Christopher Bauer’s Weblog

Greetings,

This article, entitled “Fla. To link Teacher Pay to Students’ Test Scores,” initially had me skeptical, but by the end of the three page article, it almost has me convinced.

Essentially, the plan is to introduce a new test, which will be assessed and then compared to the student’s past performance on the test.  From the improvement, the teacher of that student for that subject will receive points.  These points will be added together and then compared against other teachers in the school.  The top 10% of the teachers in the subject will get a bonus of 5%.

Although I initially thought, ‘Oh no, another standardized test,’ I am also convinced that the one way to make encourage teachers to ‘teach better’ is to offer them rewards.  It also does not state that the ‘worst’ teachers will be punished for their ‘lack of ability to teach’.  If it did, I would then be not willing to support it.  I would like to think, optimistically, that every teacher is trying his or her hardest to be the most effective teacher out there, I must accept the fact, based on my personal experiences, and experiences of those I have heard stories from, that there simply are teachers who do not care about the students, or do not care about new, more effective, ways of teaching.  I believe that this would be a decent, although by no means flawless, way of encouraging teachers to re-educate themselves in the most effective ways of teaching.

Website:

Whoriskey, Peter.  “Fla. To link Teacher Pay to Students’ Test Scores”.  Washington Post.  March 22, 2006.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101545.html?nav=rss_education>

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under Personal Readings and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.