Washington DC Teachers' contract

That short clip from youtube expresses it well.

Provided the contract is approved - and that is no sure thing -, if you're a teacher in Washington DC, you can choose two tiers:

1. Red tier. You will get something close to a 28% pay increase and 8 grand in cash.

2. Green tier. You will get a 48% increase, 8 grand in cash, and a chance at 'incentives' based on student test scores. The top teacher salary at the top of the scale there is approximately 68 grand. If a teacher is at the top of that salary scale and chooses the green tier and gets their students achieving at the highest possible rate, they are eligible to make 128 grand.

But the catch is you have to give up tenure, which would allow Rhee to fire you if your students' test scores did not improve.

She is paying for these increases with non-profit dollars and private funds. However, she claims she has a plan in place to permanently fund those contract numbers after five years - once she gets the special ed and transportation messes sorted out (which are currently draining millions and millions from the district).

Initially, I was opposed to this.

Actually, I was not. I'd choose the red tier in a heart beat - after all, you don't have to sacrifice tenure on that tract. Then after a year or two, I'd go green.

I think the terminology is interesting too. Why not the yellow and blue tiers? Well, that's obvious.

Now, though, I'm coming around to the side of paying teachers for performance.

I'm very skeptical - as are a majority of the teachers in the country - about tying pay to standardized tests.

There is a plethora of reasons -

I don't trust the tests. They are not designed by teachers who know the kids and work with them every day. They are manufactured by some test company. Quite frankly, I think these test companies - the Iowa Basics back in my day and today it's the NWEA and MCA and BST - that are raping school districts the same way the giant drug companies are raping the average person and their insurance companies.

I don't trust that the test will always measure learning correctly. There are more than a significant portion of examples where results were lost or misread or any other kind of nightmare for schools and teachers.

I don't trust that students will try. I blogged in the spring about three or four of my best and brightest College Comp kids hurrying through the test - which had zero to do with the class they were in at the moment - just so they could return to class and finish watching the movie and join in the discussion. See that motivation they exhibited is authentic, intrinsically motivated learning. If they didn't want to be in my class, they could have sluffed off on the test and taken an hour to complete it. Instead, they were back in fifteen minutes. Motivation and learning like that can't be measured - yet anyway - on a standardized test.

The students just don't see a connection. I know many are tied to graduation, but that isn't effective. I knew I had to pass the PPST to graduate and teach, but it didn't motivate me to learn more and be a better student. Nor, in fact, did it accurately measure my ability. Of the three areas, my lowest score came in composition. Yet, a few years later my thesis was the first English thesis awarded thesis of the year from BSU - at least as far back as any of the current faculty could remember. So did if accurately measure my writing ability?

Once a test is designed that truly measures learning, then I'll be sold on standardized tests as an accurate measure.

There must be better ways to do this. When I was going through the selection process at BSU to become an RA, they sat all the candidates down at a table on the 12th floor of Tamarack Hall and put us through a 'test,' but it was anything but standardized.

We were given instructions to build a device from the given materials in the center of the table that could would protect an egg from a 12 foot drop. We had ten minutes to come up with an idea, assemble it, and then drop it from the step ladder a few feet away.

Then the 'testers' sat back and watched us work it out. Of course, they were looking for who would take charge, who wouldn't contribute, who was too assertive, and who could manage the group. I thought it was a great way to 'test' us as opposed to giving us all fill in the bubble sheets.

I also like what Bill Sanders had to say about standardized tests - acknowledge the error built in and then do what other companies and industries do once they get a test result back - do more analysis.

Talk to a teacher. Look at student work. Talk to parents and the kids themselves. Or God forbid, have them write an essay test (at leas the writing tests our kids have done so well are evaluated by humans).

Simply running a cheap bubble test through a sophisticated computer is a cheap and lazy way to measure learning.

Now, with that said, I do believes - as does George Parker, head of the Washington DC union and the lead negotiator in the Rhee proposal - that pay for performance or merit pay is here to stay.

Fine.

Why not reward those who work hardest and achieve more?

Why should a teacher who arrives early, works late, busts their ass with the kids and designing lessons and doing outside research and professional development not get paid more than the teacher who arrives late, leaves early and shows movies all the time or has 'make up' days or has those asinine deals with kids where if they are good for so many periods, they get some kind of reward?

I was talking with someone the other day and he stated that one reason most coaches work so hard in coaching - and sometimes the teaching side of things suffers (I could not imagine being a head coach of anything. I can barely keep it together and I'm a lowly 9th grade coach) is that they see instant results and gain instant gratification from their respective sports.

Why not set school up that way? Wouldn't it be nice if all teachers worked as hard as the best coaches did in designing practices, traveling to clinics, managing post season honors and banquets and so on?

Merit pay could allow for that.

Now the sticky point is how do you determine that? One popular way seems to be to have an expert or lead or supervisor (pick your adjective) teacher who teaches part time and observes others part time who would then give feedback to the administrators or whoever decides merit pay.

The problem with this is could you imagine doing that to your friends and colleagues?

On the other hand, why should we not call out lazy and ineffective teachers? Isn't that part of our professional responsibility.

Yet, we let mediocrity exist in teaching. We all know teachers - or have had teachers - who you think "Oh, God, just try and get through their class with as little trouble as possible."

I think of KoKo's education, where some of that happens. I mean she had a teacher for home ec who seemed to hate kids. Then why be in the profession? How can KoKo have A's and B's in all the classes and earn a D in home ec? Because often times teachers still are allowed to grade on how they like you or what grade they think you should get.

Or you have universities, like UND or BSU, where they tell you that they know kids from certain schools come in deficient in some areas because of the lousy teaching that goes on there.

That's - to put it bluntly - bullshit.

And it happens too often in our public schools. And we allow it to go on.

This is one reason why Rhee states that tenure has no educational value. It doesn't necessarily help kids as much as protect lousy teaching.

I'm not going to dispute that.

I will say that some of my hardcore union friends and colleagues will say how nice it is that they have security from being fired over conflicts with the principal or parents. Now, this hit home both when administration found out about my blog several years ago and took an unkind view on some of my criticisms, but I was protected. Likewise when some of my comments about Kaffir Boy angered parents and conflicted with what our superintendent at the time thought should happen. Yet, I was protected.

That's great.

But too often it allows an ineffective teacher to hang on to their jobs. And ineffective teachers don't help kids succeed in a flat world where they will need to be on top of their very best intellectual games to compete against China and India.

Rhee is fond of two sets of statistics that have really changed how I view not only my job but this issue as well.

First, in Washington DC, the federal government decides how many prisons to build based on the third grade reading levels of African American boys. That point is blunt - if a kid can't read, he has a whole world closed to him. The options that are left for him inevitably wind him up in prison.

Second, again in inner city schools, results show that if a kid - especially poor minority kids - has a highly effective teacher for three years in a row, especially in grade school (because once a kid falls behind grade level, it's very difficult to get them caught up) it can change their life trajectory.

Think about a great teacher you had - did it impact your life? Think about a horrible teacher you had - did it positively impact your life?

Ask yourself this - what would your life be like if you had highly effective, empathetic, engaging, interesting, bright, and passionate teachers ALL the way through school?

That's why I've swung to the pay for performance side.