Re: Comparing Professionals

["Dale Courtney" <dmcourtn@moscow.com>]

Dale wrote:
>> "Rather, there should be a system of merit pay for teachers: People who
>> perform better should be rewarded, and this gives everyone the incentive to
>> improve performance."

Sunil asked:
> How will performance be measured?  I don't disagree with the concept, but I
> wonder how to measure performance when one considers all the variables. Do
> we look at how their students do? An advanced placement teacher is going to
> look good in terms of the performance of  her students, when compared to
> other teachers, but does that mean that she's necessarily performing better
> than the other teachers?

Lucy Zoë beat me to the punch, so I'm not going to repeat much of what she has already said.

 

As someone who has been involved for over 20 years in setting performance goals and evaluating them -- in both educational and non-educational environments -- I can tell you that it is more difficult than the current system (years+education), but not impossible. Administrators (and lawyers) like the current system because it's easy and objective (put the numbers in a spreadsheet and out pops the salary).

 

What teacher characteristics produce the best student performance? Recent research results show that smarter teachers produce better students, and that there is little or no association between the established measures of teacher training and student performance.

Recently, the Abell Foundation released a report that summarized the extant literature on teacher quality as properly measured by student performance (Walsh, Kate. 2001. Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality. Baltimore, MD: The Abell Foundation. www.abell.org). Predictably, this research has been carried out primarily by economists and other social scientists outside the education establishment. The findings of the Abell report (pp. 5-7) are:

1. Teacher quality is a strong determinant of student achievement, regardless of the demographics of the students. Some teachers are clearly better than others.

2. Experienced teachers are more effective than new teachers. However, the positive effect of experience seems to peter out after a few years, and may in fact decline in later years.

3. Matching teachers and students race does not consistently improve student performance.

4. The most consistent finding is that effective teachers have higher scores on tests of verbal and other measures of cognitive ability. This is apparently the single best predictor of teacher effectiveness. Simply put, brains matter.

5. Teachers who have attended more selective colleges produce higher student achievement. One suspects that this is why private schools tend to hire teachers from such colleges. Selective colleges are probably simply another measure of the general intelligence of their student bodies.

6. At the secondary level, science and mathematics teachers with better knowledge of subject matter are generally more effective. Again, another surrogate measure of general intelligence. There has been little research done of the importance of subject matter knowledge in English and the social sciences.

7. At the elementary level of teaching, there is no research that finds any particular college course work to be more effective.

8. Teachers with master’s degrees are not significantly more effective than those without, unless the teacher is at the secondary level and the degree is in the subject matter being taught.

If you are truly interested in relative pay systems and performance measures, I suggest you look at private school incentives for pay (including higher/grad ed). They've been doing it successfully for years (and not on the government pay scale system).

> I know that just about any teacher judged on the basis of my performance
> until I was 27 would have been in danger of losing a job.

ROTFL! 

 

Dale Courtney

Moscow, Idaho