AP - Teachers say yes to pay tied to scores

[LostInAnomie]

Yet another in a series of blatantly misleading headlines by the AP.
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WASHINGTON - While the words "merit pay" drew hisses and boos at a recent teachers' union convention, educators are endorsing contracts that pay bonuses for boosting students' test scores.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers oppose linking a teacher's paycheck to how well their students do on tests. But that is not stopping Rob Weil, the AFT's deputy director of educational issues, from helping local unions hammer out contracts that include new merit-pay plans.

"They often had no basis of any objective measure of performance," said Susan Moore Johnson, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "So what sometimes happened is there would be different awards made to different individuals and they would become public, and people would be appalled at the individuals who were given the awards or not given the awards."

Kirchner acknowledges some national union leaders do not support pay plans linked to student scores. But she says the Minnesota system is more acceptable than some others because student scores are just one of many measures used and teachers have a strong say in whether the new plans are put in place and what they look like.

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It's kind of a disjointed and difficult to read article, but it basically breaks down to very few school districts trying it after a lot of political pressure. There is hardly any union support for merit pay, and the attempts at it have met with disaster.

So, why would they use the misleading headline?

[wordpix]

1. great idea (not!)---how are you basing pay when you have a wealthy district vs. a poor one full of

immigrant children who don't know English well? :eyes:

[aquart]

2. What a fab invitation to cheat.

[ananda]

5. Cheating and teaching the test.

Education has gone down the drain because of
all the test-score mania.

[snappyturtle]

3. Big mistake. Hasn't NCLB taken a big enough toll on public

education?

[LWolf]

4. They use a misleading headline because

they want merit pay to be accepted as the status quo, of course. Everybody knows that lots of teachers support merit pay, because the tv and newspaper says so.

:sarcasm:

[Cybergata]

6. The only teachers who would agree with the Headline . . .

. . . are the ones who teach at a school whose students were only the children of University Professors. As a teacher for the past 32 1/2 years (and at a school that has a high percentage of University Professor's children), I can say that the tests don't really tell anything about what children learn, except for the ability to take standardized tests. This is more right-wing bullshit that insures that those who most need help getting an education are put at the bottom of the priority list.

We are beginning testing the second week of school at my school, and all the time all this testing takes out of real teaching is a travesty. NCLB means a majority of children get screwed by the system. It also has meant that teaching takes a back seat to testing, and the publishing companies make $$$$$$ selling their testing materials to schools. There are so many other betters ways to utilize those $$$$$$s than wasting them on testing materials.

[MasonJar]

7. This is outrageous. This means that test scores are the criteria by

which education is judged. Pathetic. We already have too much emphasis on test scores; this would only exacerbate the situation. Yes, I am a teacher. I am in a high school that has a large number of educationally unready students bussed in. Yet in spite of our student body and its capabilities, we have consistently improved our scores on the state tests. We have a lot (too many in my opinion, because students need to take more initiative in their own success) of safety net programs, which seem to assist in our continued success. However, I believe that gearing pay to such criteria is foolish for the betterment of student knowledge in the more abstract thought processes...it would just serve to reinforce the wrong attitude toward learning.

[woo me with science]

8. Extensive research in cognitive psychology

has shown that children learn abstract thought through the process of learning facts. Unless you have a strong, basic knowledge base, you don't have the raw material and foundation necessary for making abstract connections.

Teachers have to teach BOTH. The constant refrain in the media that it's an either-or proposition (teach facts OR abstract thinking) is just wrong.

[tinymontgomery]

9. They will just find a way to keep it

our school raised test scores across the board, meet all of the AYP subgroups (17) of them so it was looking good to get an extra 1500 for the year for all the hard work. Our dropout rate was 79 students last year and down to 59 this year. But since our drop out rate was 59 students we lost all our money, so the test scores didn't mean crap. And it's our fault that the 59 dropped. Our principal worked his butt off to keep the kids in but in an area that parents don't care about education that translates to the students not caring about education. So all the extra hours, work and knocking ourselves out for a lousy 1500 bucks (translate to 150 per month or about an extra 3.75 per day) is lost due to students that never did or will see the value of an education.

I know what some will say the teachers failed these students, we have over 70 teachers here and if none of them could get through to the student then I would say the student didn't try. Our school is roughly 950 students so kids don't get lost in the shuffle here. That works out to about 14 students per teacher.

They will find a way to keep that money once it starts becoming an expense.:thumbsdown:

[LostInAnomie]

10. I have a feeling you are right.

The school district I work in is already feeling the pinch for our altruism in the past. Our county has three school districts, and since ours was the largest and theoretically received the most funding an agreement was struck years before NCLB that we would take all of the Special Ed. and Emotionally Disabled children. We also set up an adult education facility to assist people in getting their GED's. Once NCLB passed our generosity became a liability. The kids in the Special Ed. programs and the returning adults held our test scores down, and the adults that quit the program were counted against us as drop outs.

So far our corporation hasn't met AYP yet. Last year the teachers and students worked their asses off, and if the scores of the non-special ed, and non-adult ed students were the only scores considered, we would have passed easily. Once they were added in we missed it by 7%.

Our district is desperate to meet AYP. Over the summer we dropped the adult ed program, and are in a legal battle with the other school districts trying to force them to take their special ed kids back.

NCLB's effect on our district has been to put us in danger of losing funds, forcing adults trying to get a GED to drive 35+ miles to the nearest adult ed facility, and possibly the forcing of special needs children into districts that are not equipped to handle them. It is one gigantic cluster fuck.