Merit Plan for Teachers
July 15, 2006 by warrick
It’s interesting to see a leading teacher union argue that teachers don’t shape outcomes, and aren’t important in determining student achievement. Regardless of what you think about so called merit schemes, you can’t really have it both ways; that teachers are the critical linchipin of successful schools and should be paid accordingly AND they aren’t responsible at all if students aren’t achieving.
This from The Australian today 15/7/2006
PLANS to reward teachers for results, rather than years in the job, have been dismissed by the national president of the Australian Education Union, who said it was “completely unreasonable to hold a teacher responsible for outcomes”.
Pat Byrne disputed the idea that the teacher was more important than a student’s family background in determining achievement and rejected the idea of tying pay to academic results.She said a such system would set teacher against teacher and discourage them from helping difficult pupils.
“You can only hold teachers responsible for what they can control and teachers have no control over the nature of the students they have,” she said.”Classes are different, the way kids interact in a particular class is different, every subject area is different, every school is different.”All these things are variable and interchangeable and it iscompletely unreasonable to hold a teacher responsible for outcomes.”
Merit pay ‘unfair to teachers’ | The Nation | The Australian
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5 Responses to “Merit Plan for Teachers”
“You can’t really have it both ways; that teachers are the critical linchipin of successful schools and should be paid accordingly AND they aren’t responsible at all if students aren’t achieving.”
Sure you can; it’s a phenomenon known as ‘necessary but not sufficient conditions.’
For example, think about what a human needs in order to stay alive: food, water and air. Each of these is necessary. Without it we would die. But none of them alone is sufficient. We need all three to live.
Now imagine your quote, rewritten: “”You can’t really have it both ways; that food is the critical linchipin of survival and should be paid for accordingly AND that it isn’t responsible at all if people aren’t surviving.”
In fact, if you have the best food in the world, and no air, you will not survive, and it is not at all the fault of the food.
The same is the case with teaching.
I’ve seen study after study that shows that the main predictor of educational achievement is socio-economic status. Children of richer parents do better in school.
We could speculate about why this is the case. I’ve seen some people argue that richer parents have greater expectations. Others argue that richer parents provide access to books and computers. Still others say that children of richer parents have more free time (they don’t have to work) and have fewer disruptions in their home lives.
That said, it does not follow that teachers are irrelevant to their learning. Children of rich parents, if they are not taught, are much less likely to learn. As things are right now, a teacher is the major conduit of learning for a child, no matter what their socio-economic status. This is why teachers are (or ought to be) provided to all children.
What could be said here is that factors both outside the school and inside the school are necessary for aducational achievement. Take one or the other away and learning does not happen. But neither, by itself, is sufficient. A student needs both.
Hence, it can be true to say that teachers are important to shaping student achievement. Without them, students will not achieve. But it can also be true to say that teachers are not ultimately responsible for outcomes. Other factors are essential as well, and teachers can do nothing about them. A teacher cannot, for example, ensure that his or her students have rich parents.
Thanks for that coment Stephen; I’m stoked to have you comment on my blog.
I appreciate the point you make, and understand what you mean; effective classroom learning is a complex interaction of elements: good teaching, well designed curriculum, facilities, resources, collaborative sharing among teachers and alignment with parents and their aspirations.
However, I’ve seen research in Austraia that suggests that in all that complex interaction, it’s the classroom teaching that’s most significant and that the teaching makes more of a difference than the school attended (and the relative ‘richness’ of the parents) It’s also the variable that we can actually do something about in schools.
My original posting was prompted by surprise to see such a firm rejection of the role of teaching in the original article; surely it’s reasonable, even in your analogy of food, air and water, to see teachers as partly responsible for student outcomes?
Thanks for reading!
An overweight patient goes to the greatest doctor in the world. The doctor follows the best practice known for helping a patient lose weight. The patient doesn’t do the prescribed exercise, or follow through on other aspects of treatment the doctor gives them, the patients family is not supportive of the situation and SURPRISE!!! the patient makes little or no progress losing weight after an entire year. Your arguement would lay part to much of the blame on the doctor.
Like the doctor, teachers don’t usually have enough control over all the variables – in real life the doctor may have even put the patient in the hospital for an extended time just so he could control the variables – teachers don’t generally have something similar as a resource to try.
Thanks for the thoughts Brian; the doctor comparison isn’t a bad one and I agree that they’ve probably got more control over their professional environment than teachers.
I suppose it’s a matter of how much relative weight we give to the skills, expertise, professional practice and experience of the doctor. It’s an interaction. If the patient keeps smoking sixty cigarettes a day when they’re told not to, the doctor can’t be blamed.
But are all doctors equally skilled? Not in my experience. Some doctors are great communicators, knowledgeable and up to date with the latest advances and empathetic towards their patients. Others…well!
So, if we recognise differences in other professional practice, why not teachers? We’re happy with the idea of celebrating great teachers (and say that they’ve made a difference – and they have) but we’re not so keen to accept the corrolary; that poor teaching might negatively impact upon student outcomes.
I’m actually NOT in favour of merit schemes for teachers, though I quite like schemes that aim to keep good teachers in the classroom, but if we want good teaching recognised somehow (whether through increased pay or whatever) there’s also a related responsibility to take account for the other side of the coin.
Which is where my difficulty with the original statement below began:
“it is completely unreasonable to hold a teacher responsible for outcomes”.
Completely? Really?
Warrick – I would agree. The problem lies in HOW to decide if a teacher is doing the job or not. Certainly I have seen some fairly obvious examples of poor teaching, but I’ve also seen examples where it was more a difference in style. There are several principals in my district that put alot of weight on how clean and organized your room appears in deciding how good a teacher you are.
I think you also have to factor in “the art” of teaching. One of my pet peeves about many of the “programmed” approaches to teaching reading or math, is that they tend to favor teachers that do better with a HIGHLY structured approach, but are anthema for teachers that like to have a degree of flexibilty in their approach.
I always use the example of Jaime Escalante (from the movie Stand And Deliver) he did things you cannot have other teachers do, but it worked wonderfully for him. He put kids that fooled around or didn’t have their work done in a chair in the front of the room and let the other kids make fun of them – called kids by incorrect or put down names (”Nethead” for example to Hispanic students) – threatened bodily injury to a few others – he “got away” with these techniques, but most of us would be seen on the six o’clock news in handcuffs if we tried them – and yet he got 80 students a year from the most disadvantaged high school in Los Angeles to pass the AP math test which was about 60 more students a year than the most high income “college prep” schools in the area at the time.
The point is I guess that deciding on “Good Teaching” is at best contoversial and difficult. Thanks for the discussion!