Tag Archive for 'teacher pay'

Prez Dispenser

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 12, 2009 in Opinion. 1 Comment

“J.F.K. took us to the moon. Let B.H.O. take America back to school,” says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.  His column “Tax Cuts for Teachers” is a bit of a sausage–a melange of gee-whiz ideas on how to stimulate the economy by getting “as much money injected as quickly as possible” into the economy while favoring investments in knowledge over infrastructure. ”Our stimulus needs to be both big and smart, both financially and educationally stimulating,” Friedman argues.  In a single giddy paragraph, he encourages Obama to reach into the trough with both hands, throwing dollars at education.

One of the smartest stimulus moves we could make would be to eliminate federal income taxes on all public schoolteachers so more talented people would choose these careers. I’d also double the salaries of all highly qualified math and science teachers, staple green cards to the diplomas of foreign students who graduate from any U.S. university in math or science — instead of subsidizing their educations and then sending them home — and offer full scholarships to needy students who want to go to a public university or community college for the next four years.

A bridge is just a bridge, Friedman notes. Once it’s up, it stops stimulating. While investing in education could get us “the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. They create good jobs for years.”

Scrapping the Sacrosanct Salary Schedule

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 13, 2008 in No category. 0 Comments

If you want to keep and retain talented new teachers, pay new teachers more and stop paying them to bulk up on credentials that don’t improve student outcomes.  That way teachers “will be rewarded for the strong improvement they make early in their career,” writes Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor in the fall
issue of Education Next.

The connection between credentials and teaching effectiveness is very weak at best, and the connection between additional years of experience and teaching effectiveness, while substantial in the first few years in the classroom, attenuates over time. Though exact results vary from one study to the next, there is little doubt that credentials and additional years of experience (beyond the first few years) matter far less to teacher effectiveness than they do to teacher compensation as it is currently designed.

Read Vigdor’s piece, but also read the reaction to it from Bill Ferriter, a 6th grade teacher who blogs at The Tempered Radical. He agrees with Vigdor, even though he benefits from the existing schedule.  “My master’s degree means little to me today, and yet I’ll be rewarded for it for the next fifteen years that I spend in a classroom,” he writes.  Still, Ferriter takes issue with some of the obvious flaws in Vigdor’s plans like basing all increases in compensation on increased scores on standardized tests. 

What we’ll never go for, though, are proposals that fail to take into account consequences for the curriculum when standardized testing is placed at the center of efforts to evaluate teachers—and it’s important to know that our opposition doesn’t stem from a fear of being held accountable for results. Instead, it stems an intimate understanding of what such systems will do to the children who sit in our classrooms. 

Smart stuff from a thoughtful teacher.

A Grand Education Bargain

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2008 in Educational Policy. 1 Comment

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?”