<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>Yoshie writes:
<BR><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">A struggle against merit pay & merit promotions is a struggle against the
<BR>management power to determine which worker is or isn't competent,
<BR>productive, etc.
<BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR>
<BR>I want to agree with the thrust of Yoshie's point here, and to comment on its
<BR>practical implications for a field like education. [I would also commend the
<BR>article she posted on the subject from _Rethinking Schools_, which is an
<BR>excellent source of progressive education analysis.] I think that the entire
<BR>discussion of pay differentials would be well served if it were more grounded
<BR>in some practical questions.
<BR>
<BR>Teaching is a craft, a complex set of skills which are only acquired over an
<BR>extended period of practical experience in the field. In this respect, the
<BR>process of mastering the skills of teaching is not unlike becoming a skilled
<BR>surgeon or a skilled carpenter. One is not a born teacher; even assuming all
<BR>of the appropriate resources and supports, it takes a great deal of effort
<BR>and hard work to become a truly proficient teacher, and it requires a
<BR>continual engagement in professional development to remain up to date with
<BR>the current 'best practices'. [A clarification for the LBO audience, with its
<BR>legions from the academy: given the anti-teaching biases of that world, where
<BR>pedagogy is not even a subject of study for those headed into post-secondary
<BR>education, very few 'teachers' at that level ever develop the level of
<BR>profiency which elementary and secondary teachers need, as a matter of
<BR>course, to reach an audience which is neither 'captive' nor self-motivated; a
<BR>one hour lecture to a group of high school students would create a small
<BR>riot.]
<BR>
<BR>So, there are learned, acquired differences in the quality of teaching
<BR>provided by different teachers. But, as in other things in this land of the
<BR>'free' market, some have many more opportunities for learning than others.
<BR>Some teachers have the opportunities to attend excellent, practicum-based and
<BR>school-based teacher education programs, of which they are only a handful --
<BR>most schools of education are just cash cows for their particular university;
<BR>other teachers start teaching with no teacher education or background in
<BR>pedagogy. Some teachers teach in schools and in school districts which create
<BR>a culture of collegiality and professional development, and where teachers
<BR>are provided the resources and the supports necessary to develop themselves;
<BR>other teachers teach in schools and school districts where it is every poor
<BR>beleaguered soul for her/himself, and where all professional growth takes
<BR>place on an individual basis, after exhausting days of the most difficult
<BR>teaching. To no one's surprise, the better prepared, better supported and
<BR>more experienced teachers, who are also, as a general rule, the better
<BR>quality teachers, are concentrated in the schools and school districts which
<BR>serve wealthier communities.
<BR>
<BR>But it will not do, either as a matter of justice or of practical politics,
<BR>to tell parents and children in poorer communities that they have to wait
<BR>until that day when the 'savage inequalities' of American education are
<BR>finally addressed to receive the same high quality education that their
<BR>wealthier peers have. At the same time that the battle is waged, and as part
<BR>of that battle, conscientious efforts must be made to continually improve the
<BR>quality of teaching in inner city and poor rural schools.
<BR>
<BR>In this context, it is important to point out why 'merit pay' does nothing to
<BR>improve the quality of teaching. First, it fails to address the conditions
<BR>which are necessary to promote quality teaching. It does nothing to alleviate
<BR>the extraordinary high rate of staff turnover in schools which serve poor
<BR>communities and communities of color; if teachers are always novices without
<BR>adequate preparation, you are never going to be able to build any culture of
<BR>quality. Second, it does not provide the supports and resources that teachers
<BR>need to develop their skills -- the time and means [accomplished mentor
<BR>teachers, teacher centers with demonstrations, study groups, seminars, etc.]
<BR>to do ongoing, classroom based professional development. It is amazing the
<BR>extent to which it is assumed that the only time a teacher works is when s/he
<BR>is standing in front of a class of students; at is as if the only time a
<BR>lawyer works is during a trial, or a surgeon during an operation. Thirdly,
<BR>instead of creating a culture of collegiality, of learning from each other
<BR>and working as an educational team, 'merit pay' creates a culture of
<BR>invidious competition, in which one teacher's reward comes at the expense of
<BR>the next. Why would a teacher share a new technique which s/he developed and
<BR>is working well with a colleague when it could very well mean that the
<BR>colleague -- and not her/him -- will be financially rewarded for the work and
<BR>effort?
<BR>
<BR>Beyond this, it is important to note that 'merit pay' schemes are not even
<BR>based on meaningful measures of teacher quality. Some use supervisory
<BR>observations, which are fraught with all sorts of problems of favoritism and
<BR>patronage, especially given that money is now involved, and which are, at
<BR>best, snapshoots of a class here or a class there, not a record of an ongoing
<BR>process. Others use standardized test scores of classes, which are even more
<BR>problematic. Even the best standardized tests are notoriously poor measures
<BR>of what learning has gone on in a class. Add to that the fact that even if
<BR>they were good measures, students enter classes at all different levels of
<BR>learning, and with radically different conditions and supports for learning.
<BR>To use one benchmark to measure how well a teacher has done in teaching
<BR>her/his students is to accept an absurd premise that all the students started
<BR>at the same spot, and had the same conditions to run the race. A poor teacher
<BR>in an elite school will have students which score well over a standardized
<BR>norm, because they started so far ahead and have so many other factors going
<BR>for them, while an excellent teacher in a failing school will have students
<BR>that never make that norm, yet have learned quite a bit due to her/his hard
<BR>work. There is a researcher in Tennessee who has developed what one might
<BR>call a "value added" statistical model in an attempt to address some of these
<BR>issues, and it certainly is superior to a simple standard benchmark, but it
<BR>remains problematic in many respects, such as being dependent upon the
<BR>standardized test as a measure of learning and in failing to account for the
<BR>reality that the cumulative effects of education are such that the further a
<BR>student 'falls behind,' the more difficult it is to make up any ground.
<BR>
<BR>The AFT and NEA have developed a number of programs designed to address these
<BR>questions of quality in a different, productive way. Both unions have
<BR>extensive professional development apparatuses, with many locals developing
<BR>and staffing teacher center programs which go into schools in need of help,
<BR>and initiating teacher mentor programs to work with novice teachers. Of
<BR>course, an union can not replace the failure on the part of a school
<BR>district, city or state to properly invest in schools and in teacher
<BR>professional development, but it can work with what investment is made, and
<BR>it can develop professional development which breaks with the top-down,
<BR>one-shot, drive by lecture by some outside 'expert' model employed by many
<BR>districts, and employ an on-going, school based teacher to teacher model.
<BR>
<BR>A quite interesting experiment has been the development of a National Board
<BR>for Professional Teaching Standards as a way to identify and promote teaching
<BR>excellence. This model is entirely teacher controlled -- the majority of the
<BR>governing board must be, by statute, classroom teachers -- and the work of
<BR>teachers is assessed by other teachers from outside their school and
<BR>district. It uses a portfolio and performance based assessment system, in
<BR>which teachers put together a number of artifacts of the teaching and
<BR>learning which goes on in their classrooms, such as lesson plans and course
<BR>curriculla, student work, a video of classes, and various
<BR>statements/explanations of teaching pedagogy and philosophy. The preparation
<BR>of the portfolio is itself a lengthy, professional development process, and
<BR>teachers often work in small cooperative circles helping each other on the
<BR>process. In some locales, unions have negotiated salary differentials for
<BR>teachers who are successfully 'board certified,' creating an incentive to
<BR>undertake that process. Since every teacher is eligible to become 'board
<BR>certified,' it avoids all the 'zero sum game' competition problems of 'merit
<BR>pay.' This system is not perfect -- no one has figured out a way to get a
<BR>completely accurate picture of what a teacher's ongoing classwork looks like,
<BR>but it provides a far better portrait than other systems.
<BR>
<BR>In line with this thinking, a number of union locals have also developed peer
<BR>evaluation programs, in which teachers -- are not out of the class
<BR>supervisors -- do the primary evaluation of the work of other teachers. A lot
<BR>of this work draws, mostly unwittingly, upon the apprenticeship and quality
<BR>programs of the old craft unions.
<BR>
<BR>All of it shows how it is possible to take up questions of quality and
<BR>improving quality without falling into the trap of having "management"
<BR>systems of judging competence, excellence, etc., with all of the accordant
<BR>traps.
<BR>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --</P></FONT></HTML>