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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (95111)	11/10/2008 9:05:45 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541771

Seems to me if you hook teacher pay to student performance not only do the students then control the teacher, and don't think they wouldn't throw tests to get back at teachers they don't like, but you also put teachers in the position of being at the mercy of class aptitude. Some classes are clearly brighter, and more capable of being improved than other classes. On top of that, you have administrators who could easily stack classes with tough kids. There are always hazards for paying for results. In the private sector, a manager could put those they disliked onto the projects that are most likely to fail, or a worker can deliberately fail in such a way as to put the blame on the boss. None of that stops pay for performance working rather well in most other industries. Of course, you do have the problem of small sample sizes with teachers but one way to get around that is to use 3 year averages. Once you get beyond grade schools, where a teacher has a single class all day long, you would have several hundred kids in your data set. That should start to get you statistically significant results and do away with anomalies like your period 2. FWIW, I'm not opposed to also using softer measures as well for merit pay but there has to be some results based component. Slacker

To: epicure who wrote (95111)	11/10/2008 9:12:06 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541771

I think you could pay teachers based on performance if you measure it in other ways- quality of lesson plans; quality of classroom observations- and I'm all for those ways, because they measure the excellence of the teacher, and not the vagaries of who the teacher might have in her class. I posted the article because it surprised me. I have enough experience with performance management systems to understand that you don't rate people on things they can't control let alone use them as a basis for merit pay. I was surprised at the assertion that if kids aren't successful it's all the school's fault. And even if teachers could control what students learn, there's the question of whether those tests are a measure of it. Unfortunately, the alternative is to pay teachers all the same or based on seniority, neither of which gets you better performance. Perhaps there's a combination of factors that could be used to determine some portion of salary. But it seems to me that the most useful thing to do is to retrain or get rid of the poorest teachers. Probably everyone in the school knows who they are. I have some experience with merit pay and I am not sanguine that it can be made to work, at least not without an enormous outlay of effort that would be better invested in the kids.

To: epicure who wrote (95111)	11/10/2008 2:59:53 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541771

Mme, it would be senseless to give merit pay based simply on overall class performance. The standardized tests can, however, be mined for effective metrics upon which teacher performance pay could be based. If you ignore the test scores, or weight them as only one part of the metric, and look instead at the change in test scores over some period of time, then you'll discover which students are under performing or over performing in that teacher's classroom. For example, suppose that you teach math and you have a class of 30 students whose composite standardized test scores over the last three years are in the 40th percentile. If your class composite test score moves into the 55th percentile then you've done a fantastic job. If, on the other hand, the composite scores of that class are in the 70th percentile and they move to the 55th percentile then you've done a poor job. The tests can be mined even further for those in earlier grades. You should be able to examine where each individual class under or over performed the national average with respect to subcategories of instruction. You could pair up teachers whose classes over performed in those areas with teachers whose classes had under performed so that they could share successful teaching techniques. Unfortunately, the tests are not mined for this information. The reason for that is, I think, twofold. First, the teacher's unions are reluctant to see any objective teacher performance metrics adopted. They'd rather circle the wagons and keep the good ole boys network in place. Secondly, and just as disturbing, I suspect that the public education system may be too dumb to think its way through real reform. It requires active, innovative thinking to find effective solutions to bureaucratic thickets and the public educational system may lack the will and the talent to find the right paths. Ed PS, regarding the class that acted up; the strays are often more intelligent than the main flock. That's not to say they don't wander off and get eaten by predators more frequently.