"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle
On February 17, 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law (US Dept of Education). According to the Executive Summary of the US Department of Education’s website the purpose of this act was to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and provide funding for education. To encourage education reform at the state level, the competitive grant program, “Race to the Top,” was implemented. This allowed states to apply for grants, provided that certain education reform was taking place within states’ schools. One particular condition under this campaign has led to much debate within our education system, implementing a pay system based on a teacher’s academic performance and the methods used to determine this (US Dept of Education).
There are many ways to compile data on a teacher and determine that person’s performance. Teacher performance can be based upon classroom observation, a teacher’s continuing development and education, and students’ standardized testing scores. The controversy centers around using student test scores to determine the performance of a teacher and thus her pay. Scott Andes, a research analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation voices the merits of performance based pay with his article “Getting Serious with Education: Why Can We Measure Students but Not Teachers?” High School English teachers, Jordan Kohanim and Ashley Ulrich vehemently state why there is no merit with performance based pay with their article, “No Merit to Merit Pay Arguments.” In each article both sides debate how performance based or merit pay will affect students, teachers, schools, and com...
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...ides to come together and implement a plan for better practices in assessing the performance of the nation’s teachers and its students.
Works Cited
"Race to the Top Executive Summary." US Department of Education Website. 20 Semptember 2010. Web . 2009. 16 November 2010
Andes, Scott. “Getting Serious About Education: Why Can We Measure Students But Not Teachers?" Progressive Fix Website. 28 July 2010. .16 November 2010
Aristotle. QuoteWorld.org. 2010. Web. .
16 November 2010
Kohanim, Jordan and Ashley Ulrich. "Teachers: No Merit to Merit Pay Arguments." Atlanta Journal-Constitution Website. 28 February 2010. Web. .16 November 2010
Popham, W. James. "Why standardized tests don't measure educational quality." Educational Leadership 56 (1999): 8-16.
When it comes to education, it is about helping people discover, refine, and develop their gifts, talents, passions and abilities; and then helping them discover how to use those gifts, talents, abilities in ways that benefit others and oneself (Bull, 2015). However, with education, there are many places where this does not happen and learners may fall between the cracks. Schools are heavily measured on testing, student outcomes and student numbers that it has become the main focus to excel the school district—but what about the students? I recall a time where I was sitting in a classroom and the teacher was going over a math lesson. Many students struggled and were having a difficult time following along with the task. The teacher started
Figlio, David N. "Teacher Salaries and Teacher Quality." Economic Letters 55.2 (1997): 267-71. Sciencedirect.com. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
“Real Lesson of the Chicago Teachers Strike—Fire Them All and Start Over!”, an opinion piece written by Wayne Allyn Root, on Foxnews.com, argues that we need to quit supporting the use of government tax money to fund inefficient teachers and instead should hire replacements at one-third of the cost, but implement a pay based on performance policy. Root claims that Chicago teachers are among the highest paid, yet have the worst performance rates. By increasing their pay during this “Great Depression,” we are increasing the billion dollar debt in chicago’s education system. In order to uncover Root’s underlying purpose, the following articles will be used in contrast which also serve to further complicate Root’s argument. Horace Mann’s Report
Salary schedules for public school teachers are almost a common feature in public school districts. These schedules largely determine the salaries for the teachers. A single district schedule sets the pay for hundreds of thousands of teachers in thousands of schools (Besharov 1). The key factor that influences the pay for the teachers in the salary schedules include experience in terms of years and the total number of graduate course works that a teacher has completed. This paper will look at the cons and pros of the salary schedules in terms of an economic point of view.
The oversite committee then evaluates the success of their money allocation and incentivize the success of the public school’s education. “Americans do not appear ready to pay the price.” (Barber, p. 215) Money is the most powerful motivator, and if the success of school districts reaps the benefits of more financial resource, educators will fight to be the best. This new desire to be the best, is possible with the equalization of opportunity from the allocation of funds to the poorer schools. The race to the top would already be won by the larger, richer, and more powerful school districts without those foundational funds. “Because we believe in profits, we are consummate salespersons and efficacious entrepreneurs.” (217) Barber’s essay supports the idea of incentivized results. Not only would districts compete with other schools, but their standards would be raised year after year in consequence to the oversite of the
Furthermore, she insists that (educators) ignore the fact that children learning abilities are different as a reply to their saying “ every child can learn” (P.99). She goes on to maintain that test scores cannot be used to prove if students learn anything. According to Ravitch, social scientists report that families’ incomes affect students’ educational lives more than their teachers do. In her book, she supports her claim by mentioning that economists observe that 60% of the test score variation is responsible for family. On the other hand, 20-25% is accounted for school while 15% of test score variation is teachers’ responsibility. Moreover, Ravitch emphasizes the importance of evaluating teachers based on their way of instruction, not their students’ performance in tests. She finally concludes by wondering what reformers exactly mean by “great” teachers. She presents two types of teachers who can be described as “great”. The first one is teachers who motivate and inspire their students to learn and those can only be identified by students and supervisors. They cannot be recognized by test scores. The second type is teachers who are great, in the performers’ terms, for raising students’ test scores, but they are not relevant based on Ravitch’s information. According to her, no school has teachers in which everyone of them raises his or her
Public education in the United States of America continuously faces many challenges – diverse student body, overcrowded classrooms, and lack of resources. Besides, many think that in order to provide quality of education for all students we need to improve effectiveness of our teachers. It is necessary to evaluate existing school teachers routinely. However, it will not be sufficient for improving the teacher body overall. Not only have we needed to evaluate existing teachers. It is especially important to ensure that young inexperienced teacher candidates are prepared to educate all students and meet their academic needs. Ravitch points out that “we don’t need to hire bad teachers” ( 69??? ) Thus, we need to ensure that prospective teacher candidates upon their graduation possess necessary skills to support student learning and take charge of their classrooms from day one. That is why New York and 25 other states are currently in the process of changing the way they give their initial certification. The new legislation is expected to take place in New York State beginning May 1, 2014. All candidates graduating at that time and thereafter will be subjected to the new Teacher Performance Assessment or edTPA.
Prostik, J. (1996). ‘ History of Teacher Pay and Incentive Reforms’, Journal of School Leadership,6, 3,265-89.
Some people believe merit pay creates competition and favoritism. They seem to think school systems will pay some teachers more than others and create a “battle” for money. In Merit Pay: Good for Teachers? By Gary Drevitch, one interviewee states, “I know it’s worked in some places, but I shudder at the idea of teachers being in competition with each other.” None of these problems will occur if school districts implement a successful, unbiased system. Another issue society presents when it comes to merit pay comprises of differentiating a “good” teacher from a “bad” teacher. School districts can easily evaluate a teacher’s ability to educate students by the work teachers put into helping students. Student’s reactions to a teacher’s class can also help evaluate teachers. More often than not, students will love a class where the teacher clearly demonstrates lessons, explain procedures, and adds elements of fun. On the other hand, students typically dislike classes where the teacher only comes in for a paycheck. This attitude is displayed by their lackadaisical teaching style. Other people argue that money should not be the reason why people go into teaching. Richard Barbieri, author of Merit Pay? argues that money is not an external motivator, but the substance of a teacher’s motivation. Financial incentives will cause employees to work harder
Hays, Scott. "Pros & Cons of Pay for Performance." Workforce 78, Number 2 (February 1997): 68-72
This in turn will cause the students to have a harder time learning because instead of the teachers teaching what the students need to be taught and more time teaching what the people who don’t know what the students know think the students should be taught. One example of this is, if a student already knows how to write a narrative but the standardized curriculum requires them to teach how to write a narrative it would be a big waste of time having to cover it that deeply if the students had already learned it. If those people would not have stepped in then the teacher could have moved faster and taught the students something they actually needed to be taught, such as how to write a argumentative essay (Paying teachers for student test scores damages schools and undermines learning) (Does Merit Pay For Teachers Have Merit? Pros And Cons Of New Models For Teacher Compensation). In the 2011-2012 school year (the year when they tried implementing performance/merit pay in idaho and many other states) the sat scores actually went down very slightly, or did not change at all --the score did not go up like the it was supposed to (Idaho ED
So even if teachers do their best, some of their students cannot get good grades (Solmon et al., 21-22). Yes, it is true. There will always be a small number of students who are hard to handle. However, merit pay is a salary paid based on employee performance, for a teacher, which is means based on their students’ score. In other words, the teacher whose students get better grades, are the people who can earn a higher salary. So what is the definition of better? If we compare all of the teachers in a country or in a state and choose who is better, this would not be fair. Nevertheless, if we just compare the teachers who are in the same schools and teaching students who are at the same level, this would be more equitable because they are teaching students who have similar abilities. Every class has good students and bad students, we can contradistinguish the average mark of a class for same exams like SAT or AP. Schools can give higher payments to the best teacher at every level. Merit pay is impartial as long as we use it in right
The state’s new evaluation system was in response to administrators who produced, “superficial and capricious teacher evaluation systems that often don't even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students' learning” (Toch, 2008). Too often, the “good-ol-boy” attitude would insure mediocre educators would remain employed. Realizing this was often more the rule then the exception, the governor created educational mandates to focus, “on supporting and training effective teachers to drive student achievement” (Marzano Center, 2013). Initially, they expected the school districts and the teachers would have issues and experience growing pains, but in the end the goal was, “to improve teacher performance, year by year, with a corresponding rise in student achievement” (Marzano Center, 2013).
Strauss, Valerie. "Why teachers’ salaries should be doubled now." The Washington Post. N.p., 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 5 Apr. 2014. .