How did they define a “good” teacher?
Student performance is a function of teacher performance, student preparation, family support and testing tools, among other factors. Putting it all on teacher is a bit like punishing the mechanic when the owner abuses the car.
This is a great idea because:
a) teachers know the academic details of all 1,500 kids in the school and,
b) all those special education students chosen last won’t feel bad about that at all.
:rolleyes:
Teachers in the US with more than 5 years experience usually make a very respectable middle class wage in most states, and have absolutely superb benefits. There are always people crying that teachers are underpaid, but I just don’t see it.
Education graduates (doper teachers excepted) are not generally noted for being brainiacs, but they are noted for their patience and earnestness. If you push the standards so that teachers have to have the same intellectual capability as, say engineers or doctors, I really don’t think you’re going to get people with the temperament of being willing to put up with the sheer BS of having to deal with a classroom of typical kids.
Really? No eyeglass coverage and dental that only covers 20%, period? Not particularly superb. My husband, a trucker, has better benefits.
Average starting teacher salaries are around $35,000. That’s pretty low for a job that generally requires a Masters degree and an unpaid full-time internship that guarantees for most people that you will acquire debt at the beginning of your career. At similar points in our careers, my brother the mailman, with no college, and I, with a bachelors and 2 Masters, make similar amounts, just for a little perspective on salary.
You’ll understand that I find this a bit condescending, not to mention I have to disagree with the premise, which is that really bright people cannot be patient with children. There’s not a ton of incentive for people interested in education to go to the really high end universities, because they are much more expensive. A state college teaching certification and Masters will get you the same starting salary with much less starting debt. If you want Ivy League educated people teaching your kids, the pay will have to be higher, understandably.
This post was written by one of those few suckers with an Ivy League degree who is teaching.
The money is just a small part of things. Money alone won’t do anything.
What we need, if we really want to have good teachers, is to have teaching be considered a respectable high-level professional career. It doesn’t have to be doctor-lawyer level. But it needs to be on par with other careers that bright motivated masters-holding people do. Right now, I could get more respect and more money as an HR rep than a teacher. Why would I teach? People don’t go to grad school to be middle middle class.
It’s funny, because on one hand we have this social attitude that anyone could teach. And that somehow teachers, as opposed to every other profession, should be in it for pure love. We’ve even got people saying smart people wouldn’t be suited to being teachers.
On the other hand, we complain that our teachers aren’t very good. Obviously there is some kind of disconnect here. Teaching is a skill. We need to find people who are good at it and convince them that teaching is worth their while.
To illustrate. I’m applying to grad school right now. I’ve been teaching for the last four years and I am a damn good teacher. You’d want me teaching your kids. And I love doing it. But I’m not even considering going in to education even a little bit. I could easily have a much more exciting career. And if I did go into education, everyone would say “it’s a shame, she had so much potential.” And, frankly, I could make more money doing just about anything else.
I see teaching as reaching less than my potential. Giving up.
If you want people like me to be teachers, you’ve got to change that. You have to start making being a teacher something that people aspire to and respect.
Here are the rankings of the best education schools for 2009. Peabody of Vanderbilt came in first this year. It is often second to Stanford. I graduated from Peabody.
Look how much it costs just for one credit. It is difficult to afford to return to school for professional development studies when one class is $6,000.
One teacher that I knew earned more money in the summer than he did teaching. Each summer he worked at the Ford Glass Plant. His only job was to sweep an area about the size of a gym. He had to keep it clear of broken glass.
Left Hand of Dorkness, I think you have found one of the secrets of keeping your heart alive and your students well-taught. You are aware of “the balance.”
papstist, yours is the kind of story that makes teachers weep. I guess you know that for yourself.
I agree. The teacher who does AP/Honors classes is going to have a higher percentage of kids that test well, regardless of whether the teacher is any good or not. A teacher that does remedial classes may be doing a hell of a job if the kids refrain from eating paste for a whole week.
I forgot to include a link to the 2009 Top Education School Rankings.
The top ten are:
- Vanderbilt (Peabody)
- Stanford
- Columbia
- University of Oregon
- UCLA
- Harvard
(The next five tied in rank.) - Johns Hopkins
- Northwestern
- Berkeley
- University of Texas
- University of Wisconsin
The list is very extensive.
The problem is that, just because a teacher is liked by the students, doesn’t mean that the teacher is actually a good teacher.
My girlfriend teaches in an inner city high school in the lower mainland in BC. Even from year to year there are tremendous variations in the quality of the students she gets. Last year she hated one of her classes because it was mostly male and contained five boys who were particularly well-known troublemakers, and was six students larger than the year before when she had three students who were the stars of the school.
This year she’s had an autistic child who’s being mainstreamed dropped into one of her classes. He has a TA provided by the district to shepherd him. That makes three TAs with difficult teenagers in that one class. Wonder what effect they’ll have on the test scores (BTW, my girlfriend has no special training or experience for dealing with special needs kids; the district forced this on her school).
If you can’t even control for the students in a particular teacher’s classroom for the same class and curriculum two years running, how can you hope to control for differences in socioeconomic backgrounds for the school, cultural backgrounds, district financing, teacher turnover, fluctuating enrollments, and all the other circumstances that make being a teacher an exercise in improvisation every day? How can you possibly compare my girlfriend’s performance to that of another friend who teaches in Richmond, who’s students argue over who’s wearing the most expensive jeans that day?
The idea that you can justly tie merit-based pay to test scores is a fantasy that betrays perfect ignorance of what actually happens in schools. It has nothing to do with the unions protecting crappy teachers, and everything to do with teachers themselves knowing that there’s no fair way to put them on a ladder with everyone else.
To put the argument in more general terms, it’s unfair to tie someone’s pay to their performance when there are large factors affecting their performance that are simply out of their control, if you don’t have an effective way to control for those factors.
Teachers are particularly powerless in this regard because so much is out of their control: class size, school funding, the background of the students, district policies that change year to year, the accident of composition that makes a particular class great or awful, and a hundred other things that fluctuate year to year. Tying pay to test scores is as capricious as tying it to the weather.
One thing that’s been left out of this discussion is the “non-curriculum” teachings. By this I mean things such as character, morals, confidence, inquisitiveness, etc. The full impact of a good teacher often doesn’t become apparent until years after a student has graduated. It is hard to test for this, and this is one of the reasons bad teachers coast by and good teachers are not fully appreciated. Imagine an engineer who designs a new widget, but you won’t know if it really works well until twenty years later.
One of my relatives is a highly successful high school AP teacher.
In two different environments, her success rates (measured by standardized exams) versus her predecessors was markedly larger–in one school she took over from a football coach who had the position prior.
Her overall success rate is determined by the pool of protoplasm being taught. If you are in a school where the average IQ and learning capacity is limited, it would be unfair to measure success against a teacher in a school where the average raw intelligence and learning potential is much higher.
Her position regarding measurement of teachers is twofold:
- Teachers should be held to a higher qualification standard for teaching–performance on standardized teaching qualification exams should be more rigorously pursued. She is underwhelmed by degrees alone–one of the incompetent administrators in her school has a Masters but SATs in the 800s…
- Having passed those standards to become teachers and maintain teaching privileges, the most reasonable measurement is against past performance of that particular cohort.
How in the world would she know an adult’s high school SAT score? I thought those were private info. for colleges and maybe employers if you wanted to brag a bit , and I can’t imagine anyone bragging about scores like those.
Agreed. This particular twit had a habit of announcing it at meetings, apparently in the belief that her Masters disproved any notion that her marginal scores on a standardized test were meaningful. It did not help matters that her position was a consequence of affirmative action, her performance was itself marginal, and she leaned on my relative to type up various administrative position papers because her own grasp of writing was poor.
But my point was that the teaching profession seems rife with marginally competent teachers and the process by which they are screened is not always rigorous. Degrees obtained from marginal programs do not confer competence. My relative is of the opinion that these sorts of marginal performers tend to be maintained by teacher unions. I am not aware if this is true or not.
I do recall a brouhaha when the new superintendant of DC schools suggested replacing tenure with a merit system that had a much higher top-end pay…
I am a first-year teacher with a newly-minted M.A.Ed. who just completed her first week of teaching Spanish to two classes of children with special needs. My school is a small charter school located in the inner city. Students’ disabilities range from well-treated ADHD and/or a touch of Asperger’s, down to having IQ’s in the low 60’s range, replete with having difficulties speaking and writing. Many of these children have suffered from various types of abuse and/or extreme poverty on top of their “shortcomings.” One or two, if not more, have home lives that would make a grown man cry.
My salary? Not quite the mid 30’s.
Obviously I didn’t get into teaching to get rich, but I relish the unique challenges of my profession. I know I’ll never enjoy a tenth the societal value of someone so needed in this world as, oh, I don’t know, an actor, sports star or tax attorney. 
Nevertheless I go to sleep at night thrilled that I have the opportunity to make a positive difference in a child’s life. All these children have talents that often don’t translate into success on bullshit standardized tests. I may be a lowly teacher, but I feel my job is to help these students maximize their potential whatever it may be and become the future’s Einsteins or Edisons instead of helpless, hopeless prison bitches.
That’s my two cents’ worth… now off for a free meal at the soup kitchen…
Polly
I teach high school in Dallas, TX. For ten years, we’ve had merit pay linked to test scores, but only AP scores, and only in English, math, and science. The incentives vary from school to school (there are actually several related, but separately funded, programs), but the incentives aren’t minor: teachers get an extra $150 for each test their students pass, and students get $100. There is more to the program than this–special training, study sessions, etc. Anyway, overall the program seems to be very successful. Certainly it has allowed us to attract some top talent away from the suburbs.
I keep thinking this is a perfect situation to see the effects of incentive pay–the district is huge, and you have a control group–those AP programs that do not carry incentives (all the social studies and foreign languages). There must be national data correlating performance on these tests, and there should be a big enough sample size of Dallas students (and other, analogous programs that have grown up) to be able to compare those correlations and see if Dallas kids have improved disproportionately under the incentive program. But if it’s been done, I haven’t seen it.
On a personal level, I’m in an interesting position because I teach 2 AP courses–one with an incentive and one without. I don’t think I work harder on the incentive course, but, of course, I’m hardly objective. For me, at least, pride is already a pretty big motivator and the money seems like a nice bonus. But I may be fooling myself.
I think a blend of several of the approaches might be in order.
I like the draft idea, only need to worry about the kids in the previous grade, a list of grade performances from last year would be helpful.
Next, order of draft, newer teachers pick first. More experienced teachers should be more likely to make greater improvements in the same student.
Make the evaluations something like so
base salary $25,000 +any cost of living/prior raises.
Bonuses:$20,000 max possible, option to trade $10 of bonus to a $1 a year boost to base salary.
Bonus determined by:
30% standardized test scores
30% peer review (principal plus 2 other teachers in dept, 10% each)
10% student review
10% calls for disciplinary action by administration.
10% parental review/complaints
10% overall student grade performance
This may not be a perfect breakdown/dollar amount, but what I am getting at is that there is room for bonuses to be recieved for being good at some things, but not all.
You have to hit alot of angles to rack it all up, a disciplinarian hardass may score well on testing but will probably get dinged in the student, parent, and disciplinary action categories. A teacher being too lax may get points for student and parent approval but most likely will suffer in peer review, test scores, and overall grade performance.
Maximum bonuses would only be achieved by truly superior well rounded teachers. The bonus vs. raise thing is to reward those who plan to stay for the long haul will derive greater benefit from such bonuses.
Standardized testing of teachers should be mandatory in all states before certification. Teachers should be required to pass tests in their subject areas, the principles of educational psychology, reading, composition, and general knowledge.
Tenure should not be casually bestowed. Teachers should be rigorously monitored during untenured years. Of course, no one has the time. Truly, no one does.
I don’t know if Tennessee still has this or not, but teachers could be tested in Tennessee to receive a $1000 bonus.
I refuse to believe Chinese children are genetically better at math and science.