First, I'd like to point out that I left quite a long response. This is me patting myself on the back because I'm a 4 year old. BOOM.
Bill Ferreter blogged about the merit based incentive system for teachers. In his blog he complains about economists from various astute universities have decided that a merit based incentive for teachers would be a way to get teachers to work harder and produce better classroom results. I didn't even know people had ever taken this idea seriously. He explains it as follows:" Essentially, participating teachers are given a bonus at the BEGINNING of a school year -- in Fryer and Levitt's study, $4,000 -- and then told that they'll have to GIVE BACK monies if their students don't meet and/or exceed expectations on standardized tests given at the end of the school year. Now THAT is nothing short of pure #edubrilliance, isn't it?" The man has a good point. Why would you punish teachers who do not perform to a certain standard? This could include EXCEEDING expectaions. That. is. ridiculous. The most alarming part of this for me is that there is no way to actually evaluate good teaching. There are schools in Detroit with 60 kids to a classroom and 20 books. How can you punish a teacher working under those conditions for not meeting an expectation when the actual school system has basically set them up for "failure". Teachers are all dealing with different conditions that may be more or less conducive for learning and trying as hard as they can. As Mr. Ferreter points out, teachers don't phone it in. We care about the children and we try as hard as we can FOR THE CHILDREN. It's not about the money, because teachers come into the profession knowing that they are not going to make a lot of money.
Furthermore, there is no fair way to evaluate teachers because we would have to rely on some sort of standardized test. Maybe we could have the teachers have a principal sit in, and have student questionnaires, but even those would not tell the entire story and could be biased. You could have lazy teachers who tried hard to impress the person evaluating them, or simply teaching to the test. So if there are truly lazy teachers, they will pay attention to the aspects that will earn them money and ignore other important aspects that will not benefit them. As I said in my comment, half of new teachers quit within 5 years, those are the teachers who shouldn't be teaching and they weed themselves out. This incentive would ultimately punish the people who stuck with it and have a passion for teaching. At the end of the day, if economists want to help the school systems, pour more money into the school system. Find private donors, take money from the Defense budget and give some to educational programs, but don't punish teachers or reward them for something that is always going to be slightly out of their control.
