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

To: bentway who wrote (200986)	9/11/2012 1:04:39 PM
From: JohnM	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. 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.

To: bentway who wrote (200986)	9/11/2012 2:03:36 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 542043

<<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.>> In theory that is great, but how do you determine who are the great teachers. How well do you think Hunter S. Thompson, Thoreau or Saul Alinsky would have faired in a merit based system? Or in times past Darwin. Einstein had a hell of a time getting a teaching position. I think he had to teach high school math at one point. Powerful people didn't like him. How well do you think I would fair if I wanted to teach in a history class that 9/11 should be remembered as the period when the constitution was shredded and we engaged in pervasive pornographic patriotism?