thoughts on merit pay for teachers
or this one
which was written as a comment on this thread at Diane Ravitch's blog..
The presumption of Merit pay for teachers is that the impact of the teacher can in some fashion be immediately measured, usually by utilizing scores on the atrocious tests upon which we rely way too much. I would remind people of the statement by Henry Adam in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams,
The presumption of Merit pay for teachers is that the impact of the teacher can in some fashion be immediately measured, usually by utilizing scores on the atrocious tests upon which we rely way too much. I would remind people of the statement by Henry Adam in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams,
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.As a teacher, I think a far better indicator of my effectiveness as a teacher is the number of students who stay in touch with me, perhaps through social media like Facebook (the last time I checked I had something over 400 of my former students, and the number goes up every week), or reaching out to me via email. This week I am having lunch with two young men who are now on to their professional lives – I taught them as 10th graders, and they asked me to get together.Or perhaps since my last decade I taught primarily sophomores, those students who return to me to ask me to write their recommendations for college and scholarship applications, even if they plan on going on in STEM related fields and I taught them government, because they feel I understand them, or they grew so much in my