Measure 60: Merit Pay for Teachers

I consider myself a "good" teacher, and my kids do great on the barrage of tests they have to take every year. Do I think I sould be in any way rewarded for those kids doing well on those tests? Absolutely not. If this were to happen, there would be a mass exodus of "good" teachers in low-performing disticts, where "good" teachers are needed most.

Simple matter is, who is going to set the guidelines to measure teacher success? This is a matter world wide as politicians look to put the blame on the dwindling interest children have on the relevance of education on the people in the classroom. Success in education is measured in the amount of money that gets to the children we educate. When Health, Education and Law Enforcement become social, rather than economice issues, and health workers, teachers and law enforcement workers are paid wages based on the value to society, student results will become irrelevant.

Not to mention, it would influence teachers to teach in districts that already perform better, i.e. white upper class schools, therefore leaving other schools in the dust. This is a classist measure, vote no!

The problem is this measure attacks two separate issues: seniority versus merit.

The thing is to pay teachers what they are worth to our society and to simply eject bad teachers from the system. That way only worthy teachers are even eligible for equitable pay-raises based on seniority, which is fair.

If you're bad at your job, you should get fired. If you're good at your job, your reward is that you get paid better the longer you continue to be good at it.

There should be no tenure protection for bad teachers. The judgment of merit could be based in part perhaps, on a combination of student evaluation, parent evaluation and independent professional educational evaluators with no vested interest.

Not only do bad teachers not deserve pay raises, they must be fired and not rehired elsewhere. It's that simple. Re ward the good, get rid of the bad.

When we have a measure that does this in a clear and fair fashion, I will vote for it.

@1/@3- Structuring the incentive package to reward teachers for making gains, not absolute achievement, would create a financial incentive for teachers to enter lower performing schools.

Measure 60 is premature but its objectives, eliminating teacher tenure and implementing merit pay are sound. However, before passing a framework for improving education Oregon should learn more about how it will fill in the details. Rhee's reforms in DC (if they go through) will provide a good case study.

The idea that the Willamette Week's response to this measure is luke warm seems very irresponsible to me considering the amount of negatives it will engender onto the school system.

Just because one aspect of it is sound, not always keeping teachers due to seniority, does not mean the bill in its entirety is not seriously flawed. Currently, the measure says teachers' salary will only be based on "classroom performance". If the education system had the resources to devote to multiple classroom observations, student/parent interviews... this might be okay. Instead it can only reasonably be done with a test. This means:

1) Yet one more test for students

2) Teacher's teaching to the test, or at the least skipping important learning experiences not on the test

3) Would hurt collegiality. Why help the other math teacher get a raise with your good idea?

This is not to mention the bigger question of how they would test fairly. Would they even go to the trouble to test the same students, or would they just compare different years? How would they factor in that low-income students tend to do worse? You can't use year to year comparisons since low-income students also tend to gain less each year than high-income students.

We all know what would happen, a "merit pay" test that was flawed in its measuring that would have a haphazard effect on salaries, not a more fair one. But yeah, other than that, you should really consider Bill Sizemore's wonderful initiative. The willamette Weekly should have come out much more strongly against this, particularly since it actually has a chance of passing.