talk to me about teacher merit pay.

I'm all for rewarding teachers for merit. I'm just not sure merit pay can be done fairly. If you're in favor of it, tell me how it can be done so that no one - particularly special ed teachers or those who teach in "difficult" schools - gets the shaft.

...leaving students behind.
but, they don't really care about them, anyway.

Not sure I follow you....

the "Voucher" people
the "prayer in school" people
some homeschoolers
some private schools

test with "regular" ed. students. It's really an outrage.

Also... as far as I know, homeschoolers and private schools are not required to participate in NCLB.

That is off-subject, though, sorry.

There is NO fair way to measure teacher compensation based on students' accomplishments.

Merit pay is like commission in the retail world. We need to figure out that some things are not businesses.

In a business or corporation, the only thing that matters is making a profit. Profit is the goal. In schools, hospitals, police forces, fire stations, park services, there is a different goal. Once the goal is profit, you distort the purpose. Best practices become defined by how much money will come from them.

I have worked at the state and national level on testing and evaluation. You can't make it fair and you can't make it adequate. Merit pay will ruin more children's lives than NCLB.

it is far easier to ID ineffective teachers and perhaps go that route.

Students know and parents know and principals know. Don't need scores to do this.

Lower their pay instead of trying to figure out how to rank the better ones.

Just a thought as a teacher and parent.

Using test scores invites corruption in otherwise honest people.

Using post grad classes to add to points isn't the best indicator --- unless they fail, which is rare, given the inservice industry which depends on these funds.

Have to work it out with the unions, which have dismayed me with their vociferous support of problematic teachers.

And this is from someone who had her pic in USA today marching in a NFT picket line.

students could vote for teacher of the year but not linked to pay. The principal usually has a good idea of who is performing or who is not and might find ways to address the problem without relating to pay. Difficult schools are difficult and no matter what you do teachers' pay is not going to improve them!

Year before this last, I got my assistant principal in a world of hurt with a child advocate because he was trying to kick my special ed kids out of the school. Guess who became the principal that January?

I love my current principal, but the previous jackass? Not objective at all.

but I think decisions should be made at teacher level not by the Federal government, state or Council etc.

"MYTH: If schools were allowed to grant merit pay, good teachers would be well compensated .

FACT: The fundamental problem is low teacher pay, period. Merit pay schemes are a weak answer to the national teacher compensation crisis.

Merit pay systems force teachers to compete, rather than cooperate. They create a disincentive for teachers to share information and teaching techniques. This is especially true because there is always a limited pool of money for merit pay. Thus, the number-one way teachers learn their craft --learning from their colleagues -- is effectively shut down. If you think we have turnover problems in teaching now, wait until new teachers have no one to turn to.

The single salary schedule is the fairest, best understood, and most widely used approach to teacher compensation -- in large part because it rewards the things that make a difference in teacher quality: knowledge and experience.

Plus, a salary schedule is a reliable predictor of future pay increases. Pay for performance plans are costly to taxpayers and difficult to administer. In contrast, single salary schedules have known costs and are easy to administer. School boards can more easily budget costs and need less time and money to evaluate employees and respond to grievances and arbitrations resulting from the evaluation system. Worse yet, there is often a lack of dedicated, ongoing funding for merit pay systems.

Merit pay begs the question of fairness and objectivity in teacher assessments and the kind of teacher performance that gets "captured" -- is it a full picture, or just a snapshot in time? Is teacher performance based on multiple measures of student achievement or simply standardized test scores? Are there teachers who are ineligible to participate in a merit plan because their field of expertise (art, music, etc.) is not subject to standardized tests?

By November 2006, 50 Texas schools rejected state grants to establish merit pay programs for teachers, tied to higher student test scores. Many schools reported that teachers opposed the idea or that administrators were reluctant to decide who should get a bonus and who shouldn't. Teachers at schools opposed to merit pay said it was not worth the extra money to break up the team spirit among teachers and spend time filling out paperwork for the program. In Bellaire, Texas, fifth grade science teacher Tammy Woods voiced her paperwork concern to the Dallas Morning News. "Most of us felt our time would be better spent working with the kids than working on the incentive-pay plan," she said. "We also felt there would be hard feelings no matter what happened because not everyone who worked to accomplish our goals would be rewarded." "

Source: NEA.org website

And what would be judged as "merit?" My students who were born addicted to all kinds of drugs make progress, even though it is slower than other children. But there is progress. Do we judge them by how far they have come, or by comparison?

and that is why merit pay can never be done fairly. Measuring outcomes by testing just concentrates the curriculum on the test data; evaluations by principals can vary broadly because they are dependent on what the principal thinks is a good techer; and evaluations by students rewards popular or easy teachers as well as(sometimes) good ones. It's easier to identify bad teachers, and that might be the way to reward the rest of the teaching profession: raise all their salaries but weed out the deadwood.

The same teacher in the same classroom in the same school would get different merit pay every year. Some batches of students naturally work harder and better than other groups of kids. Test scores, grades, whatever objective measure you use fluctuate from year to year naturally. That alone tells me that merit pay is ludicrous.

The reality is, you never know how well a teacher did until years and years later, sometimes decades later. You don't know how well the college-prep senior English teacher (my old job) did in preparing her students for college until after they all take Freshman Comp--and those grades are dependent on so many factors not in their high school teacher's control that it's not that fair anyway.

Or, judging cooks by their shopping. Gardeners by their tools.

I am a lifelong teacher. We sow seeds without knowing when or if they'll sprout, thrive, or reproduce. We don't ask kids if they'll listen or take our advice to heart. We don't wait for the focus group to give us their opinion. We don't get a commitee of advisors for the thousands of judgments we make daily. There are no balance sheets or quarterly sales numbers. Children come and go from our schools from other countries and programs. We don't choose who we'll teach or what we'll teach. Sometimes, we have no say in how we'll teach, where we'll teach, or what resources we'll use.

We have all of the responsibility and very little of the control. Some of us don't even feel safe in our classrooms, hallways or parkinglots.

But we are expected to silently stand by and let those who know nothing about kids, learning or teaching to stand in judgement of us. People believe that because they all survived schools, they're in a position to "know" what's going on in school, what "should be" going in in schools or what's missing.

The funny thing is, I can't pretend to second guess my plumber, mechanic or hairdresser. I don't have a clue. But somehow, everyone who's never spent a day in front of kids thinks they're qualified to be my supervisor.

I think the real culprit in so-called "merit pay" is the human inclination to want to get even with teachers who restricted our behavior as children. They told us what to do for 12 years, and so we want our turn.

Of course there are stronger and weaker teachers. But having said that, no one knows what a child really comes to school to learn. One teacher is better for one child and less so for another. That even changes from day to day, from subject to subject. The same thing could be said for parents.

When all is said and done, someone has to get up in the dark 5 mornings a week and meet the kids and understand them as they develop. For that priviledge, we expect teachers to excell at 6 years of college and a long battery of tests and observations. Then we trust our local boards of education to hire administrators to supervise us, hoping that they have the expertise to know the good from the bad.

Does anyone who thinks american schools are broken want to double or triple the number of administrators in their own town to ensure proper, regular supervision? Personally, I've never heard one parent ask to pay more administrator's salaries. Ever. In 26 years.

If the goal really is to improve teaching by weeding out the weak ones, increase supervision, which means increasing your taxes.

Short-sheeting teacher pay will make schools revolving doors. Children need stability and predictability. Schools should be safe and calm and comforting. Regular upheaval, by setting the teachers against each other with "merit pay", can't result in serving the children's best interest. If you want us to teach all of the children equally, then pay all of us equally. It's not like there are alot of other perks in education. At least we can count on a stable paycheck for our daily, weekly, and yearly dedication to your children.

But somehow, everyone who's never spent a day in front of kids thinks they're qualified to be my supervisor.

There's seriously a mentality that says "any idiot can teach" that undergirds most, and maybe all, of the opposition to education.