And who gets to decide what constitutes merit, and who does and doesn’t exemplify it? Do you use objective measurements? If so, how do you ensure you’re comparing apples to apples? Do you use subjective judgments? Whose? The principal’s? (Now there’s a recipe for a toxic workplace.) Other teachers’? (Ditto.) Parents? (Yikes, that’s even worse.)</p>
<p>What’s sad and funny about this whole merit-pay discussion is that there’s increasing evidence (as nicely summed up in [url="<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc"]this[/url">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc"]this[/url</a>] video clip) that financial incentives don’t even work. You’re not magically going to get better performance from teachers by dangling bonus carrots or pay cut sticks in front of them. You’ll get better performance by giving them the respect, support and autonomy they need to function as professionals.</p>
<p>In Freakonomics the book by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, (movie coming soon), there is a chapter which shows that merit pay DOES work. However, the $$ don’t go to the teachers, but the students. It would be interesting to take the merit pay set aside for the teachers and distribute it to students based on performance. It is an interesting way to bypass the controversy.</p>
<p>Who decides merit in a private company? The boss. Why should school be any different?</p>
<p>Any discussion about merit has to understand that to some degree it will be subjective. That’s life. That’s the real world.</p>
<p>I can come up with a few ways to evaluate teachers…
attendance record
for hs, scores on department-wide finals
parent/student evaluations should be a PIECE of the picture (not the whole thing, but they should be one consideration.)
evaluation by principal/vice-principal/dept head when they do observation in the classroom.
participation in committees, helping to train other teachers, etc
evaluations from other teachers</p>
<p>I don’t think that merit pay will make bad teachers better. I think it will allow good teachers to be better rewarded and less likely to burn out and leave the system. Nothing is more demoralizing than busting your butt for your students, and knowing that the slacker in the room next door isn’t doing anywhere near as much for their students as you are but that you are making the same amount of money - or less.</p>
<p>It’s not all about pay, either. Higher rated teachers should have first choice of where they teach and what they teach. And I’m not saying that seniority shouldn’t be a part of pay and choosing who gets to teach what - it just shouldn’t be the only factor, like it is now.</p>
<p>Most private HS and grade school teachers are not unionized. I have found them to be very passionate, qualified and professional. The difference being - if the non-unionized teachers are not in possession of these qualities, they simply are not asked to return the following school year. It is an at will verses tenured contract.</p>
Well, for one thing, because it seems like every time I talk to somebody who works in a private company, I am regaled with stories of the arbitrary, capricious way in which bosses dole out praise, blame, rewards and penalties, how little sense it all makes, how dysfunctional it is, and all the inefficiency and game-playing that result.</p>
<p>People love to talk as if private and public workplaces can be distinguished by the ruthless rationality with which the former are run. But from what I’ve seen and heard, the difference is mostly in the ruthlessness. Rationality is a scarce commodity everywhere.</p>
<p>I should also add - although our teacher’s union complains about teachers being unappreciated, repeated appeals from volunteer groups attempting to pass property tax increases to support the schools have resulted in little or no response from the union. I and many other parents have donated countless hours and dollars to registered political committees attempting to persuade voters in our town to increase their property taxes to support the schools - including to allow us to pay salaries competitive with other towns in the area, to attract and retain the best teachers. In over 15 years of working with these groups (and groups formed to support the building of much needed new schools as our town has grown) I have yet to see the Teachers’ Union donate one cent to these campaigns. Nor have they offered us any labor. Not even a formal endorsement! Individual teachers and principals have stepped up, in their role as private citizens, to support these measures - but the union has been deafening in its silence and lack of help. Meanwhile, the union raised dues so they could rent office space with the dues the teachers pay. I have racked my brain to figure out exactly what benefit the good teachers get from this union. I haven’t found an answer. But the lousy teachers get protection from any attempt to discipline them or motivate them to improve.</p>
<p>You convinced me. It’s all teacher unions’ fault. Get rid of unions and we’ll live in education nirvana. Get rid of unions, and we’ll only have superb teachers who work passionately with great, great success. Because they’re, you know, non union. </p>
<p>Who knew there’s one, simple solution to our education woes? And here I thought it was a complex problem… silly, silly me.</p>
<p>No, getting the unions to accept the idea of rewarding merit (or conversely, disciplining poor performance) is merely step one. After that, they can choose to be part of the solution, or at least get out of the way.</p>
<p>Step 2 would be to get the state Depts of Educ and the Federal government to learn to get out of their own way. We spend more hours and money doing paperwork to prove to the state and feds that we aren’t wasting money… we probably spend as much time and money documenting what we do as we spend actually doing it. My experience with my state’s Dept of Education: good intentions, poor execution. Our former hs principal told me once that the Dept of Education is run by people with degrees in education who either couldn’t cut it in a real classroom or just hate kids. I thought that was pretty cynical when he said it… 6 years later, I think he’s probably right.</p>
<p>Just to clarify, the schools I wrote about are not the ones my son goes to. Some charters, like magnet programs, have huge waiting lists. I think that is one of the points of Waiting for Superman – that there are not enough spaces for the kids who want them.</p>
<p>In his 20-plus years with Harlem Children’s Zone, Inc., Geoffrey Canada has become nationally recognized for his pioneering work helping children and families in Harlem and as a passionate advocate for education reform.
Since 1990, Mr. Canada has been the President and Chief Executive Officer for Harlem Children’s Zone, which The New York Times Magazine called “one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time.” In October 2005, Mr. Canada was named one of “America’s Best Leaders” by U.S. News and World Report.</p>
<p>In 1997, the agency launched the Harlem Children’s Zone Project, which targets a specific geographic area in Central Harlem with a comprehensive range of services. The Zone Project today covers 100 blocks and aims to serve over 10,000 children by 2011.</p>
<p>The New York Times Magazine said the Zone Project “combines educational, social and medical services. It starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an entire neighborhood…The objective is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can’t slip through.”</p>
Disciplining really poor performance is a possibility in every union workplace I’ve ever heard of. And the teachers I’ve talked to are as interested in disciplining their lazy, unstable or otherwise incompetent peers as any parent could be. I’ve heard them wonder why it doesn’t happen more often. I think the reason is simply that it’s easier to do nothing and blame the union for the existence of rules and procedures that protect teachers from arbitrary firings than it is to do the hard work of documenting a disciplinary case. </p>
<p>But merit pay is a distinct and much less straightforward issue.</p>
<p>I found this passage about Geoffrey Canada in the New York piece that started this thread:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is grimly amusing. First of all, the piece (and, I’m guessing, the movie) treats Canada as a pundit, someone qualified by his eminent success in school reform to serve as a source of wisdom on the subject–even though it’s apparently by no means clear that his schools are even successful. But that doesn’t matter, because, hey! in Charterworld, if a school stinks you just close it. What happens to the kids? They get shuffled to some other school which will presumably close in its turn when it’s found to be failing. The students are fungible counters in the reform game. </p>
<p>This sure doesn’t sound like a good way to run a school system. (But it does sound like an outstanding way to get grant funding.)</p>
<p>I’ve been eagerly scanning the local movie times, hoping “Waiting for Superman” was coming to a theatre near me. Now I think I’ll just continue to read about it. Gail Collins’ NYT column today made me cry.</p>
<p>I am a high school teacher in a school district that is becoming more and more urban each year. It would be difficult to judge a teacher’s performance in the classroom based on how well the students perform. There are so many variables involved it would be quite a task just to document all of them. Parents are a huge role in a child’s achievement in school. I have worked at all grade levels over the years. Would somebody tell me how you can see a child succeed academically when a parent thinks it is okay for their 8 year old to come to school late three days a week. Or when a parent allows their child to stay up until 11:00 watching TV and they come in and sleep all day. How about when a student misses 40 plus days of school a year? The parents send them to school in dirty clothes with no lunch money and they did not have breakfast. How about when a student comes in and tells you they have to go to court and testify against their dad who beat mom up and put her in the hospital. The student who cannot stay after school for extra help because he has 6 siblings to take care of. Think I am kidding?? This is the TIP of the iceberg so to speak. And all of these things have happened to me. When do we get to teach? We are playing counselor, nurse, mother, teaching social skills, stopping bullying, etc. I wish I could teach, grade papers, and have time to spend with every single student and make them value an education and have an absolute love for learning. What a concept. I do really like my job as a teacher. But quite honestly, the biggest disadvantage I see for these kids are their parents. Many of these parents just don’t parent and never wanted to. This will stay with these students for the rest of their lives and they come to school every day burdened with a host of problems. Just not fair for them. No wonder they have such a hard time learning. And they want to blame teachers when they perform poorly. Start making their parents accountable!</p>
<p>Yes - finding a good way to assess teacher performance is very difficult. Another factor you didn’t mention - huge student turnover. in some Indianapolis schools, 6% of the students who begin in a school actually are still there at the end of the year. Students move from one school to another, as their family moves or they live with different family members in different parts of town. How do you measure a teacher’s effectiveness when he/she has had students for just 1, 2, 6, months out of the school year?</p>
<p>Just came back from seeing this very compelling documentary about the state of our public education system. I HIGHLY recommend it. It puts some of the silly cc " which college is better than the other" threads in an entirely new perspective. Here is a clip. [Waiting</a> For “Superman” | Videos | Official Movie Site](<a href=“http://film.waitingforsuperman.com/videos]Waiting”>http://film.waitingforsuperman.com/videos) Most of us are on this site because we value education. The parents in this documentary do too, but have, compared to most of us here, a very different challenge. Very riveting (IMO) film.</p>