"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle
On February 17, 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law (US Dept of Education). According to the Executive Summary of the US Department of Education’s website the purpose of this act was to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and provide funding for education. To encourage education reform at the state level, the competitive grant program, “Race to the Top,” was implemented. This allowed states to apply for grants, provided that certain education reform was taking place within states’ schools. One particular condition under this campaign has led to much debate within our education system, implementing a pay system based on a teacher’s academic performance and the methods used to determine this (US Dept of Education).
There are many ways to compile data on a teacher and determine that person’s performance. Teacher performance can be based upon classroom observation, a teacher’s continuing development and education, and students’ standardized testing scores. The controversy centers around using student test scores to determine the performance of a teacher and thus her pay. Scott Andes, a research analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation voices the merits of performance based pay with his article “Getting Serious with Education: Why Can We Measure Students but Not Teachers?” High School English teachers, Jordan Kohanim and Ashley Ulrich vehemently state why there is no merit with performance based pay with their article, “No Merit to Merit Pay Arguments.” In each article both sides debate how performance based or merit pay will affect students, teachers, schools, and com...
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...ides to come together and implement a plan for better practices in assessing the performance of the nation’s teachers and its students.
Works Cited
"Race to the Top Executive Summary." US Department of Education Website. 20 Semptember 2010. Web . 2009. 16 November 2010
Andes, Scott. “Getting Serious About Education: Why Can We Measure Students But Not Teachers?" Progressive Fix Website. 28 July 2010. .16 November 2010
Aristotle. QuoteWorld.org. 2010. Web. .
16 November 2010
Kohanim, Jordan and Ashley Ulrich. "Teachers: No Merit to Merit Pay Arguments." Atlanta Journal-Constitution Website. 28 February 2010. Web. .16 November 2010
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.
Popham, W. James. "Why standardized tests don't measure educational quality." Educational Leadership 56 (1999): 8-16.
“Real Lesson of the Chicago Teachers Strike—Fire Them All and Start Over!”, an opinion piece written by Wayne Allyn Root, on Foxnews.com, argues that we need to quit supporting the use of government tax money to fund inefficient teachers and instead should hire replacements at one-third of the cost, but implement a pay based on performance policy. Root claims that Chicago teachers are among the highest paid, yet have the worst performance rates. By increasing their pay during this “Great Depression,” we are increasing the billion dollar debt in chicago’s education system. In order to uncover Root’s underlying purpose, the following articles will be used in contrast which also serve to further complicate Root’s argument. Horace Mann’s Report
This program is generally focused to gather statistics on grade school inequalities that effect the entirety of the state. Researchers have suggested that school funding levels and student success rates are largely unrelated. The ability of schools to educate their children is affected solely by the teacher’s ability to teach. Yet for a number of years there has been a steady debate centered around the essentially counter-intuitive idea that the relationship between school resource levels and student performance is the only connection to California’s academic gap/ 1971, the California Supreme Court ruled this system of granted unequal funds to millions of children unconstitutional, promising California’s the state would standardize finances across all school districts. To do this California created Proposition 13 in 1978. This proposition reduced the local property tax revenues available to schools, and the state had to provide even more financial support to maintain similar funding levels across districts. Though it leveled the playing field for the middle class, this tactic created no growth in academic equality. In order to ensure a balance in opportunity to academically excel, California needs to scrutinize the funding system, to utilize all financial resources in ways that
Teachers have become gateway keepers to providing education to students. Over the span several years, teachers have been criticized with being unprepared, unable to adapt to different learning styles, and are increasing the number of students who aren’t learning. With this achievement gap increasing, it brings up the idea of what is the education system doing wrong and what improvements does it need tending to. The education system needs to be redesigned to strengthen its curriculum, it’s connection to both practice and theory, and the idea of a powerful educator. The first aspect of this memo contains an interview with Diana Regalado De Santiago, a math teacher in the Socorro Independent School District for the past six years. The second part of this memo contains a rhetorical analysis on a journal article written by Linda Darling-Hammond.
Taylor Mali, an American slam poet and teacher, wrote a poem titled, “What Teachers Make”. In this poem, he rhythmically tells about other professions criticizing teachers based on their choice of occupation. While teachers will never earn six figure incomes, they make a difference. Teachers dedicate their lives to leading, inspiring, and educating future generations, all while earning meager pay. Though teachers form foundation of education, their pay does not accurately represent their skills. Using merit pay systems will properly assess how much a teacher should be paid, based on their teaching ability.
Gratz indicates that the report “could not provide links of teachers to students… so it is not possible to identify the most successful teachers or to identify the impact the teachers had on student performance” (Gratz, p. 3). The differences in scores between DATE schools from one year to another was less than 10%, making a minimal impact on student achievement.(3). In addition, the influence it had on math scores was one scale point above from the previous year and did not change for reading scores (3). Lastly, Gratz points out that the intentions of the Vanderbilt conclusions were to “inform policymakers”, with that in mind, it was “dictated by the need to produce information for Texas’ next funding cycle” (4). Gratz believes that although, educator surveys reflected positively, TAKS scores increased, teacher turnover was lower by 1-2%, and the findings were favorable to the DATE program. However, the findings were descriptive rather than analytic and Gratz considers that the report “may not meet its larger objective of informing policymakers” (4). As his report highlights, it had significant gaps and covers a time span for inadequate bases for “such a major policy decision” and only highlights results after one year, it fails to understand the complete success of the program with only one year of results
With the low expectations of teachers, students are limited in their ability to learn. As discussed before, it is difficult to predict how well a teacher will do at their job before they begin working. This creates doubt when hiring anyone, and employers may not know if who they are hiring is the right choice. If teachers are judged by not only the basic requirements met, but also their interpersonal skills and how well they are able to teach in a positive manner, there will hopefully be less mediocre teachers hired. In the same way, both an advanced teacher and an average teacher are paid the same wages, which creates a flaw in education. Even more, there should not be average teachers in the workforce if all teachers are paid the same. Though this harms the advanced teachers, who deserve more than they earn, it also harms the students, as they are taught at a lower level by the inadequate teachers. Gladwell mentions these flaws in his article, but he also explains the traits good teachers should have, which brings a strive forward in this issue. Because of this, it is clear America must be more selective and strict when hiring
Besharov, Douglas. "Teachers Performance: A Review ." Journal of Policy Analyis and Management (2006): 1-41.
Kobakhidze, Magda N. "Teacher Incentives and the Future of Merit-Based Pay in Georgia." Editorial. European Education 2010: 68-89. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Feb. 2012.
There is no more critical role in our current society than that of a teacher’s. Teachers help shape the minds of the future. Tomorrow 's engineers, scientists, politicians, and educators are all greatly influenced by today 's Instructors. Without teachers society would not be anywhere near where it is now, and only a select few would have access to learning. Sadly however important teachers are in human civilization, they are still drastically understated, unrecognized and under paid. 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 teach in order to keep their student’s
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).
Everyone knows that when it comes to making a difference in a child’s academic and life achievements, their teachers play a large role. A teacher’s ability to relate to their students, and teach them to achieve both socially and academically contributes to how effective they are. What does it mean to be an effective teacher? Overall there seems to be an emphasis on teacher effectiveness related to how well their students are performing on standardized testing. As teachers we know there is more to being an effective teacher then just teaching our students based on tests. This paper will identify different definitions of an effective teacher along with how to assess teachers on being effective.
Strauss, Valerie. "Why teachers’ salaries should be doubled now." The Washington Post. N.p., 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 5 Apr. 2014. .