Merit pay at last?

For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.

Here in Minneapolis, for instance, the teachers’ union is cooperating with Minnesota’s Republican governor on a plan in which teachers in some schools work with mentors to improve their instruction and get bonuses for raising student achievement. John Roper-Batker, a science teacher here, said his first reaction was dismay when he heard his school was considering participating in the plan in 2004. “I wanted to get involved just to make sure it wouldn’t happen,” he said. But after learning more, Mr. Roper-Batker said, “I became a salesman for it.” He and his colleagues have voted in favor of the plan twice by large margins.

Minnesota’s $86 million teacher professionalization and merit pay initiative has spread to dozens of the state’s school districts, and it got a lift this month when teachers voted overwhelmingly to expand it in Minneapolis. A major reason it is prospering, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in an interview, is that union leaders helped develop and sell it to teachers. “As a Republican governor, I could say, ‘Thou shalt do this,’ and the unions would say, ‘Thou shalt go jump in the lake,’ ” Mr. Pawlenty said. “But here they partnered with us.”

Scores of similar but mostly smaller teacher-pay experiments are under way nationwide, and union locals are cooperating with some of them, said Allan Odden, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies teacher compensation. A consensus is building across the political spectrum that rewarding teachers with bonuses or raises for improving student achievement, working in lower income schools or teaching subjects that are hard to staff can energize veteran teachers and attract bright rookies to the profession. “It’s looking like there’s a critical mass,” Professor Odden said. The movement to experiment with teacher pay, he added, “is still not ubiquitous, but it’s developing momentum.”

Some plans still run into strong opposition from teachers and their unions, as in Texas and Florida this year, where skeptical teachers rejected proposals from school districts. An incentive-pay proposal by Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the New York City public schools has stalled, with city officials and the teachers’ union blaming each other. Minnesota’s experience shows, however, that an incentive plan created with union input can draw teacher support.

Merit pay, or compensating teachers for classroom performance rather than their years on the job and coursework completed, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out the bad ones. But teachers saw it as a gimmick used by principals to reward cronies based on favoritism.

How thoroughly unions will embrace merit pay remains unclear, said Chester E. Finn Jr., an education scholar who served in the Reagan administration. In some cities where unions have agreed to participate in merit pay programs, they have consented only after reshaping the programs so thoroughly that student achievement is one of many factors by which teachers are judged, reducing the programs’ effectiveness, Mr. Finn said. The rewards teachers receive for outstanding performance range from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 or more in a few districts.

The Department of Education is encouraging schools and districts to try merit pay. [Last week it awarded 18 new federal grants, building on 16 others distributed last November. That makes a total of $80 million that the Bush administration has given to schools and districts in 19 states that have incentive pay plans.] Private groups are also involved; the Milken Family Foundation of Santa Monica, Calif., for instance, which helped create the Minnesota program, has channeled money and expertise into similar plans that include incentive pay at 130 schools in 14 states and the District of Columbia.

The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”

The American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators alone to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable. But it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and has endorsed arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers in New York, said the union was willing to talk further with the city about “schoolwide bonuses for sustained growth in student achievement.”

More here





Australia: Trust your bureaucracy to set intelligent education priorities

Universities are producing thousands of useless graduates in sociology and English literature (etc.) but useful disciplines are being cut back

MINING-RELATED departments in universities are shrinking at the time of the nation's biggest resources boom, with 10 geoscience schools closing or downsizing over the past 10 years and only 30 metallurgists graduating a year. Mining companies are forced to hire graduates trained in similar disciplines, such as chemical engineering and materials science, and train them on the job to meet the shortfall in professions such as metallurgy.

A skills summit organised by the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia in Canberra today will highlight the severe shortages of qualified professionals in geoscience, metallurgy and mining engineering. APESMA chief executive John Vines said public debate over the skills shortage to date had focused on the trades, and the intention of the summit was to highlight the shortage of skilled professionals in the engineering, science and technology sectors. In a discussion paper, APESMA calls for a tax incentive scheme, similar to the one promoting research and development, offering employers a 150 per cent tax rebate for spending more than 2 per cent of labour costs on training development. Mr Vines said the Australian average was 1.3 per cent of a company's payroll, while 4 per cent was considered world-best practice.

In its position paper for the summit, the Australasian Institute of Metals and Metallurgy calls on the federal Government to increase its university funding for mining degrees as part of a strategy to remedy the "dire state of minerals education". It wants the federal Government to increase funding for minerals courses by about $4000 per student, to bring it into the highest cluster of university funding, along with agriculture. Universities receive $13,411 from the Government for every student in science and engineering courses, which are expensive to deliver, compared with $17,870 for agriculture students.

The institute, representing more than 8000 professionals in geoscience, minerals processing and mining engineering, also calls on the Government to commit to a set of national principles for higher education, along the lines of the National Research Priorities, to ensure that "disciplines of national importance" are maintained.

Geosciences professor at Monash University Ray Cas described geosciences as a "nationally endangered species" and AIMM chief executive Don Larkin said at least eight minerals departments had closed since 2000. Mr Larkin said the federal Government had given a commitment to fund disciplines of national importance but, because of the Government's philosophy to move to a user-pays and market-driven tertiary education system, that was not happening.

A survey of almost 2000 members conducted last month by AIMM, and due for release on Friday, found that about two-thirds said the professional skills shortage had left them short-staffed. More than half said the shortage meant more people were working in senior roles outside their experience. And more than 60 per cent believed their employer was paying more for less-experienced personnel, with salaries rising about 18 per cent since 2005. A paper by Professor Cas says at least 10 geoscience departments have "either been closed down or downsized to the point of being ineffectual" over the past 10 years.

The closures include the geoscience department at the University of NSW, once the biggest in Australia; previously significant departments in the universities of La Trobe, RMIT, Bendigo and Deakin in Victoria; Flinders and South Australia in Adelaide; New England and the University of Technology, Sydney, in NSW; as well as smaller, regional schools. Other departments have been amalgamated into other disciplines such as geography and environmental sciences, leading to a rationalisation and decrease in staff at universities including Sydney, Wollongong, Western Australia, Melbourne and Ballarat.

But student enrolments are growing in second and third years. Professor Cas says Monash University has a record number of students, and now the largest in Australia, despite the number of first-year students not growing beyond about 200. The number of graduates at Queensland University is also growing. A 2005 agreement between international mining company Xstrata, which has a number of operations in Australia, and UQ is designed to lift the number of metallurgy graduates at the institution from five in 2004 to 20 next year.

Australian Council of Deans of Science chairman John Rice said it would take 10 years to rebuild the infrastructure, expertise and resources of these departments, with a skills shortage in the industry also translating into a shortage of people able to teach in universities. Professor Rice said the shift by government to funding universities based on student numbers made the low-enrolment schools unviable, but said the removal of the cap on full-fee paying places in the last federal budget left room for industry to step in and pay for mining courses.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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