Its great that inter-school pay disparity (or should I say, lack of disparity) between more and less demanding schools is getting attention. Has anyone spent tried to solve the intra-school disparity among teachers of different grades? At an elementary school level its common for schools to “hide” their less capable teachers in lower grades, where there are less testing requirements. The inevitable result is kids less and less prepared for 3/4/5 grade. Prior to NCLB I think inferior teachers were more broadly spread out, maybe one in each grade. Now it seems they get shuffled into the lower grades, and you have the problem of 2+ years in a row of bad teaching. As a practical matter most teachers of state-wide testing grades simply work longer hours. Maybe pre-NCLB a 5th and a 1st grade teacher had similar jobs. But with NCLB type accountability and focus on testing means that a teacher who is in a testing grade has a more stressful and demanding job that a K-2 teacher has.

To some extend tracking individual students will alleviate this problem. E.g. bringing a 4th grader who comes in reading on a 2nd grade level up to a 3.5 grade level should be considered a qualified success, certainly not a failure. As it is bringing a child who does no better (and pehaps worse, scarily enough) that what random chance should be capable of up to a 60% is not deemed a success. From a purely hobbesian perspective, why put any extra effort into a kid you could get to almost-passing, if you still think no one-year effort will get that kid to pass?

My Solution:
1. judge teachers by the individual gains of students, i.e. track their year to year growth. The weakest schools suffer from a transitory population, so tracking must be on a state-wide level, not a district level.
2. An extra $X to teach at an academically struggling school, however defined.
3. An extra $Y to teach a high pressure testing grade.
4. Extra $Z to schools that do not get free parent volunteers that do copying, etc. Those teachers need the basic secretarial help to focus on teaching and tailoring their lessons to the individual needs of school.

Unfortunately, the likelihood anything they love will be good for teachers (or kids) is very low.

People without merit, in fact, should not be teaching kids. Until the city addresses this fact (and it’s spent over 30 years assiduously ignoring it) you can expect to see the same cooked books and homemade statistics Mayor Mike has been dishing out for the last few years.

All participants in a school community need a basic grasp of student achievement data analysis for the school to develop a “culture of achievement”–not just teachers.

Teachers know what kids say about other teachers. Teachers certainly form impressions based on conversations with other teachers. But rarely do teachers actually observe one another, or analyze student achievement data indexed by teacher.

Teachers and students know who good teachers are…we should start listening to them…

So I love the idea of merit pay. Love it. Did I mention I love merit pay? But when the Gods want to punish us they answer our prayers. Cheating on standardized tests is rampant in the City’s most troubled schools. And test prep as a substitute for education, already out of control, will now have a financial impetus behind it.

I love merit pay. I earned it, and many of my colleagues deserve it. But unless merit pay is based on a metric that cannot be gamed by those who benefit from it, the potential for it backfiring is considerable.