Newsweek pundit Jonathan Alter wants Barack Obama to call for a Grand Education Bargain—much higher pay for teachers in exchange for much more accountability for performance in the classroom.
“Good teachers need to be rewarded with more pay and respect for being members of our noblest profession, says Alter. “They need more resources. But they also need to be removed from the classroom when they fail to improve. Obama occasionally says as much, but goes fuzzy when it comes to how.” Here’s how it will work in this Alter-nate universe:
Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage “thin contracts” free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.
Love national standards, but Alter loses credibility when he grandly pronounces in the piece that “we know what works to close the achievement gap.” The answer, natch, is KIPP which, in Alter’s telling, has solved the problem of dealing with teachers unions–apparently the only thing standing between every kid and a Rhodes Scholarship. Don’t misunderstand me, I love KIPP schools. Love ‘em. Did I mention I love KIPP, because I do. But until we have a lottery for every school (act of volition=involved parents), compulsory longer days and Saturday classes, and expel kids who are not down with the program and the school culture, can we PLEASE stop saying KIPP is the true and only heaven. KIPP is a first-rate solution for motivated students and families. And that, by the way, is enough, even if it’s not The Answer.
Update: See Joanne Jacobs on all of this: ”Poor kids need good teachers in well-organized, safe schools using sound curricula. Measuring teacher performance fairly is very difficult. What about good teachers who can’t be effective because their schools are so horribly dysfunctional? What about good teachers who specialize in untested subjects such as history, science, music and art?”
Paying teachers based on performance sounds like a great idea – who doesn’t want to reward good teachers, and couldn’t we motivate bad ones by tapping into their capitalistic instincts? Of course, the rub here is how to define teacher performance. As a classroom teacher for the last four years in inner-city New York, I can say that my best years as a teacher have not always corresponded to the best scores of my students, or even their highest improvement from previous years. There are many reasons for this, some of which are controllable (school resources and culture, tests that assess multiple intelligences) and many of which are not (family life of the student, neighborhood, peer influences, etc.). Until we can control for all these things, performance-based pay seems less like a logical reward and more like chance.