Teachers and merit pay

[LogGrad98]

I would love for the guy to have had some opinion about something. To me lackadaisical teachers are the bigger problem in our education system. I can handle the teachers that send my kids home with some weird ideas because it opens the door for dialogue about the issues.

In contrast we had about the opposite situation with my son who just graduated in a different school (we have moved around quite a bit). He had a history and political science teacher that was very engaging and sent kids home with homework like "Talk to your parents or another adult about the situations surrounding the end of WWII and write 2-3 paragraphs about your discussion" and he gave credit for finishing the assignment. He was very engaged in the process of teaching and was very effective imo. At the same time he had a biology teacher who ran his 10th grade classroom like it was graduate level stuff. He talked down to the kids, couldn't care less what their opinions or situations were, and taught entirely through homework so he didn't have to do much during class.

I know there are all kinds of teachers, but with 4 kids in every part of the school system from recent HS grad through 4th grade we have seen a decided increase in teachers who seem to be collecting a paycheck and nothing more. Maybe they are fed up with the system or mad about pay or whatever else, but it is something that needs attention.

 

[7StraightIsGreat]

I am 100% for this. Will it work? No idea, but the way things are going now, we're getting nowhere fast. For the first time ever, I'm actually cheering for Ogden.

While I'm not completely against incentive based pay, it's kinda hard to cheer for Ogden School District in this case considering that they are offering a take it or leave it deal with no real plan on how to implement the incentive based pay that they are pushing for. I applaud Ogden teachers for fighting for the right to get better information as well as a seat at the negotiation table. It seems only fair. If you were a teacher, I don't think you'd be very pleased with the idea of signing a contract giving the go ahead on incentive based pay when the district can't even give you a comprehensive idea of what it's planning to do.

There's some very good opinions in here about how hard it would be to guage a teachers effectivity considering all of the factors that teachers cannot control. I think that would be even more difficult in Ogden. Often times, elementary teachers are given students who speak little or no english and are expected to teach them at the same rate as the rest of the class, and there's definitely a large group of at-risk teens in Ogden once you get to the middle school and high school ages. A lot of these kids don't have a responsible adult in their lives that is going to be a driving force behind them succeeding in anything at all, let alone attending class and doing their school work.

 

[CONAN]

I agree it should be easier to cut off bad teachers. Teaching is just such a hard thing to measure. A lot of times it's a "you know it when you see it" thing. But a lot of times there's good teaching that doesn't get noticed. And the same for bad teaching. And some can be explained with data and some not. But I do think you could take care of the extremes easily. Maybe a bonus for the top teacher in each department (politics up the *** here) and then give principals more power to can those obvious sad sack 3-5 teachers at the bottom.

Would love to see a bunch of schools (not districts) given the lattitude to try some different methods on an experimental basis.

One thing I like is that most districts do (but are cutting to save money) is to give teachers professional development options and then teachers can do what they want and document it for extra pay. Mostly this is conferencing but it could be putting on an inservice or collaboration. Our district did like half and half where you could do half on your own and half was mandatory stuff but on by your school (inservices by the admins on school-specific stuff).

So kind of merit pay but more based on attending/doing things that will improve your teaching.