Jim Devine writes: >> "Incentivizing" teachers is really easy: if you want them to to teach >> to the test (or teach students how to cheat on the test), judge them & >> reward them largely on the basis of standardized tests, putting major >> emphasis on those tests with explicit punishment for doing poorly. >> (The higher the stakes, the greater the incentive for teachers to >> cheat, as shown by the big rise in this kind of cheating.) If you want >> them to be extremely defensive and cynical, hiding information from >> administrators and the like, treat them like servants, imposing even >> more bureaucratic rules to control their work (including preventing >> the cheating that other parts of the "reform" plan encourages). This >> is especially true if the administrators earn exalted salaries and do >> not benefit from any extended experience as teachers. If you want >> them to do their job "just for the money" (rather than as part of a >> profession that has inherent pleasure), emphasize monetary awards and >> punishments. They clearly would refrain from paying money to make up >> for the inadequacies of the budget. After all, if punishment = getting >> less money, then why should teachers continue to punish themselves? >> On the other hand, if you want students to learn a wide variety of >> different materials and to see how different aspects of knowledge fit >> together, you have to stop the emphasis on standardized tests. Not >> everything can be quantified. If you want teachers to be dedicated to >> their jobs rather than being mercenaries who are temporarily >> "teaching," you have to treat them as professionals and respect the >> elected leaders of their collective organizations (including unions). >> >> More and more economists (but alas not very many, since the base which >> they started at is so low) are becoming aware of the way in which >> "extrinsic motivation" (the response to incentives arbitrarily created >> by bureaucrats and markets) crowd out "intrinsic motivation" (the >> response to the inherent joy of doing a job well and the like). That >> is, if the teachers aren't active decision-makers in the education >> process (even beyond their individual classrooms) and are instead >> treated as someone to be "incentivized," they will stop doing a lot of >> work for free and insist on being compensated for all costs. They'll >> have an attitude similar to that of many non-unionized factory workers >> and some unionized ones: "it's a job, I get paid, let's see if I can >> do as little work as possible for those bastards."
I hate to break it to you, but we don't have to speculate how teachers would act if they were not unionized, protected by tenure and seniority, etc.. We have the private school/catholic school world, where the pay is frequently less than that of the public school system, but the teacher morale is, if not better, certainly not worse than the public school system. >> As should be obvious, student test scores are the test scores of >> individual students, which only partly reflect the input from >> teachers. The idea of judging the _teacher's abilities_ using these >> scores ignores the role of a variety of different factors which affect >> the scores, such as the resources that the parents have, the resources >> available to the schools, the abilities of the teachers to compensate >> for budget cut-backs by spending their own money and time,[*] elements >> of luck, and the way in which "problem" students are assigned to >> specific teachers. We are talking about aggregates relative to other aggregates, which I would think is relevant evidence of something. You seem to be arguing that teachers are impervious to any meaningful evaluation (which is consistent with the union position that tenured teachers are an undifferentiated mass). >> Usually, self-styled libertarians would object to treating students as >> anything but individuals and their test scores as reflecting anything >> but their individual ability to take that kind of test. They would >> thus object to aggregating their scores the way the L.A. TIMES did, >> which erases each student's individuality. I have no idea what you are trying to say here, or what it has to do with the points we are discussing. David Shemano _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
