President Obama’s recommendations for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and his education plan include provisions to award merit pay to teachers in an attempt to obtain and retain effective teachers as measured by student academic achievement. These proposals are supported by budgeted funding for the 2011 fiscal year with additional funding included in the optional, competitive 1.35 billion Race to the Top Fund.
A number of different merit pay systems exist. Some reward entire schools or districts when passing rates on standardized tests are achieved, while others reward individual teachers for passing rates. Some rely on peer or administrator evaluations and staff development as additional measures of student achievement. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus upon those which reward individual teachers as this seems to be the direction in which current policy is heading.
The Problem
In order for a potential policy to be viable, it must address a perceived problem (Fowler, 2009). The need to retain effective teachers is evidenced by:
• Most countries report difficulties in retaining teachers (Ingvarson, Kleinhenz & Wilkinson, 2007).
• Only 2 states require teacher effectiveness to be considered when awarding tenure; all others award tenure more-or-less automatically (National Council on Teacher Quality, 2008).
• In a study of five school districts with nearly 75,000 tenured teachers, it was found that the likelihood of a teacher being terminated for poor performance was 1 in 18,500 (The New Teacher Project, 2009).
• During the first three years of teaching, when working toward tenure, a teacher’s impact
on student achievement is rarely evaluated well (National Coun...
... middle of paper ...
...uments/20070313111150-45256.pdf
Scriven, M. (1994). Duties of the teacher. Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 8(2), 151-184.
Shulman, L. S. (1988). A union of insufficiencies: Strategies for teacher assessment in a period of educational reform. Educational Leadership, November, 36-41.
Solmon, L. C, White, J. T., Cohen, D. & Woo, D. (2007). The Effectiveness of the Teacher Advancement Program. Report: National Institute for Excellence in Teaching
Springer, M., Podgursky, M. & Lewis, J (2009). Governor’s Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG)
Program: Year three evaluation report. Austin, TX: Texas Education Agency.
Stronge, J.H. (Ed.) (1997). Evaluating teaching: A guide to current thinking and best practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Urbanski, A. & Erskine, R. (2000). School reform, TURN, and teacher compensation. Phi Delta Kappan, 81(5), 367-370.
The oversite committee then evaluates the success of their money allocation and incentivize the success of the public school’s education. “Americans do not appear ready to pay the price.” (Barber, p. 215) Money is the most powerful motivator, and if the success of school districts reaps the benefits of more financial resource, educators will fight to be the best. This new desire to be the best, is possible with the equalization of opportunity from the allocation of funds to the poorer schools. The race to the top would already be won by the larger, richer, and more powerful school districts without those foundational funds. “Because we believe in profits, we are consummate salespersons and efficacious entrepreneurs.” (217) Barber’s essay supports the idea of incentivized results. Not only would districts compete with other schools, but their standards would be raised year after year in consequence to the oversite of the
In 2010, Charlotte Danielson wrote an article, “Evaluations That Help Teachers”, for the magazine The Effective Educator. The purpose of this article was to explain how a teacher evaluation system, such as her own Framework for Teaching, should and can actually foster teacher learning rather than just measure teacher competence, which is what most other teacher evaluation systems do. This topic is especially critical to decision-making school leaders. Many of the popular teacher evaluation systems fail to help schools link teacher performance with meaningful opportunities for the teachers to reflect on and learn from in order to grow professionally. With the increased attention on the need for more rigorous student standards, this then is an enormous opportunity missed. Students can only achieve such rigorous expectations if their teachers can effectively teach them, and research has shown that teachers who are evaluated by systems that hold them to accountability and provide them for continuous support and growth will actually teach more effectively.
He also argues that without tenure it would to be easier to fire the 10 percent of teachers that are poor performers. I personally agree with Matthew Miller’s proposal.
Figlio, David N. "Teacher Salaries and Teacher Quality." Economic Letters 55.2 (1997): 267-71. Sciencedirect.com. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
Birman, Beatrice F., et al. "State And Local Implementation Of The "No Child Left Behind Act." Volume VIII--Teacher Quality Under "NCLB": Final Report." US Department Of Education (2009): ERIC. Web. 31 Mar. 2014.
Kowal, Julie, Joe Ableidinger, and Bryan C. Hassel. "Tenure Reform Options in K–12." By Emily Hassel. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Teacher Tenure Reform. Public Impact. Web. 11 Dec. 2013. .
Teacher tenure is a highly debatable topic- Should it be kept or banned forever in all schools? However, there is clearly only one explanation to this problem: We simply cannot continue with teacher tenure. It has passed it’s expiration date
Marshall, K. (2005). It's Time to Rethink Teacher Supervision and Evaluation. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(10), 727-735.
Besharov, Douglas. "Teachers Performance: A Review ." Journal of Policy Analyis and Management (2006): 1-41.
In order to understand how teacher evaluations can be positive, we need to look at their purpose and how districts do teachers evaluations. According to different articles written by Education Leadership, reformers many times neglect teacher evaluations as a tool to improve student learning, this is because most schools lack credible systems of measuring the quality of
Although some people may argue that performance pay is good, performance/merit pay is bad because it will result in teachers doing much less personalizing of the curriculum, and spending that time doing only what things need to be taught in order to keep their student’s test scores up (so they will get paid more). One of the major cons of performance pay is that teachers would have less time personalising the curriculum, teaching the students what they need to be taught, and teaching other important but non-standardized subjects; then using that time teaching only the things they are required to teach to keep student test scores up so they will get paid more(What Do We Know about Teacher Pay-for-Performance?). This in turn will cause the students to have a harder time learning because instead of the teachers teaching what the students need to be taught and more time teaching what the people who don’t know what the students know think the students should be taught.
The state’s new evaluation system was in response to administrators who produced, “superficial and capricious teacher evaluation systems that often don't even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students' learning” (Toch, 2008). Too often, the “good-ol-boy” attitude would insure mediocre educators would remain employed. Realizing this was often more the rule then the exception, the governor created educational mandates to focus, “on supporting and training effective teachers to drive student achievement” (Marzano Center, 2013). Initially, they expected the school districts and the teachers would have issues and experience growing pains, but in the end the goal was, “to improve teacher performance, year by year, with a corresponding rise in student achievement” (Marzano Center, 2013).
Washington, DC: National Center for Teacher Quality. Hinchey, P. H., & University of Colorado at Boulder, N. (2010). Getting teacher assessment right: What policymakers can learn from research. National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.com.
Duke, Daniel L., ed. Incentive Pay and Career Ladders For Today's Teachers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 42-241. Grand Rapids Community College Database . Web. 6 Apr. 2014. .
In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments. To ensure that their assessments are sound they need include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a sound assessme...