Performance based salary for teachers?

The state of Florida is going to institute pay for teachers based on theperformance of students.

Therefore shouldn't the administrators pay be based upon teacher performance.


There is much more to education than just teacher/student interaction.

The correlation between having a nice facility opposed to a ratty, rundown school building, and learning should also be taken into account. Parent/teacher/student interaction is also important.

Teachers as scapegoats seems to be De rigueur currently.
I couldn't raise a family on a teachers salary without my wife working too.
Thats why I went into business for myself.

I say if they are going to pay by performance, it's a grand per A, per student, and the scale would go down from there.

[edit on 23-3-2006 by SpittinCobra]

I do believe that good teachers are not paid enough. At the same time, the poor teachers need to be kicked out. That is practically impossible with the teacher's union. I will be suprised if Flordia goes to an uncorrupted perfomanced based teacher's pay.

If it going to be based on performance, then it shouldn't be based on grades. I believe the parents should have a say. They will have to think long and hard about how they are going to implement it. A good teacher can have more students with lower grades if their standards are higher for the kids. A poor teacher can have students will all good grades, because they really don't care and just pass the students.

The facility should not really have any effect. The only effect that should be considered is if the teacher has the proper teaching tools. The school can be run down with great teachers and proper tools, and the kids will do very well.

Just throwing money at a facility or the system isn't going to help anything. The US throws more money at the school system than almost every other country, and yet we have the lowest test scores of most countries. I have read news stories here and there about students from poor facilities with highly dedicated teachers out performing some of the best schools in the public education arena.

aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.... nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I'm gonna die cause I'm alergic to bull----

performance based pay?!!! come on! I know this for a fact because my mother is a teacher. you dont have to have all A students to be a great teacher. There are other factors. like how willing the students are to learn. how smart the students are already. the amount of funding availible. all kinds of things other than the grades. grades just means smart students. I have A's in classes where the teachers are horrible. should they get a bonus for it. NO!

I don't think it's a very good idea. It would just pad the grades, and further mask the failures of the teachers. Unless you want to organize and fund an entire division of investigators, like an IA for schools, there's nothing to stop the teachers from disadvantaging the students and making bank at the same time.

Performance-based salaries for parents, on the other hand...

What if the parent is a teacher

I am a teacher. Like most teachers, I am a pretty smart person who is qualified to do a lot of things. I chose teaching because I love when I get a kid to see how much pleasure can be found in a great book. While I do think I should be paid more, I knew going into it that I wasn't going to get rich this way. My classroom is a place that I hope a few people may fondly remember 10, 20 or maybe even 50 years from now because they discovered something about themselves and some of the beauty in the world. My classroom is not a factory where I manufacture Dilberts for corporate America.

This is already happening in a roundabout way, where schools receive funding based upon the students' performance on standardized tests. Thus, you have many situations where the teachers are pressured to "teach to the test", which results in a sub-par academic experience.

I believe teachers don't want to manufacture Dilberts for Corporate America, but that's in fact happening all too often. The sad thing is, in a good number of public schools, creating Dilberts for Corporate America is a goal way too lofty to be realistic.

ok class, today's lesson will be basic mathematics.

Timmy, if I get a $20,000 bonus when all 20 students in my class get an A, how much do I get per student?

Timmy: um...hmmm....$1,000 Mr. Crakeur.

That's correct Timmy.

Now, Jenny, if I get $1,000 per A student, how much do you get if you work hard enough to get that A?

Jenny: Sir?

ok, I switched to supply and demand economics. This is a bit different from what you will learn in economics next year. In this case, how much are you demanding I pay you so that you will each supply me with A work?


and that class, is another form of trickle down economics. you all get A's, I get a new car and you can go buy the new xbox 360 or whatever it is you kids spend your money on.

Yay performance based salary for me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111
that would be so freaking awesome!
I have so much crap I need to fix...
so many things to buy...
golf clubs are so damn expensive...
bike needs new frame...
needs new wheels...
prolly could used new sprocket...
need new graphix card...
ps3 comming out soon..
oh the things I'd do with that cash...

Originally posted by Lianna My classroom is not a factory where I manufacture Dilberts for corporate America.

Really? So, then what is school for? I thought the purpose of school is obedience training --like for dogs. Also, high schools convince people to go to college, where they can get into debt, and make school administrator rich, while funding over-specialized humanities professors.

Are you trying to pervert the purpose of school? Don't the overpaid, useless school bureacrats have enough time between to useless thwart such a wasteful travesty?

Don't smart students ditch class? So, what is wrong with performance-based salaries? Is it too much work to rig the test, like good students do. How hard is it for you to find good, who will help the class cheat on the test? Is there something wrong with that?

Schools have a lot of different functions in US society, crontab. They're supposed to functions as institutions that impart academic knowledge, properly integrate the little monsters we fondly call 'children' into society, teach (often conflicting) social and moral values, to help lift the poor out of poverty, to keep our kids drug- and disease-free, and so on.

So, yes, you're partly right. Our schools are there, in part, to make sure our children are willing to be productive members of this society. Currently that's defined as looking forward to working in Dilbert-land. We get friction from teachers, at least partly, because we're asking the same people who said "Hell no!" to Dilbert-land to encourage our kids to want to go there

I've said it before in this forum, and I'll recommend it again now. If anyone wants to know why the foundations of the American Educational system are flawed in the way they are, pick up the book Imperfect Panacea by Henry J Perkinson. It's a short read, but has some good information on why public education gained support in the US, and the conflicting goals that have led it to where it is now.

So, if I understand this correctly, you pay teachers based on their performance in a setting where both the curriculum and their authority is strictly comprimised.

It's like telling a long distance runner that you're paying him on his time in the race, then throwing caltrops onto the field and slashing his hamstrings. Teachers, having little control over what they teacher, are often stuck. The dumb kids sit back, cause trouble because they're frustrated. They either don't ahve the proper tools and need a different kind of learning, or the teacher doesn't have the proper rod to encourage them. The smart kids mouth off and cause trouble (yeah, I was one of those) because they're bored. They put in a very minimal effort, get high-B and low-A grades, then spend the rest of the time doing what they want. Teacher's can't properly reward their hard work, so why bust your balls?

Now that we've got the bell curve set, the teacher's really can't do much about it. I was one of those kids who sat aroudn class, read, and mouthed off whenever the teacher bothered me. There was really no reason for me to be there- I'd procrastinate, do a twenty-minute job, get my A. I was there because I HAD to be there. What could teh teacher do? I'd be sitting there reading, ignoring them, and they'd get understandably angry. When they asked me to participate, I debated and contradicted them. If I didn't like them, I even embarassed them. Hell, in my last year of highschool I almost had one teacher in tears because I'd constantly correct her spelling or contradict what she'd say.

"Russian royal family 'abdicated'? that's a polite way of putting it."

"You misspelt Tokyo again, Miss."

"Yes, I'd like to teach this class, Miss."

etc.

You give people improper tools, you get an imperfect product.

DE

Or you can have a state like mine that is considering this and beefed up their testing under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. They purposely made the test a "high level" test to find out where the students are in their respective learning curves. The downside of this is that Indiana positively stunk on the scores.

The politicians started to lay into the schools and teachers for not teaching "hard" enough and making low scores on the tests until the Education Department admitted to what they did.

The latest result from that fiasco is that two schools in the nearby town are slated for either completely closing or bringing in a whole new administrator and staff for the school. Parents were offered vouchers from those schools to take their kids to more progressive schools, but there were so many parents that applied that they only allowed just over 100 kids to transfer to other schools. The rest were left in the non-succeeding school.

Then there is bogus procedures like last year for my (then) Sophomore son where they did the ISTEP test. The schools made a bid deal out of it about contacting the teachers and school staff when we received the results from it so that we could fine-tune his education lackings.

We got the results... Oh yeah.

Pass or Fail.

When I called the school, they told me to call the Indiana Education Department about why they couldn't give more definitive results for the testing. The assistant to the Commissioner finally told me that they had spent over $100,000 in testing money to let the "teachers practice for the test so they all know what to expect", and then they threw all the "grades" in the trash that showed where my son excelled and where he failed.

Just to let the teachers practice.

Man, that makes me do a slow burn, even now.

JDub

Performance based pay would work well if performance were not largely a function of a child's motivation and attitude.

My wife teaches at a school with many ghetto kids who spit on her and throw chairs, etc. No one else will interact with these kids.

For a performance based pay scale to work in this setting, youl would have to START the salary at around 90,000.

Otherwise, the only people who will take this job are people who are motivated by a desire to teach and help, and will accept the low pay for hours worked. (My wife recently logged 100 off the record hours for the school on paper work she is supposed to pretend was done on school time.)

Meanwhile, Virginia has its own state test, called the Standards of Learning (otherwise known as the Shi** Out of Luck test.) The state has been sending around bureaucrats to tell teachers that they should ignore the good students and the lousy students, and devote most of their time to the kids who are marginal.

What a wonderful result of a game theoretic human policy.

[edit on 4-5-2006 by Ectoterrestrial]

My understanding is that a lot of the money gets wasted on needless overhead. Suppose we have a budget of $6,000/student, which is less than most public schools. If we have a class size of 25 students, then we have $6,000*25=$150,000. Remember, schools also operate tax-free. So, how about this budget:

$30,000 Facilities.
$30,000 School Supplies
$65,000 Teacher salary
$15,000 Supplmental Money

The teacher salary cost should include employment overhead expenses. Am I missing something from the budget. If not, it appears to me that most schools in the United States are quite well-funded. Furthermore, this doesn't include additional revenue from pop machines, food, and corporate sponsorship (I.E. Channel 1).

Why do we need to spend so much money on 'education'? If nothing else, wouldn't the money be better spent on better libraries?

I know my true posts are getting dated but bear with me.

Being in middle school I can speak most people my age.

Spend the money on people that care. Spend it on optional programs that are more advaced. The only part of school that anyone likes are the electives and I've noticed that they are really the only ones I'm learning anything of importance in. Jeez I learned this crap in what, 3rd grade. Do you really need to reiterate it to me for 4 years!