From Practical State.com
by Jeannie Smith
Much was trumpeted by the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation’s partnership with Hilborough County Public Schools (HCPS) to implement “groundbreaking approaches to ensure that all students have access to effective teachers in every classroom.” Within the $100 million grant was funding for a merit pay scheme based on student performance on standardized tests. Here are the operative points from the Foundation’s web site:
Measuring, supporting, and rewarding effective teaching.
Redesign the teacher evaluation system (so at least 40 percent is based on student achievement, compared with seven percent today), incorporating teams of highly trained teacher-evaluators, and linking evaluation to mentoring and professional development.
Establish a performance-based career ladder that raises the bar for tenure including an optional fourth year before awarding tenure.
Refine pay-for-performance by linking it to better measurements of student learning, teacher progress on the career ladder, and observational evaluations.
Institute an apprentice-teacher program, providing new teachers with trained mentors, one-on-one support, and weekly observation for two years.
Provide teachers with model lesson plans and instructional guides, and better classroom tests and assignments, as well as professional development and peer support for these new tools.
Boilerplate school reform stuff to be sure and all part of SB736. But part of the core assertions of the school reform movement of which Gates is one of the high priests, is that poverty doesn’t matter. A motivated by profit teacher they assume will overcome the fact that a child comes from a poor family – or maybe even has no family at all. Here’s a key part of Jennie Smith’s op-ed:
Indeed, where merit pay has been tried in American public schools it has not produced the desired results. In Hillsborough County, 97% of teachers receiving merit bonuses the first year worked in affluent schools; only 3% worked in low-income schools. A recent Vanderbilt University study found that merit pay did not affect student achievement; teachers receiving up to $15,000 bonuses produced the same results as teachers not receiving the bonuses, and the general feeling among bonus-recipients and non-recipients was that the recipients were no more effective than the non-recipients.
The Hillsborough numbers should be tatamount to a tornado warning. They’re not. Nor has it given pause to Florida’s GOP legislators or it’s ideologically driven reformers. Reformers consistently fail to recognize contrarian data. It’s irresponsible. Writes Smith:
SB 736 has the exact same shortcomings in this respect as SB 6 did. Even when the legislation calls for paying more to those who teach in Title I (high-poverty) schools, this does not offset the fear of losing one’s job due to poor student test scores. Only someone who intends to teach for a very short period of time–perhaps one, two, three years–would be willing to take that risk. Anyone planning on making a career of teaching will lean toward the option of a “safer” school–i.e., a more affluent school. Perhaps they won’t receive the Title I bonus, but they have a better chance of keeping their job
Current teachers - good or bad – are not going to go into a Title I school with it’s impoverished student body; not only because they won’t get a bonus, but also because they could be fired for their students having poor tests grades. Fifty percent of teacher’s evaluations will come from student performance on test scores. The Hillsborough numbers unmask the merit pay myth and reveal the folly of SB736.
Scott’s signature on SB736 will prompt an exodus of good teachers from Florida’s Title I schools. The exodus of those schools’ countless dedicated and talented teachers will be left with a staff of permanent substitute teachers and a few Teach for America kids. The later are only supposed to stay three years. Most don’t even get that far. This is an equation certain to yield a train wreck.
So onward Florida goes.
Intoxicated by the soothing words of a siren (Michelle Rhee), mesmerized by a propoganda film (Waiting for Superman) and blindly following a soothsayer (Jeb Bush), Florida’s Republican legislators and its naive Governor are driving education over a cliff.
http://www.practicalstate.com/2011/03/06/bill-gates-hillsborough-experiment-with-merit-pay-failed-so-why-are-we-plowing-ahead-with-sb-736/
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