| Performance pay would also lead to a decrease in teacher quality. Rather than sharing resources and ideas with each other, teachers would start guarding their on recious little ideas in order to be judged better than their colleagues. Teachers would fight over and make deals to ensure they got the brightest, best-behaved kids in their class whenever class lists were being drawn up. |
I wonder why teachers are so different from the normal person then. For in all other "professions", we are judged on our performance, and yes, in some cases against each other. But it is the fool that will not share with his peers. We learn by sharing. We know that each of us does not know it all, but with sharing and cooperation, we can all know it all collectively. The good teachers do not have to fear sharing, for knowing how to do something is not a one to one correlation with doing that thing well. But it does help.
I have seen my share of good teachers - and the secrets are not that secret. The bad ones just wont or cant learn them. So they continue to be bad, and the system suffers because they cannot be dealt with effectively. They are protected in their incompetance.
| problem with the statewide test is that the children are asked to write one piece of writing in half an hour about a topic they don't know and in a genre they are unprepared for and unfamiliar with. |
I hate standardized tests that are used in this way. For that is a failure of the administrators to use them correctly. The tests are not to be used as an absolute, but to show how much the student has progressed. Unfortunately, the only thing worse than a bad teacher is a brain dead administrator - and there are a lot more of them - percentage wise - than bad teachers.
I wrote not long ago about the good teachers in schools not at the top of the heap. These schools did not have the highest test scores, as the students often did not have the background that the schools with the top test scores did for a variety of reasons, one of the biggest being what was being taught to the student before they got to class.
But the measure of the teachers was not who had the highest test scores, but whose students progressed the most during the school year. And often by that measure, those schools with the lower test scores were better by far. It showed that they students were LEARNING in those classes, while in the top rated schools, all the students had to do was to regurgitate what they had already learned and still get a high score. Hardly indicative of a good teacher.
You seem to recognize that truism, and that is probably because you are a good teacher. But I sense some frustration in your post - a frustration from not being able to make others in your profession realize the same thing. And that I have seen all too often. Good teachers are beaten down by brain dead administrators until many just give up and go through the motions. These are not the bad teachers that I spoke of, but they are not teaching good either. That is a fault of the system. Where excellence is not rewarded, but automatons are. It is not the best teachers that get noticed, but the ones that can regurgitate what the administrators want to hear.
IN other professions, when that happens, social darwinism has a solution. The company goes belly up. But with government, unless there is a giant upheaval or an outside source (invasion), it never does. It is just perpetuated by the status quo. The best thing for education would be the privatization of it. So that the schools would be competing with each other. Sadly, that will not happen because the brain dead administrator and bad teacher lobby has a choke hold on not allowing that to happen. In the end, they do get to maintain their jobs. And the kids lose. Not all kids. There are enough good teachers that some will, be well educated. But not enough given the resources devoted to it.
