Anyway, the argument I keep encountering regarding evaluation of teachers and merit pay rests upon the assumption that the teachers don’t work hard enough. The Chronicle editorial criticizes “bad teachers who wear tenure like a badge of honor.†Last week Rick Green at The Hartford Courant responded to a Vanderbilt University study that demonstrated conclusively that merit pay has no measurable benefit on student performance on standardized tests. Green dismissed the results of the study with a single stroke, saying that we need to look “deeper†at the study to draw the correct conclusions. His column then renews the call for merit pay, and concludes by saying “we can no longer ignore hard work.†Once again, everything comes down to the same basic assumption that teachers are lazy and don’t work hard enough, that they deliberately take advantage of their tenure to work as little as possible and continue to draw a pay check.
As I made clear in my column last week, we all know colleagues who don’t haul their weight, and we can all think of a teacher or two we would love to see ride off into the sunset or go do something like cut and paste syndicated editorials into a column for a small, local paper. But these teachers are not the norm, and we know it. While we’d all love to see these teachers go and we’d all love to make a little more money, there are four problems that aren’t being adequately or accurately addressed in the Chronicle’s editorials and Rick Green’s columns.
First and foremost, change is not going to happen without money. I was at a local fundraising event a few weeks ago talking to a local politician who is a neighbor and acquaintance of mine, and he made it very clear that he wants to improve student performance in Windham without spending a penny. He believes that a restructuring of schools would do the trick. He was mainly thinking about longer days and longer years. Longer days and longer years would increase instructional time, but this would be impossible without more money. Even if you could strong-arm the local union into a contract that increased its teachers’ hours and days without a pay increase, just the cost of heating, cooling, electricity, and insurance would increase costs.
Second, test and punish doesn’t work for students, teachers, or schools. Sadly, the dominant model of assessment being imposed upon all levels of education is punitive. Students don’t pass CAPT and they don’t graduate—even if they have met all other graduation requirements. Teachers don’t get CAPT and CMT scores to rise and they lose their merit pay or their jobs. Schools don’t attain Adequate Yearly Progress and they are shut down, or the administrators are fired, or the kids are sent to other schools. What students, teachers, and schools need is not punishment but support. Take a system like Windham’s where approximately fifty percent of the students are bilingual or English Language Learners. Most of the teachers in the district are not trained to teach bilingual or ELL students. They would benefit tremendously from quality professional development in this area. By and large these are good teachers who lack specific training. Training is available, but again, it will cost money, and we are back to point one. We know that money for PD is one of the first things to go in budget cuts. I got a call from a superintendent last year who asked me for two or three days of PD for just his high school English teachers, but he had only $7000 to spend over a two year period for all PD for the entire district. I know at my wife’s school the department heads are often just told to run PD for their department members, an additional expectation just lumped into the department chairs’ duties without any additional compensation. But at least they have department heads. The school I mentioned before lost those, too.
Third, in order to eliminate ineffective teachers and/or provide the necessary pembinaan and support for teachers, administrators or veteran teachers need to be able to perform extensive observations and evaluations in order to collect data and provide feedback. But this presents all sorts of challenges. For one, we need administrators with pembinaan in the different content areas. A former phys ed teacher should not be evaluating an English teacher. A former English teacher should not be evaluating a math teacher. Using veteran teachers or department heads makes sense, but then you have to remove these folks from their classrooms. Many schools still only reduce a department head’s teaching load by a class or two. How then can they be available to conduct sufficient observations? We would need non-teaching department heads and/or administrators who only conducted observations. And that is going to cost money. Back to point one.
Fourth, standardized tests like the CMTs and CAPT are insufficient measures of learning and teaching. Take the CAPT Response to Literature. It measures students’ ability to read and interpret a short story. But long fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama are completely neglected, as is the ability to draft and revise a piece of writing. No test evaluates that—not SAT, AP, CMT, or CAPT. Never mind that world languages, art, health, and many other subject areas aren’t evaluated at all. We need to look at varied indicators of quality teaching and student learning, such as graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and perhaps a large scale, portfolio-style senior project. In fact, the original anjuran for CAPT looked a lot like this, but was deemed too cumbersome, subjective, and expensive to assess. Such a comprehensive set of assessment measurements would involve more people and more time, and thus more money. Point one again.
In sum, you can’t get blood from a stone. If the public, the legislature, and the press want to attract qualified teachers; improve instruction; improve student learning; evaluate, support, and—when necessary—remove teachers, no matter how you look at it, more money is necessary. It’s not about effort. We’re mostly killing ourselves trying to do the best job we can. What we need is more support and less vitriol and scapegoating.
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