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Paying teachers for performance


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Much has been made about teacher pay. Little has been done. Determining the best teachers is also uncertain.  This proposal is for comprehensive measurement of teaching performance with a recommendation that better teachers be exposed to more students and be paid more.

The typical student experiences 50 teachers, 15 substitutes (for more than a week), 5 counselors and 4 principals in his preK-12 experience. The teachers have the greatest impact but the others are not unimportant. Measuring the impact of these 74 interactions for a population of 50,000,000 million students over a period of years is no mean feat.

How do you measure teaching performance? By the quality of the work product of course and that is the improvement in performance of the students exposed to the teacher. In an industrial process you would improve the process by making sure the process steps are consistently executed and the the inputs are of consistent quality. In education little is consistent.

So rather than an industrial model it may be necessary to try other models to find measurements. A retail model may be most appropriate. Especially the approach used on cruise ships to allocate waiters to table may be instructive.
 
On a cruise ship the best waiters get more and bigger tables. More guests means more tips and thats how they get paid. At the end of each cruise the guests evaluate the waiters performance in a survey and with vote with cash. The head waiter and cruise director juggle the input data and make the waiter assignments for the next cruise. Top performers get more and more reward until they exceed their optimum. Weaker performers are moved to less demanding and less rewarding assignments until they reach their optimum.

Who said there has to be the same number of students in every classroom. It doesn't work that way in college. Some sections are tiny with 6-8 students getting intense personal attention. Others are huge lecture halls with hundreds in attendance. preK-12 might not be right for those extremes but it would be easy to see that some classes and teachers (with assistants) could handle as many as 50 students while others should be no larger than 10.

Student feedback in the form of surveys, grades, standardized test results, scholarships earned, job offers, the list goes on and on should all be weighed to make the teaching assignments. Teachers could be paid based on how many students they taught. Students would get maximum exposure to the top teachers. Weaker teachers would have fewer problems to manage and could concentrate on improving their skills. New teachers could assist the top teachers and rapidly identify with quality mentors.

Popularity contest you say? Well why not! The best teachers should be popular with their students. The quantitative measures take some of the sting away for good teachers whose demeanor and personality may be less attractive.

By the way, this approach supports more standardized testing than ever. Taking tests quarterly in every grade would make sense to aid in teacher evaluation even more so than student evaluation.





Louisiana Standard Curriculum Progressive Discipline


Created : 10/12/2007 7:54:34 AM Updated: 10/12/2007 8:55:21 AM

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