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

To: koan who wrote (200984)	9/11/2012 12:55:41 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542043

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. I OWE such teachers personally - they made a difference in my life. Poor and lousy teachers should be shown the door, not given raises for hanging around.

To: koan who wrote (200984)	9/11/2012 4:07:44 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542043

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, I'd like to see very good teachers rewarded, on the other hand, I understand that there will be problems with any reward system, but still, I think we could try it. The cheating problem is easy to solve. Teachers should not test their own students, or they should be monitored if they do test their own students. And there are pretty easy ways to catch most cheating by looking at the test scores. As far as compensating teachers based on test scores, I don't think that should be the only metric, but I don't see why we should not take it in to account as one factor. I happen to think sources like ratemyteacher.com should also be used- since teaching should be a customer friendly profession, and one way to measure customer satisfaction is by using ratemyteacher. I urge my students (and insist my own children) use ratemyprofessor.com when choosing college classes, because it is one very good way to assess the quality of your instructor. One or two reviews can be grudges, but we have found that professors and teachers with more than a couple reviews are pretty much what they are described to be. If districts were careful in assessing excellence, I would be 100% for merit pay. But it's always the idiots in the ointment that make you wonder if something would work. I'd be willing to try it, though- despite my reservations.