ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
edited October 2009
Performance-based pay, I think, is a bad idea. It doesn't take into account (as others have mentioned) the students' responsibilities in their own education... much less said students' parents and their responsibilities.
Education is not solely the result of the teacher's abilities.
Or hell, a liberal arts teacher? How about a history teacher?
Regurgitating plot lines and dates =/= learning.
Standardized tests works great for things like assessing your ability to translate written words into verbal words, mathematical ability, as well as basic understanding of basic science. But beyond that, I'm very very skeptical.
It is very tough to judge things like critical thinking, cultural/historical/literary insight, artistic or musical ability, etc, in standardized tests.
And yet, those very teachers do so constantly by assigning and grading assignments and tests. Plus you can use thigns like peer reviews, interviews with a random sampling of the students by someone familiar with the educational environment, periodic monitoring, etc. Which all would still be better than tenure based systems. It wouldn't be perfect, just marginally better.
The point is: Judging performance is ridiculously difficult. It's tough. It would be easy if teachers were more like salesmen. With salesmen, it's pretty easy to judge performance - it's just pure economics. If people buy the products you're selling, you make a profit. If not, you don't. It's simple. But with teachers, it's an entirely different animal.
I do agree that good teachers should be paid more, and bad teachers should be fire and replaced with good teachers. But I wonder about the wisdom of performance based pay.
What is the goal of all of this? I'm just hoping you guys don't think teachers get paid too much for what they do.
*edit to fof404 That sounds like a teacher that has been in the same district for 20 years and has their masters. Pay grades go by your level of education and how long you've been in the same place.
My oldest just started K-4 in public schools. His teacher makes $71,000 with $32,000 in fringe benefits (there's a site to look up public employees). I believe the teachers here also get a minimum of 3% increase each year. Now are teachers just paid well here, or is this the norm?
Starting pay in my city (low-income, urban, poor "performance") is something around $40k with increases each year (which have mostly been placed on hold due to budget cuts and the desire not to fire people).
What's the income like in your district?
Starting pay in my city (high-income, suburban, high "performance") is something around $35k.
Performance-based pay, I think, is a bad idea. It doesn't take into account (as others have mentioned) the students' responsibilities in their own education... much less said students' parents and their responsibilities.
Education is not solely the result of the teacher's abilities.
And this is the reason I would be against performance pay. My wife teaches at a private 4 year college, a public 2 year community college, and a prison. Guess which one would be the best job in a performance based pay situation?
If the problem is too many shitty teachers, then the protections for shitty teachers need to be removed. Cripple the useless unions and remove this notion of tenure. "You've been here long enough that we're not allowed to fire you" is an insane stance. "You've been here so long that you've become an irreplaceable part of our staff" is where teacher's should be finding their job security.
How about this, then: performance pay and a further bonus for teaching in schools identified as 'struggling' or having other systematic problems, reviewed every five years or so.
How do you measure the performance of an art or music teacher?
Performance Pay has always been an underhanded method to break the teaching unions and to halt the regular pay raises that barely beat the annual cost of living increases. Look at NCLB and its disastrous implementation... the fact of the matter is that there are far too many teachers to construct a reliable and equitable performance analysis system. You would spend probably one third again the cost of the education system in setting up the system and hiring the labour force required to sustain it, and then the extra time input required from the teachers would mean even less time dedicated to actually teaching the class.
tl;dr: it's not worth it, the current system is better then the reform efforts, stop trying to fuck teachers because holy god their lives suck.
I love it when people say the Teaching Unions are the problem with the education system.
No, the problem with the education system is that one particular party has spent the last 40-odd years blasting the national airwaves and the town hall meetings with the idea that the public education system indoctrinates the youth of the nation with a particular ideology.
Their solution has always been a charter system, where the public system is destroyed and private companies scrape the bottom of the barrel to set up horrendous poor-house schools. The post-Katrina charter system is an absolute disaster, and I would not hesitate to note that the disastrous experiment in pure-free market education has not stopped the Chicago-school econitards from pushing for charter systems around the world.
If the problem is too many shitty teachers, then the protections for shitty teachers need to be removed. Cripple the useless unions and remove this notion of tenure. "You've been here long enough that we're not allowed to fire you" is an insane stance. "You've been here so long that you've become an irreplaceable part of our staff" is where teacher's should be finding their job security.
I, honestly, don't believe that dismantling unions and tenure are as much a solution as people believe. I think that you'd see effectiveness of American education drop if you took away the protections that provide stability and attract those with greater skill and drive. I know that the two teachers in my family, both with masters degrees and diplomas from near-ivy institutions, would toss their towel in and go work in the private sector making at least twice their current salary. It is those very measures which protect teachers which attract otherwise qualified applicants. I mean, science is the worst. Why teach biology when you can make four times that with the pharmaceutical companies? We're talking about money as the motivator for success here, are we not?
My oldest just started K-4 in public schools. His teacher makes $71,000 with $32,000 in fringe benefits (there's a site to look up public employees). I believe the teachers here also get a minimum of 3% increase each year. Now are teachers just paid well here, or is this the norm?
My opinion is that this seems a little high for 9 months of teaching kids their colors, shapes, and abc's....but I don't know the answer to what should be a fair amount. Teaching older kids is a totally different story obviously.
US teacher's pay already seems to be remarkably high. There's probably a more rigorous study somewhere, though.
It is very tough to judge things like critical thinking, cultural/historical/literary insight, artistic or musical ability, etc, in standardized tests.
It is actually quite the opposite of "very tough".
I do not think performance pay for teachers would in any way solve any of the educational problems we have. When I think of the things that need to be fixed (end tenure, allow teachers / professors to actually teach, end "teaching towards the test" mentalities, etc.) I fail to see how performance pay would impact any of those.
Said another way, our educational system is fucked and "performance pay" will, at best, disadvantageously affect it.
Performance Pay has always been an underhanded method to break the teaching unions and to halt the regular pay raises that barely beat the annual cost of living increases. Look at NCLB and its disastrous implementation... the fact of the matter is that there are far too many teachers to construct a reliable and equitable performance analysis system. You would spend probably one third again the cost of the education system in setting up the system and hiring the labour force required to sustain it, and then the extra time input required from the teachers would mean even less time dedicated to actually teaching the class.
tl;dr: it's not worth it, the current system is better then the reform efforts, stop trying to fuck teachers because holy god their lives suck.
Yes, I'm sure the economist studying the Indian education system just wants to rob teachers of their money. I don't care if hiring effective teachers means more taxation, but I actually want results from that spending.
Argue against the study then. Actually, for all the emphasis on science propogated around here, show empirical evidence that performance pay for teaching results in a decline in knowledge. The study in the OP is well crafted and shows the opposite.
According to the study, money spent implementing a performance based rubric was far more cost effective then hiring additional teachers or adding additional teaching inputs (supplies and the like). NCLB isn't an argument against incentive based pay, it is an argument against poorly crafted and monolithic teaching standards. A poor law doesn't preclude the existince of a good law.
And where are you even getting your figures? A third again? Performance appraisal really doesn't take gobs of time. Corporations engage in the overhead even for positions where performance measurement is difficult, while still trying to retain profit, and under increasingly less layers of management. Yet somehow teaching will require one appraiser for every 3 teachers? I don't buy it.
Finally, I don't see anyone arguing for a monolithic federal system with no flexibility. So arguments to that effect are straw men.
It is very tough to judge things like critical thinking, cultural/historical/literary insight, artistic or musical ability, etc, in standardized tests.
It is actually quite the opposite of "very tough".
I do not think performance pay for teachers would in any way solve any of the educational problems we have. When I think of the things that need to be fixed (end tenure, allow teachers / professors to actually teach, end "teaching towards the test" mentalities, etc.) I fail to see how performance pay would impact any of those.
Said another way, our educational system is fucked and "performance pay" will, at best, disadvantageously affect it.
Stop parroting talking points. Explain the bold points in detail, because the first is a stupid idea, the second is an interesting statement, and the third is quite the bold claim (oh ho ho).
It is those very measures which protect teachers which attract otherwise qualified applicants.
Of the dozen or so teachers I know, especially my wife, this was not even a blip on the radar when they chose their profession. In fact, I was the only one excited about the possibility of tenure when my wife decided that she wanted to teach full time.
I have two real problem with incentivizing pay for teachers.
1) It assumes that teachers bear responsibility for everything that happens affecting a student's ability to learn. I'm sorry, but a child who becomes homeless and lioves with five different relatives during the school year because their alcoholic and abusive father can't hold down a job won't do as well in school regardless of how good or bad the teacher's methods are. Obviously, these kinds of problems will plague low income areas to a larger degree - imposing economic incentives that further decrease the supply of talented teachers where they're most needed.
2) However you structure the incentive system, based on increase in average score or total passing students etc, you create an economic incentive to tailor your teaching to one group of students over another - either those who are close to acheiving the target score or those at the bottom with the greatest gains to make. In each case, the students at the top get ignored - they'll pass either way and have little room to increase their scores, making teaching to their needs unlikely to increase your paycheck. Either the lowest or middle group will get the additional attention.
Philisophically, even if I didn't think it would deemphasize entire blocks of students and disproportionately impact poor school districts, I don't think the problems in the educational system arise from unmotivated, lazy teachers who require incentive to do their job right. People don't become teachers for the big payday anway, they're already there because they find what they do important and rewarding enough that they'll do it in spite of a low salary.
Performance Pay has always been an underhanded method to break the teaching unions and to halt the regular pay raises that barely beat the annual cost of living increases. Look at NCLB and its disastrous implementation... the fact of the matter is that there are far too many teachers to construct a reliable and equitable performance analysis system. You would spend probably one third again the cost of the education system in setting up the system and hiring the labour force required to sustain it, and then the extra time input required from the teachers would mean even less time dedicated to actually teaching the class.
tl;dr: it's not worth it, the current system is better then the reform efforts, stop trying to fuck teachers because holy god their lives suck.
Yes, I'm sure the economist studying the Indian education system just wants to rob teachers of their money. I don't care if hiring effective teachers means more taxation, but I actually want results from that spending.
Argue against the study then. Actually, for all the emphasis on science propogated around here, show empirical evidence that performance pay for teaching results in a decline in knowledge. The study in the OP is well crafted and shows the opposite.
According to the study, money spent implementing a performance based rubric was far more cost effective then hiring additional teachers or adding additional teaching inputs (supplies and the like). NCLB isn't an argument against incentive based pay, it is an argument against poorly crafted and monolithic teaching standards. A poor law doesn't preclude the existince of a good law.
And where are you even getting your figures? A third again? Performance appraisal really doesn't take gobs of time. Corporations engage in the overhead even for positions where performance measurement is difficult, while still trying to retain profit, and under increasingly less layers of management. Yet somehow teaching will require one appraiser for every 3 teachers? I don't buy it.
Finally, I don't see anyone arguing for a monolithic federal system with no flexibility. So arguments to that effect are straw men.
Everything in context. When the last discourse on performance based teacher evaluations led to NCLB, what will the next review of the public education system look like?
Politics is the Art of the Possible. No discussion on altering how teachers are paid and evaluated is possible when you ignore the political realities of the federal and state governments, and the immense lobbying groups that act both for and against the teachers. Considering that the certain party I mentioned previously has grown only more toxic towards the concept of federally administrated teaching standards, there is really no chance that a performance based teaching evaluation would be enacted without ending up as a back-door invitation to allowing even more intrusion by ultra-orthodox christian groups under the guise of community involvement in the review process.
Performance Pay has always been an underhanded method to break the teaching unions and to halt the regular pay raises that barely beat the annual cost of living increases. Look at NCLB and its disastrous implementation... the fact of the matter is that there are far too many teachers to construct a reliable and equitable performance analysis system. You would spend probably one third again the cost of the education system in setting up the system and hiring the labour force required to sustain it, and then the extra time input required from the teachers would mean even less time dedicated to actually teaching the class.
tl;dr: it's not worth it, the current system is better then the reform efforts, stop trying to fuck teachers because holy god their lives suck.
Yes, I'm sure the economist studying the Indian education system just wants to rob teachers of their money. I don't care if hiring effective teachers means more taxation, but I actually want results from that spending.
Argue against the study then. Actually, for all the emphasis on science propogated around here, show empirical evidence that performance pay for teaching results in a decline in knowledge. The study in the OP is well crafted and shows the opposite.
According to the study, money spent implementing a performance based rubric was far more cost effective then hiring additional teachers or adding additional teaching inputs (supplies and the like). NCLB isn't an argument against incentive based pay, it is an argument against poorly crafted and monolithic teaching standards. A poor law doesn't preclude the existince of a good law.
And where are you even getting your figures? A third again? Performance appraisal really doesn't take gobs of time. Corporations engage in the overhead even for positions where performance measurement is difficult, while still trying to retain profit, and under increasingly less layers of management. Yet somehow teaching will require one appraiser for every 3 teachers? I don't buy it.
Finally, I don't see anyone arguing for a monolithic federal system with no flexibility. So arguments to that effect are straw men.
Everything in context. When the last discourse on performance based teacher evaluations led to NCLB, what will the next review of the public education system look like?
Politics is the Art of the Possible. No discussion on altering how teachers are paid and evaluated is possible when you ignore the political realities of the federal and state governments, and the immense lobbying groups that act both for and against the teachers. Considering that the certain party I mentioned previously has grown only more toxic towards the concept of federally administrated teaching standards, there is really no chance that a performance based teaching evaluation would be enacted without ending up as a back-door invitation to allowing even more intrusion by ultra-orthodox christian groups under the guise of community involvement in the review process.
Just to be clear, you are being a partisan shrill, right?
Nope, just noting with disgust the national discourse on education in America. When you have major figures from a national political party decrying education as liberal indoctrination, you have a problem.
I have two real problem with incentivizing pay for teachers.
1) It assumes that teachers bear responsibility for everything that happens affecting a student's ability to learn. I'm sorry, but a child who becomes homeless and lioves with five different relatives during the school year because their alcoholic and abusive father can't hold down a job won't do as well in school regardless of how good or bad the teacher's methods are. Obviously, these kinds of problems will plague low income areas to a larger degree - imposing economic incentives that further decrease the supply of talented teachers where they're most needed.
How many times does this need to be addressed. No, it does not. You can measure relative gains and add in mitigating factors when assigning the final raise. Believe it or not, systems exist other than those that just by strict and absolute results on a nationwide standardized test.
2) However you structure the incentive system, based on increase in average score or total passing students etc, you create an economic incentive to tailor your teaching to one group of students over another - either those who are close to acheiving the target score or those at the bottom with the greatest gains to make. In each case, the students at the top get ignored - they'll pass either way and have little room to increase their scores, making teaching to their needs unlikely to increase your paycheck. Either the lowest or middle group will get the additional attention.
The horror, teachers might focus more efforts on underperforming students. That is seriously counted as a disadvantage for you? You can always split off truly gifted children and special needs (just like they already do) to obtain more equitable ability distributions inside of a given classroom. Which is fine. At any rate, adding an incentive to focus on underperformers is far better than a focus on getting a Master's and offering no incentive to actually apply it, or just rewarding time spent on the job.
Philisophically, even if I didn't think it would deemphasize entire blocks of students and disproportionately impact poor school districts, I don't think the problems in the educational system arise from unmotivated, lazy teachers who require incentive to do their job right. People don't become teachers for the big payday anway, they're already there because they find what they do important and rewarding enough that they'll do it in spite of a low salary.
Their salaries in aggregate aren't all that low, even accounting for educational requirements and time spent working. And no, they certainly aren't the only input into education, but they dare undoubtably an input. And the study shows that adding performance pay increases the educational output of their students. You don't need to be lazy or extremely hard working to respond to well crafted incentives.
I'm unconvinced that merit pay couldn't be made to work if it was based principally on independent auditors that actually sat in on the classrooms and observed the teachers. I'm also unconvinced that any implementation of merit pay we were to actually implement would not be stupided into oblivion.
More generally, I'm against paying one more goddamn dime for our education system until someone can explain how we spend more per capita than almost any other developed nation and still manage to fucking suck at it. If other places can do a lot better for a lot cheaper, than so can we, and we should stop throwing money at the problem until we figure out what it is we're actually buying.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I love it when people say the Teaching Unions are the problem with the education system.
No, the problem with the education system is that one particular party has spent the last 40-odd years blasting the national airwaves and the town hall meetings with the idea that the public education system indoctrinates the youth of the nation with a particular ideology.
I you.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I'm unconvinced that merit pay couldn't be made to work if it was based principally on independent auditors that actually sat in on the classrooms and observed the teachers. I'm also unconvinced that any implementation of merit pay we were to actually implement would not be stupided into oblivion.
I agree with this.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Nope, just noting with disgust the national discourse on education in America. When you have major figures from a national political party decrying education as liberal indoctrination, you have a problem.
Yes and when you have the other polical party enshrining the ideas of the teacher's union as some sort of holy gospel that should be followed off the ends of the earth you have a problem as well. Their influence is oriented almost entirely towards enhancing their own power and those of their most active stakeholders. Those who have taught for long periods of time are more likely to be active in union politics and also gain disproportionate rewards from retaining tenure. They also gain benefit from erecting high barriers to entry in the teaching profession. Lo and behold the union has been opposed to the mere mention of merit pay and they have also been instrumental in trying to increase the regulatory hurdles to teach.
I'm unconvinced that merit pay couldn't be made to work if it was based principally on independent auditors that actually sat in on the classrooms and observed the teachers. I'm also unconvinced that any implementation of merit pay we were to actually implement would not be stupided into oblivion.
More generally, I'm against paying one more goddamn dime for our education system until someone can explain how we spend more per capita than almost any other developed nation and still manage to fucking suck at it. If other places can do a lot better for a lot cheaper, than so can we, and we should stop throwing money at the problem until we figure out what it is we're actually buying.
Well I can tell you the problem in California is a top heavy system of overpaid administrators but California is so fucked up right now I have no idea what it says about the rest of the country.
Argue against the study then. Actually, for all the emphasis on science propogated around here, show empirical evidence that performance pay for teaching results in a decline in knowledge. The study in the OP is well crafted and shows the opposite.
This is exactly why I posted the article. I am actually very skeptical of performance based pay, but this article actually seems very good at addressing many of the concerns I have regarding it. The biggest failing of the study, is that it is so short. Do note, however, that it is on going.
Nope, just noting with disgust the national discourse on education in America. When you have major figures from a national political party decrying education as liberal indoctrination, you have a problem.
Well yeah, but there are more problems than the crazy fundamentalists who want to Bible brand everyone in schools to avoid the aforementioned liberal indoctrination. (Oh the irony)
Not everyone who thinks that teachers unions have become just as bloated and corrupt as the entities they provide protection from want to go as far as creating religious based charter schools.
I'm unconvinced that merit pay couldn't be made to work if it was based principally on independent auditors that actually sat in on the classrooms and observed the teachers. I'm also unconvinced that any implementation of merit pay we were to actually implement would not be stupided into oblivion.
That may be true, but then I question why all the supporters of the status quo don't direct their arguments towards reforming the formulation of merit pay and trying to push for a sensible implementation rather than just decrying it as hopeless or some sort of Evil Republican Ploy to tear down the Noble Teacher.
California shows why direct democracy is the stupidest system of governance ever conceived. I mean seriously, when Florida becomes a role model state on comparison, you need to fix some shit up.
I don't really have an issue with the basic concept but I don't see how it could be implemented in any reasonable way. Is there going to be a base salary and then tiers of bonuses?
How exactly is the math teacher with a class of 20 AP calc students going to be judged against the SPED teacher who is teaching the severely handicapped kids how to feed themselves? Neither are going to have any improvement whatsoever on the standardized tests (they don't include calc).
How are you going to compare the one biology teacher that teaches the 4 AP biology classes to the three that teach 9th grade biology all day long?
Will this make more competition within schools for classes that are seen as easy to teach?
I do worry that it will also create a financial incentive to focus on some students and not others. Especially if outliers are ignored why would a teacher bother with kids at either end of the spectrum if they are alone there.
Kistra on
Animal Crossing: City Folk Lissa in Filmore 3179-9580-0076
I fucking hate the proposition system. It might be ok if we didn't have the Mormon Church pouring money into bad bill that will be supported by the uneducated.
More generally, I'm against paying one more goddamn dime for our education system until someone can explain how we spend more per capita than almost any other developed nation and still manage to fucking suck at it. If other places can do a lot better for a lot cheaper, than so can we, and we should stop throwing money at the problem until we figure out what it is we're actually buying.
Stop parroting talking points. Explain the bold points in detail, because the first is a stupid idea, the second is an interesting statement, and the third is quite the bold claim (oh ho ho).
Sure.
End Tenure:
Last semester one of my tenure-track professors finally reached the end of his trek and received tenure. A week after he received tenure I hung out with him at a bar and I asked him how he felt. He replied, "I don't have to write another thing for the rest of my life. This is awesome."
That's what tenure is in higher-level academia: The finish line. One works one's ass off on publications and conference presentations until one gets tenure. Then one does whatever one feels like. Publish an occasional paper, work on a book, teach, etc. But the compulsion to do well is removed. Prior to tenure class evaluations and student opinion matters a great deal. After tenure? One basically reaches a point of, to quote another professor, "As long as I don't fuck a co-ed i'm fine".
I am not saying that teachers do not need job protection, that a particular level of future assurance is a bad thing. The problem is when tenure becomes the goal, the finish line to effort. Moreover, tenure allows for aged professors to camp out in their seats, so to speak, and milk the system for as long as they can physically enter a classroom and speak. Teaching positions need to not be life-long positions.
Here's the question. The goal of academia is to:
1) Teach Students
2) Employ teachers
Tenure aids in 2.
allow teachers / professors to actually teach:
I am TAing this semester so it is my first actual experience of being on that side of the teacher / student situation. The amazing realization I had is that rather than striving to teach students our goal is to get students to receive As in the class. As the professor for whom I am TAing said, we need to ensure that students get As so that students think the class easy so that more students take it so that we have TA positions. If we actually teach students, and grade them accordingly, less students would take the class and we would have less TA positions available to grad students.
That, to me, seems to be quite fucked up. So I jump through the little hoops of teaching to the test, but then try in the last 10 or 15 minutes of class to actually teach the students something, to leave the realm of "memorize this" and engage with them in a manner which, hopefully, gets them to think.
In an educational system wherein the goal is education, would not that 15 minutes be the whole class? Would we not ignore the question of "How do you get an A" but rather engage with the student's concerns with regard to, say, some philosophical question? When I have to stand up and do my little TA routine it feels as if I am saying "Here is how you get an A". Then, after that bullshit, I get to actually teach.
Actually teaching, I think, is an engagement with the students to discern their mentalities and utilize these mentalities to impart unto them information, facts, ideas, etc. which can aid in their growth as individual. I do not want these fuckers to memorize Descartes so that they can spit it out on a test. I want these fuckers to genuinely engage with the Cartesian problem and think, for themselves, what that means to their lives. The question "How is it known that there is an external world?" is not the sort of thing for which one need have a paragraph prepared to spit out; that is a genuine question to be assessed over one's life.
But I do not get to actually teach that. I have to get my students to spit out the correct answer on the test, so that I have a significant number of As, so that the dean continues to fund the department.
When we focus upon grades we forget the point of education.
That is not to say that grades are meaningless. Ideally, a moron gets an F and a critically thinking, engaged individual gets an A. But at some point we confused those two and crafted a system wherein we strive to get the moron to simply spit out the A-level whatever. Nevermind if they actually learned it; we just want them to shit it out on the test.
end "teaching towards the test" mentalities:
This goes along with what I said above. When we "teach to the test" we are not, in fact, teaching. We are simply coaching students along through a pre-designated path towards the goal of a letter grade. The majority of students never actually learn anything. They simply put bullshit into their heads, then spit out the bullshit on test day.
And that is fucking terrifying. Because life is about more than simply shitting out the correct bullshit answer at the correct time. So, education needs to be more than simply the imparting of the correct rubric for answer shitting.
One thing to note in the debate over how do we determine who gets paid what? We already make worse decisions.* You don't have to decide how do you determine between the math teacher and the physics teacher. You determine what are the best incentives that you can use to attract the correct number of math teachers. This may leach from the physics teachers, but you can then deal with that. (If we are at a point where that is the problem we are facing.... I will think we can say it has been a success and we are in a better place anyway.)
*See the pay schemes used in the banking industry.
I don't really have an issue with the basic concept but I don't see how it could be implemented in any reasonable way. Is there going to be a base salary and then tiers of bonuses?
How exactly is the math teacher with a class of 20 AP calc students going to be judged against the SPED teacher who is teaching the severely handicapped kids how to feed themselves? Neither are going to have any improvement whatsoever on the standardized tests (they don't include calc).
How are you going to compare the one biology teacher that teaches the 4 AP biology classes to the three that teach 9th grade biology all day long?
Will this make more competition within schools for classes that are seen as easy to teach?
I do worry that it will also create a financial incentive to focus on some students and not others. Especially if outliers are ignored why would a teacher bother with kids at either end of the spectrum if they are alone there.
The study doesn't address any of these, as they would only show up after the teachers learned the ins and outs of the system.
I'm unconvinced that merit pay couldn't be made to work if it was based principally on independent auditors that actually sat in on the classrooms and observed the teachers. I'm also unconvinced that any implementation of merit pay we were to actually implement would not be stupided into oblivion.
That may be true, but then I question why all the supporters of the status quo don't direct their arguments towards reforming the formulation of merit pay and trying to push for a sensible implementation rather than just decrying it as hopeless or some sort of Evil Republican Ploy to tear down the Noble Teacher.
I also think that it's theoretically possible to implement a completely free market health care system that works. But because of where the system currently is and because of certain political realities, I know that it'll never happen. Thus, fuck it, gimme UHC.
Similarly here - what is theoretically possible is not necessarily the same as what is functionally possible, and so we need to be careful.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I think the problem of "allowing teachers to teach" is that too often people mistake people who are good at a subject, for people that could teach that subject. A few of these people have existed in the world. Feynman being a notable exception. However, the reality is that teaching is itself a skill that some people do or do not have.
The problem? I'm not at all sure on how to address this.
Will this make more competition within schools for classes that are seen as easy to teach?
I mean, this is my theoretical opposition. There are already tons of reasons why a teaching position in a well-funded and high-income district is generally a "better" position than the same grade and subject at an urban, struggling school. This just seems to support such a position, practically.
And, on top of that, I don't understand where we get this idea that teachers need reasons to work harder and get better results. I've learned very quickly in my 18 months working with some of the largest financial, for-profit mortgage companies that people suck at their jobs regardless of if they're working for the government or Wells Fargo.
I'm unconvinced that merit pay couldn't be made to work if it was based principally on independent auditors that actually sat in on the classrooms and observed the teachers. I'm also unconvinced that any implementation of merit pay we were to actually implement would not be stupided into oblivion.
That may be true, but then I question why all the supporters of the status quo don't direct their arguments towards reforming the formulation of merit pay and trying to push for a sensible implementation rather than just decrying it as hopeless or some sort of Evil Republican Ploy to tear down the Noble Teacher.
I also think that it's theoretically possible to implement a completely free market health care system that works. But because of where the system currently is and because of certain political realities, I know that it'll never happen. Thus, fuck it, gimme UHC.
Similarly here - what is theoretically possible is not necessarily the same as what is functionally possible, and so we need to be careful.
So, in other words, you like disappointment? (I'm assuming, of course, that we won't get UHC, either.)
Stop parroting talking points. Explain the bold points in detail, because the first is a stupid idea, the second is an interesting statement, and the third is quite the bold claim (oh ho ho).
Sure.
End Tenure:
Last semester one of my tenure-track professors finally reached the end of his trek and received tenure. A week after he received tenure I hung out with him at a bar and I asked him how he felt. He replied, "I don't have to write another thing for the rest of my life. This is awesome."
That's what tenure is in higher-level academia: The finish line. One works one's ass off on publications and conference presentations until one gets tenure. Then one does whatever one feels like. Publish an occasional paper, work on a book, teach, etc. But the compulsion to do well is removed. Prior to tenure class evaluations and student opinion matters a great deal. After tenure? One basically reaches a point of, to quote another professor, "As long as I don't fuck a co-ed i'm fine".
I am not saying that teachers do not need job protection, that a particular level of future assurance is a bad thing. The problem is when tenure becomes the goal, the finish line to effort. Moreover, tenure allows for aged professors to camp out in their seats, so to speak, and milk the system for as long as they can physically enter a classroom and speak. Teaching positions need to not be life-long positions.
Here's the question. The goal of academia is to:
1) Teach Students
2) Employ teachers
Tenure aids in 2.
Don't forget that tenure also means that teachers who have hit the "finish line" will not be replaced by new hires.
Will this make more competition within schools for classes that are seen as easy to teach?
I mean, this is my theoretical opposition. There are already tons of reasons why a teaching position in a well-funded and high-income district is generally a "better" position than the same grade and subject at an urban, struggling school. This just seems to support such a position, practically.
And, on top of that, I don't understand where we get this idea that teachers need reasons to work harder and get better results. I've learned very quickly in my 18 months working with some of the largest financial, for-profit mortgage companies that people suck at their jobs regardless of if they're working for the government or Wells Fargo.
Do realize that this isn't necessarily about making current teachers better. The ideal scenario is to create a market that attracts the good teachers to do the jobs. This does not mean you need standardized pay across the bloody board. (It is amusing that the people against standardized tests seem ok with standardized pay.)
What is the ostensible point of tenure? Is there another profession with a comparable mechanism, whereby you effectively hit a point where it's almost impossible to fire you?
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Education is not solely the result of the teacher's abilities.
The point is: Judging performance is ridiculously difficult. It's tough. It would be easy if teachers were more like salesmen. With salesmen, it's pretty easy to judge performance - it's just pure economics. If people buy the products you're selling, you make a profit. If not, you don't. It's simple. But with teachers, it's an entirely different animal.
I do agree that good teachers should be paid more, and bad teachers should be fire and replaced with good teachers. But I wonder about the wisdom of performance based pay.
*edit to fof404 That sounds like a teacher that has been in the same district for 20 years and has their masters. Pay grades go by your level of education and how long you've been in the same place.
Starting pay in my city (high-income, suburban, high "performance") is something around $35k.
And this is the reason I would be against performance pay. My wife teaches at a private 4 year college, a public 2 year community college, and a prison. Guess which one would be the best job in a performance based pay situation?
If the problem is too many shitty teachers, then the protections for shitty teachers need to be removed. Cripple the useless unions and remove this notion of tenure. "You've been here long enough that we're not allowed to fire you" is an insane stance. "You've been here so long that you've become an irreplaceable part of our staff" is where teacher's should be finding their job security.
Cut the programs, problem solved!
tl;dr: it's not worth it, the current system is better then the reform efforts, stop trying to fuck teachers because holy god their lives suck.
No, the problem with the education system is that one particular party has spent the last 40-odd years blasting the national airwaves and the town hall meetings with the idea that the public education system indoctrinates the youth of the nation with a particular ideology.
Their solution has always been a charter system, where the public system is destroyed and private companies scrape the bottom of the barrel to set up horrendous poor-house schools. The post-Katrina charter system is an absolute disaster, and I would not hesitate to note that the disastrous experiment in pure-free market education has not stopped the Chicago-school econitards from pushing for charter systems around the world.
I, honestly, don't believe that dismantling unions and tenure are as much a solution as people believe. I think that you'd see effectiveness of American education drop if you took away the protections that provide stability and attract those with greater skill and drive. I know that the two teachers in my family, both with masters degrees and diplomas from near-ivy institutions, would toss their towel in and go work in the private sector making at least twice their current salary. It is those very measures which protect teachers which attract otherwise qualified applicants. I mean, science is the worst. Why teach biology when you can make four times that with the pharmaceutical companies? We're talking about money as the motivator for success here, are we not?
US teacher's pay already seems to be remarkably high. There's probably a more rigorous study somewhere, though.
It is actually quite the opposite of "very tough".
I do not think performance pay for teachers would in any way solve any of the educational problems we have. When I think of the things that need to be fixed (end tenure, allow teachers / professors to actually teach, end "teaching towards the test" mentalities, etc.) I fail to see how performance pay would impact any of those.
Said another way, our educational system is fucked and "performance pay" will, at best, disadvantageously affect it.
Yes, I'm sure the economist studying the Indian education system just wants to rob teachers of their money. I don't care if hiring effective teachers means more taxation, but I actually want results from that spending.
Argue against the study then. Actually, for all the emphasis on science propogated around here, show empirical evidence that performance pay for teaching results in a decline in knowledge. The study in the OP is well crafted and shows the opposite.
According to the study, money spent implementing a performance based rubric was far more cost effective then hiring additional teachers or adding additional teaching inputs (supplies and the like). NCLB isn't an argument against incentive based pay, it is an argument against poorly crafted and monolithic teaching standards. A poor law doesn't preclude the existince of a good law.
And where are you even getting your figures? A third again? Performance appraisal really doesn't take gobs of time. Corporations engage in the overhead even for positions where performance measurement is difficult, while still trying to retain profit, and under increasingly less layers of management. Yet somehow teaching will require one appraiser for every 3 teachers? I don't buy it.
Finally, I don't see anyone arguing for a monolithic federal system with no flexibility. So arguments to that effect are straw men.
Stop parroting talking points. Explain the bold points in detail, because the first is a stupid idea, the second is an interesting statement, and the third is quite the bold claim (oh ho ho).
Of the dozen or so teachers I know, especially my wife, this was not even a blip on the radar when they chose their profession. In fact, I was the only one excited about the possibility of tenure when my wife decided that she wanted to teach full time.
1) It assumes that teachers bear responsibility for everything that happens affecting a student's ability to learn. I'm sorry, but a child who becomes homeless and lioves with five different relatives during the school year because their alcoholic and abusive father can't hold down a job won't do as well in school regardless of how good or bad the teacher's methods are. Obviously, these kinds of problems will plague low income areas to a larger degree - imposing economic incentives that further decrease the supply of talented teachers where they're most needed.
2) However you structure the incentive system, based on increase in average score or total passing students etc, you create an economic incentive to tailor your teaching to one group of students over another - either those who are close to acheiving the target score or those at the bottom with the greatest gains to make. In each case, the students at the top get ignored - they'll pass either way and have little room to increase their scores, making teaching to their needs unlikely to increase your paycheck. Either the lowest or middle group will get the additional attention.
Philisophically, even if I didn't think it would deemphasize entire blocks of students and disproportionately impact poor school districts, I don't think the problems in the educational system arise from unmotivated, lazy teachers who require incentive to do their job right. People don't become teachers for the big payday anway, they're already there because they find what they do important and rewarding enough that they'll do it in spite of a low salary.
Everything in context. When the last discourse on performance based teacher evaluations led to NCLB, what will the next review of the public education system look like?
Politics is the Art of the Possible. No discussion on altering how teachers are paid and evaluated is possible when you ignore the political realities of the federal and state governments, and the immense lobbying groups that act both for and against the teachers. Considering that the certain party I mentioned previously has grown only more toxic towards the concept of federally administrated teaching standards, there is really no chance that a performance based teaching evaluation would be enacted without ending up as a back-door invitation to allowing even more intrusion by ultra-orthodox christian groups under the guise of community involvement in the review process.
Just to be clear, you are being a partisan shrill, right?
How many times does this need to be addressed. No, it does not. You can measure relative gains and add in mitigating factors when assigning the final raise. Believe it or not, systems exist other than those that just by strict and absolute results on a nationwide standardized test.
The horror, teachers might focus more efforts on underperforming students. That is seriously counted as a disadvantage for you? You can always split off truly gifted children and special needs (just like they already do) to obtain more equitable ability distributions inside of a given classroom. Which is fine. At any rate, adding an incentive to focus on underperformers is far better than a focus on getting a Master's and offering no incentive to actually apply it, or just rewarding time spent on the job.
Their salaries in aggregate aren't all that low, even accounting for educational requirements and time spent working. And no, they certainly aren't the only input into education, but they dare undoubtably an input. And the study shows that adding performance pay increases the educational output of their students. You don't need to be lazy or extremely hard working to respond to well crafted incentives.
More generally, I'm against paying one more goddamn dime for our education system until someone can explain how we spend more per capita than almost any other developed nation and still manage to fucking suck at it. If other places can do a lot better for a lot cheaper, than so can we, and we should stop throwing money at the problem until we figure out what it is we're actually buying.
I
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I agree with this.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yes and when you have the other polical party enshrining the ideas of the teacher's union as some sort of holy gospel that should be followed off the ends of the earth you have a problem as well. Their influence is oriented almost entirely towards enhancing their own power and those of their most active stakeholders. Those who have taught for long periods of time are more likely to be active in union politics and also gain disproportionate rewards from retaining tenure. They also gain benefit from erecting high barriers to entry in the teaching profession. Lo and behold the union has been opposed to the mere mention of merit pay and they have also been instrumental in trying to increase the regulatory hurdles to teach.
Republicans are far from the only party at blame.
Well I can tell you the problem in California is a top heavy system of overpaid administrators but California is so fucked up right now I have no idea what it says about the rest of the country.
This is exactly why I posted the article. I am actually very skeptical of performance based pay, but this article actually seems very good at addressing many of the concerns I have regarding it. The biggest failing of the study, is that it is so short. Do note, however, that it is on going.
Well yeah, but there are more problems than the crazy fundamentalists who want to Bible brand everyone in schools to avoid the aforementioned liberal indoctrination. (Oh the irony)
Not everyone who thinks that teachers unions have become just as bloated and corrupt as the entities they provide protection from want to go as far as creating religious based charter schools.
That may be true, but then I question why all the supporters of the status quo don't direct their arguments towards reforming the formulation of merit pay and trying to push for a sensible implementation rather than just decrying it as hopeless or some sort of Evil Republican Ploy to tear down the Noble Teacher.
How exactly is the math teacher with a class of 20 AP calc students going to be judged against the SPED teacher who is teaching the severely handicapped kids how to feed themselves? Neither are going to have any improvement whatsoever on the standardized tests (they don't include calc).
How are you going to compare the one biology teacher that teaches the 4 AP biology classes to the three that teach 9th grade biology all day long?
Will this make more competition within schools for classes that are seen as easy to teach?
I do worry that it will also create a financial incentive to focus on some students and not others. Especially if outliers are ignored why would a teacher bother with kids at either end of the spectrum if they are alone there.
I'm with this.
Sure.
End Tenure:
Last semester one of my tenure-track professors finally reached the end of his trek and received tenure. A week after he received tenure I hung out with him at a bar and I asked him how he felt. He replied, "I don't have to write another thing for the rest of my life. This is awesome."
That's what tenure is in higher-level academia: The finish line. One works one's ass off on publications and conference presentations until one gets tenure. Then one does whatever one feels like. Publish an occasional paper, work on a book, teach, etc. But the compulsion to do well is removed. Prior to tenure class evaluations and student opinion matters a great deal. After tenure? One basically reaches a point of, to quote another professor, "As long as I don't fuck a co-ed i'm fine".
I am not saying that teachers do not need job protection, that a particular level of future assurance is a bad thing. The problem is when tenure becomes the goal, the finish line to effort. Moreover, tenure allows for aged professors to camp out in their seats, so to speak, and milk the system for as long as they can physically enter a classroom and speak. Teaching positions need to not be life-long positions.
Here's the question. The goal of academia is to:
1) Teach Students
2) Employ teachers
Tenure aids in 2.
allow teachers / professors to actually teach:
I am TAing this semester so it is my first actual experience of being on that side of the teacher / student situation. The amazing realization I had is that rather than striving to teach students our goal is to get students to receive As in the class. As the professor for whom I am TAing said, we need to ensure that students get As so that students think the class easy so that more students take it so that we have TA positions. If we actually teach students, and grade them accordingly, less students would take the class and we would have less TA positions available to grad students.
That, to me, seems to be quite fucked up. So I jump through the little hoops of teaching to the test, but then try in the last 10 or 15 minutes of class to actually teach the students something, to leave the realm of "memorize this" and engage with them in a manner which, hopefully, gets them to think.
In an educational system wherein the goal is education, would not that 15 minutes be the whole class? Would we not ignore the question of "How do you get an A" but rather engage with the student's concerns with regard to, say, some philosophical question? When I have to stand up and do my little TA routine it feels as if I am saying "Here is how you get an A". Then, after that bullshit, I get to actually teach.
Actually teaching, I think, is an engagement with the students to discern their mentalities and utilize these mentalities to impart unto them information, facts, ideas, etc. which can aid in their growth as individual. I do not want these fuckers to memorize Descartes so that they can spit it out on a test. I want these fuckers to genuinely engage with the Cartesian problem and think, for themselves, what that means to their lives. The question "How is it known that there is an external world?" is not the sort of thing for which one need have a paragraph prepared to spit out; that is a genuine question to be assessed over one's life.
But I do not get to actually teach that. I have to get my students to spit out the correct answer on the test, so that I have a significant number of As, so that the dean continues to fund the department.
When we focus upon grades we forget the point of education.
That is not to say that grades are meaningless. Ideally, a moron gets an F and a critically thinking, engaged individual gets an A. But at some point we confused those two and crafted a system wherein we strive to get the moron to simply spit out the A-level whatever. Nevermind if they actually learned it; we just want them to shit it out on the test.
end "teaching towards the test" mentalities:
This goes along with what I said above. When we "teach to the test" we are not, in fact, teaching. We are simply coaching students along through a pre-designated path towards the goal of a letter grade. The majority of students never actually learn anything. They simply put bullshit into their heads, then spit out the bullshit on test day.
And that is fucking terrifying. Because life is about more than simply shitting out the correct bullshit answer at the correct time. So, education needs to be more than simply the imparting of the correct rubric for answer shitting.
*See the pay schemes used in the banking industry.
The study doesn't address any of these, as they would only show up after the teachers learned the ins and outs of the system.
I also think that it's theoretically possible to implement a completely free market health care system that works. But because of where the system currently is and because of certain political realities, I know that it'll never happen. Thus, fuck it, gimme UHC.
Similarly here - what is theoretically possible is not necessarily the same as what is functionally possible, and so we need to be careful.
The problem? I'm not at all sure on how to address this.
I mean, this is my theoretical opposition. There are already tons of reasons why a teaching position in a well-funded and high-income district is generally a "better" position than the same grade and subject at an urban, struggling school. This just seems to support such a position, practically.
And, on top of that, I don't understand where we get this idea that teachers need reasons to work harder and get better results. I've learned very quickly in my 18 months working with some of the largest financial, for-profit mortgage companies that people suck at their jobs regardless of if they're working for the government or Wells Fargo.
So, in other words, you like disappointment?
Don't forget that tenure also means that teachers who have hit the "finish line" will not be replaced by new hires.
Do realize that this isn't necessarily about making current teachers better. The ideal scenario is to create a market that attracts the good teachers to do the jobs. This does not mean you need standardized pay across the bloody board. (It is amusing that the people against standardized tests seem ok with standardized pay.)