Rewarding teacher quality: a rough draft on a measured system to do this consistently
Having heard the arguments that you can't measure teacher quality, I gave it some thought. Surely there's no perfect way to do it, but what if you tried.First things first, every teacher deserves a healthy base pay, this would be above that in order to reward those teachers who had proven results with their subject. This is mainly a method to adjust the pay, but as I'm sure plenty could point out- pay isn't the strongest correlation to student performance. A bad teacher in a smart area can do well, and a great teacher in an area that has cultural dysfunctions will not prosper either. So, this is by no means a cure all and isn't meant to be: it's simply a way to structure a rewards system to justly compensate those teachers who have consistent performance.
A few preconditions:
structural:
1. end social promotion
2. variable class sizes
3. incentivize quality and quantity
4. mandatory, enforced attendance, or make it so that the student actually is there for the classes
5. regular standardized tests that are not simply multiple choice, can't be 'taught to' and measure aptitude separate from actual knowledge and skills.
6. embrace 'tracking' individual students, which means to allow students to take courses outside their proscribed age level, also encourage students who are behind not to advance (related to social promotion)
cultural:
1. reward entrepreneurship and academics
2. promote studying and self improvement
3. Stress academics and those things that are lasting over those temporary things such as physical prowess - the mind masters the body not the other way around
4. embracing standardized testing, perhaps by making them race-neutral to remove the most controversial components - we should treat each child like a human being and not an identity class
Now, of course, those things are never going to happen, thank you NEA/AFT. But, let's just assume they did.
You could measure teacher performance, this is likely going to be relatively obvious but I wanted to write it out, by formulating said equations:
student test at entry = STE
student test at exit = STEX
average student test at entry = ASTE
average student test at exit = ASTEX
(ASTEX-ASTE) = Average Improvement for the year = IMPROVEAVERAGE
(STEX-STE) = Student Improvement for the year = IMPROVEACTUAL
and if you took each grade level, up to 12, for each test, so that the 9th grade exit test was STEX9
then by taking (STEX9-STE9) and comparing that number to STE10, you could get an idea of both what was gained/lost over the summer, and also a nice control on STEX9 in order to factor in test anomalies.
The rewards to the teacher, then, would be to measure how much the individual student was able to outstrip the curve in terms of their learning that year in that subject. If you could take a student who started 9th grade science with a proficiency at a 10th grade level and was able to get him to the 12th grade level, that should cause a reward to the teacher. Now this also gets complicated as well because age becomes a bad predictor for one's skills within that area. Meaning that not all 9th graders perform as 9th graders on both Math and Science. So, one would probably want to adjust for that and place students based on their tested skill level. This could get hairy, though, and I recall someone quoting a study that said that students placed out of their age bracket in such scenarios, which used to be more common, felt a great degree of alienation and separation that could be unhealthy. Even though that concern seems ambiguous, it's worth considering.
Also, while I'm obviously a fan of standardized tests, even though I don't usually do well on them, they should be localized. Nationalization of our testing standards is an awful awful thing. Each area, state, locality, should be allowed to set their own standards. We want all "American" children to perform at a specific level, but we do so with the arrogance of not considering that perhaps people are happy with how they have things. As well, perhaps my system isn't meant for everyone - perhaps a specific area wants to teach only through oral tradition, or one solely through rigorous science devoid of the humanities. I wouldn't send my hopeful future family through such a place, but it ought to be encouraged to develop. We could stand to be a little less nationally concerned, and be so quick to label one part of the country 'behind' or lacking in one way or another.
And of course this is all very rigid, so maybe it's unrealistic, but I'm not a superintendent making policy, I'm just trying to sketch this out.
Labels: education, ideas, policy
posted by . @ 3:33 PM
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