Will Changing Teacher Compensation Help Children Learn?
April 21, 2006 03:48 PM
Below is one of five recommendations from A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century, a paper written by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Martin West of the Brookings Institution.
Compensation systems should recognize and reinforce professionalism by basing pay on the scarcity and value of teachers’ skills, the difficulty of their assignments, the extent of their responsibilities, and the caliber of their work. For instance, districts should be able to pay high school science or math teachers more than social studies teachers and reward effective teachers who are willing to teach in low-performing or less desirable schools. Denver’s new ProComp salary schedule, with its multidimensional system for rewarding teachers’ skills, performance, and contributions, is a modest step in the right direction. Even more promising are systems like the one developed in the Chattanooga, Tennessee, school district, which offers bonuses for teachers whose students make strong gains on state tests.
To get things started, here are a few reactions from a 3rd grade teacher I know:
Not all teaching assignments are created equal. A teacher's strength may be working with mainstreamed students with disabilities. With a higher percentage of special education students, the growth of these students, while good, may not be as great as in a typical class. Should this teacher be penalized? Student growth in schools with a transient population is often lower. Should we pay these teachers less?
How can you place a higher monetary value on an average physics teacher versus a highly skilled first grade teacher?
If we base bonuses for teachers on state tests, the tests become the focus instead of student learning.
If you work at a school, please let us know whether changing teacher compensation as these Washington-based writers recommend would improve teaching and learning.
Comments
Compensation is one of the most indirect ways of improving teaching and learning. I'm not saying it would not, eventually, but there are better ways of doing so more directly.
I went ahead and extended on your thoughts at my own place.
dick
Posted by: Dick Dalton | April 21, 2006 03:49 PM
The problem with bonus and/or performance pay in the education field is the incredibly complex and variable nature of education. In the corporate world, performance based pay is simple and effective, as it is in sales, marketing, etc, this is not the case in education. That is not to say there is no way of establishing a performance based pay system in education, its just something that will take much more work, contemplation, and care to develop and implement. For example, if we base pay on test scores, how do you know who to give credit to? In a high school on a 4x4 block, students may see two different for the same subject, who determines who gets "credit" for that student? Or if a student misses a certain number of classes, does he still "count" in the equation? How about teachers that teach subjects not covered on the FCAT: PE, art, music, drama, social studies, economics, government, foreign language, technology, agriculture, culinary arts, etc. Who determines those teachers? effectiveness? Those are just a few examples of the complexity involved in a performance based pay system in Florida?s education system. After numerous discussions on this subject with both education professionals and non-education professionals, I get a common question of "Why are teachers afraid of merit pay systems?" The answer is that we are not afraid of merit pay, in fact we welcome it because many of us know we are doing a great job, what we are against are people with no educational classroom experience dictating a pay system with absolutely no understanding of what happens or needs to happen in the world of education. Why should we be subject to self-professed experts with no respect or knowledge of what it is we do every day? Finally, the idea of treating kids like tick marks on the board to determine how much to pay teachers is quite disturbing.
If we want to establish a merit pay system for Florida schools, lets do it the right way and form a committee of a wide variety of teachers, administrators, business leaders, parents, and lawmakers. Only when we work together can we accomplish what is best for our students and our future.
Posted by: Troy Shimkus | April 23, 2006 09:50 PM
Math teachers being paid more than Social Studies teachers? WHat?
Posted by: Phil | June 19, 2006 10:35 PM