MERIT PAY PROPOSAL – A Practical, Achievable Solution

By Robert RosecloseAuthor: Robert Rose Name: Robert Rose
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About: Dr.Rose has taught every grade in four major school districts in So.California. He has been successful using an eclectic and complex approach derived from solid research in the sciences. His web sites imaginativecurriculum.com and YouTube.com/icdrrose videos are filled with his books, workbooks, and videos that challenge the status quo. He has attempted to teach based on the Constitution and mutual respect and it has worked. For forty-five years in a yours, mine, and ours marriage, he enjoys a family that is demonstratively affectionate and loving. His latest book, Abuses of Power in Education; Challenging Practically Everything, Outskirts Press, 2008, is one of the main sources for the ideas he will be explaining in his blogs. He believes that students, teachers, parents, and administrators need legal power and protection to be able to have the freedom to do their job most effectively. No person or group should have unlimited power and that's why balance is as important as autonomy.See Authors Posts (18)
 

Merit pay has been debated and so far no one has developed a plan
that is acceptable to teachers and to management. Management wants a
plan that is easy to use and the unions want one that is fair that
doesn’t place all the responsibility for the students’ success on the
teachers’ shoulders.

Standardized testing places full responsibility on the teacher. She
is judged on how well each student or class does based on a
measurement that has a large standard error, which is seldom
considered. It also ignores all the research that proves that social
economic class is the most consistent indicator of academic success.
There is ample proof (Dr.James Popham for one) that the construction
of the tests favor middle class students and make lower class ones
appear stupid.

Therefore, teachers who work in poverty level schools appear to be
less effective teachers than those in schools with more middle class
students. (Teachers considered incompetent when transferred to middle
class schools suddenly become competent?)To punish them by closing the
schools, changing principals, creating a charter school, or firing the
staff is causing massive morale damage to all involved in education.
And, it’s ineffective.

My attempt at solutions (plural) is not simplistic, but it is a
beginning to solutions that most reasonable people could live with -
if it has a feedback mechanism built in to quickly move to change
whatever is causing more harm than good. I am not advocating everyone
everywhere adopt my suggestions as it needs tweaking dependent on
local situations. Lasting changes occur when those involved have
adequate input into solutions. So, mine will work with some, not with
others. Teachers need choices.

I started teaching in 1959 and the evaluation process was
subjective. It led to major problems when the teacher’s teaching
style, personality, or philosophy were very different from the
evaluator’s or district’s beliefs. Because of this unions fought for
policies that protected teachers from unreasonable and unfair
evaluations. Still, for many years there has been in place policies to
remove ineffective or damaging teachers. It takes careful
documentation and effort by the evaluators.

The fact that there are teachers who shouldn’t be teaching is not a policy failure, but the fault of the evaluators. In New York City where hundreds of teachers are being paid not to teach is a lack of reasonable compromises between a strong union and an equally stubborn administration.Those teachers should have been fired by competent supervisors doing their job to protect the students.

Because they don’t do so is one reason why the public buys into NCLB and Race to the Top programs to judge and get rid of teachers based solely on a standardized test. The public sees the havoc a few bad teachers can cause in a school.