I want to agree with the thrust of Yoshie's point here, and to comment on its practical implications for a field like education. [I would also commend the article she posted on the subject from _Rethinking Schools_, which is an excellent source of progressive education analysis.] I think that the entire discussion of pay differentials would be well served if it were more grounded in some practical questions.
Teaching is a craft, a complex set of skills which are only acquired over an extended period of practical experience in the field. In this respect, the process of mastering the skills of teaching is not unlike becoming a skilled surgeon or a skilled carpenter. One is not a born teacher; even assuming all of the appropriate resources and supports, it takes a great deal of effort and hard work to become a truly proficient teacher, and it requires a continual engagement in professional development to remain up to date with the current 'best practices'. [A clarification for the LBO audience, with its legions from the academy: given the anti-teaching biases of that world, where pedagogy is not even a subject of study for those headed into post-secondary education, very few 'teachers' at that level ever develop the level of profiency which elementary and secondary teachers need, as a matter of course, to reach an audience which is neither 'captive' nor self-motivated; a one hour lecture to a group of high school students would create a small riot.]
So, there are learned, acquired differences in the quality of teaching provided by different teachers. But, as in other things in this land of the 'free' market, some have many more opportunities for learning than others. Some teachers have the opportunities to attend excellent, practicum-based and school-based teacher education programs, of which they are only a handful -- most schools of education are just cash cows for their particular university; other teachers start teaching with no teacher education or background in pedagogy. Some teachers teach in schools and in school districts which create a culture of collegiality and professional development, and where teachers are provided the resources and the supports necessary to develop themselves; other teachers teach in schools and school districts where it is every poor beleaguered soul for her/himself, and where all professional growth takes place on an individual basis, after exhausting days of the most difficult teaching. To no one's surprise, the better prepared, better supported and more experienced teachers, who are also, as a general rule, the better quality teachers, are concentrated in the schools and school districts which serve wealthier communities.
But it will not do, either as a matter of justice or of practical politics, to tell parents and children in poorer communities that they have to wait until that day when the 'savage inequalities' of American education are finally addressed to receive the same high quality education that their wealthier peers have. At the same time that the battle is waged, and as part of that battle, conscientious efforts must be made to continually improve the quality of teaching in inner city and poor rural schools.
In this context, it is important to point out why 'merit pay' does nothing to improve the quality of teaching. First, it fails to address the conditions which are necessary to promote quality teaching. It does nothing to alleviate the extraordinary high rate of staff turnover in schools which serve poor communities and communities of color; if teachers are always novices without adequate preparation, you are never going to be able to build any culture of quality. Second, it does not provide the supports and resources that teachers need to develop their skills -- the time and means [accomplished mentor teachers, teacher centers with demonstrations, study groups, seminars, etc.] to do ongoing, classroom based professional development. It is amazing the extent to which it is assumed that the only time a teacher works is when s/he is standing in front of a class of students; at is as if the only time a lawyer works is during a trial, or a surgeon during an operation. Thirdly, instead of creating a culture of collegiality, of learning from each other and working as an educational team, 'merit pay' creates a culture of invidious competition, in which one teacher's reward comes at the expense of the next. Why would a teacher share a new technique which s/he developed and is working well with a colleague when it could very well mean that the colleague -- and not her/him -- will be financially rewarded for the work and effort?
Beyond this, it is important to note that 'merit pay' schemes are not even based on meaningful measures of teacher quality. Some use supervisory observations, which are fraught with all sorts of problems of favoritism and patronage, especially given that money is now involved, and which are, at best, snapshoots of a class here or a class there, not a record of an ongoing process. Others use standardized test scores of classes, which are even more problematic. Even the best standardized tests are notoriously poor measures of what learning has gone on in a class. Add to that the fact that even if they were good measures, students enter classes at all different levels of learning, and with radically different conditions and supports for learning. To use one benchmark to measure how well a teacher has done in teaching her/his students is to accept an absurd premise that all the students started at the same spot, and had the same conditions to run the race. A poor teacher in an elite school will have students which score well over a standardized norm, because they started so far ahead and have so many other factors going for them, while an excellent teacher in a failing school will have students that never make that norm, yet have learned quite a bit due to her/his hard work. There is a researcher in Tennessee who has developed what one might call a "value added" statistical model in an attempt to address some of these issues, and it certainly is superior to a simple standard benchmark, but it remains problematic in many respects, such as being dependent upon the standardized test as a measure of learning and in failing to account for the reality that the cumulative effects of education are such that the further a student 'falls behind,' the more difficult it is to make up any ground.
The AFT and NEA have developed a number of programs designed to address these questions of quality in a different, productive way. Both unions have extensive professional development apparatuses, with many locals developing and staffing teacher center programs which go into schools in need of help, and initiating teacher mentor programs to work with novice teachers. Of course, an union can not replace the failure on the part of a school district, city or state to properly invest in schools and in teacher professional development, but it can work with what investment is made, and it can develop professional development which breaks with the top-down, one-shot, drive by lecture by some outside 'expert' model employed by many districts, and employ an on-going, school based teacher to teacher model.
A quite interesting experiment has been the development of a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards as a way to identify and promote teaching excellence. This model is entirely teacher controlled -- the majority of the governing board must be, by statute, classroom teachers -- and the work of teachers is assessed by other teachers from outside their school and district. It uses a portfolio and performance based assessment system, in which teachers put together a number of artifacts of the teaching and learning which goes on in their classrooms, such as lesson plans and course curriculla, student work, a video of classes, and various statements/explanations of teaching pedagogy and philosophy. The preparation of the portfolio is itself a lengthy, professional development process, and teachers often work in small cooperative circles helping each other on the process. In some locales, unions have negotiated salary differentials for teachers who are successfully 'board certified,' creating an incentive to undertake that process. Since every teacher is eligible to become 'board certified,' it avoids all the 'zero sum game' competition problems of 'merit pay.' This system is not perfect -- no one has figured out a way to get a completely accurate picture of what a teacher's ongoing classwork looks like, but it provides a far better portrait than other systems.
In line with this thinking, a number of union locals have also developed peer evaluation programs, in which teachers -- are not out of the class supervisors -- do the primary evaluation of the work of other teachers. A lot of this work draws, mostly unwittingly, upon the apprenticeship and quality programs of the old craft unions.
All of it shows how it is possible to take up questions of quality and improving quality without falling into the trap of having "management" systems of judging competence, excellence, etc., with all of the accordant traps.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010315/48d1edca/attachment.htm>