Quote:
Originally Posted by 9th Engineer
I would generally agree to the idea of making teaching positions very well paid, and making them very dependent on performance. You would need to abolish teachers unions, make the training program very rigorous and demanding, and have schools compete for the best teachers. Essentially you would need to limit the field much more to achieve a consistently higher quality of teacher.
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This is a big issue round here at the moment. Our teachers are very well paid.
http://blog.mlive.com/ann_arbor_news_extra/teacher_pay/
and here's the quote from our principal:
Quote:
Naomi Zikmund-Fisher, the principal at Ann Arbor Open at Mack, said traditional merit pay plans are dependent on the individual students in a class.
"If you get a class full of students that are way behind grade level and you bring them up to grade level, you might have done a better job than someone who got a class full of students that already are at grade level and just moved them up a bit, yet on the tests it would look like the second teacher had better achieving students," Zikmund-Fisher said.
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exactly. Just what we are demonstrating with the 5th-grders needing subtraction tuition. A better class test score would probably be attained by continuing to teach them enough by rote to scrape through rather than taking the time to make sure they actually understand.... and then more time could be devoted to moving the rest up an extra bit of a notch. Fortunately, our school relies on parental support, so the "we" this morning was me and another mom who is an elementray teacher with a math speciality, so the class teachers could also work on cranking the whole class up another notch, and even had time to provide some extra challenges for the children who exceed the required standard.
I'm reading this thead backwards so I'm assuming this is what got us onto standardized tests?