Teachers — and their unions — are warming to the idea of merit pay, reports the New York Times.
A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession.
Typically, teachers prefer merit pay plans that are based on several factors, not just student performance.
No,it’s not right, but I need some convincing that continuing to take the money from the other taxpayers, if we implement reform, is right, period.
The money following the kid to something equally as bad instructionally doesn’t represent improvement and might not represent a “savings.”
As I’ve tried to say, vouchers with some kind of oversight in terms of what kind of schools they can be spent at sounds great. It’s only the “parent choice alone will be enough to create a net improvement” part that I doubt.
Individual parents care about what they see as the best interest of their kids, but they don’t have much interest in the common good it seems to me these days. There’s going to have to be something built into the voucher system that guarantees benefits to the folks who pay without kids in the system.
I think voucher proponents are assuming that I say that as a way to prevent vouchers from being implemented. I don’t. I say it because it’s what’s missing from the advantages of vouchers as they are presently discussed.
In Georgia, with unrestricted parent choice, we’d probably end up with the School for Perpetuating Athletic Eligibility and the School for Maximizing your Social Security Disability Benefits, as well as racist and religious segregation academies of various stripes, none of which would be focused on academic instruction.
Why not build into the system a way to prevent that from happening?
NDC said:
“n my district, the amount of money we could collect from the state would be down by two for Ragnarok’s kids, which would be significant in terms mainly of allocated teacher pay if they happened to be the particular kid who pushed the average over to earning enough to pay another teacher: the 25th if the state cap was 24 say, or if it was a year we were allocated state funds for new textbooks. In most cases, two kids being gone really wouldn’t make an appreciable difference in what was actually spent at that school that year. The teachers would be employed; the air conditioning would still be on; and extra textbooks would probably sit in the book room.”
There are fixed costs and variable costs. The fixed costs are step functions (you need one classroom whether you have 1 or 24 students, two classrooms), the variable costs change with every student. So this argument could be used to say to public schools that after the first student, they’d only get variable costs for each new student. Right? So you’re further weakening the public school case for mo’ money, mo’ money, all the time, rain or shine.
Yes, I understand that the state didn’t give me back my money. Yes, my honest politicos spent it elsewhere – shock! horror! But it’s nonetheless money that was saved.
“In Georgia, with unrestricted parent choice, we’d probably end up with the School for Perpetuating Athletic Eligibility and the School for Maximizing your Social Security Disability Benefits…”
Yes, as opposed to the Public Schools to Maximize Teacher Pay, the Public Schools to Maximize Fraud, and the Public Schools to Maximize Ignorance.
BTW, I read Nancy Flanagan’s screed. Hard to see what the fuss is about. There are the usual “accepted truths” (teachers are grievously underpaid), the usual comparisons to university professors and engineers, the ever-present plea for more money. Nowhere did I see anything about getting rid of bad teachers or running schools more efficiently.
Have I made the claim for mo’ money, mo’ money all the time? It seems to me that my claims have always been pretty limited.
For example, I might have claimed that teacher salaries shouldn’t be the area that funding for public school restroom supplies should come from when other money was being wasted by the system. Or that it wasn’t reasonable to expect teachers to be held more responsible for maintenance than it was to hold the people who were being paid to do maintenance responsible, but I don’t think I’ve ever made the case that taking more money from the taxpayers was the answer. I’ve NEVER believed that the total amount collected was the problem.
(I own up to asserting that I didn’t think you could just renege on teacher retirement as a way to address shortfalls, but you could fix that with allocating funds differently rather than straight up increasing the tax burden if honoring state contracts had any value.)
Was the 20,000 saved or was it wasted? You have a self-interest in claiming “saved” to make a case for shifting your private school burden onto other payers with a voucher, but it’s hard to make the case to the other people who had to pay for it that it reflected any savings or that any expectation that they will pay less, rather than more, if vouchers are implemented would be reasonable. It creates a direct entitlement for you to the voucher, but guarantees nothing about what could be collected from taxpayers in the name of school funding.
Why do you want to stay in this “only unlimited parent choice vouchers” or the present system loop? It’s an either/or fallacy in a way.