Here in California, our governor…Arnold S…believes that our school teachers should be paid on merit…that “could-care-less” teachers should earn less.
The Teachers Union is blasting Arnold for his attitude.
I believe that if good school teachers make no more than mediocre or bad school teachers, what is the incentive for a good teacher to help the person after hours or put in that extra effort?
On the other hand, how do you determine merit?..you cannot go by results because a mediocre teacher in an affluent area often will obtain better marks from his/her students than an excellent teacher in an impoverished area.
Thusly my question is: Should all teachers be given the same salary and the same benefits for teaching at a particular level or should better teachers be rewarded with better salaries and benefits? If you think the latter is true, how would you determine who that good teacher is?
Merit pay is a great idea. How to determine it? How about the same way private industry does? Peer comments, manager (principal) evaluations, student comments, consistently high test scores for students maybe… In the end, it’s a judgement call. In my company, we have them every year. We are evaluated by our managers, his evaluations are approved by his, and we are ranked into quintiles. Pay raises and perks are based on where you stand relative to your co-workers.
My wife, on the other hand, works in a union where there is no merit pay. They have huge morale problems, and the inevitable slackers who show up for work and sit on their asses and make the best people work harder. So you get punished for excellence, and rewarded for being a slacker. So eventually, the best people leave or burn out and give up.
Definitely merit pay should be the model. I’ve been teaching for about seven years now, and there’s a huge difference in quality between teachers (I also work a lot with other teachers, so I get to see a wide variety).
This is the crux of the problem. I doubt there are many people who would disagree with merit pay in principle, but there are many who would prefer no merit pay to a flawed system of determining merit (e.g. standardized test performance of students).
Even as an experienced teacher, I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to articulate a specific method to determine merit - after all, folks spend years in graduate school studying evaluation and assessment. It’ll suffice for me to say that a robust system would probably include evaluation by a committee of supervisors and peers, consideration of average performance in the classroom over multiple years vs. other classrooms in the same school, teacher development, and school community participation (remember, a school is more than just a collection of classrooms).
[sub]Special note: I wouldn’t be affected by this one way or another - no personal hobbyhorse or axe to grind.[/sub]
Well I don’t know if it should be the model specifically for the reasons you mentioned (along with many others). Certain jobs (like firemen, teachers, police officers) cannot be merit based pay by nature. Too many problems would arise from trying to “rate” a teacher’s performance. Also, most teachers don’t become teachers to make tons of money. Most good teachers are motivated by their students’ success.
Agreed. Not to mention that nobody would teach in a crappy school or a teach remedial class if their pay were based on test scores. I think a better approach would be to pay different types of teachers different salaries. I’ve never understood why gym teachers get paid the same amount as physics teachers or English teachers. High school teachers should also get paid more than some lower grade teachers.
I think the variation in the quality of teachers definitely supports the need for merit pay.
However, individuals vary in their quality of teaching depending on who they are teaching.
Some teachers do well with advanced students. Some teachers do better with remedial or average students. What if a teacher finds herself teaching two advanced classes, one above-average class, one average class, and one remedial class. If she is better teaching advanced students but not-so-well with slower, her overall “merit” won’t be so high as a teacher who works only with one category of students–the one she’s best suited for. And even good teachers have to work harder with slow students than fast-learning students. Why would you want to compare their efforts with that of teachers who only tend to the school’s cream-of-the-crop?
Would merit be assessed from year-to-year? What would it be based on? Grades (which can be artifically inflated)? Test scores? I remember doing the “minimum basic skills test” stuff in grammar school (K-8th grades), but not in high school. Measuring merit each year seems alright on paper, but every teacher knows that there’s variation in the “crop” from year-to-year. One year many of the students will be brilliant. The next year, the class may be filled with slow students with behavioral problems. It’s a random draw, in some cases. In others, their may be reasons for these differences. For instance, a local feeder school may have recently added some bad teachers, resulting in low-quality students coming from that school. Or, a magnet school may be required to open its doors to more students in the district, lowering the selection standards it previously held. Or, the reason could be even more drastic. I have a friend who’s been a teacher for more than 30 years, and she believes that her students are worse than they’ve ever been. She seriously think the full impact of crack addiction in the 80s and 90s is finally coming to fruition).
Also, it seems to me that merit-pay from institution to institution will vary tremenduously. It will take a lot more for a teacher of an overcrowded inner-city school full of low-income students to do “well” (however you want to define that word), than a teacher of a plush suburb, where all the students have their own computers at home, can afford tutors, and have parents who can and do help out with assignments and projects. Their base salaries shouldn’t even be the same. Why should their merit pay?
Just the opposite, IMO. Having taught everything from pre-school to (now) college, I feel quite confident that it’s usually harder to be a good teacher at the lower age bracket. Teaching 25 little kids is very difficult work.
And while I’m in favor of merit pay, every single metric has rather obvious routes to abuse. The best bet is to measure it by multiple criteria; which is probably too complex a concept for the politicians to master.
Like many of the poster so far, I favor merit pay…as soon as we figure out what merit is and how to measure it.
This is a lot more complex than an ‘industry’ job- no matter how much you input, your outputs can vary wildly, because we are dealing with children that learn at different rates, and respond to different methods of teaching. That’s without considering any external factors that influence success. I’ve always thought that it’s unfair to throw the burden of their learning fully on the shoulders of a classroom teacher, ignoring things like socio-economic class, family dynamics, etc…but teachers are a convenient scapegoat.
I also am wary of any plan hatched by a state legislature, and even more suspicious of any plan to be implemented by a local school board.
Also, seconding **furt’s ** suggestion that teaching primary school can be as tough or tougher than higher grades. My Lady is a classroom teacher, and she takes non-readers and turns them into readers. How she’s able to do so as consistently as she has is almost beyond my comprehension.
I don’t mean that it should be a linear relationship. However, it is much harder to teach high school English than 5th grade. My mom is an English teacher. The amount of papers she grades is astounding. Most elementary school teachers don’t have a great workload. Of course, they are more involved in molding a child’s character, but I don’t think that makes up for the extra work. My mom has also taught at many different levels (as have many members of my family), so I’ve seen the varying amounts of free time she’s had.
Also, unless merit based pay worked as a zero-sum game, it would be a budgeting nightmare. If too many teachers do well one year, you will have exhausted the budget. There’s no way to plan ahead.
True. But any good teacher should be able to teach any subject at a 5th grade level. I’m not saying that elementary school teachers don’t work hard, just that I think it’s not always as hard as other teachers. Either way, it’s probably impractical to determine salary based on grade level in any rational way without causing chaos.
This ‘inability to measure’ meme is simply false. There’s nothing about teaching or being a fireman or a police officer that makes it any harder to assess merit than, say, a programmer or a mechanic.
I suspect you all know who the good teachers are, correct? You can identify the bad ones? That’s all you need. The idea that you have to have a standardized measuring system for merit is just old union thinking. You have principals. They talk to parents. They walk by classes and see what’s going on (or if they don’t, they themselves should be subject to review). They hear other teachers talking. They see test scores. They can figure out who the good teachers are, as can the other teachers, as can the parents. All can give input into a teacher review.
I simply don’t agree. I currently teach 13th grade literature and composition; I’ve also taught grade-schoolers to read. IMO the latter is much, much harder. You have a point with the workload involved in grading essays; but as monstro’s post suggests, older students can work independantly, which can free up time.
Fair enough. I think the early grades (K-3) are just as hard if not harder than high school. That’s why I said some lower grades. Teaching kids to read is really difficult. But, kids know most of that by 5th grade.
Of course, that assumes I trust the people making the decisions, both objectively and to also not allow their prejudices, office politics, etc. to get in the way of an accurate assessment. Suffice it to say, I’d feel more comfortable with some sort of objective standards, assuming we can create them. If we can’t, we’re better off not implementing a policy like ‘merit’ pay.
Of course it’s harder. A programmer creates a program that is a direct result of his/her understanding of computers, and his/her effort. If the program sucks, he/she doesn’t get a raise. If it doesn’t make any money, there is no raise. Teachers, firemen, and police officers don’t create a tangible product that can be tied to an individual’s performance. Just knowing/thinking that someone is a good teacher doesn’t mean that it can be measured in any meaningful way. The input-output relationship doesn’t vary nearly as much in most other professions. Plus, things work differently in the public sector. There is a different level of accountability and transparency.
I don’t think you realize how most schools work. A principal doesn’t usually have first-hand experience evaluating teachers. Walking by a classroom doesn’t usually tell you how much a kid is learning. Test scores don’t usually reflect how great a teacher is. I will try to look for the cite, but in one of my mom’s teaching magazines, they reported on a study stating how most kids that are at the bottom of their class by the middle of elementary school will remain there for the rest of their educational careers. Basically, a “C” student will likely remain a “C” student. Despite the fact that a student will have good teachers and piss poor teachers, their performance usually doesn’t change much relative to their peers. How fair would it be to penalize teachers for something they have no control over?
Another things is whether the criteria for being a good teacher is based on “value added”. That is, is a teacher who raises a child test scores from 65 to 80 better than one who raises another child’s scores from 90 to 93? Is someone who teaches at Harvard better than one who teaches at a less prestigious school? Schools like Harvard and Princeton add little value to their students. They only accept people who have a history of success. While the graduating class at Harvard may be more successful than that of Rutgers, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have better teachers.
Lastly, I think many people don’t understand what motivates most people in education. They are not in it to get rich. They like imparting knowledge to students and molding young minds. Most of them that I know genuinely feel that way. Sure, they would like to make more money, but that’s not gonna be the impetus for them “working harder”. Most ineffective teachers I’ve known were either bad communicators, or people with bad personalities. That will not be changed by dangling the prospect of more money over their head.
It would make a teachers’ job much easier if there was a unified dress code and mandatory respect for the teacher in the classroom.
Disruption in the class and disrespect should be penalized across the board. Then teachers would have a better chance of teaching.
I favor uniforms for all students to avoid designation of rich, medium or poor.
A good education must begin at home with the parents. But how can a parent with a 3rd or 4th grade education (many of the undocumented aliens) help their children with their homework or really have an interest in encouraging education in their child?
Would merit pay be based on some kind of objective standard? Such as, you are eligible for merit pay if 80% of your students score 50% or better on the system-wide standardized test. Because I would be for something like this.
But if it’s more subjective, such as “All the kids and parents think you’re hot shit” or “Compared to your colleages (all English teachers, all fifth grade teachers, etc. in your school), you are the best”, I don’t agree with it. It’s like being graded on a curve. A teacher has no control over how well his or her colleagues do. Their merit should stand alone. (Also, imagine how you will feel if you find yourself at an excellent school full of super-duper teachers. Will you earn a bonus there just as easily as you would if you worked at a fair-to-middling school full of average to mediocre teachers? Will a new teacher receive more attention–positive or negative–than a veteran teacher?)
Even it would be measured by the first method, I’m not sure how I feel about it. A teacher of remedial English will have to do much more work to get 80% of her students to pass the standardized test than a teacher who teaches AP English. For it to be fair, some kind of sliding scale would have to be instituted. Not only within schools, but between schools (with socioeconomics of the students entered into the equation).
But for it to be practical, it seems like it would have to be a more relative, more subjective measure. As brickbacon said, if too many people meet the criterion for merit pay, then the budget will break and the meaning of “merit” will be lost. If the bar is set too high, though, it won’t be a realistic way to motivate teachers. Instead, it will result in having a bunch of teacers unfairly labeled as “bad”.
I don’t think our criteria for what constitutes merit will or should be based on a simple equation, Sam.
Curious, how do you achieve this ‘mandatory respect’?
I support school uniforms, btw. And I do think that parental involvement and support have as much, if not more, to do with student success than any given teacher does. When I see the parents (if any exist) of underachieving students on parents’ nights, it pretty well answers all of my questions as to why the kids are not performing. But once again, it’;s not like anyone wants to pass any sort of legislation telling parents that it’s their fault that their kids are underachieving. Better by far to throw it on teachers, right?
A point worth making for virtually every job. I mean, teachers would like another buck like everyone else; but are you really going to do things completely differently because there’s $500 more at the end of the year if you do? Phooey.
If you’re a lazy teacher, you won’t have the motivation to do that; if you’re a good teacher, you’re already doing what you think is best for your students and it’s going to take a* lot * of money to change your mind.
Are you prepared to deal with all of the problems that will result when Mrs. Johnson is making $30k a year while Mrs. Smith makes $60k a year, both teaching the same subjects in the same school – and everyone knows it?
As I said, I’m in favor of merit pay in principle, but every metric has rather obvious routes to abuse. The best bet is to measure it by multiple criteria; which is probably too complex a concept for the politicians to master, and open to manipulation by outside groups such as the NEA.
My solution is to get rid of government schooling, but I’m nuts…