Ghost_Rider1 wrote:
PD, please explain to me what is so wrong with performance based pay raises or even job security. I have worked for 2 companies that gave raises and retained employees based on their monthly evaluations. I have a friend that works for Cox Communications and his raises and job security are also based on his performance evals though he has topped out currently in his job, but he still must maintain good evals in order to retain his job. If you do the damn job you were hired to do, you should not have a problem.
Here is what is wrong with a teacher performance pay scale:
1) Every teacher does not have kids of the same ability.
2) Every teacher does not have kids with the same motivation and in some classes kids are not motivated at all.
Let's say Teacher A has kids who are motivated, have parents who are engaged in the learning process, parents that follow what their child is doing in school, parents who DO show up at orientation and for anything the school calls for to better their child's education etc
Then we have Teacher B who has four kids out of 25-28 who will pop in and out of school back and forth across the state line running from DCF all year, three others who attend school about half of the week at best, then another three to four who are "pushed-in" from ESE classes who have never been in a real Algebra class their entire school careers but have to be there even though they have never passed a Pre-Algebra class either or have their basic facts memorized to the point where calculator use is not needed, then at least two who show up and have to attend counseling because they are a) living in a car with their parents, b) living with grandma and grandpa because mom and dad are meth addicts and don't want their kids, and then four or five jocks who think that they are going to pass just because they are football/baseball or other sports stars.... oh and none of your parents will even return a call or email about their child's academic performance.
How will Teacher B stand a chance against Teacher A when a comparison is made? Which teacher do you think will earn the merit pay?
You are judged by the efforts that
YOU put into your work. A teacher is at the mercy of how the students perform. What happens if on the day of FCAT Jimmy's mom just got finished beating the hades out of him before he arrives at school? Or she didn't feed the child and while he sits trying to complete the FCAT you can hear his stomach growling? (Yes, I have had that happen when I have proctored exams.)
Unless an equal playing field can be created between subject matter teachers, how will those teachers be judged in an equal manner?
All of the things I have mentioned and more happen to kids every day that I go into a classroom. I'm all for being judged by a fair standard and an even playing ground about student performance. The problem with this entire issue is that all students are not born with an equal ability to learn. Everyone cannot be ABOVE AVERAGE as the state, the federal government, and NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND pretends them to be. There are high performers, middle of the road, low performers, and kids who perform poorly because of intellectual deficits and/or other disabilities.
Just this year the state formula for determining teacher performance was thrown out because even the people who created it were not able to fully explain how it works. Then the state also wants to create a value added measure (VAM) to help inflate the scores of students with the aforementioned issues. They can't really explain how this works as well. Local secondary schools still won't know until December or January what our FCAT results and school scores will be. Then we will have less than two months to interpret the data and create some interventions that will help improve our scores. How asinine is that?
That is why peformance pay for teachers is total TOROCACA.
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