An Attack On Teachers
I recently read an article Shortchanging Teachers in the blog eduwonk, which was a synopsis of Shortchanged, a report from TNTP (formerly known as The New Teacher Project), which criticized the current practice of teacher salary schedules and their reliance on years taught and degrees earned. Of course the recommended solution is a change to a system which rewards actual teacher performance. Sounds rational, and yet…
Back in the 1980s there was a push to eliminate salary schedules and move toward rewarding teachers with “merit pay.” As with the current recommendation to reward teacher performance the problem remains - how do you measure teacher performance in an unbiased way. Is a high-performing teacher one that students like? Is it the teacher who teaches the AP course and his/her students perform better than the national average? What about the next year when the students don’t score quite so high? Is it the teacher’s fault or just the mix of students in each class? What about using value-added measures to evaluate teachers? Oops, that really doesn’t work to well either.
Another item mentioned in the article which rubbed me the wrong way was the criticism of compensation for advanced degrees - what? It seems we all want our sons and daughters to attend colleges where they will be exposed to the musings of scholars who possess advanced degrees. Wouldn’t it make sense that parents would want the same for their K-12 sons and daughters. I felt my subject-area knowledge and teaching ability increased as I took my An Attack On Teachers:
