Merit pay for teachers?

I'm trying to be serious, too.

Inspiring kids to learn so that they can be productive citizens is a teacher's primary job, is it not?

And if it isn't, what is?

So.

Back to "How do you measure 'inspiration'?"

 

I love the idea of learning just for the sake of learning. And, in a society where information is a click away, maybe there's no need to remember millions of points of data.

But there are still things that 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders need to learn. Need to know.

And the same thing goes for high school teachers.

In most cases, how well someone is prepared for life, and how well they will do is determined very early. Expecting someone who has a poor grade school education to succeed is like expecting someone to pick up baseball at 16 and then make it to the major leagues. it might happen, but it's rare.

If you want to make the major leagues, you need to learn the basic skills as a child and improve them over time. The same thing applies to kids. The won't grow up to be doctors, lawyers, or CEOs if they didn't learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic as a young child.

 

Regarding the example about the bad teacher who continues her reign of terror, the simple answer is to give control to the principal (and in turn give the district control over which principals to replace). This is one area where I think the teachers unions are full of it; they paint this picture that a merit-based system is only going to lead to nepotism and favoritism, but why would a school district be any more susceptible to that than a private company?

The principals know who the bad teachers are. If they had more latitude to kick them out or force them to retire, schools would get better. I suppose there is some risk of unfairness but no more than in your average workplace.

 

Unless there are serious problems like gangs and/or bullying, I think you are probably right.

Especially in the big public school systems, there loads of opportunities.

My one brother had to take his daughter out of private school & put her in a public school -- in a not so highly thought of school system -- because they had programs that could challenge her in a way that her private school just couldn't. They weren't big enough & weren't flexible enough.

Another brother has always sent his kids to public school in Berkely and they take classes that were never offered to me in private school. They are thriving.

But, both brothers (and their wives) are very involved in their kids education. They know what programs are available and make sure their kids take advantage of all the opportunities.

 

Again, I don't think you have an argument from anyone that the 3 R's aren't important.

The question is whether you base pay (administrators' as well as teachers') and school funding on a short snapshot taken during a standardized test. And at this point, I would say the answer is no. The intention is to show what kids have learned, but the reality is schools teaching to that test and throwing other stuff out the window.

 

Sorry. I thought you were being flippant.

But, I still think that teacher would score well by other metrics as well.

When a manager is said to "bring out the best in his players" isn't that because their results improve? If a teacher is inspiring his/her kids, it should be obvious in measurable ways.

 

Even across a range of easily measurable skills - like those of a baseball player - I'm not so sure how obvious any metric will be in revealing who inspired what.

Again, taking poor Derek Jeter as our example, which coach at which level over the last thirty years is responsible for which parts of Jeter's game? Can such things even be isolated? Could you even get an answer by asking Jeter himself?

I think, though, that the baseball example leads us closer to an answer about teachers and how to assess them.

We consider Jeter an excellent ballplayer because we've measured his performance in many, many, many ways over a very long period of time. Offensive, defensive; BA, RBI, OBP, OPS, etc., ad inf.

I think teachers probably need to be assessed across a range of evalutors as well; classroom presence, student performance, parent interaction, curriculum design, etc., ad inf.

Trouble is, that takes time and money and effort and patience. Assessing a complicated skillset is likely itself to be a complicated process

Parents and politicians seem only to want scapegoats and sacrificial lambs enough to cover their own shortcomings.

 

To take the baseball comparison to an extreme:

If we're to compare teachers to anyone in baseball, it would be managers. The "test results" (won-loss) tell you that Joe Girardi was the best manager in baseball last year, and among the four best this year. But is that because he's a managerial genius? Or because he's got the equivalent of a rich suburban school district behind him -- about all the resources he needs for an organization with a tradition of expecting success? (After last night, I'm not sure I'm hearing anyone claim Joe Girardi is one of the top four managers in MLB.)

How about Joe Torre? Prior to joining the Yankees, he was a sub-.500 manager who had one division title in 15 seasons. "Test scores" said he wasn't much, but making him a Yankee suddenly turned him into the "best" manager in the league.

 

I was thinking about the sabermetric comparison last night in a different context.

While my wife and I were talking about this, she was mostly making emotional arguments - "They don't care about the kids as much as I do!" - along with what she felt intuitively, i.e. that merit pay undermines cooperation between teachers and therefore hurts kids in the long-term.

She showed me the governor's Web site, where he uses buzz words about "accountability" and "rewarding our best teachers."

And I thought: I could give a disseration on why or why the sacrifice bunt is a good play in baseball, with all sorts of empirical studies. And thousands - millions - of other people are doing the same every day.

But there is probably a tiny group of economists working on something like this - whether merit pay actually works. And neither the politicians nor the teachers seem to give a shit about actually putting together proof to find out. Because their "gut" is all they need. And I thought, "Why should someone's 'gut' be any more useful in something this fucking important as it is in assembling a baseball roster?"

And, yet, 99 percent of Americans would shout "Pish posh!" at an empirical study that didn't support what they already believed in their "gut" regarding merit pay (or any other complex issue).

Infuriating. And I include myself as a target of the fury.

 

That's part of what irks me when people cite standardized test scores from other countries (China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc.) as though they were an apples-to-apples comparison. It seems educational systems in this part of the world are based solely around cramming as many facts into kids' heads as possible so they can regurgitate them on tests.

It's heavy on math and science, sure, but there are few classes in the arts (your time, your dime) and the standard of foreign language classes varies wildly (don't get me started on how low the bar is for English teachers). The system is designed to produce test-taking automatons, which is fine if standardized tests are the sum total of your ambitions. On the other hand, how are you going to challenge and build upon the existing body of knowledge if all you know is what your teachers tell you?

It doesn't stop once you leave school, either. Want to be a civil servant? Take the standardized test. Want to gauge your ability in French? Take the standardized test. Want to prove your proficiency in folk dancing? Take the standardized test (and receive a snappy certificate of proficiency to hang on your wall -- not that I'd know anything about that).

 

What troubles me the most is the idea of basing it on a zero-sum game within a building or school district. Again, I don't have any empirical studies at the ready, but it seems to be that this would really undercut necessary cooperation between teachers in the same building. And if cooperation is as important as teachers say it is, then that would hurt students.

The other thing that troubles me is the short-sightedness of using these sorts of standardized tests, given annually, as the metric. First of all, a one-year sample size of a couple dozen students is miniscule. Second of all, other longer term metrics should be important: Improving the drop-out rate. Getting more graduates into college OR immediate gainful employment in a trade or something along those lines.

Oh, and third, screw all the old farts who don't want their property taxes to go up to support the schools. I see the signs all over my town right now: "Cap property taxes!" Screw 'em. I'll move onto the next town. I don't like contributing to sprawl, but I'll do it if the choice is between that and my kids' education.

 

One thing I do like about standardized test for college admissions, flawed as they might be: For kids who want to take advantage of them, they can be a rare ticket out of poverty and into Harvard, Yale, or mega-scholarships at State U. The son of the CEO and the son of the trailer park baby mama with eight kids by six dads sit down and take the same test, graded on the same scale.