Welcome to my first video blog here at teacherscount.org. This is an experiment and I appreciate your thoughts both in terms of the content and in terms of your take on posting video versus text. Please let me know. Thanks for watching! dven.
TEACHERSCOUNT BLOG
Educators from across the country share their thoughts on monthly education topics. In April, bloggers discussed the topic: Cheating. The topic for May is: School Choice and Vouchers.
Since what you mainly have is audio content, not much to watch, maybe you should release these as podcasts (or just audio files). Just an idea.
good idea…thanks
Merit pay will be yet another way to lower morale to rock bottom levels by alienating teachers from one another even further than they already are in some school cultures.
Teachers and administrators need to learn how to create genuine learning communities. Teachers need to learn how to collaborate, but collaboration can only occur when all parties experience TRUST. An administrator’s leadership ability is essential to establish and promote trust. A leader needs to afford its teachers with authentic opportunities to genuinely build trust and camaraderie. Only then will teachers begin to learn from one another. Teaching is all about trial and error and only then will there be professional and personal growth which naturally spills over to produce effective teaching.
A bit of healthy competition doesn’t hurt anyone. But it must be just that: healthy competition, where there are no losers, and all stakeholderes win, especially the students, and of course the teachers who deserve to be compensated monetarily for the work they do through a salary increase, but not merit pay.
Pitting a teacher against another is what merit pay will do. What can I do to ensure that my students outperform my colleagues’ so that I can guarantee that I earn the merit pay and he/she doesn’t? This cut throat mentaliy will run rampant. Unfortunately, if money enters the picture, some people may even resort to drastic measures, i.e, changing test scores, or even sabotage of learning opportunities. (When I coordinated the production of a literary magazine for my school, one of my peers complained to my principal that my fundraiser was contributing to childhood obesity, and then he encouraged students to not accept the literary magazine once it was distributed.)
Let’s get real and think about the viciousness and territorial attitude which already exists in so many of our public schools because of the dysfunctional leadership and unstable, unhappy teachers. Throw money into the equation, and only the most vocal, most ruthless, or rather the administrators’ cronies will benefit. It will be survival of the fittest!
Again, those who are out of touch with the daily reality of what happens in a school and blind to the subtle yet powerful impact of a school’s culture fail to realize merit pay will not guarantee quality teaching in every classroom. It will guarantee teachers will take on a cut throat mentality if they feel their livelihood is at stake.
Where will the money come from if every school has top notch teachers with high achieving students? This scenraio will never happen. Human nature and brain research proves that every student in a school will not be a high achiever. Not every kid will demonstrate growth. Some teachers are going to have to teach either some of those low achievers, or all of them, or to ensure equity these kids will be scattered throughout a school building so that not all the smart kids are in one room, so that one teacher won’t earn the highest merit pay. This will give rise to another educational dilemma: the problem with heterogeneous classrooms which ignore the needs of our gifted students. The implications and all the possibilities for disastrous effects are endless.
Teaching and learning present complex often intractable problems. Those in power need to explore the human factors which may simply prevent us from reaching just one solution. There will always be lazy teachers, but merit pay should not be an option to solve this problem!
There absolutely has to be merit pay. There are many bad teachers and they have to go, I will agree more great teachers than bad. But our kids deserve so much more than some teachers give.
Do you really believe the “bad teachers” will be let go? Bad teachers have become part of the culture of every school. Visit any school in the U.S. and you have at least one, a dozen or even more bad teachers in any given school. Will those states with unions continue to protect them? My state has no union, yet we still have bad teachers protected by incompetent administrators who love them because bad teachers know how to do one thing well: keep students and parents happy by inflating grades and entertaining kids with lights, sounds and games from the technology the district has spent millions of dollars on. Bad teachers will always exist as long as we have bad administrators, bad school boards and bad superintendents.
As a parent and a teacher, I spoke up at a school board meeting against a “bad teacher” in my district who showed over 50 non academic movies in an AP English class, Transformers, was one among them. I was able to prove that this bad teacher submitted a fraudulent syllabus to the College Board; I even spoke to the higher ups of the College Board, but to no avail. College Board does not have the resources for checks and balances of bad AP teachers other than relying on teachers submitting syllabi to them which must be monitored by their principals. The checks and balances depend on the honesty of the principal whose job it is to ensure that the AP teacher is abiding by the syllabus he/she submitted to the College Board. Bad teachers lie! And so do bad principals! They lie to cover up how bad they are! And many times they win, and students lose! To make a long story short, the bad teacher I blew the whistle on is still teaching AP English because the kids love the fact she does not teach; the parents love the fact that she gives the kids As for doing nothing in an AP class, and the administrators love the fact that the parents are happy. How will merit pay eliminate these types of issues? I would love to hear your thoughts. Check out my blog:
theempoweredteacher.blogspot.com
There are always going to be bad teachers, just as there are bad doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who fall through the cracks in whatever evaluation system is put into place. I’m not excusing it and there should be measures of accountability in every profession. Performance pay, however, isn’t the answer to rid schools of poor teachers. As it is based largely (if not solely) on standardized tests, performance pay doesn’t acknowledge that there are many other factors contributing to student success.
Teachers need to be treated as professionals. Schools should attract the best and brightest graduates with outstanding pay and benefits, not with a reward system based on standardized test results and that pits colleague against colleague. Doctors don’t receive performance pay based on how many patients they successfully treat! If teachers are treated as highly-qualified professionals, then highly-qualified professionals will pursue the teaching profession.
Finally, if you are concerned about performance pay becoming a reality, especially in light of President Obama’s proposed federal education policies, I suggest writing a letter to your local and/or state representatives and make your voice heard. The only way to change the opinions of lawmakers is by educating them on the consequences of what may happen if teacher performance pay becomes the “norm.”
I agree with you Amber! The only way we can empower ourselves is by educating our lawmakers. We need to write to them and make our voices heard.
theempoweredteacher.blogspot.com