Merit Pay for Teachers... sounds good but...

President Obama said a few weeks ago that he supports merit pay, essentially bonus' for teachers that are doing a good job. However, the reason why many teachers and unions oppose this measure is that the way teachers are evaluated -- who is doing good, bad-- is that their student's standardized test scores are measured. Test scores are as much a reflection of how the teacher does as much as how much TV, MTV, YouTube videos, video games, etc. the students tune into for the week.

Would it be any surprise then that the "best teachers", the ones deserving more merit pay under the proposal, would generally be teaching more AP (Advanced Placement) students. Those students generally come to the teachers as smart kids and leave generally about as smart as they came.

I agree that better teachers should be paid better relative to those that are barely doing the job, but there must be other, more effective means to measure this. Of course, that would take more time and scrutiny, to do class visits, look at lesson plans, etc. and while that is a more effective way to judge a teacher, it is time consuming and costly so it is the exception to the rule in evaluating teachers.

When Teachers Act Up

I cannot come close to doing justice to this story, so I will describe it briefly and allow you to follow the link if interested.

When teachers misbehave (severely) or are accused sometimes falsely of doing so, they are sent to a kind of teaching purgatory, where they sit day after day while someone investigates just what happened. This can take weeks, months or years. In the meantime they sit and do nothing all day long except collect their full pay. This "rubber room" is a holding room (or actually series of rooms) where teachers play cards, read, argue, sleep, just do whatever they want.

This 23 minute news radio program is produced by NPR and if you advance the arrow at the bottom to the 7:25 mark this story will begin. Los Angeles also has a room like this where a colleague of mine was just released after several months. He was released because it was discovered a student of his had made a false accusation about inappropriate contact. http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/CPRadio_player.php?podcast=http://www.thisamericanlife.org/xmlfeeds/350.xml&proxyloc=http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/player/customproxy.php

Mentoring New Teachers

An Old But Effective Concept

Unfortunately in the span of two days, I have learned of two first year teachers that are packing it up and calling it quits. The first one is the godfather of my oldest son. Jasper left the world of acting and went back to school around age 30 and got two masters degrees. This year he is teaching in Riverside, CA at a Christian high school and has two preps-- one for Bible and the other for a drama class.

What would have softened his burden is only to have taught one class, as a first year teacher spends as much time figuring out what to do for that day/week (making lesson plans) as much as she spends on grading, or perhaps more. However, unless you are teaching PE, it is fairly common to teach more than one class, but as noted earlier, this makes a first year teaching job even harder. What did Jasper in though, was classroom management. He is on to another advanced degree, a PhD so he can teach at the college level where he believes it will be a better fit. Though he didn't say it, it sounded as if his students weren't quiet and well behaved and that this bothered him. That bothered me a lot at first but after 13 years now I have learned ways to structure the learning that helps them stay attentive-- unfortunately he is leaving before he figures those things out. Jasper teaches at a smaller, private high school and did NOT have a mentor teacher helping him along. Even at my high school of 175+ teachers, when I began in 1996, I was considered "low priority" for help as I had my teaching credential. Those receiving the most support were the teachers teaching on an "emergency credential". That's basically any college degree holder that wanted to give teaching a try for a year (or two) before enrolling into a college program to continue their education and commit to the teaching profession.

The other first year teacher is a nephew of a person I play hockey with. He got a job in (cue scary music...) South Central which is not supposed to be called that anymore, but now euphemistically South Los Angeles because the former name carries too much of a stigma for gangland. The only details I got from his uncle was that "the students don't care and neither do the parents." Pretty hard gig for a first year teacher. It's like going straight from Army boot camp to the worst part of Iraq and being told "good luck." The odds of succeeding are already difficult for a first year teacher, add an environment where their dropout rate is probably over 40% (I'm guessing), and the difficult odds become almost insurmountable.

As I posted a few weeks ago with a link to the article about states receiving low marks (actually a D-) on teacher recruitment, retention and firing, these two cases (like hundreds or thousands across the state) could have been handled better and supported in a way to make it more likely they would have been around to develop into fine classroom teachers. You hear of mentor teachers from time to time but the practice, like most practices in education, seems to rise and fall with the whims of budgets, parent councils, new research, and so on. This old standby of mentoring falls by the wayside and with it, many promising careers. Too bad.