re: #343 Obdicut

There’s a lot of problems with merit-based pay for teachers. Coming up with a fair metric is an incredible challenge.

Should a teacher be judged on the success of their students? If so, that skews things so that teachers will want to have only good students in their class, and the problem students will be marginalized, expelled, and given to the teachers with the least seniority and pull.

Should a teacher be judged on the comparative success of their students, based on when they entered the class? In that case, teachers have no incentive to teach a student who’s already achieving well. In addition, a lot of kids will improve their overall study habits and performance at school thanks to just one teacher who takes the time with them, but all the teachers who had that kid would benefit from it.

It’s a very, very tricky problem, and I know of no good merit-based systems.

The unions, the school boards and the parents have brought it on themselves. There is no good way to measure merit, because we don’t judge students by accomplishment to start with, we measure there worth by the fact that they simply show up to school.

I just went through my first year with a high school senior step critter. The last time I had to pay attention to what was going on in the schools was around 1985.

I was amazed at the total lack of achievement… achievement that was tied to actual accomplishment. You want to be in the school play, show up, you’ll get some part, even if you show no obvious talent (one example).

At the awards ceremony a few weeks ago… everybody and his brother was getting some sort of award, “scholarships” (they were payoffs, investments by the collages as far as I was concerned) were given out like candy.

I don’t have the desire right now to go into a detailed essay on the topic, but you know what I am talking about.

Bottom line, when you have a educational culture that can’t even hold students to competitive achievement, how can you expect to be able to measure any metrics if there are none to measure.