Merit pay for teachers?
Merit pay for teachers was discussed on KUOW's "The Conversation" this afternoon. I haven't had a chance to listen to the show yet, but did read some of the background links they provided:
'Merit pay plan's unintended lesson', St. Petersburg Times
'Pros and Cons of Merit Pay For Teachers' , About.com: Elementary Education
It's a tough issue to say the least. I like the idea of rewarding the best teachers. I think money for a rewards system would be easier to come by politically than simply raising pay for all teachers. But, setting up the right metrics to decide who is best is certainly problematic.
Bonuses cannot be based on test results alone -- as per the Florida example, you don't want to set up a system where teachers in affluent schools reap most of the rewards. Also, teaching at its best is a team activity, and we cannot have a bonus system that pits good teachers against each other. Perhaps all of the teachers in a school should get an equal bonus based on the overall performance of the school when compared with the expected performance of the school (based on the children the school serves). Is there some reasonable way to measure this? And, I wouldn't want to judge a school on the three R's alone.
If a team of teachers is rewarded based on how they perform as a unit, it would not only encourage positive teamwork, but might also help with the issue of how to most effectively deal with underperforming teachers. I readily admit that as a parent I'm not in the best position to judge a teacher objectively (good or bad, for all students). But, I suspect teachers -- more than anyone -- truly know the value of their peers. A team-based bonus would be financial motivation for the teacher's union to police themselves --whether working to improve teachers who need help, or moving the weakest performers out of teaching. The key to this is that there must not be a fixed pot of money that gets redistributed -- there must be the potential for everyone to get paid more if the whole district responds to the challenge.
My crazier idea is that all adult taxpayers should get to vote (right on their tax return) for the public school teachers that had the biggest positive impact on their life, and a government bonus pool should go to those people. Unlike the short-term bonus, this would be a longer-term way for us as a country to acknowledge the importance of teachers in our lives. Time gives us all the perspective to know which teachers have truly made an impact that deserves special reward.
Thoughts? If you're a strong teacher, don't you believe it's unfair that some lesser performing teachers get paid just as much or more than you? Is merit pay for teachers something that should be explored in Seattle? Is it possible to devise a way to administer this fairly with proper incentives?
'Merit pay plan's unintended lesson', St. Petersburg Times
'Pros and Cons of Merit Pay For Teachers' , About.com: Elementary Education
It's a tough issue to say the least. I like the idea of rewarding the best teachers. I think money for a rewards system would be easier to come by politically than simply raising pay for all teachers. But, setting up the right metrics to decide who is best is certainly problematic.
Bonuses cannot be based on test results alone -- as per the Florida example, you don't want to set up a system where teachers in affluent schools reap most of the rewards. Also, teaching at its best is a team activity, and we cannot have a bonus system that pits good teachers against each other. Perhaps all of the teachers in a school should get an equal bonus based on the overall performance of the school when compared with the expected performance of the school (based on the children the school serves). Is there some reasonable way to measure this? And, I wouldn't want to judge a school on the three R's alone.
If a team of teachers is rewarded based on how they perform as a unit, it would not only encourage positive teamwork, but might also help with the issue of how to most effectively deal with underperforming teachers. I readily admit that as a parent I'm not in the best position to judge a teacher objectively (good or bad, for all students). But, I suspect teachers -- more than anyone -- truly know the value of their peers. A team-based bonus would be financial motivation for the teacher's union to police themselves --whether working to improve teachers who need help, or moving the weakest performers out of teaching. The key to this is that there must not be a fixed pot of money that gets redistributed -- there must be the potential for everyone to get paid more if the whole district responds to the challenge.
My crazier idea is that all adult taxpayers should get to vote (right on their tax return) for the public school teachers that had the biggest positive impact on their life, and a government bonus pool should go to those people. Unlike the short-term bonus, this would be a longer-term way for us as a country to acknowledge the importance of teachers in our lives. Time gives us all the perspective to know which teachers have truly made an impact that deserves special reward.
Thoughts? If you're a strong teacher, don't you believe it's unfair that some lesser performing teachers get paid just as much or more than you? Is merit pay for teachers something that should be explored in Seattle? Is it possible to devise a way to administer this fairly with proper incentives?
Comments
One pilot study found that students whose teachers enrolled in the program performed slightly better on standardized tests compared with students with non-ProComp teachers. Denver also saw statewide assessment scores improve substantially this past school year, with the district now outperforming state gains in all grade levels in reading, writing and science. Moreover, a larger number of teachers are applying to work at Denver's toughest schools, one of the chief goals of the program.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1833989,00.html
Granted, teachers who have high student turnover in their classrooms won't benefit from value-added assessment as much (and their students won't benefit as much either, no matter *how* good the teacher is). I don't know what the answer is there.
Helen Schinske
-a strong teacher (I think!)
That is nearly impossible to judge. Do we really know why students are behind, or ahead? Do we really know what any student's potential is? Is there an accurate way to measure teacher performance vs student ability? What about students who have very difficult home situations, disabilities, etc? What if a student was way ahead because their parent taught them to read early at home, but then ran into some other problem? That regression may have little to do with the quality of teaching a child receives. Or maybe a student was taught to read early at home, but was not really that smart and therefore did not stay on the same trajectory? The lower trajectory isn't always a measure of the teaching. It seems like a good theory, but impossible to implement. Merit pay would wind up being just another way to coax teachers to move to high SES schools, and we don't need more motivation for that.