Obama wants to give pay raises for performing teachers

[Genx87]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politi...0310/pl_politico/19824

Now this is something I can get behind. I wonder how the labor entrenched democrat party will approach this?

 

[GTKeeper]

I agree. I have friends who are teachers and basically the only way you get more money is tenure and degree type (masters, PHD etc)

 

[Brainonska511]

There is no reason teachers shouldn't be payed based on how well they teach - just like every other profession, where you're payed by what is essentially the quality of your work.

 

[frostedflakes]

Sounds good to me. Between this, ending farm subsidies, etc., though, he's probably not winning a lot of brownie points with the people who voted for him.

 

[ScottyB]

This is great as long as there is a peer review process and no political (within the school) or retaliatory firings.

 

[chucky2]

I'm not saying there aren't teachers out there that need to be axed (Lord knows I've had enough of them), but, how and who are going to determine it's a teacher vs. environment (bad school), or, bad kids/parents, making the teacher look bad?

Are we going to first have school Administrations that actually stand behind the teacher and don't sellout to angry f*cktard parents who think their kids are gods gift to the earth, or are we going to expect the teachers to just somehow do the impossible?

IMHO, you deal with the parent problems first, you make a way bigger impact that "bad teachers"....

Chuck

 

[OrByte]

It is not enough to say that only good teachers can be retained and let the "bad" teachers go.

All teachers are now teaching to the testing standards....which to me is teaching to the lowest common denominator.

Was it NCLB that created these testing standards? We need to roll that back too...

Otherwise, a "bad" teacher can still arguably be employed simply because he or she is teaching to the "standard" of education that other "good" teachers are doing too.

 

[yowolabi]

As long as teachers are judged against their peers, I have no problem with that. That is, judged against teachers that are in the same environment. It's a lot easier to do your job in a rich suburb as opposed to an inner-city school.

 

[JeepinEd]

The teacher's union will never allow it.

On a side note:
This past weekend, I spoke to a friend of mine who is a 3rd grade teacher.
She is currently waiting to find out whether or not she is going to get a pink slip this week.

In her school, there is a teacher who is so bad, that the principal tried to fire him. The union stepped in and said he has tenure, you can't fire him. The principal ended up having to put this teacher to work watching kids in detention. The really sad thing is that if the school does have to let a teacher go, it will be my friend. Even though she recently won a teacher of the year award for the district, the looser teacher watching kids in detention has tenure over her.

They would have to keep a teacher, who the principal feels is unfit to teach and fire the teacher who is one of the best in the entire district.

The power these unions have is down right scary.

 

[yowolabi]

Originally posted by: JeepinEd
The teacher's union will never allow it.

On a side note:
This past weekend, I spoke to a friend of mine who is a 3rd grade teacher.
She is currently waiting to find out whether or not she is going to get a pink slip this week.

In her school, there is a teacher who is so bad, that the principal tried to fire him. The union stepped in and said he has tenure, you can't fire him. The principal ended up having to put this teacher to work watching kids in detention. The really sad thing is that if the school does have to let a teacher go, it will be my friend. Even though she recently won a teacher of the year award for the district, the looser teacher watching kids in detention has tenure over her.

They would have to keep a teacher, who the principal feels is unfit to teach and fire the teacher who is one of the best in the entire district.

The power these unions have is down right scary.

How do you think the teacher's union will stop it? This is actually the only way that changes can be implemented against the will of the teacher's union. If funding is linked to the changes, then changes will be made.

For instance, do you think that teachers wanted No Child Left Behind, and to have to teach to the tests? It happened anyway, didn't it?

 

[fleshconsumed]

Originally posted by: chucky2
I'm not saying there aren't teachers out there that need to be axed (Lord knows I've had enough of them), but, how and who are going to determine it's a teacher vs. environment (bad school), or, bad kids/parents, making the teacher look bad?

Are we going to first have school Administrations that actually stand behind the teacher and don't sellout to angry f*cktard parents who think their kids are gods gift to the earth, or are we going to expect the teachers to just somehow do the impossible?

IMHO, you deal with the parent problems first, you make a way bigger impact that "bad teachers"....

Chuck

Yes, it's a good idea in general, however there are too many ifs and buts. I'm reminded of a story told where a teacher was teaching special small volume class and was getting reprimanded because she had one borderline retarded student who was skewing up performance statistics.

I don't see a realistic way to assess teacher's performance. Tests results from inner city schools will invariably be worse than the one in suburbs, does that mean that teacher should be sacked? Maybe yes, maybe not. The teacher might be bad, or he might be doing a good job considering the circumstances, but you can't do much if your students aren't willing to learn.

You could do it based on the student feedback, but then again, these are high schools where students typically dislike teachers in general, so any feedback cannot be trusted. A tougher teacher may receive lower marks simply because he makes students work. You need some sort of maturity in students if you want to rely on their feedback, and that's not happening while they are still in high school.

As much as I would like to see this work, I don't think it will. Pity, as I've known a few college professors who should have been sacked long time ago. Funnily enough, in general, I think my high school teachers were better than the ones I had in college.

 

[Modelworks]

To me teaching is something you either have a knack for or you don't. It isn't something that you read a book and now you are a teacher. How we judge who is good/bad is really a hard question to answer. One place to start would be to just ask the students, they often know who is good and who isn't better than anyone on the outside.

I had a teacher during high school that would just walk in the door, write what page numbers he wanted us to study on the board, and then walk over to his desk , put his feet up and lean back in his chair the entire class. He was the schools football coach so to them was untouchable.

 

[xochi]

The Feds can do little to influence teachers, especially firing, when most are local district employees. They could push a teacher incentive package to the States, but many states already have incentives in place.

Texas has a teacher incentive initiative but it was unpopular. Many school districts opted out due to it being a administrative burden.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: JeepinEd
The teacher's union will never allow it.

On a side note:
This past weekend, I spoke to a friend of mine who is a 3rd grade teacher.
She is currently waiting to find out whether or not she is going to get a pink slip this week.

In her school, there is a teacher who is so bad, that the principal tried to fire him. The union stepped in and said he has tenure, you can't fire him. The principal ended up having to put this teacher to work watching kids in detention. The really sad thing is that if the school does have to let a teacher go, it will be my friend. Even though she recently won a teacher of the year award for the district, the looser teacher watching kids in detention has tenure over her.

They would have to keep a teacher, who the principal feels is unfit to teach and fire the teacher who is one of the best in the entire district.

The power these unions have is down right scary.

Why is she in this union that discards her in favor of some douchebag that has just been around a long time?

I think this is a good move by Obama. It'd be nice if some of the horrible teachers could be fired more easily, but the carrot should certainly be part of the equation and may force some of the poor teachers to step up their game.

I have to acknowledge that its probably kind of hard to measure this though...and who is going to make the call? The testing standards issue was mentioned already.

 

[winnar111]

There's nothing wrong at all with 'teaching the test' as some morons put it. Better to evaluate which districts are saddled with failure, then cut and run with our funds.

 

[nageov3t]

how do we determine performance?

I went to school in the suburbs... my parents and most of the parents of my classmates were super focused on education, punished us for bad grades, made sure we did our homework, etc and thanks to property taxes, our schools were pretty well funded. I'd imagine that test scores were significantly better than at an inner-city school where a lot of parents don't give a crap about what their kids are doing and text books are 50 years old.

does that mean that my teachers were inherently better than the inner-city school teachers?

 

[halik]

I'm sure the union will have something to say about that...

 

[spidey07]

Agree that the teachers union will never allow it. Here in KY they let a few teachers go for things like not showing up for a month, showing up drunk everyday, etc.

The union is outraged and is suing to get them reinstated.

-edit-
It's a good idea, give it a shot. I just don't see those goals as attainable given the teacher's unions.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: winnar111
There's nothing wrong at all with 'teaching the test' as some morons put it. Better to evaluate which districts are saddled with failure, then cut and run with our funds.

Well... there are good and bad things when teaching the test.

It's easy to standardize and easy to point out laggers. It also does build basic skill sets, like spelling, mathematics and reading.

On the other hand, it severely curtails critical thinking and independent thought. When these kids get to college, it's a totally different environment. You usually aren't being force-fed facts, instead you are given situations and you have to think critically about what's involved. So while good test scores might get them into a top tier school, they might not have the skill sets necessary to succeed in college.

The public school system should do both, foster development of basic skill sets and also provide the tools necessary to think critically about situations and identify the key points that are being addressed.

Plus, we really need public schools to be in session for the entire year. We are no longer an agarian society where kids need to go home and help with the harvest. Personally, I would not mind seeing schools move to a semester based session that gives 2-3 weeks off in between each semester. That way, kids are in school year round and are being continually exposed to new material. So it'll be something like 15 weeks on, 2 weeks off, 15 weeks on, 2 weeks off, 15 on, 3 weeks off (to round it off to 52). That's what other countries, that far exceed what the US in mathematics and science, are doing in their public systems.

 

[fskimospy]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Agree that the teachers union will never allow it. Here in KY they let a few teachers go for things like not showing up for a month, showing up drunk everyday, etc.

The union is outraged and is suing to get them reinstated.

-edit-
It's a good idea, give it a shot. I just don't see those goals as attainable given the teacher's unions.

Please provide links to support your stories. I'm betting they are either outright made up, or you have 'forgotten' to mention some important details.

 

[MotF Bane]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Agree that the teachers union will never allow it. Here in KY they let a few teachers go for things like not showing up for a month, showing up drunk everyday, etc.

The union is outraged and is suing to get them reinstated.

-edit-
It's a good idea, give it a shot. I just don't see those goals as attainable given the teacher's unions.

Stories like that are what give unions a bad name.

 

[LumbergTech]

Originally posted by: eskimospy

Originally posted by: spidey07
Agree that the teachers union will never allow it. Here in KY they let a few teachers go for things like not showing up for a month, showing up drunk everyday, etc.

The union is outraged and is suing to get them reinstated.

-edit-
It's a good idea, give it a shot. I just don't see those goals as attainable given the teacher's unions.

Please provide links to support your stories. I'm betting they are either outright made up, or you have 'forgotten' to mention some important details.

I don't doubt that many of these type of stories are made up. I do recall quite clearly a few teachers who were completely worthless and actually hated the kids anyway though. There are plenty of teachers not doing their job. There are also a decent amount doing a very good job. I think that a culling is in order.

 

[mugs]

Been done before at lower levels, and was abandoned. It seems that when you tie teacher pay to the performance of their students, teachers cheat.

 

[StageLeft]

A meritocracy for teachers? No! Think of the children! They will suffer in this, surely! Think of the kids, how dare you blah blah demotivate teachers, blah, vomit, blah.

I think it's a great idea. Fvck those sh*ty teachers. I know I had many (it shows, doesn't it?).

Of course, we know this won't do enough or go far enough. Teachers unions are like a link in a chain and so integral now I don't see them being given the sound beating they deserve.

 

[LumbergTech]

even at universities people with higher degrees manage to stay around...

They may be the smartest person in the school, but they can't teach. Math is a perfect example. My math teacher for pre-calc was a really smart guy, but he was terrible at teaching math. My calc teacher is smart, but doesn't seem quite as quick as this other guy to come up with crazy ways to solve things. Yet, he is a very good teacher. I can easily understand the concepts when he explains them and now to me doing calculus is nowhere near as painful (currently taking calc2 from him)

im a computer science major..another example is my current programming teacher. The guy has published papers and is very intelligent, and yet he is terrible at passing on that information to other people. What seems obvious to him is not obvious to almost anyone else in the class. He gets rude and is annoyed that he has to explain what he considers to be easy concepts. My former programming teacher made the whole thing very easy while still teaching the same content that the other teachers teach. He knew that his job was to TEACH and he enjoyed doing it.

It makes all the difference in the world.