Spare the Rod and Spoil the Teacher

Wow. Yikes. I'm all for merit pay if we can find a nuanced way to institute it. And I'm all for getting bad teachers out of the system. But remember a few posts ago when I said I was thinking of going back into teaching?

This article has convinced me otherwise, all in the course of a few short hours. A "bipartisan" commission on NCLB proposes that teachers who are "chronically ineffective" must be blocked from low-performing schools.

Sounds fair, right? We don't want bad teachers in our schools. The problem is, they want to tie the performance of teachers and principals once again to test scores. And although I agree that we need to find a solid way to measure teachers, this again does not seem right to me. What kind of school culture are we creating when the teachers very jobs rest on how well the student does on a test?

Some would say it creates a culture of accountability, which is what we generally have in corporate America. (Ahem. Ken Lay, anyone?). Teachers (especially those newbies) will work hard to figure out exactly what to do to help students score well on tests.

But then you throw in kids with learning disabilities (in higher numbers in low-performing schools). You throw in "English as a Second Language" learners, for whom the Department of Ed will make no concessions on tests. You throw in an unsupportive home life, where kids don't have a stable environment where they can rest, eat, study... or where they're working for $25 an hour as a pipefitter to support the family. This happens in New Jersey - B's mom is an English teacher and one of her students makes more than I ever have as a pipefitter.

And then you make the teacher responsible for all of this, and hire or fire her based on it. Wow. That does not sound like a profession I want to enter. And this is what tens of thousands of college graduates might be thinking right now.

"Tougher Standards Urged for Federal Education Law." (Schemo, D. The New York Times. Feb. 14th, 2007).