>>I'm in favor of merit based progression everywhere. Seniority is a lousy system that rewards people for not making waves, brown-nosing and sitting on their ass.
Good teachers should advance and be rewarded. GREAT teachers even more so. Poor and lousy teachers should be shown the door, not given raises for hanging around.<<
Hard to argue with those sentiments; however, it's the application of these sentiments that gets into the problems koan discusses.
It's my own position that finely grained, test based student achievement measures as a basis for merit ranking do two things that undermine this process: (1) they are highly variable as the NY State system is now learning and the New Jersey system will soon learn (teacher score very highly in one year and then very low the next, which should not happen); and (2) they corrupt learning into teaching students how to test well.
I suspect one would find that teachers in most systems fall into roughly three very large categories: (1) teachers that everyone knows do the job superbly, year in and year out (no need to use test measures); (2) teachers who are just terrible, don't like students, and so on, and who don't improve no matter how much counseling, teaching workshops, and so on (not many here, but everyone knows who they are, and they should be fired); and (3) the middle range, the largest block, for whom it makes no sense to have quantitative measures of their work and for whom workshops and the like tend to help.
None of this calls for all the quantitative, best based measures that corrupt education. Just calls for teacher unions being more flexible on firing very bad teachers. |
