Alright, then, quit testing students!

[Joe Fields]

If teachers don't need to be held accountable, then neither do the students.:sarcasm:

Teachers, what the hell are you afraid of? Why should you be exempt from proving your worth?

Merit pay may be a misnomer. Maybe it doesn't provide equity in teacher's pay, but it will give parents and administrators a good idea of who's worth keeping and who should find a different profession. Maybe, as merit pay structures have been enacted in the past, they have been lacking on certain fronts. But that doesn't mean that merit pay models can't be tweaked, allowing for innovative ideas and flexibility for communities with different dynamics.

I was on the Executive Council for Head Start in Kansas City, and worked closely with Dwayne Crompton, Executive Director of K.C. area Head Start program. During that time, I had the opportunity and privilege to get intimately acquainted with many schools. The Executive Council identified problems, formulated programs and followed through on the progress of the kids, as they passed through the elementary system, and now even through high school. So, telling me I don't know what I'm talking about won't wash.

My sister taught English and French for 25 years, and received numerous awards for teaching excellence. She quit to go into the private sector, because the pay was so lousy.

I have to say that there are a lot of teachers out here, afraid and in denial. There ARE a lot of bad teachers out there. Mind you, I'm not saying they are incompetent, but bad, as in lazy, doing the minimum to get the job done. Those are the ones who cheat the children. Why can't Johnny read and write, by the time he gets to H.S.? I see it here, with posters who exhibit poor spelling and grammar. I saw it all while going through the public school system, and I have witnessed a lot of it as an adult, through Head Start, as well as from watching my son go through school. Some here can deny it all they want to, but I know better. You who deny this just look plain foolish.

You can say what you want, justify any way you want, but the bottom line, IMO, is that you aren't so special that you should be exempt from being held accountable for results anymore than anyone here with any other type of job.

I have the utmost respect for the good teachers. Contempt for those just punching a clock. Like someone said earlier today, we need to separate the wheat from the chaff. There has to be a way to make this work. I would love to see the base pay for ALL teachers raised to reflect the importance of the noble task that teachers take on. Then, I want some form of merit pay structure installed. The devil will be in the details.

Joe

[ContinentalOp]

1. Wow, I just had a brilliant idea!

If we want to give "parents and administrators a good idea of who's worth keeping and who should find a different profession" perhaps we should take a clue from the private sector and hire some kind of overseers who could manage the teachers, gauge their performance, and administer evaluations of their performance. We can call them something catchy like... how about.. ADMINISTRATORS? :shrug:

[sense]

7. NEA

The NEA will never allow it. They are in charge of education in this country and should not have the power they have. I'm not anti-union, but I am against the NEA because they are only concerned about the teachers and willingly toss the children aside to ensure teachers job security, regardless of their qualifications. I don't believe they have any regard for the children of this nation and that makes them evil.

[ContinentalOp]

22. Good god you're an idiot.

Did you even read my post? I'm talking about management making their own judgments about the employees, free from any arbitrary testing metrics. It's what every single business does already, school districts included. Ooh, but I suppose the evil scary UNION wouldn't allow that huh? The union would never allow administrators to observe teachers in the classroom would they? They would never allow any process for parents to file complaints against a teacher. :eyes:

[sense]

29. Oh, you can file

All the complaints you want, there'll simply be no action, except that the child will be bullied by the teacher in addition to the students. Haven't been to school in a while? I was told by the district that if I wanted them to follow the laws I'd have to sue the state and they'd drag it out forever and then they would just do as they pleased no matter what the verdict. Very pro-child.

[Joe Fields]

34. you come up with your lame analogy, and call that guy an idiot.

ROFLMAO!!!!:rofl:

[ContinentalOp]

37. Analogy?

I simply described how the review process currently works in public schools, and indeed in most other jobs in the world. A supervisor oversees your performance and makes their own judgement, not subject to any arbitrary testing or metrics but based on firsthand observation.

[Joe Fields]

40. your answer on #3.

[ContinentalOp]

43. Oops, I see what you mean now. I wasn't thinking of the context of the whole thread.

I made a facetious post saying that administrators should observe teacher performance which they already do and "sense" said that the NEA would never allow it. I'm sure it wasn't a good idea to call him or her an idiot, and that's probably grounds to get my post deleted but I'm sorry, if you're going to come onto DU, and bash unions and public education you might want to have a slight clue about how the system works.

[rwheeler31]

2. Will you test the administrators and the parents?

[Joe Fields]

6. Administrators are definitely part of the problem.

Why shouldn't they be held accountable, as well? As for parents, dream on. Many parents are a hurdle that teachers just have to find a way to clear.

I will say, though, that Parents as Teachers programs are a godsend, where I'm from, and are a major help to the classroom.

[fed_up_mother]

49. Good ol' boy administrators who protect bad teachers can be a BIG part of the problem

[ContinentalOp]

3. Merit pay is a great idea though.

High school football coaches should be required to let any and all applicants on the team, rotate them in a random order, and take merit pay based on the team's performance.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

5. heehee

:thumbsup:

[noamnety]

9. Ha!

professional coaches, too - why limit it to high school?

Random people should be on pro football/baseball/hockey teams, the coaches should get to work with each group for only one year and have to deal with all their physical history and ability that they bring to the game. I love it!

[ddeclue]

14. We have that already - it's called "Reality TV"...

:P

[ContinentalOp]

24. I was going to extend the analogy to all private industry...

but I thought it would be better to let the football image stand on its own. That's sure to get the Freepers and Texans shitting in their pants. (Sorry Texans, I kid).

[Joe Fields]

10. Since football is not a required subject, and is extracurricular,

your proposal would not and should not apply. The emphasis on sports is a big problem with schools.

[last_texas_dem]

19. Do you see any parallel there, though?

Just as not all children are "good" athletes, not all children are "good" students.

I was a pretty good student, but was not a good athlete, largely because I cared nothing about sports. And no matter how good or inspiring of a coach I might have had, I was unlikely to try to "become" a good athlete because it was not something that was important to me.

If I felt that way about athletics, it hardly surprises me that many children feel the same way about academics.

A good or inspiring teacher can only do so much to alter a student's behavior in a one-year period, and this is why I think the very idea of tying a teacher's pay to the "performance" of the students that happen to be assigned to his or her classes is a very bad idea. It seems to be based on the flawed assumption that the relationship between one teacher and one student exists in a vacuum.

[XemaSab]

45. Here's my objection to what you're saying

(This is going to be slightly roundabout, so bear with me.)

Tonight I saw a show on the NattyGeo channel about the Hubble space telescope, and what the Hubble has taught us about the universe.

It was the coolest damn thing I have ever seen on TV, at least since last month when they had the NOVA show about dinosaurs.

Kids think nature is cool, kids think archaeology is cool, kids think astronomy is cool, kids think paleontology is cool, kids think herpetology is cool, kids think science fiction is cool, kids think Native American legends are cool, kids think bodies are cool, kids think animals are cool, kids think stories are cool... In short, kids think all kinds of things are cool.

I think the big problem with education is the focus on teaching kids the damn multiplication table instead of teaching kids cool stuff.

If kids were taught that you need algebra to calculate where a rocket will land, kids would think algebra was cool, but I know when I was in school I thought algebra was useless.

Similarly, if kids learn that a good background in spelling and grammar means a lifetime of work as a journalist or author, that opens a lot of doors that would otherwise be closed.

Academia doesn't seem relevant, so kids think they're not interested.

You say that some kids might not be interested in school, but here you are today posting on a political website that demands a somewhat broad understanding of current events. I think that in and of itself is an interest that should be encouraged in future generations.

[nadinbrzezinski]

23. The emphasis on sports is a big problem with schools. ...

Absolutely,

They are the worst problem, and I know in some places they are a religion, but the football team is a very large problem,

[Marrah_G]

53. Sports is not the problem- Sports can be a very positive thing

Schools who put sports over academics is the problem.

Some regions are worse then others in regards to this.

In my town sports is a positive extra curricular activity.

No kid here gets a pass because of sports.

The coaches are all teachers.

The coaches make it clear that academics come first.

Teachers know they can let a coach know a kid is fucking up and the coach will address the situation.

[ContinentalOp]

28. You're absolutely right.

Since it's not required it should be the FIRST thing to go before we discuss any of this other nonsense. Cut all extracurricular sports funding in schools and then we'll talk.

The point is about the performance of public employees though is it not? And since coaches are public employees why should they be playing by a separate set of rules from their peers?

Maybe the day we can confiscate back pay from FEMA officials who failed at their jobs then I'll start to consider the concept of merit pay for public school teachers.

[Joe Fields]

30. That's the spirit. Since other systems are broken, let's not fix education.

Hmmm....

[ContinentalOp]

35. If by "fix" you mean...

"to castrate or spay" or "to arrange or influence the outcome or action of, esp. privately or dishonestly" then yes, let's please not "fix" education in that way. If you honestly think merit pay and all of the testing and metrics of NCLB were intended to improve public education then I don't see why you should object to applying those tactics to every other aspect of life. You object because these ideas clearly don't work and were only designed to kill public education.

[Joe Fields]

48. why would you make a giant leap to that conclusion?

did I mention anything about spaying and neutering?

I think not.

If you are a teacher, is this the type of logic you use in the classroom? I hope not.

[ddeclue]

12. Reductio ad absurdum

NO that's NOT how merit pay or testing has to work.. that's just taking the most ridiculous mindless version of testing to prove your point and because it is ridiculuous if FAILS to prove it.

You test for IMPROVEMENT not absolute performance and you have to consider other factors such as the student's basic potential - you can't expect the same performance out of profoundly handicapped children as you do from gifted children.

Common sense has to prevail but you can't say "I can't be held accountable for my work product".

Nobody in America IN or OUT of government gets to do that.

:eyes:

[ContinentalOp]

32. That's fine. My "No Athlete Left Behind" program just needs some minor adjustments I guess.

The team that wins the state championship will be the team that is "most improved." A mediocre team that edges their way up the rankings a bit will bring in a big bonus for their coach while last year's championship coach will have to go on probation if his team is not so strong this year. Sounds fair to me.

Are you honestly telling me that everyone in government and private industry is "held accountable for their work product"? I mean seriously are you shitting me? You've been in a coma the past 50 years or something?

To bring it down to practical terms, my mother who taught for 35 years gets no bonus because her school's test scores were already high. My moron Freeper aunt who has been teaching for five years in an underperforming school in hicksville CA gets a nice bonus for drilling the kids on bullshit tests and getting the scores up slightly each year. Tell me what good does that do?

[ddeclue]

38. No I think YOU'VE been in the coma for the last 50 years...

try getting a non government sector job and you'll find out how much pressure there is and how accountable every is - at least at the peon levels that 99% of the world operates at.

To answer your question posed by your final example:

It's NOT about "rewarding teachers" so the incentive described makes PERFECT sense, it's about improving student performance which apparently it does (at least insofar as standardized tests are concerned) year over year.

Your problem is that you are thinking about yourself as the center of the universe rather than what the actual goal of the incentive is: to improve student performance.

Doug D.

[ContinentalOp]

41. LOL, "try getting a non government job"

That's priceless! Because I defend teachers you assume I am one and you insult me for it? Though both of my parents, two of my grandparents, and an aunt were all teachers, I myself have never had a government job. I'll admit that I don't know anything about blue collar work, but I feel pretty confident in saying that in the office world, success has more to do with looks, personality, manner of dress, and negotiating skills than it does job performance.

I suppose their are plenty of jobs that can be quantified in terms of time spent doing a task, number of widgets produced, etc. but teaching is not one of those jobs. And I can understand that somebody working in a factory who is working under some kind of production quota might feel resentful of a professional such a teacher whose performance is not easily quantifiable.

It's funny that you say that I think about myself as the center of the universe, because I think that's actually the result of a lot of the animosity toward teachers. If your child is having problems with a particular teacher it must be the teacher's fault! Never mind the hundreds of other students that teacher has helped throughout his or her career. Imagine if we treated doctors the same way? What? The flu? Certainly not! MY child doesn't get the flu. I demand to see another doctor!

[ddeclue]

44. Oh brother... you are so full of it...

By your standards we should stop handing out grades to the students altogether so we can avoid judging anyone's performance.

Welcome to real life 101, people get grades, some people pass some people fail.

Of COURSE we can evaluate student AND teacher performance numerically. It's just that you don't want to do that because it will point out that some teachers are bad teachers.

:eyes:

[last_texas_dem]

47. How can we evaluate student and teacher performance numerically?

Teachers take examinations in order to be allowed to teach, but knowing the information regarding your content area and your knowledge of pedagogy-related material doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a good teacher who can reach the students.

Students have grown up receiving a glut of standardized testing, but obviously these standardized tests aren't all they're cracked up to be, considering how often they are scrapped and reformulated. Even if someone manages to come up with a "definitive" standardized test, how does, say, the difference in a student's score on the test from one year to the next indicate that the "growth" or lack of growth are due to the teacher in that particular subject area? Maybe they just didn't feel like taking a test that day...

Or, OK, let's say this "merit pay" system is going to have nothing to do with standardized testing, and it's going to be based on something even more subjective, but somehow still be an accurate gauge of student and teacher performance. I've yet to see any of the "merit pay" defenders on this board produce an example of a fair and accurate system of how this would be done. All I've seen is a lot of defense of the idea of "merit pay" in theory and/or whining about how everyone just "knows" who the shitty teachers are and who the good teachers are and so that's how teacher quality should be assessed.

[Maru Kitteh]

18. That's really beautiful. I'm going to have to borrow it. Often.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

51. Merit pay needn't mean "pay teachers with classes with high test scores more".

I think that criticisms of the merit pay for teachers in general make much less sense that criticisms of specific executions of merit pay.

Just because "pay teachers with classes who score highly in SATS more" is a foolish idea doesn't mean "find better ways of distinguishing people teaching well from people teaching less well, and pay the ones teaching better more, to encourage burned-out teachers to teacher well" is.

[Extend a Hand]

4. maybe we should quit testing students

My son went to a Montessori where they didn't test, grade, or assign homework 2-6th grade. It was an amazing learning experience for him. The point was to learn and to learn to love learning, not just to pass a test.

[ContinentalOp]

33. Maybe we should come up with a new "testing" paradigm.

The teachers can assign projects to the students... writing, creative projects, spur of the moment essays, etc. The teachers can then evaluate the results of those projects, assess the students' progress based on each individual's needs and potentials, and assign then some kind of graduated metric, perhaps based on an alphabetical system. We could call these assessments something like "grades". I know it sounds crazy but it just might work.

[Extend a Hand]

46. The current grading system

works so well? You could've fooled me.

[noamnety]

8. Most people don't mind being held accountable for their own actions.

The objections start to appear when we're being held accountable for 100 other people's upbringing, attitudes, abilities, and previous educational experiences.

[Joe Fields]

13. That is clearly not the sense that I get from this board.

The teachers here DO seem to mind being held accountable.

[noamnety]

17. They already are accountable for their actions

through evaluations that happen in a number of ways.

You may need to reread my post again, I think you missed the point of it.

[tkmorris]

20. All I've seen here is the same objection made in post 8

I've seen that issue raised about using standardized testing as a tool to measure a teacher's performance again and again and again. It's an argument you address not at all in your OP, as if you were somehow unaware of it, and you failed to address it yet again when it is brought up directly.

Qualified or not your unwillingness or inability to counter that argument (or indeed, any of the others) makes your argument very unconvincing.

[Joe Fields]

27. There you go clinging to the old ways.

Did I not say in my OP that new, innovative and flexible ideas need to be explored to try and make merit pay models work?

[tkmorris]

36. Sure, but you offer no ways to do that

And there's the rub. Merit pay is, as you know, not a new idea. It gets kicked around every few years, usually around presidential changeover periods like now, and people make the exact same arguments you are making now. Unfortunately they always seem to drop the ball when it comes time to actually propose a method of even reasonably accurately assessing teacher quality.

I am not against the idea philosophically. I have met some excellent (and underpaid) teachers in my time, and I have met some that honestly made me question how on earth they ever managed to acquire a degree, let alone convince someone to hire them to teach children. I'd LOVE to dump the driftwood, and reward those that deserve it. I just haven't seen any proposals to evaluate teachers performance that inspire any faith in me. Perhaps we just need to accept that any evaluation system will be rife with distortions but declare it to be a better approach than what we are doing now. I'm not certain I agree with that, but at least it's honest and who knows? It might actually be an improvement.

[Joe Fields]

42. One thing is certain: a "one size fits all" approach would surely fail

I am not part of the president's team. I have little or no input. I believe that much of whatever is agreed upon should come from each community, because no two communities are the same. For me to sit here and spout "solutions" would be foolish.

I will say this, though; I have heard absolutely nothing from those against merit pay, except that they don't want it.

[Lost in CT]

21. I not sure where teachers get this strange idea that managers in the private world

pick all there own employees and don't have to deal with fuck ups of a various nature.

[noamnety]

31. Schools are not corporations

For good reason.

Would you really want schools run like that? In a corporation, a manager may not have picked his own employees, but someone has screened them, and there is a process in place to get rid of the employees that don't perform.

Corporations don't employ every person in the community who decides they want to work at that company, the employees don't have the option of not showing up - with no warning - several days a week, and retaining their job. If a manager has a poor employee, they don't become a "failing" corporation because they kicked the nonperformer out, and they don't become a failing corporation because a nonperformer decided to quit.

That's not the function of schools, nor should it be.

[Iris]

50. students and parents cannot be fired.

[Joe Fields]

52. if you are a teacher, then you know that, going into your profession.

If you can't figure out how to be effective, given that fact, then get out of teaching. you don't belong there.

[rwheeler31]

11. Trouble is some were brung up to think different.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

15. I don't want the devil to be in charge of anything.

and this intimate acquaintance? is that like carnal knowledge and by the way Johnny pulled my pigtail and I lost my homework and My mother smokes crack and Dad left last week with his girlfriend.

[Ichingcarpenter]

16. ADMINISTRATORS in Scandinavia are voted on by teachers

The person holds the position for one or two years.

There is no Administrative system that cuts out the power
of the teachers like the United States.

Many schools, like days of old, vote on who should run them
among their peers.

[Luminous Animal]

39. That is exactly the way it should be. (n/t)

[Luminous Animal]

25. Bullshit. There are not a lot of bad teachers out there.

There a few bad teachers and 30 years of Republican propaganda. Propaganda that does little more than pit teacher against teacher. Workers against workers.

[sohndrsmith]

26. Not exactly the same, but in the '70's, my (rather progressive) school decided

to stop grading students because (if I recall correctly) it labeled kids with a possibly inaccurate "ranking" that didn't indicate the skills and abilities that students may have had that weren't being graded or measured...

The idea has merit (heh) to a degree, in my view, but I don't think the school really thought it through all that well...

Apparently, the teachers didn't like it much because they had to write detailed reports - or rather, more detailed reports than they had always been required to do (which were already rigorous, done twice a year for each and every student), so the school went back to using a more traditional grading system.

I was in 3rd or 4th grade at the time of this "experiment" (or thereabouts) - the only reason I knew about it was because my mother was a teacher at the school, and while she never divulged inappropriate "insider" information to her kids about the faculty, etc., we couldn't escape some extra details by default. The amount of time she put into her reports every year was monumental already, but she put in 200% in each of them, so I don't know if the change really affected her personally. Perhaps the "normal" reports weren't rigorous for some of the other teachers... and it was not a welcome addition. I don't know.

The kids thought it was kind of cool but it didn't last long, from what I remember. That's the closest I can come to a real-life version of your "suggestion". : )

It was (and is) a great little school - quirks and all.