The unions say no, that doing so would just make teachers flee poorer schools, where they are needed most.
The feds say they want test results as criteria in order to get federal dough.
What to do?
12,000 Teacher Reports, but What to Do?
The answer isn’t clear, of course. We need a way to pay better teachers more money, but nobody has suggested a reasonable way to decide who is a better teacher. Until then, paying teachers the same as other teachers in the same area with the same experience is the only thing that makes sense.
Another option is to simply pay teachers in poor neighborhoods more. The school would be free to hire based on subjective notions of which teachers are “better”, which is actually probably more accurate than any objective yardstick at the moment.
Factor in the previous scores of the children in each class so that teachers are compensated for the relative performance compared with peers year to year rather than absolute performance. Presumably, this would put the incentive on working in a lower performing school whose pupils had a higher performance “ceiling,” and more potential for improvement.
You might, maybe, be justified in tying teacher pay to how much their students improve over the previous year’s tests-- Someone who can bring students up from a failing understanding to a passing understanding is presumably a good teacher. But just tying it to the raw scores themselves isn’t at all fair to the teachers who started with pretty poor students to begin with.
Even going by a “most improved” metric, though, there are still plenty of problems. First, there’s the tests themselves: Unless you can guarantee that what the tests are measuring are what we really want out of our schools, then you’re going to force teachers to “teach to the test”, possibly neglecting lessons that are, in the real world, more important than what happens to be on the test.
Second, you’d have to control for attendance somehow. If a kid plays hooky every day and then fails the test, his poor performance can hardly reflect on the teacher, but then again, if we just don’t count those scores, then a teacher might directly or indirectly encourage the worse students to skip. I’m not sure what the best way to account for this is.
Third, even if you’re comparing to previous scores, how much a student improves can also be influenced by factors outside the teacher’s control. The biggest factor in how a student does, far more significant than anything a teacher can do, is what the home environment is like. A lot of students, especially in poorer schools, have parents who just don’t give a damn about education, and there’s nothing a teacher can do about that.
I do not know how your school systems work over there, but the same debate has been going on here lately. A problem here is that teachers correct exams and set grades, so if their pay would depend on their students’ results, they could just give themselves raises by jacking up grades artificially (this kind of cheating already happens in private schools, to make them seem “better”).
Would this be a problem with your system? It’s obvious that the tests and grading must be completely independent of the teachers for such an incentive program to work.
I don’t think this is any different from any other job. How do you tell if someone is a good manager? How do you tell if someone is a good HR representative?
I highly doubt a principal or superintendent doesn’t know who his good teachers are and who would be first out the door if the opportunity presented itself. That’s how they make tenure decisions in the first place. Heck, even in high school, as a student, it was easy to tell which teachers were good and which ones were incompetent or didn’t give a damn.
The problem is that it’s a subjective process, which is anathema to unions.
Seems a lot of student test performance is connected to SES and parenting… not as much teacher performance. So, as a neighborhood ages and perhaps SES falls over time, test scores fall and so would teacher pay. As a neighborhood gentrifies, scores go up and teachers get a windfall. Doesn’t seem fair unless you have some kind of SES adjustment.
My wife was a special education teacher for 35 years. Some of her students couldn’t even dress themselves. For some of them, a victory would be to have them be able to read one more word than they had the previous year. Yet No Child Left Behind required that those students be measured and tested by the same standards as everyone else.
It’s unlikely that more than a handful of the hundreds of students my wife taught would ever do well on a standardized test – that’s why they were special ed students in the first place. But the rules (as they’re currently written) are specific. They’re expected to take the test, and they’re classed as a subgroup whose performance must meet the standards.
So, how do you evaluate the performance of students who simply don’t fit into the parameters of the test? Not just special ed students, but students who don’t test well for any of a variety of reasons.
I can’t speak for education in general, but around here the tests are prepared to a statewide standard and graded by a third-party.
Once you get the test measuring what you want, account for previous years performance, adjust for attendance, and all other factors, there is still one problem left with tying teacher salary to test scores.
How do you get the students to care? For example, Ohio students take an 8th grade science exam that counts for nothing. They must eventually take and pass a graduation exam in order to get a high school diploma. But, there is no pass this test or you don’t move on to the next grade requirement at every level.
Once you make a year-end must-pass test, then you can start thinking about linking it to pay.
There’s already a big problem with “teaching the test” when scores only affect school funding and ratings. If it directly impacted the teacher’s salary, they’d probably be running “here is exactly how to take this test” boot camps.
And why shouldn’t they? They would be fools not too. As the spouse of a teacher, I can tell you they are sliding towards that now. One solution that I think has possiblities is incorporating peer-reviews in to pay. It would not be the complete basis for pay, but could be a worthwhile component.
Despite the obvious argument that test aren’t necessarily indicative of knowledge, the teacher hardly has control over the children’s parents values for education which study after study shows is the most important indicator for early success.
Public schools are tasked with making a good product while having no say in their raw materials, what company on Earth does that? It’s hardly surprising Private Schools do better, they get to pick who can go.
Yeah, but the stuff on the tests doesn’t cover everything kids should be learning. If all the time is spent teaching the specific questions on a standardized test, no time can be spent on anything else.
A better idea would be if teachers were paid based on actual gpa/grades performance, but since the teachers are the ones making the assignments and issuing the grades, everybody would have straight As and every teacher would be rich.
Don’t know any way around that. Having the school set the assignments/tests would be bad.
To me, the problem is that tests are often only indicative of knowledge, which is a rather lame thing to test.
It’s like that video of Al Franken drawing a map of the US by memory. That sort of thing is just a party trick. It serves no actual practical use, just as it doesn’t serve any use to be able to memorize the date that every American war was declared, what year every president was born, etc.
Every year schools should have a draft where teachers take turns picking what students they want.
Then during the year there will be an academic tournament, with salary dependent on what place a class comes in.
No, that’s not the problem.
I heard someone on the radio years ago talking about restaurants, and it fundamentally changed my view of the institution. They said that a restaurant constitutes an ongoing war between the kitchen and the customer, and the wait staff are the diplomats who try to prevent full-scale hostilities from breaking out.
In a school, principals are under tremendous pressure to follow the latest educational fad, to raise test scores, to give their school all the junk that looks good to their bureaucrat bosses. Kids are under an entirely different set of pressures.
A teacher is a very little bit like the wait staff. My job is to give the kids what they need. Sometimes, that’s going to mean standing up to administration. It might mean teaching more science or more social studies than the administration thinks is appropriate, or teaching these subjects in a more authentic, hands-on fashion (teaching science through read-alouds is obviously an insufficient strategy, but it’s pretty much all there’s time for in the daily schedule). It might mean protecting a half-hour recess from the chopping block. It might mean fighting and fighting to get special services for a kid that really needs them. And it might even mean teaching kids authentically, despite the fact that teaching them how to eliminate answers on multiple-choice tests and how to highlight the first sentence in a reading passage might help them reverse-engineer tests better and therefore score higher.
A teacher who cowers before administration might be the darling of a principal rating system. But that’s very different from being a good teacher.
So back to what you said, Sinaijon: it’s quite likely that the teachers you identified in high school as the best teachers wouldn’t be the ones that a shitty or even mediocre administration would identify as the best ones.
The problem isn’t that it’s a subjective process: the problem is that the traits a bureaucrat looks for in a teacher may very well not correspond to the traits that makes a good teacher.
The problem with trying to get year to year performance is aggravated because they are closing schools this year and increasing class sizes due to state budget defaults.
Why should the teachers pay be based on a students performance or test scores? Ughhh, i guess what I really mean is-
Why can’t we just the accept the fact that everybody has a different intelligence level? Some people are smart, and some are dumb. People have different intelligences, just like they have different talents. Johnny may not be book smart, but maybe he is better at plumbing than the nerds.
Why don’t we test the kids to their best individual abilities?
Take me for example. I graduated high school at the bottom- 70 graduates and I was number 63 from the top. But 15 years later, I was among 6 of the graduates who got a masters degree. I always got A’s in art class, and that’s what my MFA is for. A subject that is never ever tested.
And now being that guy who sucked at high school tests and barely graduated, I’m teaching college level classes! Put that in your test and suck it!
Yeah so anyways, the tests should be about the students and not the teachers.
As the parent of an under performing pair of kids when they were in high school I am here to tell you the problem was not teacher excellence. My kids lived with my ex during their high school years and they weren’t stupid, they were simply lazy and distractible procrastinators, and got more or less zero parental oversight of their academic performance.
I think a lot of what we blame teachers for is simply crappy parenting. If your kid is not expected to learn and held to performance standards in the home I don’t know why we expect there will be some magic occurring in the school.
They had a very good article about a year ago in the Economist about what makes a good teacher. Fieldwork across the world revealed that the countries with the best teachers have exactly one thing in common.
They recruit the best. They recruit teachers out of the best schools. They have high standards for teachers entering the profession. They pay them enough that top grads would consider teaching as a career.
Right now, our nation does not respect teachers. We consider an education major to be a major for people who couldn’t cut anything else. If we want good teachers, this has to change.