From CNN:

I think this would give something to motivate the faculty of our public schools. While I was attending school I had always felt that the Teachers were there just "doing their time."

[quote=Rev_DelFuego,Jan 15 2004, 10:27 AM]
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I think this would give something to motivate the faculty of our public schools. While I was attending school I had always felt that the Teachers were there just "doing their time." [/quote]
No jockey(teacher) ever won the Kentucky derby riding on the back of a donkey(some kids)

I donot agree with this, Students such as myself have different learning levels. Doing this will mean the teacher would have to find each and every different learning possibilities. However i do support pay raises for teachers.

I agree with Juber3. Also, some teachers might make it easy for students when they take tests so they can get higher salaries - some teachers might even not stop students from cheating. There's also the problem that some or perhaps even all of the students might not want to learn and/or might want to give the teacher a hard time which would impede his/her ability to teach.

There are far too many CEO's who are gladly taking multi-million dollar bonuses while their companies lose money, don't pay dividends to stockholders and push on ever-increasing health costs on to their workers. For some reason people applaud bad CEO's but want teachers to tie their pay raises to whether little Johnny passes his proficiency tests.

I don't mind paying talented teachers based on merit (and getting rid of incompetent teachers), but it is unfair to hold teachers to a higher standard we don't hold businesspeople, professional athletes or politicians.

I am wondering how anyone who supports this plan expects a teacher to be willing to work in an indigent area, or with special needs students? Should a doctor's salary be contingent on the outcome of his/her patient? We'd see an end to a lot of expertise in the critical care specialties that way.

I think the salaries of our politicians (especially the ones who back this measure) should be contingent on the state of our economy. They can let us know how that works for them.

If there were some way to arrage the pay reviews to take into account the academic or social skills of pupils before being taught by a particular teacher, and compare it against their performance after being taught by them, and then just compare the average percentage changes (or some other function of it, then yes, I would be all for performance based teachers pay. Otherwise, no.

I don't know if you have selective intake schools in the public sector there, I'm guessing not. We still have some in the UK (= "grammar schools"). My guess is that teachers of a class of bright middle class kids that are keen to learn would be found to be far less effective at than ones working in the toughest inner city schools, or with other types of special needs kids. The trouble with teacher assessment is that it's far easier to compare simple outputs (such as test scores). A school of bright kids will be easier to get high scores with, so the teachers will get paid more. My contention is that it's more impressive when a teacher or a school can get an above-expected improvement rather than jsut an absolute high score.

Trying to think of an analogy - it takes a better mechanic to take a rusted hulk and bring it up to a standard where it can finish in the middle of the field in a race than to take a brand new custom built racecar and finish first with it. (Not perfect, but hopefully you'll get my drift)

As for bad teachers, I can't help but think that the people who know best who are the quality teachers and who are the bad ones are the kids themselves. Of course, there are personality clashes, and some kids just don't like some subjects, which colours their view of the people that teach them. But overall, across a whole school or academic year, the kids all know who the best and worse teachers are.

If there were a way of obtaining this information in some kind of blind test, so the kids couldn't gang up on a particular teacher, I think this should be fed into the teacher assessment matrix too.

I think the fairness argument Nighttimer raises certainly reflects the true picture, but surely it's an argument to be tougher on fat cat bosses, sports stars or politicos, not to go easy on teachers.

Most CEOs already have a huge portion of their income tied to performance. The value of their company's stock, and their stock options, depends greatly on their performance.

Most athletes have bonuses for winning games. They certainly stand to make much more as a standout athlete, through better contracts, and hugely, endorsements.

Hmm. Politicians. They are paid (get to keep their job) by keeping the electorate happy. If the "fat-cat" corporations happen to fund their campaigns, and dupe the electorate into thinking their politician should be re-elected, well, then, that's at least partially the fault of the electorate.

I support pay for performance of teachers, if the performance measurement is done right. As a matter of practicality any performance based pay is usually only a fraction of total pay. 20% would be more than most.

The performance measure would have to be VALUE ADDED. I can think of no other way to measure value added to a student over a period of time than percent change in standardized test scores.

Of course standardized tests are imperfect, but they are the best we've got, and will improve as we use them more.

I think it should be bonuses, not salary increases.

Bonuses are there to motivate employees (in this case, teachers) to perform their best.

The only way to measure performace is either test scores (preferably standardized) or grade passing %.

To be fair, the bonus should be based upon the change from last year. IE, low scoring classes need only improve slightly for the teachers' bonuses to kick in. Higher scoring classes would need a bigger improvement. Of course, you have the law of diminishing returns working against the teachers of brighter students, but it can certainly be argued that they have an easier job to begin with.

No plan is ever really fair, though. We do need SOME incentive for improvement and innovation, however.

I don't see how you could do truly effective standardized test for art, music, theater, and other more "liberal" subjects. Would teachers of those subjects be excluded from this bonus pay-structure? High School English would also be very difficult to do since the subjects in each classroom vary (drastically) from school to school.

But what about teachers who would purposely give their students high grades in an effort to increase pay? Harvard was having that problem when the majority of the student body was graduating with honors and A averages. That would not motivate teachers to teach better, it would only motivate them into being more lenient on grading.

Actually, the best i can come up with off the top of my head is having student evaluation of their teachers as a method for finding less than satisfactory teaching and finding those who are doing their job.

oh, and being a libertarian, i agree with nighttimer. CEOs should be held to the same standards as everyone else. a man who steals is a thief, regardless of his money or position of power.

This might work at the collage level, but from elementary school to high school the students lack the maturity to objectively evaluate their own teachers. The teachers would also cater to this immaturity to gain their approval.
After thinking about this topic further I seem to come to the conclusion the grading teachers by test scores would not work neither. If you look at the Texas education in regards to TAAS testing, you can see how the teachers spend far too much time catering to the test. If teachers were evaluated on the test scores then they would probably emphasis the answers to the test questions to inflate the test scores. This would not promote free thinking, which already suffers in public education, and student would not feel compelled to read the rest of the information if they already memorized the answer to the test questions.

yeah, thats something i considered as well, the maturity issue. That's why they would have to be simple fact questions like "was the teacher readily available for consultation" rather than "i would recommend this teacher to another student"

Still, im not advocating that should determine pay raise. Pay raise should not be determined by the people under someone, otherwise they could easily appeal to those people in an attempt to get a pay raise

I must preface my response with the assumption that the testing referred to in this debate question is standardized testing. I feel that any other testing used as a criteria would be subject to endless and uncontrollable variables i.e. teacher grading models and the teachers subjective evaluation of the students performance capacity (credit given to essay answers). That being said...

I believe that standardized testing is an excellent tool to gauge student performance as a group meaning the whole grade level of one region compared to that of another. It does not serve to depict the actual classroom activities and the skill level of individual teachers. Is it fare to blame a specific teacher whom happened to be challenged with a classroom of students that have little respect or interest in learning. You might say it is the teachers responsibility to adapt their teaching style to the specific needs and interests of a given class though in the same light can one teacher magically change in 9 months a pre-established (from infancy) lack of interest from the students. The teacher can only try to engage the students and their families. With no support from home it would appear to be an uphill battle to me. A bonus system applied on a teacher by teacher basis may only reward the teachers whom happened to be placed in a "good school".

It is my belief that what is proposed as teacher incentives would in actuality be of greater use presented as incentives to schools as a whole and monitored by the districts. I feel it is the schools and the districts that supervise them to be in the best position to determine where the needs of the students are not being met and exactly what action plan could be instituted to rectify the situation. If the school is performing well, GREAT pass out the bonuses! If a school is not performing up to standards the very same bonus monies (or a portion of) should be spent in that school and to the benefit of the teachers and students though on programs, activities and training that will help rectify whatever the problems exist. The onus is then placed on the teachers and schools to problem solve, the funding is there to implement solutions. Ultimately who wins, the students learn and the teachers eventually get their bonuses.

Edited to include from Smorpheus:


Excellent point Sir! Hmmm thanks for getting me thinking . FYI It was an art scholarship that introduced me to higher education. Without my NYC High School art program I probably wouldn't have gone to college.

Should teachers pay increases be tied to their students test scores?

Most, if not all of the teachers I have known were union members. I don't see that a union would agree to such a system. It might work in a private school, but it sounds like a system that would lead to "teaching to the standardized tests" and to even more grade inflation.

Many of the best lessons I ever learned in school were days when current events caused the teacher to change a lesson plan.

The announcement of the cloning of Dolly the sheep, for instance, prompted my Ethics professor to lead a class discussion on the morality of cloning.

When President Kennedy was shot, our Biology teacher canceled the lesson plan so that we could listen to the radio that we weren't allowed to have with us in school.

The national president of the National Honor Society came to our High School to speak at an assembly where the new members were to be inducted. He spoke on the topic, "The person who won't get inducted into the National Honor Society." He described the then abhorrent picture of a motorcycle riding hoodlum in a leather jacket among others. The name of the first inductee was announced, and he rode his motorcycle on stage, wearing his leather jacket, and with his girlfriend on the seat behind him. "Thanks man." He said, and then sat down in the front row on stage, opened his briefcase, and took out his knitting. (After he read A Tale of Two Cities, he always took notes with his knitting. It apparently worked...) The assembly was dismissed, we went back to our classes, and we discussed respect for authority and appropriate behavior. If the teachers had to adhere to a fixed lesson plan, and agenda, the topic might never have been raised...

My mum a teacher said that proposals like this would do nothing but make teachers squabble over who gets who in their class.

To me stuff like this places dollar signs on our children in an environment where children should be taught that we all have equal worth. Much like the dumb logic behind no child left behind...some kids DO get left behind. And punishment is not the answer...usually what these kids need is more resources more help which equals more money. My mum has worked in some really rough schools and she has seen first hand the kind of damage these types of programs are creating. Some areas in the US the kids are entering school already GREATLY disadvantaged and Bush's current answer and ones like the one being proposed here only aim to further those disadvantages. It is very bad policy.
We shouldn't make our children who need the most help come with even more added costs.

In theory I completely agree with you. In reality (I can only speak for the state of NJ) it is not what is happening. In 1998-1999 I was assigned a class in public school. Curriculum as well as materials were supplied by the state and subject based district exams were administered at the end of school year. My students were also required to take a core skills assessment. Based on the test scores of my class, I was then offered permanent position. My point being is that there already is a system in place that directly parallels student scores with teacher performance.

Should teacher’s pay be tied to test scores? I say no.
Could a bonus type of reward system be effective? Since the system already exists and is used for assessment of students and teachers why not use the information gathered to motivate and enhance performance.

I still am not convince that some type of incentive program would nor be workable.

What I envision is a system that compares students, year-to-year, and rewards the teachers who bring out the best of them. Keeping track of students on a year to year basis will eliminate the "I got a bunch of bad kids" syndrome. Any improvement in the aggregate test scores would merit a bonus.

This would need to be measured through standardized test, of course, to eliminate the favoritism angle.

We need to introduce some incentive to give our students a better education. This would be one idea (of course, it won't entirely solve the problem).

I propose doing a different type of incentive program. A type of stock option program for educators.

Each teacher is given a small percentage of each student's future tax payments. This would give credit for helping develop the whole student instead of focusing on test scores. And then teachers might be able to get a compensation system that is like that of a CEO.

The prospects of being able to pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars of future revenues should be just the incentive our teachers need to go out and improve their students' plight.

This type of incentive program would not make teachers better, it would simply change what they teach to accomodate standardized tests. This is an idea that sidesteps the real root of the problem.

The reason there are underqualified teachers in classrooms is that the bar has been lowered across the board. The pay is not enough to attract many well-qualified candidates (why teach math when you can take the actuary test?). The good teachers are usually teachers who understand that they could make a better living somewhere else and do the job for the simple love of teaching. The rest are those who perpetuate the saying "Those who can't, teach." Why not invest more money in all teacher's salaries and then raise the standards to make teaching a more profitable and prestigious profession? Teachers should be respected much more than they are now, after all, they determine a lot about our future as a society.

Giving bonuses to teachers for their students' test scores would not change the fact that they are underqualified. And besides, most of the best teachers are like Curmudgeon's description and don't care about adhering to some government mandate. They value more robust learning experiences. The test scores simply follow as they should if the tests are well-designed (another topic entirely).

For exactly the reasons you already stated: the current crop of teachers are failing, and rewarding them for the substandard job the industry has performed recently is just the wrong message to send.

We need strict job performance criteria for teachers, but that is the subject of another topic...

Rewarding the teachers who DO succeed is not only fair, it gives incentive for some teachers who may have "fallen into a rut". There is no penalty for being a bad teacher, but there should be some incentive for being a good one.

Although it would be a paperwork nightmare that would probably dwarf the IRS in the future, this would be along the same lines I had thought of. Do not give the teachers a bonus or pay raise for a yearly test score or achievement assesment for a student, but give them something that is directly tied to each of their students future achievement.

The con to that idea I would have to use me as an example, while I am successful in life, I know full well that if something like this were to be implimented my English teachers would be making money off of my success where they failed me (my own opinion mind you) in my english language teaching. (grammer and spelling mistakes left in for a point)

Blaming teacher for the problems in education is like blaming doctors for the problems in health care.

If teacher pay was higher than more people would consider entering education as a profession. From that larger pool of people, hopefully more talented administrators and educators should emerge. Just because such a system would reward the older "more mediocre" pool of instructors from the previous generation is not by itself a reason to scrap it.

The biggest problem with a reward system is that it is nearly impossible to measure the quality of education imparted. It is the people immediately around teachers that have the best chance of measuring their quality. Smaller schools and smaller school districts with more autonomy or local power are in the best position to evaluate the quality of instruction, not some federally created test.

Measuring the level of test scores rewards teachers who teach in a good system whether or not they are part of the reason that system is good.

Basing it on improvement will reward teachers who are working in an atmosphere of failure. If the average score of students on a test from a bad school district is 40%, there is a lot of room for improvement. But if you work in a district where that average is 90, a one point score increase is harder to achieve and a percentage of improvement reward would pay less money for the more difficult task.

Down here in the south there needs to be an across the board improvement, but the atmosphere is often, we put in a lot of money and don't get the results so why put in more.

Well, we don't put in near enough money down here and we get what we pay for.

This argument in inherently circular. If we pay current teachers more, we are rewarding some for failing as educators. If we raise the standards further, even fewer people will try to become teachers. So which do we do first? Is it the chicken or the egg?

If we do both, yes some teachers will be paid more for doing a substandard job. However, in the long run, the profession will become more desirable to qualified candidates, and the ineffective teachers will be forced out by better qualified ones (except for tenured teachers: a problem in and of itself).

This is a wonderful idea that gives teachers an extra incentive to work harder to improve the understanding of the kids they teach. Performance based incentives are common in industry and have worked well for decades. Why should teaching be an exception?

Because teaching is NOTHING at all like like working in "industry"...
...that's why.


Putting a value on human interaction is nonsensical. How about this scenario:

You are in middle management in a large Insurance Company. Being in charge of the Call-in customer service department it is your job to ensure that employees provide adequate responses to customer requests in a timely manner. One day your boss shows up and tells you that you will be getting a new employee who has recently moved to the area. After a few weeks it becomes obvious that this new hire is incompetent. He/she refuses to pay attention at meetings, is rude to customers and peers, is frequently late but you CAN'T fire them. You complain to your boss about the person and are told that you must try some new techniques for managing them; your boss gives you a self-help book on interpersonal relations. You try for months to find a way to motivate this person to become a part of the team but they ignore/insult you whenever you try to talk to them. After a year of this your productivity plummets. The new employee fails to learn how to do the job and the rest of the department has lost morale. Because of the disarray your boss docks you 20% of your pay for that year.



Hmm...doesn't sound like "industry" to me!


People are NOT widgets and teachers are not miracle workers. They can't decide who they work with and they can't get rid of those who don't want to work.
It is preposterous to think that a teacher should be able to somehow tap into the heart of every student and motivate them. Where is the rest of the village?!?!?!?!
Shall we fine parents of unruly children? How about if your child commits a crime, should you lose some of your income for having failed to parent?
Any parent will tell you that there comes a time in raising their child that the new individual (the child) takes over and the parent loses control of the directions they go. After that point all ANY of us can do is point, coach, support, and hope for the best. A teacher's job is to supply their students with all the knowledge and tools they possibly can for survival in the world. We can't make them take up those devices nor can we make them use them.

This is a collections of teachers' attitudes about their work environment:
Teachers' opinions on education

This is the current state of affairs in public schools. Teachers spend more time trying not to be sued now and often are not allowed (by statute or by parents) to provide a student with what they need. This is basically because everyone from lawyers, local businessmen/women on the schoolboard, random parents, and even the children have all been given the voice to tell teachers what is in the best interests of their students. And all without ever seeing what is actually going on inside the classroom.


This entire thread is a travesty simply because it is yet another example of the eroding trust our society has for people in authority. Police are crooked, politicians worse so, and teachers are incompetent....


Teachers are forced to answer to the charges laid on them by students every day and then told that they aren't teaching well ...

Gee, could it be because the students have learned already that their teachers are not authority figures?


Here is my suggestion: Before deciding exactly what a teacher's job should entail spend a couple days working in an average school. You can easily take a day or two off from work and try being a substitute teacher. This, of course, will not introduce you to lesson planning, correcting, and (most of all) dealing with the Individual Education Plans of all the "special needs" students each day, but you will at least have some point of reference....

I have viewed many foriegn education systems, the Russian one the most in depth (I plan on sending my own child to Russia for about 3 months a year to improve her education)- and the problem isn't and never has been the teachers or the system in America- it is 100% the parents and society itself. We consider the school the problem- look at all the posts here blaming teachers, school and curiculum- when it is the parents. We, as a society, treat our schools as babysitters. We, as a society, expect the school system to make our kids behave and learn and learn what they decide is good to learn. Russian teachers are paid far far less, the system costs far far less, but the education is far far better (at the primary to high school level)- because it is the parents responsibility to see that they get a good education.

At no point in those systems do the parents blame the teacher- they either work harder with the child after school, or pay for a tutor, or discipline the child.

No; students' pay should be linked to their test scores. But it is, you say? Well, then, no problem.

What ever happened to "Education is taken, not given?" The quaint expression "I took my education at XYZ College" has gone the way of the Dodo. In our Brave New World, students must apparently just show up, slouch into their public school seats with little more than measured contempt for the process, and highly skilled teachers will painlessly administer the Golden Eduction funnel, inserting 'education' efortlessly into the waiting gullets.

If this process 'fails,' we angst and grunt and point at the teachers wielding the great Golden Funnels, and demand of them, "Why are YOU failing to deliver the education?"

At some point in our recent history, the politics of mindless entitlement has totally screwed up our model for how education actually works. But, that's OK, because replacing education with mere instruction is also a part of some political agendas, and teachers can be held accountable for not administering mere instruction.

Excellent teachers can at best merely offer excellent education, but for the process to actually work, that education must be taken.

In fact, when it works well, it is taken by the throat, as if one's life depended on it, which is a far cry from barely hidden contempt.

Fix THAT--a popular cultural defect--and there is no more 'problem' in education to angst over.

Don't fix that, and it's all noise.

regards,
Frediano

An example of why it is NOT the teacher failing the system is my own family.
Out of 6 of us, I am the only one to go on to college, and one other made good financially by working hard and using her basic intellect. Another did OK by spending 20 years in the Air Force. The other 3 are dirt poor based on lack of ability to learn. They actually started having problems in 3rd grade. Same teachers, same parents. So there is the first major variable to consider that has nothing to do with quality of instruction.
Another variable is outside influences, and surely we know that times have changed and there is a lot more to distract the student and parent from the goal of getting a good education. Parents are busier now trying to survive and have less time for their own children. Times have changed, but human nature has not. Many of us tend to want to do as little as possible to get by, and then want to blame others for our not becoming a "success".
Teachers are still a part of the problem. My wife tells me that she expects her 8th graders to be immature, but not the younger teachers who think that they have learned more in 4 years of college than the older teachers who have the same education and many years of real experience as well.
What you get out of anything is usually a reflection of what you put into it. Nearly all our problems begin with ourselves.
Yes, pay sucks for a teacher, and still some are overpaid for their effort. But we can't fire the poor teachers without putting a huge load on the remaining good teachers. Where will we get good teachers to replace the slugs? Surely, we will have to start paying more until we attract the quality needed before we can fire the "retired-in-place" type.

All of the teachers that I had that I would consider good did not receive any more pay then the next, the ones I liked enjoyed what they were doing and i personally liked them more as a person at the same time. If you start to approach such things as students failing because the teachers don’t care, giving them more money will only make the teachers competitive with each other for that money, not because they honestly care about the students education. I agree that public education like healthcare should get more money then they receive, but I do not think this is the correct approach to handling such an issue. You might find corruption as you would in the stock market as just one example of blowback from such a decision.

on the other hand we could go with the pattern of reducing human activities to just such things as money

Many public schools suffer from such things as having 45+ students in one class with one teacher, students the teacher cannot relate to and vice versa. Again I find it as more of a quick fix to something complex, a story I hear a lot.

I find that a better approach in all reality would to be handing money to students for better performance. It would be much more effective and condition the pupils for real life at the same time, they could even have stock options and collage accounts the money could go towards.

when teacher pay is directly tied to student scores on standardized tests, many problems arise:
a) i believe there was a case in NY where a teacher encouraged her students to cheat so that they would do well and hence the teacher be paid better. what kind of morals are we teaching kids this way?
the main thing is i hate standardized tests. they are stupid and especially when done on a national level can not possibly effectively cover the varied curriculum across the country. hence it is not even an accurate way to measure students' progress and hence tie it to teachers' paychecks.


where is this?

Nice story.

Teaching to test can be perfromed by anyone with a template, it ties teacher pay to the lowest demoninator; a teacher who would teach to test. However, the concern is critically valid. Not only because some students aren't receiving an education, but because the use of draconian, privacy-invading, discipline policies have gained social acceptance. The same 'teacher' with a template now has police resource. It doesn't reward the thinking; we should be frightened that it rewards the obedient.

High states testing doesn't eliminate the children who are struggling. It targets them with a bizarre combination of social engineering that defines racial diverstity and promotes average achievement instead of human potential. Public education becomes a sorting process, 'finding the cherry' and leaving the 'bad apple to rot' in some dumbed down, prison like setting. We have a growing culture of child prisons. An honor society that seeks out, documents and tattles to reduce the administration workload of gathering 'incident reports'. The economic push to respond to childhood discipline problems with fear mongering and exclusion from liability on the part of the school. After placing the complex responsibility of justices in the hands of children, 'whole school' discipline drives a bigger stake in the responsibility of fairness by forcing one person to arrange the classrooms to further identify the most obedient and doll out mass solutions.

A short trip to the National Center for Education Statistics should tell you the consequences of collecting data will reward schools financially for identifying failure. Schools are rewarded for incident reports, special ed numbers, and children are ostracized and excluded from education. The US is number one in growing prison, child prison, alternative education, security devices and documentation. We are targeting the poor, disabled, and minorities, and at the same time failing in engaging all children in science and math. We rely on immigration to produce the good numbers. The risk is tyranny enforce by secuirty devices and aides.

This is a very interesting thread.

My children are grown now, but my husband went into teaching in his early 40's(leaving a job that paid well, with nice bonuses). We lived on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. The school district was small compared to large cities and even some smaller cities. There was good teachers and some "just there teachers".

At the even of the school year, he would have all his classes do a report card on their teachers for that school year.(they wouldn't put their names on them) It was an interesting read after school was out for the year.

While I'm not a teacher(I would be a horrible teacher)I did help out at the school.
I found it distrubing that students who misbehaved and were in ISS(in-school suspension)would be allowed to go outside and shoot baskets)because they had to much energy)while students who were behaving had to sit in the hot and stuffy classrooms. What message does this send to children??????? The message I got was..... hey, act up in class and get rewarded.

I honestly have no problem holding teachers accountable, but everyone leaves out the biggest part of the equation. The student! Children are no longer held responsible for their own grades. It can't be the child's fault, it must be the system. Children are seldom held back any longer(might hurt their self esteem). Why have stardards if we aren't going to hold children to them. To often children who have a talent (especially in sports) don't do that well in academics. Not because they can't, but because they don't see the need to do well. This happens in alot of schools. They have a grade policy for athletes, but don't always hold to the policy. Especially when parents come in demanding that little Johhny be allowed to play.

Well, with maturity does comes some wisdom. When our oldest was in kindergarden they wanted to hold him back. Of course, like most parents we were not going to allow that! Big mistake on our part. True, he could do the work, but he wasn't emotionally at the same age. It is to our regret that our pride for want of a better word, did our son more harm than good. Sometimes one on the outside can see the bigger picture than those who are close.

About testing. Have really mixed thoughts on that one. Arizona came out with the state test required by every student to graduate. Sounds like a great idea. Big problem, the test covered things that most children in our school district hadn't taken in class. If you have never had the subject matter how can one be expected to pass a test on said subject matter. Public education is a 13 year program(K-12).
With this new push on accountablity, it's not fair to teachers or students to expect someone who in year 10 or 11 and hasn't had the same program in their previous years to achieve the same goals. Teachers don't have the time to go back and teach what should have been learned in the lower grades and still get their subject matter taught.(another case of our society that likes to see instant results)


In all my ramblings, what I want to say, short and simple. Students MUST be held accountable the same as teachers and parents. Life doesn't give you a free ride.

My grandfather taught in Phoenix in the 60's, it's a small world. He taught shop and quit the day he saw the shadow of a hammer being raised behind him, he decked the student and quit his job. Interesting that a child's maturing in kindergarten should affect him the rest of his life and leave parents to wonder if they had failed to trust authority well enough. My guess is there have always been children who have failed and in my own ideal world they would never be there. Elementary school, just like college would be a slower transition into an adult social world.

>I found it disturbing that students who misbehaved and were in ISS(in-school suspension)would be allowed to go outside and shoot baskets)because they had to much energy)while students who were behaving had to sit in the hot and stuffy classrooms. What message does this send to children??????? <

That isn't a choice of the parents is it? That's progressive education that is imposed on families and they have little control over it.

Note this article on toddler's. I don't think we should accept that 'Toddler's bite'. I think this could have very negative consequences on some children if they were repeatedly expose to this experience. When I've presented this article to special ed teachers, they think it's ok... the kids will learn through experience. That's progressive education, teacher's don't teach, kids learn from each other. Let the kid's bully each other while the adults act at the nice guy. If the kids don't 'want' to mimic the adults instead of the children the child is a defect.



http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2004/0...ub/10046941.txt

I agree with you on so many points, Lethalletha.

We had our child in Montessori preschool before we moved. Her birthday is the end of November, and we started her in kindergarten when she was not quite 5.
On the one hand, there have been maturity issues, even though she is bright enough to do the work. But really--I am not sure that making her start a year later would have necessarily made that much difference; at least I hope not.

I agree that the student is responsible for his/her performance. We can beg, cajole, remove privileges, make healthy foods available, bug the kid about going to bed on time, provide an atmosphere of little to no distractions after school. But until the child recognizes the need to study and learn in school, it's an exercise in frustration. And no matter how good a teacher may be (and our daughter has excellent teachers), if the child wants to slack off the child is going to do precisely that. The best you can hope for sometimes is for the child to make friends of other children who consider their schoolwork and grades important.

Should we withhold pay from health care workers when a sick patient doesn't get better? Only if it could be demonstrated that the health care worker did something to make the patient worse or otherwise neglected the expected standard of care. Sometimes the patient dies regardless of what the medical person does. Sometimes students fail to do well in the most favorable of conditions.

It is incumbent upon the parents to be in contact with the child's teachers and to provide the best home environment they can. In the absence of any demonstrable evidence that a teacher is doing a poor job, the teacher should not be penalized, especially when it means whether they themselves can put food on their family's table.

"Margin of error in Iowa Tests raises red flags
May 25, 2000
Chicago Sun-Times, Metro section
By Rosalind Rossi
Education Reporter

How certain can a Chicago public school parent be that a 7.7—the score eighth-graders need to graduate next month—is really a 7.7?

Not very, the system’s former top testing official said Wednesday.

The margin of error of any Iowa Tests of Basic Skills score is the size of “a football field,” although system-wide average scores are far more reliable, said John Easton, now deputy director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

An eighth-grader who hits a 7.7 (the seventh month of the seventh grade) is 95 percent as likely to score as high as a 9.5 or as low as 5.9 in an equivalent retest, Easton said. The same student would have a two-out-of-three chance of hitting an 8.6 or a 6.8, he said. An 8.8 is considered grade-level.

Easton’s calculations, based on confidence measures provided by the Iowa publishers, prompted Parents United for Responsible Education to urge Wednesday that eighth-graders whose scores fall within the margin of error be allowed to graduate in June and attend summer school afterward if necessary.

The current policy is “scientifically unsound” and has “devastated” thousands of students, said Julie Woestehoff, executive director of the parents group."

Standardized tests do not accurately measure students, but it is cheap and Corporations make big bucks off the testing.

There is no other way to guarantee the quality of something without a standard. Feel-good fuzzy teacher-set standards are meaningless today, and sure to be manipulated. Admittedly, a test may be designed as a system test (which this Iowa test seems to be) or an individual test. One test with a wide standard of error does not damn all testing. A proper test of an individual student would have a narrower confidence interval.

Perhaps instead of tying teacher pay to grades, perhaps we should charge the parents on a sliding scale by grades for school. F student- they pay full price- B and above pay nothing. I bet the students in our schools will improve performance immediately. Like with almost everything in our society when it comes to our problems- we never point in the right direction. 100% of all scholastic problems in our school reside in the parent.

I also agree with Paladin and Lethalletha on their points.
If a students wants to slack off, s/he will slack off. Case in point, a little earlier this morning, I asked my Computer Applications 2 teacher what her position was. After a moment of thought she told me, "I think it's pretty unfair because they're be students like you; no matter how much I'd yell at you you still wouldn't get any work done."
And I, myself will admit that I'd rather--much rather--be doing something else... like visiting this site, for instance. But to base a teacher's salary on their student's progress is like debasing them to the level of a frycook. I do work as a frycook--I should know. We get salaries based on "how much work we're doing and how much better (brown-nosing) we get at slathering chicken products in fat." All right, so that's not the way my higher-up put it but it's the idea of the situation. I've been working there for over two years and I'm pretty sure my pay hasn't raised from the $5.40 an hour it was when I checked last month.
In this case it's completely understandable to be paid on progress because the chicken products are already dead so they can't talk back. They're much more easily manipulated than a bullheaded teenager such as myself. To that effect it makes perfect sense that because the food products I dunk in fat are controls of a working experiment, and students in a school are quite variable, to judge teachers upon the progress of a student who does not want to learn (I do, I'm just apathetic) is completely unfair. However, if there's a situation of a teacher whom has been working at one school for a long period of time yet the students aren't learning from this teacher, then a drop in pay may be highly considered.
CruisingRam makes a very interesting point and one that could actually be a very powerful tool to get students to learn. If a parent had to pay a hefty tax (a hefty tax in the mind of the ignorant masses is the equivilent of a 2 mil school levy. A mil is 1/10 of a penny... It didn't pass.) for their slacker child, that child would surely have major back problems from being hunched over a table for several hours every night until their grades seriously improved. Kudos, CR.

This topic could also easily lead to that of Bush's No Child Left Behind policy which, I'll speak in brevity for a change, is complete and utter rubbish. Making more standardized testing, expecting every child to be at the same level at the same time is idiotic to say the least. It, for one, tries to put special education students at an impossible level and before a goal that they can't ever reach, and if it were implimented it would seriously impede their ability to have any life whatsoever, let alone letting the graduate. It's an impossible ideal that would set us back to ... well, no, we've never left the society of "classlessness," have we? There are classes. The haves and the have nots, and the No Child Left Behind policy would make the sad fact of this blatantly obvious and would assist in making Bush making himself look like a fool. Now this is not to say Kerry's any better. I just want to give him a sugar cube, really. I hate them both.
But I think a certain quote sums up our situation:
"We're a nation of sheep ruled by wolves run by pigs."
And the wolves are trying to slaughter working class students with standardized testing.

~Pau-Goat~

As a high school teacher, I feel compelled to respond to this link. I do not feel that teacher pay should be based on student performance. Standardized tests are just a "snapshot' of a student's progress in any course on any given day. If a student is having a bad day or is just one of those kids who has "test anxiety", it is not a reflection of my performance as an instructor. I have seen exceptional students in my AP Calculus course bottom out on the ACT because they have put so much pressure on themselves to perform well.

At the high school level, we also battle the problem of exhausted students. Students are working more hours than ever to pay for clothes, cars, insurance, cell phones...They can barely stay awake in class.

The no child left behind act assumes that every student is capable of learning at the same level at the same time. This could not be further from the truth. Some kids have developed abstract thinking skills by Jr High while others do not reach that level until later years. This is the reason why some students can tackle a course like Algebra I in Jr. High and others are not ready until their Junior year. Some students are skilled in English, others in math, and others in the arts. To lump all kids together is ludicrous.

Every child has strenghts and weaknesses. To base a teachers salary on the assumption that all kids are the same is unfair.

This has probably been mentioned, but to corrolate teachers' pay with grades will lead to grade inflation. The incentive will be to give good grades rather than teach.

Manypaths, you say this is an incentive, but I truly hope you are being sarcastic. To call a lie an incentive is just a wasted thought. Who, other than everyone involved, is being cheated? To just give a child a good grade without them deserving it would not help the student in the long run--instead of getting teacher-to-student assistance and knowing something they didn't understand before then that they may indeed confront when reaching their college years--and it wouldn't help a morally respectable teacher. Not to mention the fact that if their higher-ups found out that they were giving good grades and not teaching the students a thing, that in itself could get their paycheck seriously cut; they could even be fired. So to be so dishonest to your students, the government*, and most of all, to yourself, you only prove yourself that much more of a walking, breathing, living lie.

~Pau-Goat~

Note: When I said "you" in my post above, I was not speaking of Manypaths himself, I was speaking of any teacher that would do such an unhonest act as to give good grades for a higher pay. So I apologize if you misread me; I was actually agreeing with you in a less than tactful way. That's all.