Obama Repeats Call For Merit Pay In Front Of Powerful Teachers Union

The Hill:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Saturday thanked the National Education Association for its endorsement but also made it clear that he continues to support merit pay for teachers.

His position is a controversial one with the 3.2 million member group and it has earned him criticism when he addressed the NEA in 2007.

Read the whole story: The Hill

Comments

[RobtBrock]

Merit pay = Sister Soljah

[rasthedestroyer]

Merit pay = Seperating the good ones from that bad ones.

[rasthedestroyer]

OOPS...

[Wilburrr]

If we want a consistent supply of quality people trying to enter the teaching profession then we need to raise the pay for all teachers. Starting pay is a joke. Math and science degrees command far more money in the private sector, but all subjects are equally important.

[RedEyes]

Is PE equally important? Home ec? Math and science degrees are more important because they're harder to understand.

[blindjester]

Breathtaking logic.

[Wilburrr]

A good PE, Home Ec, or whatever you want to bring up, teacher is teaching math, science, and language arts in an integrated curriculum that addresses the needs of all students. That we don't have this consistently across all school districts is due to the lack of candidates due to low pay.

[southernfried]

i think thats a very good idea, i'll support that , it will weave out the poorest teacher performances from the best teacher performances in year to come..

[adzeman]

I guess Obama will be for privatizing the government next. Or maybe recognizing the stars and bars as an alternate US flag. Maybe he can get a couple of votes by proposing a Jesse Helms monument on the White House lawn. Where did Barack Obama go?

[AgeofReason]

Here's an idea: Merit pay for Congress. We can judge them on how many of their bills get passed and signed into law, how many votes they are present for, and how much wasteful spending they cut in other districts but secure for ours.

Merit pay for teachers will not work. How are you going to judge the merit of the teacher who has 5 preps rather than one? What about the AP teachers vs. the special ed teachers? What if I have all average and inclusion classes, and another teacher in the building has all honors classes? Which one of us has more merit? What about the teacher who teaches in the school with over 50% free and reduced lunch; does that teacher merit more or less than the teacher at the affluent school accross town? Are you going to use test scores to determine merit? I can teach to the test more than I am already required to. Are you going to use grades? I'm pretty sure I can structure my grading policy so that no one fails if it will get me a bigger raise.

Most teachers are fine with the pay systems that are in place. They reward longevity and continuing education. You can't base the pay system of every profession on a business model.

[kay]

I think the idea is baseline performance. For example: two teachers, same student population, same school. That corrects for a lot of the variables you mention. It's a "fair" comparison.

The baseline for merit pay would be the teacher who performs better, given the same "conditions".

So, you would compare "like to like". Special Ed teachers compared to other Special Ed teachers.

[Genmaicha]

But even within the same school and same grade level classes are still NOT the same. Sometimes a teacher may get/be given more of the discipline problems or "slow" students.

[RTIII]

All these things are just mathematical variables and it CAN be worked out. See my post elsewhere in this thread for some suggestions. The comments you make that I didn't address merely propose additional factors that work in the equations. The real key is to measure actual change in student performance "of like kind" and factor in the elements that make the job easier or harder. We are more able to do this now than in the past. This is essentially applying science to the job. If tasked with the job, I could do it to most everyone's satisfaction, though it may take some in-service adjustment (like any newly engineered device) to get it right.

[truthynesslover]

I dont know how do you determine if someone has mastered a subject?I went to the u.of chicago back when you didnt even have to show for class just study the subject and pass the test!Is there anouther way I havent heard about?

[chitown8]

Maybe we should use the merit pay in inter-cities some of the teachers. Here in Chicago the public schools system is in shambles if your in a bad area. I am AA that attended a a mixed school in a mixed area of Chicago from there I went to a mixed high school. I think that I benefited from it. in 1995 or so Chicago took over the CPS. I think that it has gotten worst. Now children are force to go to schools in their neighborhoods. In some case that a good idea and some cases that's a bad idea. Example my neighborhood school at the time was Roberto Clemente in Humboldt Park. At the time the grad rate was 25%. I was able to apply through a lottery and got lucky. As of now the schools are closing and the kids are not passing. Teacher should be held accountable to a certain point. For the teacher who are trying to make a difference she/he should be rewarded. The system of awarding all for not the same accomplishment is not the fair. The system should be held accountable at a certain degree if the teacher are considered part of that system they should hold some fault.

[kay]

CLINTON: Well, I support school-based merit pay for a lot of the reasons Chris was talking about. We need to get more teachers to go into hard-to-serve areas. We've got to get them into underserved urban areas, underserved rural areas.

But the school is a team, and I think it's important that we reward that collaboration. You know, a child who moves from kindergarten to sixth grade, say, in the same school, every one of those teachers is going to affect that child.

BLITZER: But what if there's an excellent teacher in that team and a crummy teacher in that team, a teacher who's simply riding along and not really working very hard, not really educating those young kids?

Do you give just everybody the merit pay, or do you give it to individual teachers?

CLINTON: Well, you need to weed out the teachers who are not doing a good job. I mean, that's the bottom line. They should not be teaching our children.

[geobushono]

any teacher that wants merit pay needs to accept an a two year assignment to the lowest performing schools in their district. to demonstrate/justify the compensation...........that's where they're needed the most.........increased pay will be incremental and based on assigned school and real world scholastic improvement.
periodic reviews can be designed to minimize the political influence in assessing the progress.

[kay]

Maybe we didn't talk enough about education in the primary.

Reading the comments, I'm struck by how little people seem to know about the various Democratic candidates proposals.

[4wehttam]

Right on Kay! These people act like this is the first time they've heard of these policy issues. They must have NOT been paying attention during the primary or they didn't quite grasp it. Barack specifically said he supports MORE PAY for teachers, then in additional as an ongoing program supports merit pay for them based on performance. They start off with higher pay and have the opportunity to increase that pay if they consistently work hard. How difficult is that?

[kay]

Edwards' plan was very specific, with dollar numbers.

Clinton vacillated a little: she seemed to waver after getting the teachers union endorsement.

By 2008, I'm not clear where she was on this.

[VivaZapata]

Obama's position on merit pay is simplistic. it fails to recognize how political the education system has become. schools are broken mostly by the structure. principals, whether competent or not, need allies to protect them from the various forces of attack that surround them. in order to ensure that, they must reward those who support them, not necessarily those who teach well. this is also known as ass kissing. another problem is evaluation. different school populations cannot be judged in the same way, though Bush and company would suggest otherwise. language, behavior, sense of achievement, parental supervision, etc. are just a small sampling of the factors that separate goals from school to school, class to class. one very positive and basic step would be to remove licensing of teachers from state university systems. they are too invested in self-preservation, with not the best results.

[kay]

Clinton, Edwards and Obama all supported some form of merit pay.

Clinton was quite clearly in favor of it in 2007, but had stopped mentioning it by 2008.

[VivaZapata]

only in the context of the posted article did i refer to it as Obama's position. I did not in any way mean to imply that merit pay was an original idea on his part or that other politicians weren't guilty of supporting what I, for the reasons stated above, referred to as a simplistic solution. As a former teacher who was recognized for excellence by parents, students, administration and The New York Times, let me tell you that merit pay wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in my performance, but it would have given the administrators greater power to insulate themselves from needed scrutiny.

BTW don't be so naive as to think that if there was money to be made, cheating on tests wouldn't occur.

[Sportswoman]

PART TWO
Furthermore, Ms T, liberalism has nothing to do with the lack of acceptance of merit pay as a general rule. I have no problem with it in concept. It is that we who have seen what happens to people who could not handle being in a classroom with kids, and then, as administrators, are given more money as well as power over those who do prefer that environment, is truly frightening. In Los Angeles the answer seems to be to adhere to some textbook theories advocating Small Learning Communities. Sounds good--except that LA has spent over l.5 million dollars on moving all the secondary classrooms to cluster these communities together but does not have any money to either fund the SLCs nor offer sufficient classes with in each to make them work. Like every hair-brain scheme state superintendants come up with, (bilingual ed, whole language, phonics, sight reading, back to whole language) they cannot be held accountable for teachers' jobs when most often they are too busy to ever watch us teach.Fewer administrators, no limos for sups, or fancy district headqurters. Chop up the big districts into smaller ones, have administrators teach at least one class, have community boards with parents teachers administrators communicating via forums, and maybe then the small learning community can actually work. Urban education needs repair before pay issues can be addressed.

[hawkseye]

Right on!

[truthynesslover]

And the majority of teachers who couldnt pass the G.E.D. test dont forget those!

[blindjester]

"And the majority of teachers who couldnt pass the G.E.D. test dont forget those!"

Glass house?

Your critique of teacher competence omits two apostrophes and contains an error in the antecedent. Here is one possible way to improve your posting:

And the majority of teachers who couldn't pass the G.E.D. test--don't forget those!

Or:

And the majority of teachers who couldn't pass the G.E.D. test should not be forgotten!

This would be better:

Don't forget that a majority of teachers couldn't pass the G.E.D. test!

Even better would be writing something that was true.

[MissT]

I will agree with you that there are a lot of dynamics that go into a failing school. But I stand by my assessment that going forward, assessment of teachers has got to be a part of the solution. I for one can see excuse for keeping unqualified teachers in the classroom no matter what other concitions may exist. And keep in mind that merit pay is but one part of the solution.

I am also a believer that teacher should be held in higher esteem. And one of the ways that we indicate that is by repesentative pay. So qualified teachers should be rewarded at the proper monitary level. Teachers succeeding difficult shools should be rewarded at an even higher level of pay. But the bottom line for me is teachers must be qualified.

Lucky for me, my children are grown so this isn't personal. It's just my observation. I would not want unqualified teachers with low expectations teaching my children or any grandchildren that I may have in the future.

[gypsy508]

Truth is the best thing the federal government can do is leave education decisions to local school committees. Standardized testing of students already is a colossal failure and evaluating teachers by some unknown standard seems a similarly large waste of effort for little reward. Carter created the Dept. of Education. Bush the Elder rightly shut it down only to have it be re-created again later. The education system in America was better before it.

Evaluating teachers to some standard, like doing so for students, leads to a one-dimensional society, not to mention opening the door for mass propaganda. If local school committees want merit pay, I think it would work but some sort of federal measurement is a bad idea.

[hawkseye]

I don't think Bush I shut down the Dept. of Ed.

[MissT]

We are competing in a global world. We cannot afford to leave the education of children at the local level. That's what we have now more or less and it's not working. Most inner city children are not prepared to compete even with their suburban counterparts, let alone children in India, Japan or China.

[Sportswoman]

Ms T and anyone else who uses the word "testing:" STOP. That is everything that has been wrong with education the past several decades. Teachers not only teach to a test, but money is spent on getting kids to pass it through remediation that could be better utilized simply teaching them the fundamentals that they are lacking. This was a core failure of No Child Left A Dime; est scores were expected to increase each year or funding was cut, and this adversely affected the lowest-performing schools. We already have exit exams and they are a drain, particularly whe special needs children are given the same standards yet have not mastered the fundamentals necessary to pass and then special ed requires remediation classes atthe expense of regular classes--thus we have 45 kids packed into Los Angeles HS classrooms in such basic classes as English math and social studies.
The problem is overcrowded classrooms, unmnageably large urban districts, top-heavy with administrators whose job performance is not weighted as heavily as a teacher's, yet are paid 3x what a teacher makes.

[BOISATOOL]

I agree stop this merit pay garbage and just raise wages so we get more people interested in teaching.

[Tropiholic]

Aren't salaries in most professions based on merit? Why should teaching be any different? You don't perform you don't get rewarded, it seems like common sense to me.

[scrawf]

And the problem with urban schools is that the kids who are attending them are generally way behind by the time they get to kindergarten. Kids whose vocabulary is more like that of a 3 year old, kids who have no books at home-and no one to read them books, kids who are emotionally damaged, kids who have no concept of following directions, and who regularly challenge the teacher's authority-these are a few of the problems that confront city schools.

If Obama really wants to change the way that city kids perform, then we need universal preschool, and we also need to hold the feet of city parents to the fire. Parents need to know that they cannot come to school and browbeat teachers who give their kids directions that they don't want to follow. Parents need to understand that their kid(s) need to come to school with homework completed. Parents need to understand that it is not ok to let their kid stay up into the wee hours of the night.

Until those in power are willing to face the real problems of city schools, and to address them, kids will continue to fail. Charter schools will do no better. Until parents are involved and/or compliant with school rules, their kids will continue the sad slide into nowhere.

[kay]

All of the Democratic candidates in the primary supported some form of universal preschool.

Obama has a specific program. It's modeled after a California proposal.

[kay]

Preschool is part of Obama's education plan, as it was part of every Democrat's plan in the primary.

His is modeled after California's proposal.

[sharonh]

Kindergarden IS universal preschool. Leave the kids alone--they already spend too much time in school and on related projects. Get rid of those stupid FCAT tests. All time that could be spent teaching is instead spend preparing for these insane tests and the students suffer. All children are being left behind. Get the feds out of your school system.

[RTIII]

People who say Merit Pay can't work just aren't being objective. Just because THEY aren't smart / creative enough, and because nobody has "done it yet" doesn't mean it can't be done. All the great achievements of mankind have happened against the odds of "can't be done."

Here are just some creative comments that might help make a merit pay system work well:

1) develop statistically valid ways to group students - good home-life, bad home-life, etc. There can be as many groups as makes sense

2) Use the groupings to measure whether any given teacher is producing students, on the whole, at, above, or below the mean, and by how much.

3) Let teachers themselves "curve" the grading - that is, let them grade each other.

4) Let the students grade the teachers - and make comments!

5) Recognize extra activities of teachers and let it contribute to their merit score, such as: Put own money in to the classroom, developed new curriculum, attended professional development training or other such function, worked / volunteered with parent-teachers unions, etc. Create a standardized list. Each contributes to their overall merit score.

6) to help be fair overall, except for 1 & 2, omit all negative input, just add the positive. (eg, if all your students think your wonderful, that counts, but if they all think you're awful, that doesn't count.)

.... just a start ...
.

[pupbayer]

1. You could have as many groups as you do students. Students are human beings and all of them have their own unique situations. Situations change constantly. It's not so easy to pigeon-hole kids.

2. LOL.. as long as all of the teachers involved are professional, know what a good teacher really is, and are totally objective. In small districts, personalities will enter into it. In large districts, they may not even know each other.

3. LOL Most students think a good teacher is one who has no expectations of them. What would be better is let the students grade the teachers AFTER those students are grown and have children of their own. Trust me, their opinions are totally different then.

4. Those who who care only about coaching get points for that. As for PD and organizational work, schools and states require it. Putting money into their own rooms...many, many teachers do...many cannot afford to because they are supporting their own family. They should be "penalized" because they have more children than someone else?

There is no way to make merit pay fair or meaningful when your product is human beings. It is one of those things that sounds good on paper but just doesn't work in practice.

No one would like to see the good teachers be rewarded more than me. I've seen many attempts at it but it just never works. And, in the process, the kids are the ones who lose.

[RTIII]

I don't feel any of you r points are valid.

First off, it seems as though you don't understand mathematics and the statistical sciences. The students CAN, fairly easily, be mathematically described, even if each is unique. There are factors that go into students that can be culled by their basic information in the schools registry - one or two parent home? etc. In some cases, studies have already been performed to provide weighting to these factors, while in other cases, new studies will be needed, and in all cases the system will need some "in service" experience to tweak the math. But the overall idea of tracking students of like-kind is valid and implementation is straight forward. This is the primary point of my post.

Secondly, you harp too much on the human animal as if it's somehow not understandable. This is your failing. We can - and in many ways are - well understood at the statistical level. Lots of good examples are found in the domain of marketing.

Third, you see this as a penalization system - I get that from your response - and I think this is the REAL reason you don't like the idea. I'm seeing it as a REWARDING system to give EXTRA not basic income. The concept is that all get a base amount, and some earn an extra amount for being excellent in ways we can recognize.

It's YOUR perspective that's the problem.

[AgeofReason]

Actually, people who say merit pay won't work are being scientific. It has been done before. Check this link: http://www.psea.org/article.cfm?SID=165

There have been several studies on the merits of merit pay, and as a general rule, they have not shown that merit pay improves education.

[tcagle]

A lot of my talented schoolmates would have loved to teach, but not for the insultingly low wages offered. Let teaching be a desirable profession and pay them what they are worth. We could attract much more talent that way, and push the stinkers out. Merit pay is not even a bandaid.

[senga6]

Oh, please. When will the unions learn/admit that what's best for the union is not always what's best for the country? Even teachers will tell you that part of the problem with our so-called education system is the widespread tolerance of incompetent teachers. Their very presence in the school system is an insult to the teachers who strive and work hard to do their best for the kids.

I'd sure like to be in a profession where my union membership entitles me to be protected from my own consistently bad performance! But, luckily for my clients, I am expected to do my job and do it well, and if I do I will be rewarded, and if not I will get CANNED.

I read an article about this subject in Time magazine in a doctor's office about 6 months ago, and it was very optimistic about merit pay, when applied correctly, as one possible tool to improve our education system. Obama is on the right track here. I disagree with him on FISA, but I have gained a lot of respect for him over the last few weeks as he has been mercilessly attacked from the left for not being the perfect progressive fantasy hero they have been having wet dreams about for eight years. He has remained level-headed and thoughtful in the face of a lot of crap.

[PoliJunkie]

Thank you. I too think this is great idea for the teachers. I have worked in the school systems for years and the "bad" teachers are protected far too long. They should be canned like anyone else doing a bad job.

[hawkseye]

There are no incompetent teachers where there are competent administrators. There are no tenure laws anywhere that prevent firing of incompetents.

[BOISATOOL]

We do not need to be canning anyone, we need to give teacher the tools and resources to be successful. Merit pay is a gimmick that can be gamed at the expense of real learning. If we want smarter and more successful students we are going to have to pay teachers more and turn schools in to 12 month endevors. No one needs the summer off.

[gypsy508]

Personally I'd like to right to pay my doctor based on how good he/she was. But that ain't gonna happen either.