Philotic Web

I am doing a huge paper on teachers pay and how it should be based on their performance in class, and I think i created the best plan ever for teachers. for the united states

My merit pay plan for teachers

Ask students what thought of teacher after take a semester of class
A number of evaluations by different people from national level
Students test scores (I know most hated idea)
Student overall improvement
Undercover students who study the teacher (possibly midget‘s)

then a committee reviews the evals and test scores and give a raise if needed

I don't know if anybody has created this before just need comment on plan before i submit to certain officials

*laughs*

Seriously?

If you're serious about this, maybe you should try to contact a representative from a teachers union in your area. If they take the time to respond I'm sure they can explain the inherent flaws in this plan better than I can.

Undercover students who study the teacher (possibly midget‘s)

I think the midget plan is awesome

ok flaws people it a list of ideas

Except, as we all know, midgets are notoriously unreliable, hence why they are generally avoided as replacements for kids in these kind of situations. A better alternative would be the TV Actors Rule that maintains that 23 year olds can legitimately pass as 16 year old high school students.

You do realize, shadow, that adult little people still look like adults, right? They don't just look like children... just, really short adults.


As for the rest of your ideas:

1- Asking students. While it would be nice for high school students to be able to do teacher evaluations, the amount of importance you should place on them is questionable, at best. Teenagers are not the most reliable evaluators.

2- "Evaluations by different poeple from a national level" is too vague and quite ridiculous.

3- Test scores say diddly-squat about the skill of the teacher and only slightly more about the student. Overall, standardized testing is about how well you take the test and not how much you know. And I say this as somebody who aces standardized tests, not as someone who is bitter about doing poorly.

4- Student overall improvement. How do you plan to assess this? Pre and post tests in class? Refer back to 3.

5- I cannot stop laughing. Seriously. This is the MOST RIDICULOUS idea I've ever seen... second, perhaps to the idea that we should start doing Speakings for real.



I like the suggestion that you take this to a teacher's union and see how long it takes for them to laugh you out of the building. Actually, they are likely to be much more polite to you than that because teachers are, generally, pretty classy.

alright somebody actually told me what was wrong.

the evaul from national level is what i like since they constantly complain that administrator are bias. well how can people that don't even know you be biased maybe state level would be better.

the midget think was a joke. but undercover students would be good ask the honor students to do it not the dropouts.

remember when you were in high school you knew who the good teachers were and who just did it for the paycheck

teenagers are good evauls ask them what they think of there teachers they know whats going they have had tons of teachers ask them a in surveys and interviews. Don't consider asking the kid who sleeps in class ask the kid who gets good grades.

Teacher unions are horrible they only want more money. they don't care how they get it either I also put this plan together this morning without research so it sounds basic and ridiculous

As for evaluations from a national level-- perhaps local administrators are biased. But national, or state, evaluators would be under-informed. One 50 minutes period does not adequately evaluate an educator.

Undercover students, even honor students, still does not seem like a good idea. For one, that's putting too much pressure on the students. They are expected to learn the material and evaluate the teacher. Plus, they aren't actually qualified to make those judgements. They don't have pedagogy training.

I remember going to high school and thinking there was no way in hell anyone would be there just for the paycheck. Teachers get paid jack squat to do an incredibly difficult job. Yes, they can get frustrated and have off days and sometimes be focused on things other than strictly the class their teaching (think, coaches) they still have value as an educator in some capacity.

As for teenage evaluators, you are skewing your sample by asking only "kids who get good grades" and I think those tend to be some of the worst critics. I was definitely one of those kids and just because I didn't jive with the style that a teacher used doesn't mean they were inherently a bad teacher, just that it didn't work with what I liked. And, kids who usually get good grades but run into a concept that is difficult for them will often blame the teacher rather than themselves, making that a bad idea.


And teacher's unions want more money because teachers are VASTLY underpaid for the work that they're doing! They often make barely a living wage for a really rough job.

*tries to read this thread*
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kaBAM!

Students are terrible evaluators. They have no idea, most of them, of what teaching is about. Go look at ratemyprofs.com... What a nightmare. Student evals should be given far less weight than administrators give them now. Like Kim said, they don't know squat about pedagogy.

Teacher unions are horrible they only want more money. they don't care how they get it either I also put this plan together this morning without research so it sounds basic and ridiculous

Teachers are so incredibly underpaid for what they do. And teachers unions, for all their flaws, do a lot of good.

Teacher unions are horrible they only want more money. they don't care how they get it either I also put this plan together this morning without research so it sounds basic and ridiculous

And you have how much experience with teacher unions, exactly??

Aside from wanting to ensure that teachers actually get paid what they deserve (which typically they don't, especially in the U.S.) their real purpose is to ensure that teachers are treated fairly. You have no idea how much they do that has nothing to do with negotiating salaries.

The problem with most of your ideas is that they are highly subjective methods of evaluation, and they rely on very poor subjects at that. Any teacher will laugh at the very suggestion of having students evaluate their job performance. How on Earth can you expect them to give fair and objective appraisals? Yeah, I really want the kid who I just had to phone home about because he's skipping my class and consequently failing to have a say in how much I get paid. And how is a student the least bit qualified to assess me?

And test scores?? Are we talking about standardized tests or ones made by the teacher? The problem with the latter should be obvious. The problem with the former is that as Kim has mentioned test scores tell more about the student than the teacher (that's what they're for, after all), and what would stop teachers from "teaching to the test" as we say? That's not what school is supposed to be about.

Neo, do you support any kind of performance-based pay scale for teachers, or do you think it's always a bad idea-leaving aside for the moment exactly how performance is judged?

It's a good idea in theory, but how can you assess it fairly? In Ontario your place on the pay scale is based on your qualifications and years of experience, which are things that can be measured objectively and theoretically should have some correlation with job performance. I can't really think of a better way to do it.

The current system needs to change, but this would be a lot worse. Teachers are underpaid but thats because they are paid by the U.S. goverment.

It's a good idea in theory, but how can you assess it fairly? In Ontario your place on the pay scale is based on your qualifications and years of experience, which are things that can be measured objectively and theoretically should have some correlation with job performance. I can't really think of a better way to do it.

What about peer review--weighted less than qualifications and experience, but still a factor? After all, you do know who the bad teachers at your school are.

Shadow your ideas are out there but I see where your coming from.
I am a only a senor in high school but I know who the good teachers are at my high school. I have taken dozens of courses and each teaching method is diffrent so how can you choose who is teaching better and who is a bad teacher. besides We being teens get angry easily at teachers making us really biased. So your plan is horrible

thanks for the input I will make a diffrent plan

Just keep thinking, shadow. It's a problem that people much older and more experienced than you haven't come up with a solution to, but it's worth people thinking about!

It's a good idea in theory, but how can you assess it fairly? In Ontario your place on the pay scale is based on your qualifications and years of experience, which are things that can be measured objectively and theoretically should have some correlation with job performance. I can't really think of a better way to do it.

What about peer review--weighted less than qualifications and experience, but still a factor? After all, you do know who the bad teachers at your school are.

It's true, you do, but, judging from my parents' experiences and the various stories, teachers can be quite vindictive about each other. Although, I have to say, for people that are supposed to be judging all of their students fairly and unbiasedly, they tend to be, on the whole, pretty good about it. Also, that would tend to scale the opposite way of the "qualifications and years of experience," because it always seemed, both my experience directly with my teaching parents, and with their experience, the older and longer a teacher has worked, the more burnt out they get (which is entirely understandable).

teachers can be quite vindictive about each other.

Yes. Maybe it is different at other schools, but the Jr High teachers were/are just as bad about cliques and gossiping as the students.

We had this observation checklist, called the Teach 4 Success -T4S- that the admin used to prepare us for county-wide observations. At least 2-3 times a year, teachers from within our school would spend their plan period and observe their peers; not always in their subject because you need to see good teaching across the subjects. (Likewise, you need to see what bad teaching is and avoid it when possible.)

Officially, once a year, administrators from all the schools in the county (principals, vice-principals, Career Services reps, etc) would split into teams of 3-4 and observe all the teachers at all the schools over the course of two weeks. Your school knew what day, but you as a teacher didn't know what time, so you had to be on 'top form' all day.

Now, I think it was a lot of jumping through hoops because they only observed 20 minutes of your lesson and it's unreasonable to expect you to do everything in 20 minutes all the time but I thought what they were looking for were good things to have spread throughout a regular lesson plan. And trust me when I say, if you did not practice these things all year long, you were not going to do well on this observation.

I'll come back later and edit to add what they were observing.

I'm not sure I would like to see that as a way to determine pay as the way Jason mentioned is also how it is determined here and is at least objective...but I don't disagree (entirely) with what they were looking for in doing these observations.

It's a good idea in theory, but how can you assess it fairly? In Ontario your place on the pay scale is based on your qualifications and years of experience, which are things that can be measured objectively and theoretically should have some correlation with job performance. I can't really think of a better way to do it.

What about peer review--weighted less than qualifications and experience, but still a factor? After all, you do know who the bad teachers at your school are.

Well, as far as my federation is concerned teachers are all equal members of the union and thus we don't have the right to evaluate each other in any formal way, which makes sense. What kind of work environment could we have otherwise? People get evaluated by their boss(es), not their peers. In fact, even department heads are no longer permitted to be involved in the hiring process. Only administrators have a say.

So the obvious question is why not have principals and/or vice-principals evaluate us, and the answer is that they do. It doesn't directly affect out pay, however. It's more of just a legal thing. It's just not really possible for anyone to walk into a teacher's class for a period and say "this is how good a teacher you are. Here's how much money you deserve".

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*head explodes*

kaBAM!

Ditto.

I am doing a huge paper on teachers pay and how it should be based on their performance in class

Gives up and despairs here.