Merit Pay

[Whoa_Nelly]

[aikoaiko]

1. It shouldn't be about merit pay, but about the criteria for merit pay.

And obviously standardized test scores should only be part of the metric.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. Test scores shouldn't be any part of the criteria.

[aikoaiko]

3. Why not? they are a part of mine as a college professor.

Unless you think teacher performance has no impact on student test performance, I can't see why you think test scores shouldn't be in the criteria.

[yewberry]

8. The situations are not analogous.

Is there even such a thing as a Title I college? Do you often find yourself with first-year students who don't speak English? What's your transiency rate? When's the last time a new student transferred into your classroom (third grade, in my my most recent case) and didn't know her letter-sounds, but was expected to perform at grade level four months later? Ever had a family sabotage their child's progress by taking them out of school for 8 weeks for a trip home to <insert far-away country> and then dropping them back into the system? How many of your students haven't had their IEP finalized? Do your students live in homes whose cultures of origin don't value the written word?

I do think teacher performance has an impact on student performance. However, having spent a couple of years working in a local Title I elementary school, I know that it's unreasonable to tie test scores to performance evaluations. In my neighborhood, poverty, transiency, hunger, illiteracy, & language barriers are commonplace. And as a "poor" school, we never had enough SPED teachers to remain in compliance, so we had to stall IEPs. Nice, huh?

I was "so good" at reaching and helping these challenged kids that the most needy ones ended up with me. I gave them everything I had...but nearly all of them failed to reach grade level. Yes, they all learned and they all had daily successes, and I'm incredibly proud of the progress they made, but grade level? No.

Using test performance as a criterion, I'm a very bad teacher.

[aikoaiko]

14. Let me just say that admins can use test scores stupidly, but they can be used intelligently

Sure, different schools and different class have different advantages and disadvantages. I get that. And I understand and agree that merely drawing a line on a chart and saying that above that line is good teacher performance and below is bad.

For example, gain and improvement is a better way to use test scores to reward merit. Did your students improve? Did they know more at the end of the year? Did they learn a lot more even if their performance was still below the arbitrary criteria? Is there a comparable class like your in your district, your region, your state?

[Hannah Bell]

9. It does, but the effect isn't predictable. I've loved teachers my friends hated,

been bored by teachers they found fascinating, & skipped classes I actually enjoyed cause I enjoyed other things more.

Teachers have classes that click one year; they can do exactly the same thing the next year & nothing clicks.

You being a college professor should know it well.

[aikoaiko]

15. I do understand the variability in students, but standardized test scores are still in my eva

You roll with the ups and downs and if there are documented mitigating circumstances that can part of the evals too.

[proud2BlibKansan]

12. It's not the same thing at all

Yours have to apply to come to your class in the first place. You can flunk your kids out of class and never worry about them again. Mine fail and I still have to teach them every day. It is highly unlikely that any of my kids will ever even be in your college class since they are disabled and poor. A success is graduating from high school. I have a couple this year for whom prison seems more likely. And no I do not have low expectations; these kids come from families with three and four generations of adults before them ending up incarcerated. One of my kids has never even met his father as he has been in prison since this child was 6 months old.

A good day for me is a day when they do their homework and show up with a smile and a willingness to absorb what their teachers are telling them instead of creating a disturbance in every class.

I don't mind my teacher performance being judged. I want to be held accountable. But my kids don't have the same outcomes as yours. How about judging me based on their behavior and attitude instead of a standardized test they have no chance of mastering? And how do you measure that?

One of my kids went from 80% attendance last year to 100% this year. Why can't that improvement be what determines my merit pay increase? Every single model includes student performance on standardized tests. Until they move from that model (and I am not hopeful) I will not support merit pay.

[aikoaiko]

16. Its how test scores get used that is the issue.

You say you got a kid to increase his attendance to 100%, and that you think that should be used to determine merit. I do too. But you could have made the same argument agains that criteria that you use aginst test scores. Some kids, classes, and schools have different propensities for attending school. But you are proud of the fact that you IMPROVED that kids attendance (and you should be) and you think it should be rewarded (and you should be).

Likewise I want to reward teachers who improve standardized tests scores. There can be other criteria used in merit pay (for example, attendance rates), but there is nothing wrong with including test scores in the mix (especially gain scores).

I can understand why you may not want to be held accountable for test scores, but I'd rather give an instructor who is willing the chance.

[aikoaiko]

17. And why should that student behavior be excluded?

Should any student behavior or outcome be included in merit pay?

[proud2BlibKansan]

18. It's pretty hard to document it objectively

I collect data on kids every day so sure I would love for that to lead to a raise in pay. But it is MY opinion, my observation. It's likely that another observer would reach a different conclusion.

Hard to say how to document positive behavior changes.

[Whoa_Nelly]

5. I can agree with that

sort of...

NCLB has decimated the public school system, taken away other learning experiences for those students who need things such as Art, PE, Music to be better able to make inroads into and support their learning styles or abilities.
NCLB has done more for leaving children behind in learning, and has limited the teaching approaches a teacher can use to reach those who have learning gaps, or area little or greatly behind the developmental curve of the "average" child. A teacher can be raked over the coals for being intuitive and inventive, and be dressed down, have an evaluation that places their job on the line for not following the standards to the letter in the greater effort to reach the child as individual.


Standardized test scores determine funding to individual schools within a district. Standardized scoring is currently being used to punish those schools that "fail", even if that "failure" is by a .2% below the projected success that must be reached.

Standardized tests are crap when it comes to determining who is a better teacher.

But, what do I know? Have only been involved in Education since 1975. :shrug:

So, yes, standardized test scores can be part of the metric, but I have become bitter about how teachers are judged based on student scores, and saddened by the students who become demoralized because they don't make the grade.

[Hannah Bell]

10. nclb is designed to make *every* school fail. that's its nearly inevitable

mathematical end point.

you can probably guess what the goal is.

& maybe you can guess why our new president continues to support it.

[Patchuli]

4. I love Dr. Tinycat!

:loveya:

[FrenchieCat]

6. sigh......

September 2008 -

"But I'll tell you what's wrong with No Child Left Behind: forcing our teachers, our principals and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong. (Cheers, applause.) Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind is wrong. (Applause.) Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong. (Applause.)

And don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test. (Cheers, applause.) I don't want teachers to the -- teaching to the test. I don't want them uninspired and I don't want our students uninspired. (Applause.) So what I've said is we will measure and hold accountable performance, but let's help our teachers and our principals develop a curriculum and assessments that teach our kids to become not just good test-takers. We need assessments that can improve achievement by including the kinds of research and scientific investigation and problem-solving that our children will need to compete in a 21st century knowledge economy. And we have to make sure that subjects like art and music are not being crowded out of the curriculum. And that's what we will do when I'm president of the United States. (Cheers, applause.)
snip
And that's why I proposed last year a new Service Scholarship program that will recruit top talent into the profession, and place these new teachers in overcrowded districts and struggling rural towns, or hard-to-staff subjects like special education, in schools across the nation. To prepare these new teachers, I'll create more Teacher Residency Programs that will build on a law I recently passed and train 30,000 high-quality teachers a year, especially in math and science. (Applause.) To support our teachers, we'll expand mentoring programs that pair experienced, successful teachers with new recruits.

And when our teachers succeed in making a real difference in our children's lives, we should reward them for it by finding new ways to increase teachers' pay across the board -- (applause) -- and to find ways to increase teachers' pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. We can do this. From Prince George's County in Maryland to Denver, Colorado, we're seeing teachers and school boards coming together to design performance pay plans.

So yes, we must give every teacher the tools they need to be successful. But we also need to give every child the assurance that they'll have the teacher they need to be successful. And that means setting a firm standard not based on a single, high-stakes standardized test, but based on assessments developed with teachers and educators so that teachers have confidence that they are being judged effectively based on their own -- the own tools that they put together with their peers."
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/09/obama_education_speech_in_ohio.html

[EFerrari]

7. Hey -- I think I had that kid in one of my English sections!

:rofl:

[exboyfil]

11. A sad story about who is being taught

My daughter complained yesterday about her World Studies I class (the first half of it being classical history from Mesopotamia to Rome). Her complaint was not that the teacher was boring or that the course was too hard. Her complaint was that her peers were being too disruptive and preventing her teacher from teaching more fully or efficiently on this topic in which she has a great interest.

Apparently the teacher tries but the consequences for class disruption are not sufficient to keep the malcontents from disrupting the class. I have only talked briefly with the teacher in the past (before my daughter started this class), and I do not know him well. My daughter told me not to approach him (and I would be reluctant to anyway not knowing what to offer).

We are talking about a Blue Ribbon Junior High here with some of the best test scores in the state. This is not the first time that my daughter has complained about her peers disrupting her opportunity to learn.

In many cases teachers can only do as well as the material given to them (students).

[proud2BlibKansan]

13. Good example

It is absolutely ludicrous to compare teaching a college class where the kids have had to apply to be there and know they can flunk out at any time to a mandated public school class. You would think a professor would know that. But I had more than one professor in college who could never hope to come in and do my job for a day, much less an entire year.

[tonysam]

19. Repeat After Me: Schools. Are. Not. Businesses. Schools. Cannot. Be. Run. On. Business. Models.

Government agencies are not businesses. Besides, "merit" does NOT exist objectively; "merit" is in the eye of the beholder.

People have this ridiculous notion people "get ahead" because of their "merit." That's never been true, and never will be.

As long as you have corrupt administrators in this world, "merit pay" will never work.

This is nothing but an attempt by the Business Roundtable types to undercut unions and jettison civil service-style pay systems.

[Whoa_Nelly]

20. THX, tonysam

Truer words never spoken :hi: