http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2008/07/14/a-grand-education-bargain/ Closing the Achievement Gap: Teaching Content Mon, 22 Mar 2010 02:03:38 -0500 hourly 1 http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2008/07/14/a-grand-education-bargain/comment-page-1/#comment-4338 Seth Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:54:51 +0000 http://www.coreknowledge.org/blog/?p=568#comment-4338 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. 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.

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