Poll: merit pay for teachers

[JRslinger]

Some people think that basing teachers salaries on their students performance will motivate teachers to do better. In the U.S. at least its very hard to remove a bad teacher once they have tenure due to the power of teachers unions.

I think merit pay could work if done on a local school by school basis. That way it wouldn't discriminate against teachers in the ghetto schools. Also it would have to be based on state tests and not student grades. If it were based on students grades teachers would just make their own tests really easy.

Critics says that state standardized tests are an imperfect way of judging a students knowledge. I think these tests are sufficient to determine which teachers are doing a better job at teaching the material that the standardized tests cover. If lousy teachers can't be fired, then at least they should make less money.

I can't think of a good way to apply merit pay to music/art/sports teachers right now.

 

[Cpt_Oblivious]

I said no, because there will always be the kids who just don't bother and drag everyone else down and disrupt the class and will do badly on the tests, causing the teacher to lose pay. Not to mention, if students dislike a teacher they may decide to do badly on the test on purpose to try and get them to lose their job / get a severe pay cut.

Also, how do you determine who teaches the smart kids and who teaches the stupid kids?

 

[Gooble]

This would be incredibly hard to implement, especially considering the differences in the plain ability of pupils. I think if students could somehow prove that a particular teacher was useless/lazy then that would be a different story, although still incredibly tough to implement.

 

[tsfkingsport]

There would be a lot of different variables that need to be addressed if this would actually work well, although there does need to be some kind of quality control for teachers especially in the US.

If a teacher can have a class where they only teach an average of 15 minutes a day in a 90 minute class something needs to happen, then again the students love teachers that do not teach and can push back if the school board does too many things they dislike.

 

[Mstrswrd]

Unfortunately, it's not always accurate. What about kids in special-ed classes, or people who would willingly take a bad grade to see a teacher they hate fail (and don't say it doesn't happen, because my entire 9th grade spanish class tried to do it, excluding 3 people, who where me, and 2 girls)? What about people who enter courses that always have low grades (AP programming, for example, had about 9 people per 30 who would pass, and of those 9, only 3 would be above 80's)?

I'm not really against merit-pay, I'm just pointing out flaws in its execution. It has to be conditional, with lots and lots of watching, judging, testing (not on paper, but of how to correctly judge pay), etc.

I would like to see it happen, though, after the kinks are ironed out.


EDIT: Wow. Pretty much everyone who posted so far has the exact same thoughts.

 

[Flour]

Great system...

Punishing teachers would never work, it would only encourage them to find other jobs because for one very simple reason: Where I live, we could fail every test in the first three school years and fix it all in the fourth year's exams. Hell, I was kicked out of my German classes about four months in to the last school year, failed every test and still managed to pass because I got 96 'points'(out of 100) for my final exam.(bringing my 25 average up to 70)

 

[Del-Toro]

Lets just cut back the power of teacher's unions, THEN we can start talking quality control. Besides, if the teachers were constantly at the financial mercy of the students then it wouldn't end well, has has been pointed out by several others.

 

[Hookman]

I said no, because there will always be the kids who just don't bother and drag everyone else down and disrupt the class and will do badly on the tests, causing the teacher to lose pay. Not to mention, if students dislike a teacher they may decide to do badly on the test on purpose to try and get them to lose their job / get a severe pay cut.

Also, how do you determine who teaches the smart kids and who teaches the stupid kids?

I agree completely with this. 70% of my school are like this.

 

[Sewer Rat]

No because while it is a good idea in theory, theres always going to be some jackass who does not want to learn no matter what you do. Why punish the teacher for that?

 

[WrongSprite]

Nope, cause they could be working in a high achieving school or an inner city slum area.

 

[Deathsong17]

This reminds me of something.

During the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people from England emigrated to Wales to take part in the rich coal industry there. Because of this, teaching standards in Wales changed. Because so many English people were moving there, the government decided to issue a merit-payment system to teachers, but you could only get good results if you spoke English fluently. The problem? Everyone in Wales spoke Welsh.

To 'combat'(for want of a better word) this, the teachers instated the "Welsh Not". This was a small piece of wood that was hung around the neck of a child caught speaking Welsh. At the end of the day whoever was wearing the Welsh Not would be beaten viciously, so hard in fact that they could barely walk afterwards. Also, there only ever one, which encouraged kids to tell the teachers if they caught anyone else speaking Welsh, to pass on the buck. The teachers took anyone's word for it, even if you speaking English for the whole day you could get the dreaded W.N. Friendships came crashing down and children were abused, and for what? A big fat paycheck for teacher.

The effects of this still exist today, the Welsh speaking community in South Wales, where the most coal existed, has been crippled, with few speaking Welsh(such ad I) and no one using it as their first language.

And that is why I'm against merit pay; it turns teachers into greedy pigs whose pay means more the eduction of children.