Educational Thoughts

I was reading Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope earlier this week, and came across a thought-provoking quote about education, appearing on pages 192-193.

If we’re serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we’re going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid additional expensive course work; pairing up new recruits with master teachers to break their isolation; and giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms.

It also means paying teachers what they’re worth. There’s no reason why an experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000 annually at the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such critical areas as math and science - as well as those willing to teach in the toughest urban schools - should be paid even more.

There’s just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become more accountable for their performance - and school districts need to have greater ability to get rid of ineffective teachers.

So far, teacher’s unions have resisted the idea of pay for performance, in part because it could be disbursed at the whim of a principal. The unions also argue - rightly, I think - that most school districts rely solely on test scores to measure teacher performance, and that test scores may be highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like the number of low-income or special-needs students in their classroom.

But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with teacher’s unions, state and school districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine test data with a system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which new teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad). And we can make sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.

Let me say, I am not endorsing this, nor asking you to accept it - I simply thought it was a thought-provoking article.

- Jason Dean