The real problem with teacher merit pay

The Coffee Shop
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There is an actual real problem, which is one of the reasons why the job is unionized in the first place. Actually there’s 2 real problems:

  1. a 30 year veteran teacher isn’t really much better, or possibly worse, than they same level of talent in a teacher with 5 years of experience.

Slowguy had brought this up before in that typically promotions come with new job responsibilities. Even if not, in my job, for example, an engineer with 5 years experience might be just as good as an engineer with 30, but the engineer with 30 is going to have so much more accumulated background knowledge. ie The 5 year guy might have worked in composite design and CAD work, where in 30 years he’ll haveworked in composite design, CAD work, electrical systems, systems engineering, programming, etc.

In addition, older engineers tend to build up a lot of good organizational, business, and leadership skills and often move into project management, logistics, or some other higher business function.

Teaching? Algebra is algebra. Sure the older teacher will have seen a lot more in his classes, encountered more types of students, etc. but it only really makes a marginal difference.

  1. There’s not really a whole lot of value placed on education. If kids score better or worse on exams…in most schools parents and administrations just accept that that’s the way things are. Very rarely do people come to the PTA meetings demanding that scores increase. Yes to some degree that might happen, but it pales in comparison to business.

My product, for example, has some serious goals that it needs to meet in order to be competetive. They could save $15K a year by geting rid of me and getting a fresh guy out of college, but it might cost them hundreds of thousands if not millions in service costs.

The point being, if you take away tenure, and take away the unions, and move toward a merit pay system where teacher are rated partially based on student perfromance, you end up with the incentive for the administrations to pay less money to the older teachers or to get rid of them altogether.

As a society that may not necessarily be a bad thing (no offense to your wives, and I’m not suggesting that we do this). I know this is exactly how teaching is viewed in some other countries (Zimbabwe and South Africa come to mind immediately) where teaching is seen as something you do in your 20s before moving on to another career.

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re 1) above - - without some data to back this up - - I claim bullshit
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One word: egalitarianism
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Why would anybody intelligent go to college for 6 years for a $35,000 a year job if there was no guarantee of longevity? It wouldn’t be worth getting a masters degree if you ended up out of the teaching profession (to dump salary for a younger person) before you started making decent money.

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re 1) above - - without some data to back this up - - I claim bullshit

Do you have data to back up your claim?

I had the highest test scores in my school in my 3rd year of teaching with a failing rate of 1/5 the county average.
My brother got his band to 2nd in their division, and far exceeded anything any other teacher had done in that school over its 40 year existence in just 5 years.
My cousin took a last place school in T&F and XC and turned them into a 5 time state championship team in his 5th-13th years as a teacher.

It is possible that we are unbelievably talented, but I don’t think so. I think we were just good, because this kind of success happens all the time. Now compare that to private industry. Not coincidentally where I work, there’s not a single early or mid career engineer who woul dbe considered “the best in the company.” Not even close. The old guys are way better than the young guys, by and large.

Maybe if the system was based on merit there would be a real drive for teachers to improve themselves over the years, but for the most part in my experience and observation, if you get a kid in a class with a teach with 5-10 years experience, there’s no reason to expect that they’d do much worse than with a teacher with twice the experience.

I agree, though, that data would be interesting.

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. . . move toward a merit pay system where teacher are rated partially based on student perfromance, you end up with the incentive for the administrations to pay less money to the older teachers or to get rid of them altogether.

great idea; what do you think that rating system would look like?

-mike

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Don’t go pushing my buttons (shakes fist). ; ^ )

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zing!

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but seriously. your plan?

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But I thought teachers didn’t care about money…

Seriously though, why should anything in life be guaranteed? I know lawyers who went to law school, racked up $100K+ in debt and now basically work as contract attorneys because the economy tanked and the jobs they thought they’d be getting never materialized. I know dentists with huge student loan bills making $70K a year as independent contractors (they thought they’d be doing $200K+). I went and got my MBA with no guarantee that it would do anything for my career; it was a risk I took. On that same note, I see lots of people saddled with B school debt that have good jobs, but they could lose those consulting or investment banking jobs tomorrow if their employer wants to cut them. They have no guarantees. If someone wants to be a teacher, they should be a teacher. But it shouldn’t be some sort of protected class.

FWIW, what school system only pays a person w/ a masters degree $35K a year? I live in GA and the salaries are atrocious for teachers, but even here they make a good bit more than that.

Why would anybody intelligent go to college for 6 years for a $35,000 a year job if there was no guarantee of longevity? It wouldn’t be worth getting a masters degree if you ended up out of the teaching profession (to dump salary for a younger person) before you started making decent money.

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FWIW, what school system only pays a person w/ a masters degree $35K a year? I live in GA and the salaries are atrocious for teachers, but even here they make a good bit more than that.

Been to Louisiana lately? The ONLY reason you become a teacher there is for the love of teaching…

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http://teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state

I’ve read through this and the other big thread on teachers salaries. I honestly think a lot of people on this forum need to quit with the war on teachers. Serves me right for bothering looking in the lavender room.

It’s really quite a sad commentary on a lot of you. You’d swear these teachers were all getting rich and have some humongous pension to fall back upon. They don’t…but lets not let the facts get in the way. Just bash away at them…they’re only educating your kids.

I’ll be sure to take this up with one of the posters when I see him next time in person.

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oh…and I’m sure every single one of you has had several very good teachers growing up. You should go back and tell them how lousy they were.

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For the number of contract days and hours they work per year, plus all the add-on pay for extra duties, plus the stellar benefit plans they get, plus the guaranteed step increases and COLAs that they conveniently don’t call raises, plus the generous state retirement plans – that’s a damn high salary for the effort.

My father was a teacher. It used to piss him off no end when people griped about how overpaid and underworked teachers are. Then he quit teaching and started a small business. Suddenly he understood how sweet a deal he had as a teacher.

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http://teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state

I’ve read through this and the other big thread on teachers salaries. I honestly think a lot of people on this forum need to quit with the war on teachers. Serves me right for bothering looking in the lavender room.

It’s really quite a sad commentary on a lot of you. You’d swear these teachers were all getting rich and have some humongous pension to fall back upon. They don’t…but lets not let the facts get in the way. Just bash away at them…they’re only educating your kids.

I’ll be sure to take this up with one of the posters when I see him next time in person.

Just make him write “I will not denigrate teachers” 50 times.

My father and my mother-in-law are retired teachers. Some of my friends are too. So, with that in mind - I don’t really see an overwhelming number of posts here that would bash them. Just like with any profession - there are good ones, and there are bad ones. But even the best ones have a difficult time overcoming some cultural, societal and economic backgrounds that influence many students.

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I don’t think I ever said teachers were overpaid. My only point is that it should be treated like any other job/career and that there should be accountability. Why do you believe that teachers should be guaranteed a job which is what your earlier post implied? If a teacher isn’t doing well 5 years in, they should be kept on indefinitely because they went to school for all those years and they were under the assumption that they would be kept on until they got a pay raise? That’s not how the rest of the world works. A poor performing teacher 5 years in should be cut and it shouldn’t matter that they went to school for teaching or that maybe they racked up student loans thinking they’d be a teacher forever. I’m not sure the logic of keeping a mediocre teacher around for 30 years just because they weren’t paid very much money up front and through the years they finally started making a decent living.

I don’t even think there is a war on teachers; it just seems to be a lot of spin. A lot of teachers want to believe that they’re martyrs who only care about the well being of our future generation and the rest of us just don’t understand. If that were the case, the teachers in Tacoma wouldn’t be on strike right now which resulted in their precious students not being able to attend class. Teaching is just a career like any other career. There will be good teachers and bad teachers. Right now, their compensation system doesn’t seem to differentiate between the two types. What is so wrong with coming up with a compensation/promotion/incentive system that would reward good teachers and weed out the bad.

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Been to Louisiana lately? The ONLY reason you become a teacher there is for the love of teaching…

I think this exemplifies my point. Your state has one of the shittiest school systems in the westernized world. I mean it is a crying shame the shit that passes for education down there. It seems like “teaching for the love of it,” itn’t exactly getting the job done. Try paying them a decent salary and maybe you’ll get teachers who love teaching and can actually teach!

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I’ve read through this and the other big thread on teachers salaries. I honestly think a lot of people on this forum need to quit with the war on teachers. Serves me right for bothering looking in the lavender room.

It’s really quite a sad commentary on a lot of you. You’d swear these teachers were all getting rich and have some humongous pension to fall back upon. They don’t…but lets not let the facts get in the way. Just bash away at them…they’re only educating your kids.

I’ll be sure to take this up with one of the posters when I see him next time in person.

Who’s bashing teachers???

Some teachers suck just like some of any profession suck. Just because they aren’t as awesome as the fair tales make them out to be doesn’t mean we are bashing them.

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re 1) above - - without some data to back this up - - I claim bullshit

It works both ways, where is your data to prove it isn’t true?

Even if they hate their job and are terrible at it, a teacher over 50 is not going to quit (pension is too generous) and there is almost no way to get rid of them.

I don’t even understand why teaching K through 12 is a “career”. I think we would get much better results if teachers came in and worked 3-5 years and then left. There would probably have to be a few veteran teachers, probably to act more like consultants than anything else. I have worked in one of the top training programs in the world and it does not take 4 years to give competent individuals the training they need to be good instructors. A couple of months at the most. IMO really just a couple of weeks of classroom training, and then relatively frequent monitoring and evaluation with feedback provided. We continuously rotate instructors out every couple of years. Anyone is going to run into motivation issues if they spend years on end working with students, especially unmotivated ones.

Again, in the real world, it is very rare to do the same thing for 30 years. Many programs are rotational by nature or the successful advance and the poor performers leave or are fired.
If you start out teaching sixth grade, where are you going to go in terms of increased responsibility and/or promotion? The whole teaching as a career model doesn’t make much sense. The only time if really did was when there were few career choices for women, so just due to circumstances it developed into a career. Now I would imagine most people go into because they want a lot of time off, don’t want to be held accountable and/or do not have the skills to do something else.

I would love to go teach for a couple of years. However the way the system is set up there does not appear to be any reasonable way for an experienced professional (even one with instructor experience) to go and do something like this.

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Why would anybody intelligent go to college for 6 years for a $35,000 a year job if there was no guarantee of longevity? It wouldn’t be worth getting a masters degree if you ended up out of the teaching profession (to dump salary for a younger person) before you started making decent money.

I think you answered it, an intelligent person would not do this. I don’t think the most intelligent people are going into teaching.

There is no logical reason to need a masters degree to be a teacher. This is something ginned up by the unions to make teachers seem like they are highly educated and deserve higher pay. It is also a way to prevent experienced professionals in other areas from teaching for a couple of years (barrier to entry).

Teaching should not be a career. It should be something to do for 3-5 years and then you should go back to doing something real. It would be a great benefit, especially to high school students if they had experienced professionals teaching some of their classes.