From the Hunington Teacher
Merit pay tied to test scores is counter-productive. Instead of motivating, it demoralizes. Value added measures are invalid methods of assessing growth. Elimination of seniority, so administration may keep staff based on skill, not time on the job, has produced unintended consequences: effective professional teachers are leaving in droves.
Now Indiana wants to add relaxing teacher licensing requirements to the list of ruses to demoralize and deskill the teaching profession. The real purpose of these collective initiatives is to eliminate the voice of opposition, specifically teacher unions, so education bureaucrats can “improve” education by reducing its cost and allow the continued privatization of the education market.
In order to sell the idea of reducing the cost of education and to privatize a once public institution, the Federal DOE, entrenched with huge corporations, has waged a propaganda campaign that poor teaching is the root of the problem in education. This is wrong. Professor James Alexander notes:
The documentary [Waiting for Superman] and most other commentaries on schools and schooling—as well as laws and funding—are based on the notion that somehow teachers are the root cause of the problems facing U.S. schools. The idea seems to be that we need to get rid of a whole bunch of lazy, incompetent teachers. I have a problem with that notion.
The education system in the United States has a problem, but not with its teaching profession. The U.S. has a poverty problem. In a report by the United Nations’ Children Fund (UNICEF), the poverty rate among children in the U.S. is among the worst. Over 20% of U.S. children live in poverty.
In an article in The Principle Difference, Mel Riddle writes:
The problem is not as much with our educational system as it is with our high poverty rates. The real crisis is the level of poverty in too many of our schools and the relationship between poverty and student achievement. Our lowest achieving schools are the most under-resourced schools with the highest number of disadvantaged students.
Instead of addressing the poverty issue, the federal government has attacked public education and used teachers as scapegoats. A necessary component of a successful campaign against teachers was weakening teacher unions.
William Hileman, in an article in the Post Gazette adds:
The claim that seniority keeps bad teachers in the classroom and harms children is absolutely false. The two objectives of this movement are to weaken unions and to pay teachers less… School district wants the power to lay off higher-paid, experienced teachers and to keep lower-paid inexperienced teachers. Who has the best interests of children at heart, the district's accountants or the teachers?
Student success and teacher success are intertwined… A proposal to change the basis for layoffs from seniority to performance is an illegal shortcut designed to circumvent fair evaluations and due process. Layoffs cannot be used as a substitute for a rigorous and legal procedure for performance evaluations.
Today's measures of effective teaching are in their infancy and have limited or no validity. It is impossible to differentiate between two effective teachers and then to fairly decide who does and does not have a job. The research affirms this and the school district knows it.
Further continuing the ruse is to rate teachers based on test scores. There is very little logic behind these merit based pay schemes and value added measures. This from Schools Matter: How Much Teachers Affect Student Achievement, and Other Myths:
Around 9 percent of variation in student achievement is due to teacher characteristics. About 60 percent of variation is explainable by individual student characteristics, family characteristics, and such variables. All school input combined (teacher quality, class variables, etc.) account for approximately 21 percent of student outcomes." So even though teachers are the most important school-based factor in student achievement (however you measure it), a teacher's influence pales in comparison to factors from outside the school. So now you can explain to me the logic of how student testing and observations should count 100% of a teacher's evaluation for effectiveness when teachers, even the best ones, account for less than 10 percent of student achievement.
So, does having qualified teachers in the classroom really matter, or should we allow relaxed teacher licensing? In a research brief form IUPUI entitled Teacher Licensure/Certification in the United States:
Teacher quality has been shown to be the primary institutional factor in improving levels of student achievement (Clotfelter, Ladd & Vigdor, 2007). As a result, much of the professional discourse and research has focused on the ability to recruit, prepare, and retain a highly qualified teaching force.
As a group, the studies find that teachers who are fully certified (through traditional college/university based teacher education programs) have a more significant positive impact on student outcomes than teachers who are not. Similarly, it suggests that full certification rather than alternative certification is associated with better teacher quality and subsequently better student performance... and more importantly, the impact on low income urban and rural minority populations when a significant portion of their teachers are not fully certified and/or have the appropriate skills and training to teach all children.
In other words, qualified teachers make all the difference in student achievement. It is just that student achievement is not that which can be measured on a standardized test.
If our true focus is only to have students pass a nationalized, standardized test, by all means, keep up the ruses, deskill teachers and hire cheaper labor. However, if we expect our students to become thinkers, problem solvers, life-long learners, with creative and flexible minds, and citizens to preserve the democratic process, protecting a highly skilled teaching force and inspiring the next generation of college students to teach must become a priority.
http://ahuntingtonteacher.blogspot.com/2012/05/ruse-of-merit-pay-value-added-measures.html
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