Friday, September 24, 2010

NPR: Race to the Top: Teaching for Dollars - Pt. 4 | Learning Matters

Race to the Top: Teaching for Dollars - Pt. 4 | Learning Matter

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Posted by Janis Sartucci at 7:34 AM

1 comment:

  1. Teaching for dollars assumes that teachers will be motivated to better educate students if they are to receive extra compensation. By definition this should reward over-achieving teachers and it should encourage under-achieving teachers to perform better. The fact that this reward system has been shown to be ineffective in Tennessee does not mean that teaching for dollars is ineffective as it has had success elsewhere. The experiments in Tennessee need to be checked for the actual testing and validation methods for student improvement. In most companies it is management's responsibility to motivate employees and to keep them motivated. Some people are not motivated by money, and we can hope that teachers also posses a passion for education. This may also confound merit based pay studies. In the book Freakonomics, teachers were critiqued based on the improvements of individual students from year to year. Every student has different abilities so it may not be fair to judge solely based on test scores. Students typically showed improvement from year to year on standardized tests. For teachers that excelled, their would be an extra improvement in their test scores. This improvement would then persist in following years. For teachers that falsified test scores, the improvements would fall back to normal in subsequent years. Additional problems arise because their is dispute on the efficacy of standardized tests in general and the worry that teachers must "teach to the test" instead of worrying about other foundational skills. Merit based pay is a complex issue, and it is not clear that it is a solution, but finding ways to motivate teachers and keep them motivated is the answer. The question is how can we make sure that administrators are able to motivate them?

    J.F. Lesoine

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