Clue to the Clueless Editors at the NYT

You cannot run schools on a "merit pay" system because school systems are notoriously political, and principals have complete and total power over teachers. Principals, unlike managers in private industry or in other governmental sectors, are not closely supervised and therefore they run the schools like their own little fiefdoms, doing whatever the hell they want when they want to do it. This is why teachers are terrified for their jobs; they know the extreme power imbalance between themselves and administrators, and their pitiful "unions" do little to rectify the situation. Administrators are held to NO accountability for their actions whatsoever, despite their often obscene salaries and perks.

A "great" teacher (typically somebody with many years in) can be a "terrible" teacher just by a principal loading a teacher with hard-to-reach students or students with behavior problems. Those "test scores" would go south as predicted, and the teacher could be sacked. Teachers, of course, do NOT select the students they teach; the administrators assign students.

Gates and Broad, to say nothing of Bloomberg and Duncan, must be paying the New York Times editors to come up with a bunch of nonsense.

Besides, schools are supposed to be collaborative enterprises consisting of TEAMWORK. They can't be run on competitive models. To force a "merit" system--merit, of course, not defined and doesn't truly exist--on teachers undermines the morale.

Not to mention school districts are too hard up for money to implement such a stupid system as that.

Why is the paper quoting the "New Teacher Project," founded by failed teacher and administrator Michelle Rhee?

Edurama

There are many reasons why "merit pay" would never work in education. The biggest problem is determining what "merit" is, and the person who would determine it is more often than not the least qualified to make that decision.

It also undercuts the collaboration among colleagues necessary for schools to function by turning teaching into a competitive enterprise.

It just doesn't work.
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"Merit" is one thing, qualifications or lack of them is another. The outrageously unqualified WCSD sup Pedro Martinez tries to talk a good game about cooperation and the challenges with minority students. He actually doesn't say much of anything of substance here.

The lack of substance is a perfect reflection on him.

Any Educator Will Tell You

"merit pay" is a bunch of shit, especially considering how absolutely toxic the public school workplace can be. When teachers' livelihoods depend on one individual--a principal--who typically doesn't know his or her ass from a hole in the ground, how in the world could a "merit pay" system possibly be fair?

More evidence running schools on business models is a recipe for disaster.

Thanks to Our Anti-Education President,

some states are taking educational "reform" to extremes, with the most draconian being Florida.

There would no longer be a step system for teachers, just a bullshit system of "merit" based primarily on test scores:

Thrasher himself calls the bill “the hammer,” which he says is necessary to force the Florida teachers union to end its opposition to merit pay for teachers.

His bill includes a demand that end-of course assessments be developed or acquired in all subjects not measured by state assessments or other tests such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate. But it doesn’t provide any money to accomplish the task--even if there was research suggesting these kinds of tests would be useful evaluation measures, which there isn’t.

There’s a lot of other awful components to the bill: Newly hired teachers would be on probation for five years and then work on annual contracts for the rest of their careers, for example.

The reason this is so dangerous is because standardized test scores, as has been said previously on this blog, are in no way a fair representation of how well a teacher has done his or her job--or for that matter how much a student has really learned.

Standardized tests used today in schools are nowhere near sophisticated enough -- if indeed any single test can be -- to serve as an important measure of performance.

Arne and Obama are fully to blame for a disaster like this being proposed.

The Education Wars: Mandates

Georgia is already suffering from a major cheating scandal, and this state's governor wants "merit pay" based in part on test scores?

Talk about a recipe for even more cheating:

Our teachers are being cheated; cheated out of the opportunity to teach, not teach to a test, or teach about a test, but to educate our youth and teach them to think about things that matter.

Principals are also being cheated. Instead of being out and about in the community communicating with parents, at a football game or in the hallway greeting and supporting students, they are, instead, burrowed away in small “war rooms” with reams of test data taped to all four walls, trying to come up with ways to increase standardized test scores so they can find equitable ways to implement a law that is very underfunded. If their schools do not make AYP there is a great chance they may lose their jobs.

Teachers and principals are often vilified in the media and made scapegoats by politicians and pundits who do not want to commit to the costly measures of real education reform: Those who do not want to pay the high cost of things that actually increase student achievement, like smaller class sizes, extracurricular activities, parental involvement programs or teacher aides. Instead we give tests; then place the blame for poor school performance on principals, teachers and students instead of looking at the actual culprit, which is, in part, the yearlong test prep our students are receiving in lieu of an education.

And now, with the punitive “pay for performance” suggestion by Gov. Sonny Perdue, the amount of pay a teacher receives could be influenced by these same standardized test scores. This in itself could be cause for even more widespread cheating! The very thought is ludicrous.

The Education Wars: "Merit" Pay

Of course it will absolutely kill teaching, which is already on the ropes with deliberate deskilling of the occupation, but that's the point.

Teachers will be nothing more than "technicians" making little over the minimum wage, as long as people stupidly go to college and take on huge debt to embark on "careers" lasting no more than two or three years.

The Education Wars III

The Texas "merit pay" program for teachers didn't work like it was intended:

For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.

But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.

The Texas Educator Excellence Grant, or TEEG, plan did not produce the academic improvements that proponents – including Gov. Rick Perry – hoped for when the program was launched with much fanfare in 2006, a new report from the National Center on Performance Incentives said.

"There is no systematic evidence that TEEG had an impact on student achievement gains," said researchers for Texas A&M University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri.

But never mind the facts; Governor Perry still supports this idiotic concept.

The Education Wars IV

Tying standardized test scores to teacher "evaluations" and pay is a bunch of ignorant tripe. As the piece notes, many teachers teach subjects not subject to standardized testing such as music, art, physical education, and special education.

More important, though, is the fact few students take the standardized tests that seriously. They tend to rush through the tests, checking off or bubbling in any old answer.

As long as students don't take the tests seriously, and they never will, the rest of the country shouldn't, either.

The Education Wars

Merit Pay = Pay Per Score

How in the hell can one even TRUST administrators, many of whom were failures as teachers, not to mention many of them lacking any sense of ethics, to be able to evaluate teachers fairly, and then tie teachers' salaries to some concept called "merit"?

"Merit pay" and other "reforms" will fail as long as "refomers" fail or refuse to see the truth of public schools being political institutions rife with all of the corruption and ineptness of other governmental entities.

Obama Promises to Be a Disaster

on education as long as he supports the Business Roundtable's agenda of "merit pay" and other such nonsense. And his support of this nonsense has filtered down to state legislators, some of whom want to force a business model on something that isn't a business to begin with.

Dan Grimm, a former state lawmaker who headed a task force that recommended merit pay to the Legislature, said that, if nothing else, we should pay principals and superintendents bonuses for hiring and firing the right teachers.

"Right now, they have no financial incentive to be diligent in the management of their staffs," he said. "There are tremendous disincentives for taking action against a poor-performing teacher. This is to change that dynamic.

"I think we know that if we reward good behavior, we'll get more of it."

Yeah, I can just see this. The school district from which I was "dismissed" is full of asskissers and principals and other administrators who violate federal and civil rights law. They'll throw out the "troublemakers" like me who refused to cheat on testing students but keep the wrongdoer principals indefinitely because they "get results."

This is last bunch of shit public education needs. School districts already suffer from nepotism and favoritism, and "merit pay" would make it much, much worse.

Obama

continues to display his utter ignorance of education issues when he talks about "merit pay" and other such horseshit peddled by the likes of Arne Duncan in a speech today.

The neoliberals and libertarians, to say nothing of Republicans, want to ditch the idea of "tenure" altogether, thus displaying their complete ignorance because "tenure" is NOT lifetime job security or even job security AT ALL. They also want to get rid of the system of step and longevity pay, although that is a hallmark of civil service employment and at least in theory prevents nepotism and favoritism. And let me tell you, both are rampant in public education anyway.

Hell, I was "tenured" or had "post-probationary" status and was still unjustly sacked from WCSD. I had more rights in the private sector than I did as a public school teacher.

Campaign Notes.

Obama's bowling is even worse than mine.

He needs to use the bumpers.
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This is one of the main reasons why I refuse to support Obama, even if he gets the nomination.

"Merit pay" for teachers doesn't work because schools are not businesses.
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So who really bought to so-called "Rezko lot"?
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Take a Look

at the scheme put forth by those who want "performance pay" for those lazy public school teachers, think tank types who wouldn't know "competence" or "merit" if it bit them on the collective ass.

As Ohanian notes, this outfit helps write Obama's speeches on education.

Clue phone to the clueless: Schools aren't businesses and can't be run on business models.

I am deleting that site from my links blog.