Comments on Into My Own: Dan Brown on Merit Pay

Be freindly but not friends... that's a great answ...

2007-12-26T17:45:00.000-05:00

Be freindly but not friends... that's a great answer! I like it.

Watch my upcoming posts, Paul. I have an idea I think you'll like about keeping administrators accountable.

Dave: Thanks for the kind words, and understand th...

2007-12-26T17:23:00.000-05:00

Dave: Thanks for the kind words, and understand that I keep coming here because I enjoy what you write and the opportunity to learn.

To be accurate, I'm not an advocate of merit pay per se. I'm looking for a way to reward good teachers and eliminate bad teachers. Using money as the reward is expensive and useless if teachers aren't motivated by money (except apparently at contract negotiation times).

And it is at least as important to figure out how to select and retain effective administrators who have the guts to fire bad teachers.

But then that requires Boards of Education who have the political will to hold the administrators accountable. I think that one of the reasons I didn't get the endorsement of the teachers' union is that they asked what I would do to maintain friendly relations with the union. My answer was that it is important to be friendly, but not friends. The Board is, after all, the party that sits on the other side of the table during contract negotiations, and is the body the community elects to select the district leadership and hold it accountable. Back to my point in the prior comment about Navy captains.

This begs the question of how the Board is supposed to know - objectively - who the bad teachers are, so the Board can tell if the administrators are dealing with the situation.

The answer doesn't have to be merit pay. But the public is demanding something better than we have now. All of us remember having a bad teacher when we were students, and suspect that there bad ones in our school systems today. Now, as the adults who are forking over ever increasing tax dollars to fund the schools, we want to be sure we're aren't giving such teachers a free ride to a sweet retirement deal.

So if merit pay, and the implied evaluation system used to determine merit, isn't the answer, what is?

PL

Paul, I guess I'm advocating the status quo as far...

2007-12-26T12:38:00.000-05:00

Paul, I guess I'm advocating the status quo as far as teacher pay is concerned. Merit pay leaves you with two choices: one is to pay teachers based on test scores, which I think is a horrible idea because of how cut scores are gamed at the state level and for a variety of other reasons I've written about here. The other option is to based merit raises/bonuses on administrator evaluations... the same evaluations system that you find fault with currently.

I think administrators need to be held accountable for evaluating their staff. I will be posting soon a list of ideas for improving education in Ohio without spending any (or much) money. One of my ideas will deal with this issue of evaluations. Stay tuned.

(For those not familiar with the site, Paul and I have a running debate on this issue. But it's a debate formed out of mutual respect. I think Paul is a great guy, but wrong on the issue of merit pay! We agree though on lots of other things though.)

Dave,Enjoyed reading your blog since I found it! T...

2007-12-26T11:13:00.000-05:00

Dave,

Enjoyed reading your blog since I found it! The merit pay issue on the campaign trail reminds me of other education "quick fix" ideas being thrown around -- from pre-kindergarten to school choice. These ideas are simple and relatively easy to explain to voters in 30-second sound bites -- while the real debate that needs to go on, as you wrote about in the HuffPo is much broader than this. This is certainly a fascinating campaign to watch, from an education reporter's perspective...

Dave: As I've said before, I think the real issue...

2007-12-26T10:58:00.000-05:00

Dave: As I've said before, I think the real issue is that the taxpaying public wants to find a way to help the best teachers decide to stay in their profession, and maybe take on the toughest kids, while weeding the bad teachers out of the system.

While merit pay might not be the best mechanism to do this, neither is the step increase mechanism now in place. 'Good' and 'experienced' are not the same thing. While an 'experienced-good' teacher is better than an 'new-good' teacher, I'd argue that an 'experienced-bad' teacher is the worst of all. They do a disservice to the kids, and consume precious funding that might pay for two 'new-good' teachers.

And as I've said before, I have no confidence that administrators are motivated to deal with bad teachers, especially since administrators are themselves former teachers and often friends with the very teachers who should be fired.

The Navy has a policy that when an officer is promoted, he/she is also reassigned to a new duty station. It is never the case that a ship's captain is promoted from the ranks. The theory is that a leader is more effective when there are no personal ties to the other officers and crewmembers.

I wonder if this is good policy for schools as well: A teacher cannot become principal in the same school in which he/she served as a member of the faculty.

But again, this merit pay thing comes from a public which is increasing alarmed by what they perceive as a retire-on-the-job mentality of some teachers at a time when our property taxes are exploding, the economy is looking pretty soft, and our own jobs seem to be in jeopardy.

If merit pay isn't the way to answer this concern, what is your suggestion?