It is ridiculous to me that we, the people, are even having this discussion. All jobs/professions should be paid based on merit and performance. Experience should lead to better performance. Education should lead to better performance. But that fact it that you can’t take that for granted. Just because someone has been doing a job for 20 years doesn’t mean they are better at it than someone who has been at it for only 10 or 15…
The National Post gets in right in this editorial:
Objections to merit pay nearly always revolve around two basic assertions: (1) that teaching is too complex a craft to be successfully measured; and (2) that students vary too much from classroom to classroom, school to school, and year to year, for there to exist any fair method of comparing teachers.
But is teaching really more complex than, say, the practice of law and medicine? In both fields, it is common for professionals to be held accountable for their work performance. The same is true of engineering, stockbrokering, sales and any one of a hundred other occupations.
One thing that the NP says in this article I’m not 100% in agreement with:
Teachers unions once resisted school reforms in Alberta, too. But over the past 20 years, those changes have helped make that province a world-leader in student achievement, especially in mathematics and science. And now that the reforms are in place, most teachers have dropped their objections — if they still ever remember what they are.
Alberta allows principals to control their schools’ budgets and hiring decisions. In most cities, there are also open boundaries that permit students to attend any school they wish, if space permits. Then the province pays a per capita grant according to the number of students there are in each school. In this way, the money follows the student, so schools are compelled to be sensitive to parents’ and students desires and more accountable for their teachers’ performance.
What I don’t see is that the Calgary Board of Education has taken the opportunity to open the system up as much as Edmonton has done… The freedom to choose schools and the “money following the student” is happening there, not in Calgary…
3 comments
Archie
7 January 2011 at 5:42 (UTC -6) Link to this comment
The system in Edmonton is screwed, and the teachers are being run ragged by a system that does have a clue what their doing. You cannot grade a teachers performance by the grades of the students. The amount of teachers aids has been cut in half as the size of classes slowly increases. Certain schools just teach whats on the tests and not the full course. Some classes have children with sever handicaps which bring down the grades and some classes have students with childern with the mentality of a 3 year old or less, but their parents want their little Mary or Johnny to go to regular school. Then there are schools that are full of ESL students. How do you grade a teacher that has a classroom full of ESL student that score low to a teacher that has no ESL student that score high. It cannot be done, yes there is some bad teachers, as there is some bad Principles (usually placed in schools Edmonton School Board wants to shut down). EPS is losing good teachers, because they and the province keep on piling extra work on them and in some cases causing mental break downs. Also you won’t hear anything from the teachers, because the School Board and Province has place a gag order on them, if broken they are fired. Its a system that is about to explode
Taliesyn
7 January 2011 at 9:44 (UTC -6) Link to this comment
If you don’t think we can judge the performance of teachers based on student performance, how would you propose we measure their performance so we can get rid of the bad ones and reward the good ones?
In my field we have to measure the performance of individuals working with different customers on different kinds of projects – yet we figure out how to do it fairly. The education system MUST do the same.
Cynical Bard
19 January 2011 at 9:32 (UTC -6) Link to this comment
To use the actual scores of students at the end of the year may not be the appropriate, but if the tests were useful the appropriate measurements might be to use the change in scores for the particular students taught. With computerized results it should not be too hard to sort that out.
All the objections I have heard about the standardized tests being of no use because the teachers will just “teach to the test”, tell me that the tests are not properly designed.
Multiple choice tests might make it easier to mark them by computer, but if I want to know if the student can write complete sentences I have to design the test to get them to write the sentences.
If the test question were, say
“Write an essay on ONE of the following four topics:”
Then let the teachers “teach to the test”. The students will be able to express coherent thoughts, in complete sentences, which is what we ought to be striving for. I could express the same principles for mathematics.