Recently, National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roeckel testified before the Aspen Institute Commission on No Child Left Behind. President Van Roeckel discussed the NEA's stance on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and how to improve it. He listed the need to treat teachers as the professional they are, the need for better teacher education programs, a partnership between schools and parents, and adequate financial support for education as the ways education can be improved nationally.
I believe anyone who truly wants educational reform would agree with this platform, and NEA is anxious to partner with the federal government to come up with programs that will meet these goals. The concern I have is how the government plans to achieve these goals.
One of the methods currently being promoted by the Obama administration is a program entitled "Race to the Top". This program requires states to compete for a record near $5 billion in stimulus money. The concerns I have start with states having to compete for this money. My understanding is the first round of the money available has less than 10 states even eligible for the money. That sounds a lot like the rich getting richer mentality, which brings to question if the money is truly designed to go to the schools most in need. By the way, North Dakota is not one of those states eligible for the first round of money.
The part that scares me the most is a provision that encourages teacher pay tied to student performance. If a teacher only teaches lower level classes, such as Essential Math, can they expect to have their students score as high on standardized tests as a teacher of advanced math classes, such as Pre-Calculus? I think not. Besides, where are the evaluation of student performance for elective classes? Should they receive less pay because they teach job skills instead of a core subject?
A major part of collective bargaining is that teachers should be treated in an equitable fashion. Teacher pay tied to student performance, in my opinion, will lead to pitting teacher against teacher. Instead, all teachers in a school district need to work together to provide the best education for all their students. I am not against the concept of merit pay in theory. I am against the concept because I don't believe a program can be designed that properly rewards all teachers who do a good job. Until a program can be designed that accomplishes a fair, equitable method of rewarding ALL good teachers, any form of merit pay will be detrimental to education.
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Randy,
ReplyDeleteYou make some awesome points about the money out there for education and making schools and states compete for funds that should be available to everyone, especially now in such a rough period of our history. The second issue you discuss is very touchy for some people. I agree with you that performance based pay would create unfair inequities for many teachers, including those like myself in CTAE classrooms. However, there are MANY, and I do mean MANY teachers in this country who are not doing their job as well as others and are skating by with the current system. If they were to base our pay on performance, then they would need to redefine and strengthen the way they conduct teacher evaluations in the classroom, not simply looking at students grades and test scores. In Georgia, we have the GTEP, which our administrators use to evaluate our performance. They look for several things including student interaction, standards based learning, and how well developed lessons are. You cannot fake these things and it would be a great idea to tie performance pay to this. After all, education is one of the only systems that rewards time worked over performance, unlike countless other businesses throughout the U.S.
The distribution of money should not be a competition. I really dont like it when people that don't know much about education come up with these great ideas on how to improve it. Obama is a parent so he has a focus group of two ... his own kids. What if they do something new like ask teachers.
ReplyDeleteRandy,
ReplyDeleteI agree that it won't work. The only way I'd be interested in working under that regime would be if they gave me the choice in who I could teach and I was able to teach them year after year. Otherwise, I'm just getting the poorly educated student from the previous person the students either weren't motivated to learn anything from or just couldn't. What's that make each classroom in America? Cut-throat. If that's what Obama wants, that's what he'll get. Everyone will be pitted against each other like you say and it won't be a system of democracy or free flowing ideas. It will be perfectly socialistic.
Money, in my opinion is not what the schools need. It's ever more evident in my tiny district and how they've lost $250,000 in 4 years in our lunch program alone. That was after years of making money with another director responsible. Not only that, but they increased the cost of lunches from $1.50 to $2.25 per student and opened a snack bar that kids pay up to $10-15 a day buying things from. Can you say poor leadership? Well, it starts at the top, Obama, and it trickles down, lunch lady. If we don't have good leadership, our country cannot help education.
Good blog.
Randy B.