<p>Just to throw in my two cents, creating a merit program for teachers is not something that is necessarily going to be successful. I had an AP Economics teacher that told stories about an old friend that was teaching the same class in a district where they gave incentive bonuses based on AP exam grades of the students. As a result, the AP classes basically become test prep courses where the teachers focused on making sure the kids learned the secrets of test taking and the little tricks to use in order to pass the exam. The material was never being taught, as making them proficient in the subject was much more difficult than just teaching the shortcuts. It was in the teacher's best interest just to get everyone a 3 on the exams so he could collect the $50 for each passing grade. That adds up when you have 100 or more students getting ready to test.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The fact is that the union is not the villain. I am not especially pro-union and don't think unions are all that powerful,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Really? Except for a few small things: their mobilization power and the need to include them in every serious debate about making changes. To state it midly, teacher's unions in the United States are all about preserving their monolithic powers. The headquarters' orders are pretty as no expense nor energy will be spared to combat ANY ides that might mean an improvement for students and families, but might mean the slightest of erosion. In this regard, the US teacher's unions are far from aligning themselves with their international counterparts. Teacher's unions in countries such as Belgium or Denmark have learned to operate and thrive in changing environments. </p>
<p>If the unions are not the vilains, when looking at the record of despicable inviduals such as Reg Weaver or Randi Weingarten of defending the interest of children, a more appropriate the term might be ... the devil.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It was in the teacher's best interest just to get everyone a 3 on the exams so he could collect the $50 for each passing grade. That adds up when you have 100 or more students getting ready to test.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sounds like it works, just needs a little more care in setting the goals!</p>
<p>Denver has been using merit pay
<a href="http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_5158267%5B/url%5D">http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_5158267</a></p>
<p>In Texas, the "unions" are not mandatory and carry no real weight. Our governor is "rewarding" better teachers by offering grants to schools doing a good job as measured by test scores. Our school got one. Our school (actually, a hastily formed committee of teachers, including me) is responsible for figuring out how to disburse this grant. We had to do this; spend umpteen hours writing an "application" for a grant, all while we were trying to get geared up and teach at the beginning of the school year. (wasn't optional - we were instructed to do it, and, no, it wasn't during school hours) The "grant" application has been returned to us several times because the administering state agency doesn't like how we propose to allocate the money; they want it to go to 3rd-5th grade teachers whose kids score well on the state tests. We realize that all the teachers contribute to those scores and want to share it at all grade levels, including our art/pe/music teachers.
But here's the real problem, guys. Kids aren't widgets, and how do you really measure superb teaching? Maybe at the high-school level, where one teacher teaches a statistically significant number of kids in one subject, it might work. But let's look at the reality of my type of classroom. Let's say I start the year with a hypothetical class of 22 kids; of those 4 have serious ADD/ADHD (not yet diagnosed, kids are unmedicated; kids aren't usually diagnosed until later grades), 4 have serious behavior issues and or emotional disturbances that effect their ability to learn and seriously impact the classroom climate. Let's say that in my hypothetical class I get lucky, and have several higher-level students with supportive parents. During the course of the year, 9 of the children move permanently, 1 of them leaves for several months (back to Mexico for extended Xmas break) and then returns, and the other 8 new children that enter my room (1 in October, 2 in December, 2 in January, 1 in March, 2 in April) are of varying levels of learning - but, generally, are well below the kids who have been in the class all year. Who do you test? Do you test the 13 that have been with me all year? Just the ones who were there for the whole semester? Do you take out the kids that will be labeled special ed. in future years, but haven't yet been tested as such? How about accounting for the fact that my hypothetical class usually is "loaded" with a few extra behavior and or lower-achieving students, since the principal knows that I am good at working with these kids? Is 13 a statistically accurate sample? Am I better teacher because 70% of those 13 passed the test at 70%? (whew, my higher-level kid decides not to move) Or am I a better teacher because the kid who was working at a 20% passing rate can now pass 40% of the time? Of am I better if he/she can answer 40% of the questions correctly, when before he/she could answer none? Am I a better teacher if I luck out and a high-achieving student moves to my class right before the test, thus causing 80% of my kids to pass the test, when only 65% of my kids would have passed if the low-achieving kid hadn't moved and been replaced? Frankly, I am just as good or as bad a teacher each year(well, hopefully a little better each year), but the level of my kids changes from year to year, depending who has moved in and out of my class. And kids aren't widgets, and their learning doesn't happen in a linear fashion; I have a kid who struggled for months to learn how to write his name, all of a sudden, he's writing his name and letters and connecting sounds and all. If you had measured my success with him last week - I would have been labeled unsuccessful. Now he's got it, and, voila, I am a success. I would sooner not have the money than have had to waste all this time writing and administering this stupid grant. Pay for performance is lousy, and inappropriate in the school setting. And now, to bed, so that I can go in at 6:30 a.m.to work and be home before 5:00 p.m. P.S. After workshops and conferences etc. we get about 3 weeks off in the summer, not three months.</p>
<p>Teachers don't do what they do for money; if they were totally money-oriented folks they would never set foot in the profession. They sometimes have double master degrees and some I know also have Phds. When you have a school where teachers leave as soon as possible, it is a place where they are not valued and their opinions don't count. People talk about Escalante in LA and the great work he did. Read about what he had to go through. All schools have varieties of him/her and they are gems. Many times it is not the money that teachers want to stuff into their personal wallets: it is money for materials, time, extra help, special programs that they could pull off because they know how to do it. They are the experts. Give teachers support, back them up, respect them for the great work they do and that in itself would go a long way to rectify some of the problems. (I'm not touching on the societal problems) But like I said a couple of pages back, I don't think it will happen and then who will do this great work? If unions are the problem that causes this lack of respect, malaise and money for programs, I'll eat my hat.</p>
<p>Do you like your hat with salt and pepper? Transnational comparisons show clearly enough that unionization as it exists in the United States is part of what reduces respect for the honorable occupation of teaching.</p>
<p>These always break down to extremes. No one is going to convince anyone here and change their minds. If you really want to change... volunteer. You don't even have to go to a school to do it. Volunteer at a shelter or boys and girls club, use your superior intellects for something positive. Work with the kids that really need your help and wisedom. Or just sit and complain.. which ever is easiest I guess.</p>
<p>"reduces respect for the honorable occupation of teaching."</p>
<p>Ya can't eat or buy a home with respect, or should teachers be allowed to reproduce? or own homes evil blight on the earth that they are. :)</p>
<p>It just gets comical at a certain point. grrr go get em big fella.</p>
<p>....excuse me, "the honorable profession of teaching".....</p>
<p>Yet since DuPont introduced decentralization to business nearly 90 years ago, large companies have stumbled across few ideas that have better withstood the test of time. Now, momentum is building from New York City to San Francisco to Miami to decentralize public schools and drag them into the 1920s.</p>
<p>There are 12 school districts in the USA that have more than 10,000 teachers, and that's not counting non-teaching employees. Companies that grow past 1,500 employees start to bulk up at the center and become bureaucratic, says UCLA management professor William Ouchi.</p>
<p>Just as General Electric's Jack Welch spent much of his 20-year career as CEO fighting bureaucracy to create an environment of small companies at the behemoth corporation, some school systems are recognizing that principals know their neighborhoods. Decentralization, often called autonomy, takes billions of dollars away from superintendents and the legions of central office minions and turns it over to those schools and principals.</p>
<p>The movement goes back 30 years to Edmonton, Alberta, where principals today control 92% of the money, and local voters have consistently indicated in school board elections that they will have it no other way.</p>
<p>But elsewhere the movement has been slow. Public schools have the luxury of resistance because they can't go out of business. "Unlike the woolly mammoth," schools can persist in a state of failure, says Ouchi, a longtime proponent of the push. Also, not every neighborhood school, principal and teacher welcomes the accountability that decentralization brings. It may sound nice to be in charge of a $10 million high school budget until you find out that you, not school boards and superintendents, take the heat for tough choices, such as cutting funding for the school band.</p>
<p>Decentralization is, however, starting to make inroads into giant school districts. In January, New York City decided to increase the number of schools in its autonomy zone from 58 to more than 200, turning the nation's largest school system into a serious player in the decentralization movement. Today, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (No. 5) will hold committee meetings with the goal of giving 18 schools freedom from district control to tailor their staffing and purchasing. That decision is to be made by the school board next week.</p>
<p>Seattleand Houston (No. 8) decentralized 10 years ago, followed six years ago by San Francisco and St. Paul. Boston and Chicago (No. 4) have small experiments. Oakland jumped in with a district-wide program last year, and Hawaii (No. 10) started it statewide this year.
Largest U.S. school districts<br>
The school districts with the most students for the academic year 2002-03:</p>
<p>— Number of —
School district City, county or state<br>
Students</p>
<p>Teachers</p>
<p>Schools
New York City Public Schools Kings, N.Y.<br>
1,066,516</p>
<p>65,242</p>
<p>1,213
Los Angeles Unified Los Angeles<br>
721,346</p>
<p>35,150</p>
<p>659
Puerto Rico Department of Education San Juan, Puerto Rico<br>
612,725</p>
<p>37,620</p>
<p>1,543
City of Chicago School District Chicago<br>
435,261</p>
<p>23,935</p>
<p>602
Dade County School District Miami<br>
368,625</p>
<p>18,608</p>
<p>356
Broward County School District Fort Lauderdale<br>
251,129</p>
<p>11,822</p>
<p>243
Clark County School District Las Vegas<br>
231,655</p>
<p>11,769</p>
<p>259
Houston Independent School District Houston<br>
208,462</p>
<p>11,197</p>
<p>289
Philadelphia City School District Philadelphia<br>
201,190</p>
<p>11,266</p>
<p>261
Hawaii Department of Education Honolulu<br>
184,360</p>
<p>10,927</p>
<p>261
Source: National Center for Education Statistics</p>
<p>School boards have it under consideration in Charlotte (No. 24) and Las Vegas (No. 7), says Ouchi, who gained respect in 1981 when many were predicting that the runaway world economic power of the future would be Japan. Ouchi refuted the defeatism in his business best seller Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge. His refocus today on education is attracting other top management experts into the field, and — for the first time in 50 years — the Academy of Management Journal (<a href="http://www.aomonline.org%5B/url%5D">www.aomonline.org</a>) concentrated on public education in its January issue.</p>
<p>"When I was principal of a big high school in Los Angeles, I never saw the damn phone bill," unless asked to reprimand someone for making "bizarre calls to Afghanistan," says Michael O'Sullivan, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, a union for principals.</p>
<p>Many principals prefer it that way, and the annual turnover rate for principals edges up from 12% to 15% when decentralization is introduced, Ouchi says.</p>
<p>A new breed of principals</p>
<p>But those who leave are often replaced by principals like Clover Codd, 31, who sees decentralization as entrepreneurial.</p>
<p>Codd is in charge of a $1.6 million annual budget at Loyal Heights Elementary in Seattle, where schools are autonomous, dollars follow students, and parents can choose within geographic clusters of six to eight schools. "I like to think my job is on the line," if test scores were to plummet at Loyal Heights for consecutive years, says Codd, who saved the school enough money to hire a part-time counselor to work with students on mental health.</p>
<p>That's the way it's designed to work, Ouchi says. Under decentralization, the heat might get turned down at night or the gym floor might go another year without refinishing. In the past, if a school made such efforts to save money, the funds would only be sent back to the central office to be spent by someone else. Now it stays where it may mean a part-time reading instructor. When substitute teachers are paid by headquarters, teachers call in sick more often. When money saved on substitutes comes back to the school, absenteeism falls 40%, Ouchi says.</p>
<p>Principals at high schools in New York City's autonomy zone have given up assistant principals, guidance counselors and attendance clerks. But they have been able to add so many teachers with the same budget that the number of students a teacher sees each day has been driven down from 160 to 60, Ouchi says.</p>
<p>This flexibility to redirect resources is a lesson DuPont learned after it took its World War I gunpowder profits, expanded into an unwieldy conglomerate and nearly went broke, says John Smith, a Lehigh University professor who specializes in the history of industry. As a last resort, division heads were given control of their budgets and promoted or fired based on division profits and losses. Today, companies such as Texas Instruments give semi-autonomy to just about everyone with managerial authority. Decentralization spurs innovation and creativity by making supervisors "the master or mistress of their own destiny," says Texas Instruments Vice President Marcia Page.</p>
<p>But even in business, decentralization is a work in progress. Sara Lee struggled when it became the ultimate in decentralization, a holding company for independent divisions that made everything from Wonderbras to Jimmy Dean Sausage. New CEO Brenda Barnes says the company was so decentralized that there was no knowledge-sharing or camaraderie from one division to another. She is trying to balance the efficiencies of decentralization while getting Sara Lee's 137,000 employees to feel part of the whole rather than islands. Barnes says decentralization makes sense for public schools, but it can't be used for everything. For example, information technology "has to be centralized, or you wind up with a hodgepodge that doesn't talk to each other," she says.</p>
<p>Ouchi says schools have no choice but to decentralize if they want to succeed. Since 1932, the number of public school students has doubled to 50 million, yet the number of school districts has declined from about 127,000 to 16,000. New York City and Los Angeles now have budgets as large as Dell Computer or Johnson & Johnson.</p>
<p>Ouchi's reputation from Theory Z gave him the clout to raise $1 million for ongoing research on decentralized schools. He concludes that they consistently outperform traditional public schools. For example, math and reading scores have improved more in decentralized Houston than in Los Angeles, both large school districts with similar demographics. But accurate comparisons are never easy in education and have proven subject to manipulation. In this case, Houston was found to be undercounting its dropouts.</p>
<p>Criticism clashes with praise</p>
<p>"Decentralization is a terrible idea that would be a disaster," says A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. Too many principals and assistant principals are "demigods who take credit for what teachers do and blame teachers for what goes wrong," and they would become more "mean spirited" if given the power of the purse, he says.</p>
<p>Decentralization works in industry, Duffy says, because employees can find a similar job elsewhere if they have an abusive boss. "You can't do that in schools," he says. "You either work there, or you become a welder."</p>
<p>But decentralization probably serves to weed out bad principals, says former astronaut Sally Ride, who straddles the worlds of education and business as the owner of Sally Ride Science, which encourages girls to pursue science and math careers. Ride concurs that there are bad principals, which is why there "is value in having their feet held to the fire."</p>
<p>Ouchi points to large private school systems, which decentralized long ago. The Catholic schools in New York City have a central office staff of 22. The public schools have 10 times as many students, which should translate into a central office staff of 220, Ouchi says, but the actual number is 25,500.</p>
<p>Educators such as Duffy find decentralization one more business intrusion on schools when "the Delphis, the Enrons, the WorldComs" prove that business is far from the perfect role model.</p>
<p>Critics worry that principals could skim money from schools, but that has proved unfounded, probably because $500 to an individual school is a lot of money and would be noticed, whereas it's a rounding error in the $13 billion Los Angeles Unified School District, Ouchi says. Even those like former Los Angeles principal O'Sullivan, who agrees that decentralization is a good idea, say it's just another flavor of the month that will be implemented and abandoned with each new mayor and superintendent.</p>
<p>Ouchi sympathizes and agrees that schools have long been whiplashed by one idea replacing the next. But he says decentralization will stick, as it has for 30 years in Edmonton, because schools and parents resist new regimes if they attempt to take back the money.</p>
<p>anxiousmom has explained eloquently what is problematic with performance-based merit pay. this is a case of success having many mothers and fathers--as does failure, both in and out of school.</p>
<p>When substitute teachers are paid by headquarters, teachers call in sick more often. When money saved on substitutes comes back to the school, absenteeism falls 40%,</p>
<p>That is amazing to me-
I have been trying to get data about staff attendance rates in the schools
Because while students are penalized if they are late- miss class etc- we don't have data on what classrooms actually have a permanent teacher and how often teachers are out of the classrooms for vacation, for illness, for training.</p>
<p>Ive got a couple local reporters looking into it- I hope they follow up
( I also would dont understand why the statement- money on substitute comes back to schools & absentee rate falls- the teacher who is absent gets paid regardless- if the teacher doesn't have loyalty to classroom, they certainly don't have it to the principal- who rarely stay at any one school more than 2 or three years- )</p>
<p>Anxiousmom and Marite,
We're on the same wavelength. My teaching career has been in schools and classrooms exactly as Anxiousmom described, with poverty and mobility impacting every day of the teaching. Teachers held the school together.
In addition: we had so many principals (6 in 5 years...) due to burnout that my First Grade students thought the janitor was the principal since he was male and carried a ladder around, fixing things. Each spring, the teachers dealt out cards to equalize classrooms for the following year by race and academic ability. Yet, as each new principal came in, some power blocs within the teaching staff made summertime visits, resulting in changes over the summer on the class lists. In September, teachers screamed over these changes, knowing their year was sunk. The power-bloc teachers manipulated the classrooms so the teachers doing pilot studies and Title I hoo-hah stuff got the most experienced teacher aides and kids from the most reliable families. This pleased administration (shakey and new) because they wanted to maintain grants for the following years, so needed to show the pilot programs worked.
The currying of status within the faculty was unbearable. If I had been paid any less than these teachers, I'd have killed them. We all worked extremely hard, including those I'm calling "power bloc" but their students' scores reflected many factors in addition to the teaching, including: best teacher aides; best preparation time together so projects could be coordinated (while the newer teachers were fragmented into different time slots); best coverage by local newspapers so their services were requested by the few professional families in the community.
So I would not like to work under merit pay. Unless it amounts to the equivalent of combat pay, it's not worth it for the added grief we already deal with in inequities among teacher recognition.</p>
<p>Post 154 and the one by anxiousmom illustrate why "performance-based" pay is an unworkable idea, because of the many variables largely or completely out of a classroom teacher's control. These posts additionally illustrate (in my view) how broken the system is, how bureaucratic, how distant from the most important tasks of learning & teaching, public education has become. And it clearly is hardly just one State we're talking about. Again, this is why Steve Jobs' statement is neither profound nor heroic, let alone original. (No vendetta; I'm a Mac loyalist.) His statement is simplistic; it addresses maybe one-tenth of the causes of failure & underperformance. </p>
<p>The long, interesting post by Sonic sheds further light on the level of frustration & the quest for manageability. Even WITHOUT unions, public education has become an unwieldly industry, especially in large metro areas, where not just control over education, but connectedness to education (by the teacher, the parent, the student) is a challenge for even the perenially cheerful person.</p>
<p>However, if one did not have nearly the number of variables that anxiousmom accurately enumerates -- such as in some newer charter schools where staffing is so slim that "power blocs," etc. are less of a factor -- the school, the teacher would still be faced with the 2 ultimately noncontrollable factors: the performance of the STUDENT and the performance of the PARENTS. It really is a triangle. In that regard, the only such merit award I see as a successful motivator would perhaps be a <em>bonus</em> offered jointly to the highest achieving (or better, highest improvement) educational team of teacher + home adult. I shrink from including the student in this for a number of reasons, & because if one is rewarding for motivation & skill & responsibility, the greatest proportion of that rests with adults. However, the incentive would help to concretize how in very real terms it is the primary adults in the student's life who contribute to and sometimes detract from, the student's education. It is not a shifting of responsibility away from the teacher. It is an acknowledgement that education does not resemble manufacturing or the business world in that so much happens & doesn't happen to that product OFF-site, that contributes heavily to the end product.</p>
<p>I think for many of the parents on PF, this is hard to see. The reason is, as I enumerated over the last year+ on various threads, it is the most educated households who least appreciate how abudantly they are even indirectly & unconsciously contributing (positively, in their case) to their children's educations. I grew up also in such a household, and I never appreciated it until much, much later in life. For students from such households, it may be much clearer "who" is at fault: in some cases that may be ONLY the classroom teacher; but if so, the appropriate response is not the temporary but the permanent withholding of pay. But more often it would be teacher + principal, or teacher + principal + unenlightened district office, or State-mandated "fad" curriculum foisted on unwilling, unsuspecting teacher suddenly required to teach this, reluctantly.</p>
<p>For the opposite kinds of households (the ones not on PF) -- the ones mostly populating the large metro districts -- one of the primary "culpable" variables is the home. This is more obviously evident in charter schools which are not complicated by the kinds of nuttiness described by anxiousmom, nor the wasteful absences by contract teachers for the 75-80% unnecessary "professional" days. (Yes, EK, those, plus burnout contributing to liberally chosen vacation days, are the primary reasons for all those subs you see; it sickens me, too, but it is symptomatic of this broken system.) </p>
<p>The great demon is not the unions per se, although I repeat: their lack of leadership and moral outrage is appalling. They support the current system; they are not leading the charge for aggressive reform. The great demon is a system out of control, and not just rudderless, but unable to locate a rudder & remember its course. I say, stop throwing money at this system & let it implode. It needs a new motherboard (Steve).</p>
<p>this is a better article re merit pay- with some good links at bottom</p>
<p>( I also want to mention- that while I am not a teacher- I don't quote rumors- but only things I have first hand knowledge of- Ihave been on * many* committees and attended * many* :eyeroll: meetings)</p>
<p>Seattle actually is changing the way schools receive money and write their budgets
with the weighted student formula and total site based budget- there wasn't comprehensive accountability that money was going where it needed to go & a lot of time was being spent every year- allocating funds to the same places-Principals really need to be doing much more than writing budgets and some schools were just throwing numbers together for the district to rubber stamp it before submitting to the state.</p>
<p>I agree that high need populations need to be financially and other supported more than populations with parents who don't speak English, who are perhaps less educated- more impoverished etc.- There are currently lots of grants available for that- some require principals to apply, other schools have grantwriters on PTAs who get money for schools- ( we also have outside business people spending money on schools- but that is another ball of wax)</p>
<p>Seattle is going to try Staffing weighted formulas- something that I hope will work better-
Right now-for instance- the district assigned more kids to Ds high school, than they gave them money for- which was a squeeze and money to take care of those kids, wasn't reallocated until a few months into the school year, resulting in late hires ( after the "good" teachers already had jobs)</p>
<p>With weighted student formula- budgets are reassesed everymonth- At Garfield, many students take classes from the community college- as at other area high schools. Partially this may be because they can save time- if they take a CC class, one quarter represents one year of a high school course. This can also save money in college, as many state schools will accept CC courses for freshman and soph level work.</p>
<p>This also may be because they are at a higher level than the high school offers, or they want to free up time for work or extra curricular activities.
In any case- since student count is taken every month- and is determined by how many hours the students are there- the school loses money- once the community college year begins.</p>
<p>There is I-728 money available to reduce class sizes, but for some reason that doesn't kick in until the school year is started- so it requires lots of shuffling by the principal. ( I also haven't seen class size reduced at any school D has attended, as the funds can also go for "teacher training" and other things)</p>
<p>National Board Certification is another thing that gives teachers a pay increase & recognizes merit.
When we began in the public schools ,when D was in 3rd grade- she had a strong teacher- he had received Board Certification, he took teaching very seriously, he planned lots of field trips related to classroom activities, he didn't miss a single day all year, and he often used teacher assistants, either from university students- or middle or high school students ( this was a K-12 school)</p>
<p>While we have lots of teacher training sessions through the year, Board Certification and other outside programs- where teachers can connect with other educators from around the country and even the world seems to have made the most difference IMO.</p>
<p>When we were receiving money from the Gates foundation, there was motivation from some staff to take a hard look at what was working and what wasn't working- after all- that was what the money was for.</p>
<p>But frankly- some teachers were very afraid for their jobs, and even though they had seniority- fought against results from grade levels, being broken down by classrooms, even though IMO, if we could indentify why one classroom was doing well in math, and another wasn't for example, perhaps we could have replicated it- and done a better job preparing the students to move on.</p>
<p>That is one of the biggest failures of the school system.</p>
<p>My daughters class will have to pass the WASL to receive their diploma- Less than half I think, pass all three sections of WASL. The district and state have known for * years* that the pass rate wasn't good.
* Years*.</p>
<p>They could have paid more attention much earlier.
Math in particular is holding many kids back. But now they are having to play catch up.
For instance,even though D has never gotten below a B in math- even though we have hired tutors to help her make up what they weren't teaching in the classroom, she is still having to take two math classes- so all year- this her junior year- she has zero electives- at a time when I think she should be able to take something she is interested in, and can get excited about.</p>
<p>The error in the dissing of merit pay is that it is based on the presumption that for merit pay to be effective that it has to be 100% fair. Merit pay is used in all aspects of the private sector and I doubt that you can find more than 5% of the jobs in which it is administered in a quantifaibly fair manner. That's life. </p>
<p>However, note anxiousmom's quote:
[quote]
since the principal knows that I am good at working with these kids?
[/quote]
<br>
Note that principals do generally know who the best teachers are and don't need objective test results to make this determination. The key to administering merit pay (and for eliminating seniority as the only means for job security) is to allow the administration to perform its job just as adminstrations in the private sector do - by making subjective evaluations of their staffs. Will this always be fair? Will principals always show the wisdom of Soloman in their decisions? Will personalities/politics always be avoided? Of course not, but neither is it in any other form of employment - welcome to the real world. </p>
<p>There is no question that good teachers need to have better pay, but until they are willing to allow themselves to be differentiated from the poor teachers by subjective measures, just as their private sector counterparts are, they really don't have a leg to stand upon when comparing their salaries with the private sector.</p>
<p>Epiphany, you are exactly right, at least as I see it. Education is a three-legged stool: student, teacher and parent. The teacher isn't teaching in a vacuum, so that leg is really, as you point out, "teacher + principal, or teacher + principal + unenlightened district office, or State-mandated "fad" curriculum foisted on unwilling, unsuspecting teacher suddenly required to teach this, reluctantly."
As for the excessive use of substitutes, unnecessary "professional" days which are a result often of training to deliver "fad curriculum," standardized tests, which require scoring and analyzing, and other really less important activities than providing a consistent presence in the classroom. Unions and administration share the blame for this insanity. It costs less to hire a sub than to pay curriculum rate for a teacher to be trained or do work outside of contractual school hours. That's why there are so many subs. I think the system is broken. There are good teachers, but they are beyond frustrated. Special education has become such a financial drain for many districts that teachers are penalized for suggesting IEPs or 504 plans, even when needed desperately. And the documentation required to avoid lawsuits is frightening.</p>
<p>Whoa, fundingfather - It's a slippery slope in education when the principal becomes a middle manager who mimics corporate merit policies. I think Opie already addressed at least some of the problems with this. Principals come and go - this power would certainly make school politics rise to the level of corporate politics (as if they aren't there already). I don't think there would be any benefit to students....</p>
<p>I might catch hell for saying this, but I think a big problem with teachers today is just that they aren't that intelligent. Teaching has become a profession for the B/C students in high school. Its a degree offered at most colleges, and the job security is pretty much unmatched. When you have people going into it because its a simple thing to get into and offers good benefits and security, instead of truly loving teaching then of course the education system is going to suffer.</p>