms into some bogus corporate model"

Nail, meet head. :thumbsup:

Believe me...that's what the good folks who spend their millions of dollars a year lobbying for this kind of shit want.

They want less learning, and more indoctrination. They want less critical thinking, and more just keeping people smart enough to run some piece of equipment, and do the paperwork at the end of the day. They want less people that can actually think for themselves and can figure out how bad they are getting screwed, and more obedient workers that will put up with them cutting their pay, benefits, retirement, overtime and workplace safety regulations.

[EFerrari]

46. And they want their buddies to make a bundle on dumbass software

that "teaches" children to push a button, not reading, writing or arithmatic, let alone critical thinking. Was that Neil Bush? And Poppy has cronies in the school book industry.

The vampires have been FEASTING on our schools for decades.

[XemaSab]

50. Thanks for posting this... I was hoping someone would

Naivete would indeed be the word. :)

[ourbluenation]

59. and when parents are partnering with the teachers performance goes up.

when parents don't, performance goes down. This is why merit pay won't work. Too many things beyond a teachers control that affects performance. Or is it effects?

[GaYellowDawg]

49. Oy.

The naivety of teacher merit pay arguments.

I think opponents of teacher merit pay are honestly going about this the wrong way.

The people in favor of merit pay tend to be the consumers... ie the parents of school age children.

These consumers have their own 12 year experience with the public school system as well as dealing with their children's teachers.

There opinion is based on their own experiences. They have dealt with teachers with poor language skills, horrific grammar and on the sleeve emotional issues.

Once again, irony strikes.

Well guess what. In every company I have worked people get promotions and raises. These judgment calls are often unfair and sometimes senseless. I myself for many years have been in a position to hire and fire people and much of it honestly is gut feeling and guesswork. That's real life.

Saying that a principal or superintendent may use favoritism to give out merit bonus is simply stating the obvious. Thats how other organizations do it as well. Are teachers so divorced from reality that they find this shocking?

What you seem to be saying here is that the corporate model, which has plunged our country into an economic abyss, should be applied to teachers. You also seem to be saying that other people having to deal with crappy conditions merits teachers being subjected to those same crappy conditions. I hope you can see why teachers would immediately reject that particular line of argument.

As for merit pay I believe it should be up to the principal, the school board and the teachers union on how it is distributed.

Well, this model would leave merit pay up to the principal and the school board in states that have no union. These are the Southern states. Let me set up a chain of events for you.

1. Teacher teaches evolution.
2. Fundamentalist principal objects to evolution.
3. Fundamentalist school board members object to evolution.
4. Teacher gets refused merit pay.
5. Other teachers decide to not teach evolution.

You can repeat this for any particular topic that fundamentalists dislike. Leaving merit pay in the hands of administrators who don't darken classrooms and school board members who have no education experience (happens all the time) would drive more good teachers out of the profession than I could count. Your model only works if you require principals and school board members to have a minimum number of years as teachers. I'd require a 10 year minimum myself.

It's hard to believe that someone who has spent as little time clearly thinking the consequences of your stupid models through has the nerve to refer to naiveté.