Teachers Unions, Performance Pay, and Autonomy
So we have a few problems to address. First is the notion of quantifying performance. There are obviously cases where you’ve got an exceptional teacher. Everyone knows they’re great. The students love them. The parents love them. Other teachers love them. And then there are cases where teachers are obviously bad. They’re disliked, have terrible results, etc. But I’d say most of the time the situation is much, much more difficult – most teachers are hard to quantify. It’s hard for many reasons, including who their students are, where their school is, how the funding is at that school, how the teachers at the school work together, who the principal is, and so on and so forth. So the government wants to quantify the performance (for whatever reason, not currently teacher pay, though) and the only way to do that is to use standardized tests, graduation rates, and future success of students.
Of course, standardized testing is a terrible metric (and the others aren’t much better) for student or teacher success. Standards require uniformity, and across the country uniformity simply doesn’t exist. A lot of the new data on learning indicates that even across one school, or one classroom, countless differences exist in how students learn. Some students are visual learners, others very physical, still others social, and so on and so forth. Some students do very well when they are lectured to and assigned long papers; others do better when put in group projects. Some are good test-takers, others are not. By forcing teachers to teach to tests we leave a lot of these kids behind. By paying teachers based on abstract and arbitrary national (or even local) standards, we are going to sabotage teacher performance because we’re going to ignore how kids learn, and inevitably how teachers ought to teach. Any professors out there want to start teaching to national standardized tests?
I didn’t think so. [Read more →]
May 6, 2009 79 Comments
