Obama, taking on unions, backs teacher merit pay
"AP – President Barack Obama speaks about education at the 19th Annual Legislative Conference of the United … WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Tuesday embraced a new approach to public education that adds up to merit pay for the better teachers and longer days and school years for students."
Alfie Kohn in his book Punished by Rewards pretty well summarized and demolished the arguments for this sort of thing ("merit pay") both in the educational system and society at large.
My Polyanna-ish take on this is that it is political posturing by Obama to gain support for his general package--though I am fearful that he is serious about strengthening the charter school movement which I see as a Trojan horse for the school voucher movement which is a Trojan horse for the privatization of the schools, etc.--although I do think Obama himself is ultimately a supporter of the public school system...
Although it is overwhelmingly complex task, fraught with political and social landmines, it seems to me that somebody somewhere ought to be working on establishing some definitive criteria for measuring educational "outcomes"--as they are wont to say in the ed business. In my mind outcomes evaluation would be something that would include standardized testing as only a small part. Or maybe it should not be included at all. It seems to be one of those little tails that always winds up wagging the dog.
After you have a clear idea of what you want educational outcomes to be, then you can begin the discussion in earnest of how to get there.
As far as outcomes, just off the top of my head--one doesn't need to use standardized testing, but statistical metanalysis and the like can be used to quantify and contrast various other kinds of data, e.g. what is the drop out rate for the schools, where do students go on to post-secondary and how are those schools ranked by the aribiters of various pecking orders (like the U.S. News & World Report surveys of colleges) how many students wind up in the criminal justice system, how many report life-long learning, how many are satisfied with their vocations--a bunch of stuff could go into the mix besides SAT scores and IQ tests...
(Of course, there's probably a multitude of folks doing stuff like that & I just don't know about and/or it hasn't all been brought to one place. )
R.
No comments:
Post a Comment