Testing Undervalues Us, Teachers Say
Edward Langer has heard the arguments about paying teachers for performance instead of seniority. He doesn’t buy them.
Yes, Langer says, every school has teachers who spend more time monitoring the clock than their students’ homework. And some educators clearly excel compared with their peers.
But keying teacher pay to student outcomes — the method usually proposed for measuring a teacher’s value — seems about as fair as ranking a dentist’s performance on how many cavities he fills in a year, says Langer, a seventh-grade geography teacher at Buchanan Middle School in Hillsborough County.
“To base a professional educator’s pay on kids, and parents who might not stress that education, is not fair to the educator,” he says. “There is no perfect system. … Maybe the seniority thing is the least unfair.”
Many don’t agree with equating education with other businesses. Teachers work with children, not interchangeable supplies and products. Every child is different, they say, and — here’s the key — many come with baggage teachers can’t overcome.
“If I have a student, which I do now, on a third-grade level and I can raise them to a fifth-grade level, who’s to say that’s not progress?” says Natalie Gago, a reading specialist at Middleton High School in Tampa. “Am I going to have them on a ninth-grade level? No. There’s only so much I can do.”
Mine is – why not their’s?
The teachers don’t want anything that threatens their money. Teachers generally come from the bottom third of college graduates.
People in general who are not doing a good job do not like being held accountable for doing their job.
The dentist comment in the article is ludicrous. If the dentist could show that his patients had 50% fewer caveties the next year, he would be doing a great job. You can’t track performance based on total numbers, but on the progress that is made with those students/patients/clients/etc.
Teachers pay should be based on how well they motivate students and how much progress the students make. Test the students at the beginning and end of the year, and you’ll see who the best teachers are.
There are problems with pay for performance. One of the major ones is that students from poor families consistently do worse. If you paid teachers on performance you would be penalizing the teachers in the places they are needed most. Some functions are purely public and can’t compensated for in a private sector way.
Would you want soldiers in the army paid according to how many people they kill?
Teachers union will never let it happen.
There’s a very good reason for not tying pay to performance: there’s a lot of classes where the performance can’t be measured. For example, consider the teachers who have classes of special needs students (my mother taught those kids for years). How do measure how well kids with learning disabilities do? How about kids that require time away from their other courses to learn braille or sign language?
Measuring by performance might work for the regular case, but there are far too many irregular cases to effect such a system reasonably.
The worst teacher I ever had was the one who churned out the best results in the country. I went into her class with a great interest in maths, but she killed it for me with her teaching methods. The performance of teachers, most notably in English, cannot be directly gauged by their students’ results.
It’s difficult to isolate individual performance. Children aren’t widgets on a production line. If you can measure the abilities of the children prior to the school year, and consider overall performance at each individual school, then end of class performance should be used in evaluations linked to salary. The trend is to measure each schools overall performance and link that to yearly bonuses for all faculty and staff. It takes experience to be a good teacher. A second year teacher will not reach the standards that a 20 year dedicated veteran will. Of course the bigger problem is the 25 year tenured veterans coasting to retirement. Many are burnt out and on autopilot. It would be better to offer early retirement and cycle these individuals out. Sixty-five is too damn old to stay ahead of fifteen year olds.
Do the teachers get to pick their students?
One risk of paying teachers according to their students’ test scores is that some teachers might target their teaching specifically toward obtaining better results on the test that determines their pay. The more generalized curriculum objectives could easily take a lower priority in this scenario. A good comparison might be the industry that has arisen to prep high school students for the SAT test. These prep courses don’t markedly improve a student’s education, but they do improve the SAT score. Wouldn’t it be great to see teachers trying to get an advance copy of the proficiency test?
One analogy would be to pay doctors based on how many of their paitents get sick. There are some things that are simply out of your control when you’re working with other people. It’s simply insane to think that teachers are the sole influence on how much a child learns or that there is an accurate way to measure that learning. People who propse such systems generally have no experience in education and have never had the frustration of trying everything known about teaching methods with a student or class and still coming up empty. There are a lot of problems with the educational system in the US but blaming them on teachers is really quite unfair. If you talk to some of the best teachers, educational psychologists and researchers they will tell you that the politics involved in education are probably the biggest problem.
As for #2 “Teachers generally come from the bottom third of college graduates” please cite your source. I’ve never heard such a thing.
I am a teacher and I am actually for it. There are many folks around me not doing their job. I feel that the largest problem would come from teacher cheating. If the results were based on the tests, cheating would go crazy.
I understand the teacher’s complaint that some kids are harder to teach than others, but how is that different from working in sales where you may end up with clients that are harder to sell to than your co-workers?
I don’t really care what is fair to the teachers, I don’t think my company’s pay program is fair, but it doesn’t matter. Usually compensation is intended to be beneficial to the employer, not the employee.
“The Teachers” – what, are they some radical group? Would you want someone taking “your money”? Pay based on how well teachers motivate students? All teachers would become Tony Robbins and not everyone is motivated by Tony Robbins! The comment on the dentist comment; is the dentist keeping track of the eating habits of his patients? How often they floss or brush? You are trying to make something objective to be something completely not objective! I am sure there are fine dentists in Great Britain who have the same access to information as American dentists, yet look at the British teeth! What ever happened to individuality in society? Motivation is different for everyone! So what some of you are writing is that a teacher’s pay should be based on a student who was just raped by a mother’s boyfriend the night before a test? If you think this is an exageration, you do not know many who have worked in education that can tell heartbreaking stories like this! Last time I checked, there were morons working in every field!
This is pointless to debate. The real problem can be seen by the second commenter AB CD. There is a simple reason why teachers come from the bottom of the barrel. They are underpaid. As a computer programmer I make a decent amount more than teachers and I can tell you that my work is far less meaningful to society. If you pay teachers as well as say engineers you will find smarter people interested in teaching. The system is setup so that only those who love to teach more than anything else and those who couldn’t make it in any other field end up teaching our kids from useless textbooks.
Once teachers are paid more making the job more attractive, we can start to talk about paying them based on performance. Seniority should be a factor, but not the only factor as it is now.
“soldiers are indeed paid by their performance – for their leadership, integrity, courage.”
OK, guys. Anyone who’s ever been in the military — especially lifers, you can get up off the floor, now, and stop laughing.
“Teachers generally come from the bottom third of college graduates.”
Perhaps, like any profession, there are low level performers. But many also come from the top third of graduates (including me), and choose to go into teaching because it is very challenging and satisfying work. Schools that have low test scores generally have new and inexperienced teachers that cannot cope with the myriad of students who are English language learners, or socioeconomically disadvantaged students that have more pressing needs like food, safety, etc. Highly qualified teachers go to schools that have students that don’t come with these overwhelming needs. They go to schools with adequate resources, and competent administrators. If teachers are going to be paid based on performance, they need to be at a school that is fully funded and provide adequate support to their teachers. Only then can a teacher be more fairly evaluated on merit.
This is a lot more complicated than people are making it out to be. There are definitely teachers that have no business being in a classroom, but most teachers are doing an adequate job.
The kids and their parents are the problem. If education is not stressed at home, no amount of motivation wil be enough. This seems to be an economic problem as opposed to a race or cultural problem. If a boneheaded kid doesn’t show up to class, won’t do the homeowrk, will not study, etc. What do you expect the teacher to do? My dad is a science teacher here in Houston and the stories he tells me about the kids and their home life are ridiculous. The kids come in to his 10th grade science class not knowing how to do long division, multiply decimals, or calculate fractions. This is stuff I learned in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade at the LATEST!
My simple solution: Kick all the kids that that cause discipline problems out of class. You would be AMAZED at how well this would work to making the other kids more productive and attentive. Allow the teachers to teach without having to deal with discipline problems with politically correect kids gloves.
soldiers are indeed paid by their performance – Bfor their leadership, integrity, courage.”
Eidard makes a point here. Paul doesn’t. How many litres of integrity does the average marine contain? If you can’t measure it you can’t pay for it. That is precisely my point. But Paul’s comment does give us all a little too much insight into Paul’s sexual fantasies!
Currently teachers and the whole school system are TOO insulated from competitive pressures. This results in the bloated beaurocracy we now have. Before you flame me with some imagined slight about teachers, understand the problem is the whole system. Teachers aren’t the whole system. The problem is not focusing on educating youngsters.
Introduce competition into the school system and let the schools improve naturally. Allow the people who are sending their youngsters to school have a major influence on how the whole school gets compensated for their efforts. The touchstone should be the parents of the youngsters; if they are satisfied you are ahead. If not you better improve. I predict that we would see a reduction in the overhead (administration) and more funds go towards teachers. Administrators and their staff don’t contribute to teaching. Yes, you need some, but not 50% of all staff being non-teachers.
Will some parents be complacent and not fight for a better school? Sure, but that is their progative.
Also I like the idea that teachers should have a variable component to pay. Furthermore, it might be more beneficial if this variable component was school wide. You want these teachers to work toghether for your youngsters. If they worked together they might come up with some novel and effective ways to improve education. If you make it every man for himself you have a tendency to get infighting. (not the goal)
“The touchstone should be the parents of the youngsters; if they are satisfied you are ahead. If not you better improve. ”
Much hilarity ensues. “Why can’t my kid read good? Why do you teach evolution when its just a theory? My kid don’t need no fancy book learnin!”
I will be comfortable with others judging my teaching skills when I get to judge my parents parenting skills.
“I will be comfortable with others judging my teaching skills when I get to judge my parents parenting skills.”
Carm, the desk-chair “experts” won’t get that, but my wife, the teacher, applauds you for saying it.
Short answer, yes Teachers should have salary based on objective performance standards, as long as this is consistent through out society.
CEOs for example. People commenting on this post: for example.
If any of you has the nerve to argue “them” but not “me”: which is more implicit in your responses than your realize or accept, then start to get a clue that you are part of the problem as to why American education is so underfunded [don’t even think about giving me that pathetic, “The money is there it just isn’t being used right.” excuse.)
Teachers can be absurdly stupid and bad (roughly 33.33%), or, “okay” enough to get by with a lot of situational ups and downs (roughly 33.33%) and really effective (roughly 33.339%) which is just like your existing job area. To use teachers as the scapegoat for some really bad cultural/sociological “decisions” is both unfair, and blind hypocrisy. Seriously, until you are willing to implement all the “reforms” you want to impose on education on you own line of work, shut up, please.
Quality of an educator is directly proportional to the number of students who experience an improved quality of life, and general productivity as a result of exposure to that teacher.
You know that from personal experience (and if you don’t, you really don’t have anything, sadly, to add).
Figure out how to measure that, and apply it to projective hiring and you have the holy grail for all business, not just education. If you don’t have that particular algorithms figured out, will you, please just STFU.
America is dying because of zelots and control freaks. We are behind in exports, and ideas. Period, dude, period. Education is our real HOPE, and you can be the problem not the solution if you are using to require standards that you don’t ask of yourself.
We are dead if we are not in this together. Scapegoats don’t keep your personal parts out of the fire; they just delay it.
Yes, heap all responsibility for individual student achievement upon government, and the schools…
Why should parents and kids take any responsibility for student success or failure?
Unbelievable!
It always amazes me that there would never be the expectation that one could coach a championship HS basketball team comprised of five foot tall kids that can’t jump, but most expect that the teacher can take 125 kids with varying mental ability, social backgrounds and values, and create an environment in which ALL SUCEED regardless of what the student does or does not wish to do.
If you want to hold teachers to the same standard of competition that exists in the corporate world, then the teachers should be allowed to “fire” students who refuse to try (attend school regularly, study) just as companies would fire an employee who does not work.
Jim (#25) touched on the real problem: lack of competition.If schools were forced to compete for students the teacher pay and quality with come with it. That is exactly why the US university system is so good and the US elementary and HS system is so awful.
I’m afraid Thomas that the US university system is a joke. It just looks good compared to the schools. Students in Canada who aren’t bright enough to get into graduate studies go to US universities instead and typically get top marks. The lowest standards for university admission in Canada are equivalent to the highest standards in the US. That’s not even counting the breaks we give the jocks, which are almost nonexistent, meanwhile in the US jocks just show up slightly more than half the time. Your whole system is screwed.
BTW I’ve sat in on lectures at Harvard and I get much of my information from a college instructor working in Canada who got his masters in America.
you can’t tie teachers pay to student performance……my God….do you want millions more on welfare?
A market based education system would really resolve these issues. If you don’t like how your kids are being educated just move them.
Should teacher pay be tied to student performance?
No, because every student is an individual with strengths and weaknesses that do not necessarily correspond with a teacher’s ability to teach.
A better method would be to tie teachers pay with student attendance. The more absenses, the less pay. If a teacher’s performance is interesting (the ability to allow knowledge to enter) then students would not miss a class. If the teacher cannot engage a class pupils would be more inclined to stay home for mild sicknesses.