Damn right, this is controversial! If this catches on, who knows where it will lead. Next thing you know, people in all walks of life will want to be paid based on (of all things) ability, the quality of the work they do and job performance. Insanity!
States venture into teacher performance pay
The controversial idea of paying teachers based not on how long they’ve been teaching but on how much their students learn got a boost when a key congressman recently proposed adding pay-for-performance money for teachers in high-poverty schools to the next version of the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
Proponents say merit pay would give teachers incentives to raise the quality of students’ work and could help the NCLB program, which requires schools to show yearly improvement on standardized tests or face penalties. Proposed last month by U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, the merit plan has support from Republicans and U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
But although some states already pay teachers for performance, the national teachers unions have unleashed a barrage of opposition to Miller’s plan. Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, called it a “deal breaker” that could cost Miller the unions’ support of that version of NCLB revisions. Unions and other teacher support organizations have contended that merit pay relies too much on tests that may not paint an accurate picture of how well someone teaches.
There is a problem with this. Teachers with more tenure get the best classes and students. It’s easier to show performance when you have several honors English classes than a dump all Freshman class that a new teacher gets. You need to measure what the students have gained from your teaching. To do this you must test students before and after the school year, not just rely on end of course testing. The best teachers often gets the students who needs the least help.
If they paid the President and other politicians based on performance, all the rest of us would be a lot richer than we are right now because they’d end up owing all of us money – a lot of money!
I wonder if the dickhead politicians thought about that when they were considering how to improve education?
Even good teachers are often against this. Why? Because they’re concerned about how you measure how good a teacher is. I think there would be more support for teacher merit pay if there was a good system for determining which teachers were doing the best job.
Education is not a problem that can be solved from Washington. Everytime the idiots in Congress or the White House try, they only makes it worse.
What is it that is so unique about the profession of teaching that makes it so difficult to determine who is doing a good job, Ben Fraske? This seems like just another evasion by the teachers unions.
+1 to #3….
There’s no way to measure this…. “Teaching to the test” shortchanges the better students and barely helps the rest.
The basic problem is that really bad teachers get tenure, and that students and their parents often interfere (in various ways) with the educational process to the point that education is often impossible.
It reminds me of a very bad story:
Little Johnnie had been tossed out of every school in the County for all kinds of reasons. Somehow he ended up in a Catholic school, and suddenly his grades went way up, and his behavior improved immeasurably.
Naturally, his parents asked. “Well, I saw that guy hanging up on the cross, and figured these people really meant business….”
Regards,
Stu.
#3 & #6 We are to lazy to figure out a good way to judge the work of a teacher, so we should just not do anything? what a joke…..
“Well Miss Johnson most of your class is failing, but that can in no way be a reflection on how you teach, so here is a raise. Just think now you make more than someone in the private sector with the same amount of education and experience and you get 4 month of vacation! Be careful though the union might go on strike if we teachers have to pay any more than $5 a month for our health insurance!”
Stu –
If there is “no way to measure this”, how do you instinctively know that those teachers are “bad”?
W-w-w-w-waitJISTAMINIT, Buster…
Are you suggesting some kinda evil, right-wing, oppressive, Fascist system here, where people succeed by virtue of their actual abilities and efforts – and not the proper, progressive, diverse, multicultural way of legislating equal outcomes and rewarding membership in selected ethnic / racial / gender groups??
Are you actually proposing a… [shudder] meritocracy???
The PC police’re gonna be on yer ass, you betcha. :O
Best gratuitous picture ever! I want to become a teach now.
It is very sad indeed that teaching has become a “poor” job. We continuously have to listen to “for the children” crap, but yet critically underfund education.
This whole equal pay for all teachers is a major problem for the education system. To get the highly qualified math and science teachers, you have to raise the pay for all your teachers, which only the really rich school districts can afford.
There are other problems with the “pay for performance” design, specifically dealing with teaching. Take a look at the education system as it exists now. Look at a middle class area school, a poverty area school and a high wealth area school. Test scores and graduation statistics are very high in the high wealth areas, in the middle in the middle class areas, and low in the poverty areas. A large reason is that education is not as highly valued in each of the areas accordingly. Since the test scores are not as high in the poverty area as in the high wealth area, the poverty area doesn’t receive as much money from the government. We also know that since the poverty area is in poverty, land value won’t be as high. This mean the local school are out even more money. Teachers need to eat, so they try and get jobs in the middle class and high wealth areas leaving unskilled, unpaid teachers in the poverty area. This is how the system already works and we want to skew the system even more?!
The problem is not the teachers, its the amount of money that the school has to use. It’s been shown that the more money you pour into the education system, the better performance you get.
That’s not to say i don’t support a pay for performance” scale, I just think that there are larger problems with the system. Education really does relate to societal values and racism and teachers are a very small problem in comparison.
“It’s been shown that the more money you pour into the education system, the better performance you get.” – WHAT?!? Blindly dumping buckets of money down the rathole automatically makes things better?
On the original topic: try introducing merit pay into any unionized profession. Union management is terrified of merit pay. If the membership can get ahead through skill and hard work, what do they need unions for?
I am absolutely dumb founded that there are people on this site who actually think its bad a idea to pay people who are good at their job more money than people who are bad at their job. What planet do you live on?
What do you mean you can’t tell if a teacher is good or not? Maybe try: 1. As the department head, 2. ask the principal, 3. ask the students, 4. check the class results against the results against the same class last year 5. Ask the parents (if they are involved). Really, if the principal can’t figure out who the good teachers are and who the crap ones was are, then the principal should be sacked and replaced with someone who has leadership abilities.
“It’s been shown that the more money you pour into the education system, the better performance you get.” – WHAT?!? Blindly dumping buckets of money down the rathole automatically makes things better?
Who said anything about blind? You’re saying schools are ratholes? Come on, you know better…. 🙂
Funding is, and will always remain, a huge issue in underperforming schools. There are occasional exceptions and pockets of genius, of course, but as a rule the quality of a school and everything in it is easy to extrapolate from their budget.
And I agree with the others. If we need to create an objective measure of performance, fuggetaboutit. If we can tolerate a subjective system based on peer review, principal ratings, parent input and the like, then the idea has merit. But I betcha the NEA will never let the latter system off the ground.
14 is right. It’s very cheap and easy to find out who the good teachers are. But, since we’re all about giant bureaucracies, we need to spend lot’s of money developing and publishing standardized tests, and waste classroom time taking them. Without spending all that money, I can already tell you what those tests will discover:
If students aren’t given compelling incentives to care about their test results, their scores will not accurately reflect their knowledge and abilities.
That’s what we call a million dollar finding.
Looks like most of the arguments, against merit pay, focus on the idea there are too many vague or gray areas of judgement involved with making the determination of who actually excels at their job. I tend to disagree. I believe there are similar factors in the high, middle and low end schools to enable a fair assesment of teacher skill. Some were already mentioned here. After saying this, I continue to believe that low income or poor economic area schools should be abolished and the funding for those schools used to pay for education in schools with better facilities and teachers. Gee, sounds like school bussing ?
#2 – Cinaedh,
The right thing to do about the pols, and it won’t happen ’cause they make the rules, is to stop all lobbying. Then tie their salaries to some multiple of the median household income for their constituency. If they want a raise, all they have to do is improve the lives of their constituency in a meaningful way. Essentially, put them on commission.
I’m all for rewarding better teachers, but we have enough “test teaching” as it is. I am working around the clock to fix deficits in my children’s education, yet my children sc ore off the chart on standardized tests, which test memorization of trivia, not education. There needs to be a better benchmark. Parents aren’t necessarily the best judges of “good teaching,” either- in many cases, they’re motivated by politics, controversy, or idocy, as in the case of the teacher who was fired (!) because preteens saw a nude statue at an art exhibit.
We expect people to pay for college degrees to teach, yet we pay them less than McDonald’s managers. Then we cripple the good teachers by insisting they teach for tests, follow a mandated curriculum to the letter, and punish innovation. And yet we can’t figure out what’s wrong with education?
As a technology coordinator in a school and recent classroom teacher, I am all for performance based pay, as long as the tenure system is torn asunder.
Generally speaking, students don’t fail, it is the people that run the schools that fail. And when they fail, even the good students get dragged into the mud.
Standardized testing serves one great purpose: to measure the ability of the school to teach. Some people complain that teachers end up ‘teaching for the test’ to which I respond “So what? At least they are teaching something.”
Hold school administrations accountable for the performance of the students under their care, and hold teachers accountable for the performance of the students in STANDARDIZED tests.
We have this mentality of hearing that a person is a teacher, and automatically placing them on a pedestal, as if the choice of work automatically makes them a special / superior person, no questions asked.
That photo makes me want to become a teacher!!!! Can i name my performance bonus?
I think the problem comes from the whole ‘standerize test’ bullocks. Really, it should be the principals who ultimately decided who is hired and who is fired, and who get paid what. Somewhere, the bureaucracy has to bite the bullet and actually give someone the power to act, be rewarded when things work well and be thrown out when things go to shit. ’cause things just work better when you do it that way.
From the article… Proponents say merit pay would give teachers incentives to raise the quality of students’ work
Okay… But I would say that only a student can raise the quality of their work.
#7 – Just think now you make more than someone in the private sector with the same amount of education and experience and you get 4 month of vacation!
Teachers do not get paid more than people in the private sector and they do not get four months of vacation. But whatever bullshit you need to fuel your knuckle dragging agenda is okay with me. I wasn’t really expecting facts.
The problem with “merit” based pay is that the only way to gauge it is through the standardized tests that are administered to students. This seems OK at a glance, but there are problems. First this will drive any competent teacher out of low performing districts. No one wants to do this job for a pittance, so good teachers will find schools that will earn them more money ie. high income areas. Second, anyone who has worked in education knows that every so often you get a “bad class.” This is a class that is just chock full of losers who’s parents don’t care about their education. Good teachers can and do end up with classes like this and NOTHING they do can make these kids learn. Third, this will encourage cheating on the part of teachers. Good teachers will want to keep their pay, and bad teachers will want to get paid more.
Further more, all you people who want to blame teachers for poor performance need to remember that teachers have them for at best 6 hours a day. The other 18 HOURS of the day they are in the care of their parents. Parents need to take some personal responsibility for the education of their children and not just claim it is all the teachers fault. If you weren’t going to care for your children, why the hell did you have them? It’s not a teachers job to instill a work ethic and strong desire to learn in a child. That job lands squarely on the shoulders of the parents who are ignoring it for one reason or another.
Try focusing on the social problems that cause low performance and stop blaming teachers for things they have only a limited influence on.
#24 oh they don’t hmmm well June July August no work and 2 wks x-mas 1 wk spring break and a host of other days through out the year. My father is a teacher believe me he makes more than the average college grad in the private sector, gets all that time off, a 90% pension, more job security than you or i could ever dream of, with no oversight of his performance to speak of.
Does anyone else see the disconnect here
#14 – I am absolutely dumb founded that there are people on this site who actually think its bad a idea to pay people who are good at their job more money than people who are bad at their job.
I’m pretty dumbfounded too. Not because we are talking about paying “good” teachers more… But because we are talking about paying “bad” teachers at all… Why are we even employing “bad” teachers? Is it because teaching is treated as a third rate profession and McDonald’s managers make more than teachers, meaning that schools are forced to take what they can get?
And this noble Ayn Rand idea of a meritocracy will last 12 minutes before it is corrupted by nepotism, favoritism, and any number of other -isms…
We simply need to pay these professionals like professionals. And we need to provide them with tools and facilities… and bla bla bla
But what we really need to do is shut up. Most critics of education don’t have a clue what they are talking about, as evidenced here every few days when it becomes open season on teachers…
Look… Rich schools get great grades and ship over 90% of their kids off to college. Schools in the middle do pretty well as well. Poor schools perform badly… and what do you expect?
In my ex-wife’s first year teaching the first grade, she had 37 kids. The oldest parent was 25, the average was 22. Of those kids, 8 had fathers at home, and 10 had fathers who were dead… and 3 of those kids had actually witnessed their father’s murder. There were 2 mothers who could never be reached to sign report cards or give updates to, so I took care of that. I drove a cab in those days so I took whatever material the mother needs to their jobs personally. I knew where to find them because I knew which streets they walked at night.
So my question is… what the fuck do you people want from these teachers? You aren’t saying it, but you are only talking about poor schools. We don’t actually have an education problem in this country. That’s a myth. We have a poverty problem. And unless you can solve it, your are going to have badly performing schools. Also until we stop scapegoating teachers, who did nothing other than dedicate their lives to the thankless job of teaching your kids, we aren’t going to be successful in finding solutions.
Now, faced with reality, and not what the public and politicians think they know about education, how to you award merit pay to teachers? I’d rather award combat pay, frankly…
#26 – I was married to a teacher, she and most of the other teachers in our circle worked year round…
But in regards to those months where school isn’t in session, they don’t get paid for that.
So until you know the job, don’t judge the job.
Can teachers be evaulated objectively to determine who gets the most pay? Yes.
Will teachers be evaluated objectively to determine who gets the most pay? Never in a million years.
Remember, the people who will develop and apply any system that is implemented are politicians & bureaucrats. Objectivity has the proverbial snowball’s chance.
#28 I know the job. they get paid a full years wages for 9 months of work. A starting teacher where i lives starts at $40K. That is a full years pay for 9 months worth of work. Really good pay considering that is no experience and the median home cost in my area is $60K