Our Best & Brightest Children...

[Killer Joe]

I can't imagine any union rejecting merit pay based on "someone might feel bad". I totally can see how the union would want to know exactly how a school baord would rate a teacher FOR merit pay? And reject it if it wasn't acceptable.
Test scores would NOT be the way to do it. I HATED my teachers because they wanted me to WORK! (bxstxrds)
So I would NOT do well for them if I even had the slightest hint that they would personally (financially) benefit from my testing being high.
Well liked? Nope, you give someone better pay for. I'd be RICH beyond belief if THAT were the case.
A good disciplinarian? Ok, so I get better pay because I can Animal train? Ok by me.
Good attendance? Doesn't complain alot? How about if I teach "Gifted" classes? Onlt the students with high I.Q's and who DO WELL in their classes? Ok, where do I sign up for teaching THOSE classes?
Merit pay sucks in my opinion. Teachers get paid enough to what they KNEW they would be hired to do,....THIER JOB!
If the pay isn't high enough then keep looking for school districts that shell out the the big bucks.

 

[Spiderman]

Merit pay sucks in my opinion. Teachers get paid enough to what they KNEW they would be hired to do,....THIER JOB!
If the pay isn't high enough then keep looking for school districts that shell out the the big bucks.

I have difficulty with these statements; maybe the former teachers among us can attest to their experience, but there's a lot more to a teacher's job than just "teaching". And if everyone kept looking for those districts that paid better than others, then the lower districts lose out on some of that "teacher talent" and it ends up hurting the kids.

However, the one solution that I can see for that is that there would have to be a "standard" pay rate for teachers across the country, so it doesn't matter where they go, but that ain't gonna fly.

 

[Killer Joe]

A standard rate? A FEDERAL standard rate? States wouldn't allow that anyway.
I agree that none of my suggestions are realistic. Merit pay just isn't ever going to work.

 

[EricBess]

The problem is that every one of the criteria you list expect things to be measured. I think that whether or not a teacher is a good teacher depends upon a number of areas.
Are the students happy? Okay, that's absurd, but you can get a general sense of whether a teacher draws kids into enjoying learning.
Are the test scores good? How about, are they improving? If two teachers are teaching the same subject and one has the kid's interest, the test scores should natural follow. I think we spend too much effort trying to get kids to have higher scores and hope they actually learn something. That's backwards. We should get them enjoying the learning first and hope that the test scores follow (which they will, but unfortunately not always immediately).
Attendance? Well, if kids don't want to ditch the class...

But at KJ points out, all of these are "measures". If the administrators are doing their jobs properly (and I'm certainly not saying they are), then they should know who the good teachers are. Listen to the students. Are the teachers "tough but fair"? "An easy A"? "Impossible to understand"? Personally, I don't see why there has to be a measure of what makes a good teacher. For example, how do you measure attitude? And yet a good attitude often can be the difference between a good and a bad teacher. How do you "measure" attitue? For that matter, how do you "measure" whether or not the teacher makes themselves available to the student outside of class hours? I don't think you can slap a "measure" on this to know who the good and bad teachers are. It takes an observant administrator who is actually doing his/her job. I'm not sure we have very many of those under the current system.

 

[Oversoul]

Since the topic has come up, last year I actually spent some time making up a system for merit-based pay to work. I'd look for what I originally wrote down back then if I weren't on vacation, but the gist of it was that I read someone stating that merit-based pay was a total pipe dream and gave all the reasons that it could never work. So I brainstormed a program that would defy all the reasons this person gave. It involved large central testing centers and a multistage randomized selection process for creating test classes that teachers would have for short courses (I never came up with an actual number of hours for the course, but presumably they would last a few weeks) and would instruct. Students would take locator tests before being enrolled in these classes and specially designed tests would be used to measure improvement, etc. I can think of a lot of possible objections to this system, but I can also imagine solutions (or what I think would probably work as solutions) to most of them. There is, however, the minor issue of, uh, cost. Implementing this system would be rather expensive...

 

[Killer Joe]

Tax payer proponents of your merit-based pay could be billed?

 

[Mooseman]

Yes, great solution.... spend more money to get what? Better teachers? Do you know that or is there any research to show that it is a good possibility?
More likely, you'd get more red tape and regulations and paper pushing.
It's just like drug testing for welfare recipients, more costs than benefits....
I have never heard a good solution to this problem.... except for parents to get involved in their children's education.
If a home schooled child were to attend public school and have as much or even half as much attention and dedication from their parent(s), that student would better than if only having one or the other.

Did I rant enough?

 

[Oversoul]

Yes, great solution.... spend more money to get what? Better teachers?

Well no, that's the thing. It wouldn't make teachers any better. Not by itself anyway. It would merely make merit-based pay something that is unquestionably based on actual merit. It's sort of a thought experiment, I guess. Proponents of merit-based pay don't typically, in my experience, provide a good explanation for how merit would be determined in the first place. I think that it's like a lot of things, technically possible, but impractical because of the enormous cost.

I think I agree with you about the real solution being for parents to get involved. I mean, there's more than just one problem here and there are definitely areas I've seen where improvements can be made, but I don't think there's any educational panacea, except maybe parental involvement.

 

[Spiderman]

If a home schooled child were to attend public school and have as much or even half as much attention and dedication from their parent(s), that student would better than if only having one or the other.

I didn't quite understand this statement. Are you saying that if a parent put as much attention/effort into the public system as they do for the home schooling, the student would be "better"?

 

[EricBess]

I personally think there is a great way to get merit-based pay for teachers. Get rid of unions and let the free market determine things. In buisiness, there is a reason people receive "entry level" pay when they first enter the workforce. It's because they are untested and haven't built up any experience or reputation. I still say that people, in general, know who the good teachers are and who the bad teachers are. Parents should have more freedom to choose the school they send their children to and the schools should have more freedom to choose how they select their teachers. Good teachers would be at a premium and would natural get paid more as multiple schools competed to get them to come and teach at their schools. Bad teachers would be weeded out of the system as no one would want to hire them, or at least wouldn't hire them with significant salaries.

It's what happens in the business world. Why wouldn't it work with schools? The only reason I can think of that it wouldn't work is if parents and administrators just didn't care. From what I've seen, administrators don't care about students, but they do care about a school's reputations. As for parents, looking for a good school district is one of the highest determining factors when moving to a new area, so whether they are actively involved or not, they at least care enough to find a school with a good reputation.

There is a "third party payer" issue, but if the schools are run by cities and counties, each city or county to decide how to affect taxes to pay for schools and people would look at that as well.

 

[Mooseman]

Spidey: Not into the school (only), but into their children.

EB: I couldn't disagree more. Who are these people, who know in general? Parents, administrators, board members? Better yet, politicians?
Schools are not businesses, their objective is not to make money or maximize profits and market share.

 

[EricBess]

Mooseman - do you have kids in school? I certainly don't know everything there is to know about every one of my children's teachers, but I do know which ones have a reputation as a good or a bad teacher. There is a science teacher at my son's school that does a phenominal job of making things interesting for the students. There was (he got transfered this year) a math teacher that was dismal. I'm not particularly impressed with his replacement, either.

IMO, the more you try to "measure", the worse things get. Schools may not be a business, but they do have incentives to be as efficient as possible and they also have incentive to have a good reputation. What I'm saying is that market forces would work in schools if we would let them.

Currently, politicians have decided that all teachers are equally good. How is that a better system?

 

[Mooseman]

Never said it was better, but anecdotal evidence is a very bad way to make determinations. Would all parents share your views on those teachers? Would future parents also agree with you.... I doubt it.
How does a teacher get transferred? Do you live in a place where the school district is huge? I live in a small school district, but almost all the districts in PA are small enough that there is little chance of "transfer", they mostly have 1 HS and a few grade/middle schools.

BTW - My kids graduated and I did teach for a while... I have license to teach math.....

Market principals may be used to good effect, but the "free market"? Voucher?
Would you shop you child around each year for the best school deal?

 

[Spiderman]

Spidey: Not into the school (only), but into their children.

So you're saying that if the parents put as much effort into their kids as they do homeschooling, the kids would be "better"?

 

[turgy22]

There is a science teacher at my son's school that does a phenominal job of making things interesting for the students. There was (he got transfered this year) a math teacher that was dismal. I'm not particularly impressed with his replacement, either.

Perhaps it's simply easier to make science interesting for the students. Math is a pretty boring subject.

 

[train]

A standard rate? A FEDERAL standard rate? States wouldn't allow that anyway.
I agree that none of my suggestions are realistic. Merit pay just isn't ever going to work.

Why not have a federal minimum and maximum that teachers could make - adjusted for COL of course? We have federal min. wage for hourly workers, and restaurant waitstaff.... why not teachers?

I've actually got a theory on making math interesting - but thats a different topic.

 

[EricBess]

Perhaps it's simply easier to make science interesting for the students. Math is a pretty boring subject.

I disagree with you. I find math very interesting. I've tutored a few people and if you can show someone how math is interesting (okay, maybe not "exciting" like science, but definitely not "boring", either), they will pick it up a lot faster.

Mooseman: the math teacher was giving multiple choice tests as a rule. Several of the kids in the class took a general test after the course and there were huge gaps in what the kids should have learned that year and what they actually did. In other words, he didn't even teach everything that was in the material, so the kids were supposed to know about graphing and he didn't even bother to teach them. I don't know that the school district is "huge", but there are several middle schools. He should have been out on his ear, but because of tenure, they moved him to another one of those schools where he continues to be a bad teacher.

Never said it was better, but anecdotal evidence is a very bad way to make determinations. Would all parents share your views on those teachers? Would future parents also agree with you.... I doubt it.

I don't understand why this is such an issue? I just got a new job because I was recommended for the job by people that I hadn't spoken to in 7 years. It's a good job and it pays well and I was able to negociate less pay for fewer hours so I could still control my schedule. There may be people who don't like me or don't like how I program, but those people don't need to work with me. That's the way things work.

Why should it be any different in a school. Would future parents agree with me? Well, if a science teacher makes science interesting and the parents can see that and see how excited their student is about science, I would think that yes, this is a general thing that people can agree on. Perhaps there are parents who want their child to go into acting, so they are upset that the interest in science is taking away from drama. Perhaps there are parents who think that the mathematics of science is super important, so they think that the teacher is spending too much attention on "cool" experiments and not enough on the theory. Perhaps...

Obviously, people aren't going to always agree, but if a teacher has a good reputation, the school administrator might be more willing to pay a higher salary to get that teacher to come teach at their school. Why does it matter if not everyone agrees? If a school has a good reputation for trying to find good teachers, they parents will be comfortable letting their children go to that school. And if I don't like the way my child's current school is handling certain things, I have the right to move them to another school without needing to "shop them around" every year. I also have 5 children, so my younger children might end up attending a different school than my older children if I didn't like the way things were handled.

You keep saying that we shouldn't even try something like this because not everyone would agree, but that's the beauty of the free market. If you like one product and I like a different product, we can both get what we want. If my product is more expensive, but gives slightly better results in an area that you don't care about, who cares? We both end up with what we want, as do the companies behind those products. I understand that schools are not businesses, but the principles remain the same.

 

[Oversoul]

EB, it sounds like this wouldn't be merit-based pay, but instead a popularity contest to determine one's pay grade. That's pretty different...

 

[EricBess]

I don't see how a good reputation as a school and teacher equates to "popularity". If a popular guy can't teach the material, don't you give people enough credit to be able to recognize the difference?

 

[turgy22]

I disagree with you. I find math very interesting. I've tutored a few people and if you can show someone how math is interesting (okay, maybe not "exciting" like science, but definitely not "boring", either), they will pick it up a lot faster.

Haha. I'm an engineer. I find math interesting, too. But I'm trying to think about how your average kid feels about certain subjects and I think it's much more challenging to keep continued interest in math than other subjects.

With science, obviously, you can do experiments to show how things work. With social studies, you can take field trips to learn about history and stuff. With English, there are a lot of interesting books out there that will capture a kid's attention.

With math, there's not a whole lot to it except putting a pencil on paper and solving problems. I mean, you can show kids how it's practical and maybe come up with some fun word problems, but in general, I'd say it takes more to make math interesting for kids than other subjects.