Teacher performance based pay looks like it’s about to be shown the door in the Grand Canyon State. A judge ruled Arizona’s Career Ladder program unconstitutional because it isn’t open to all its districts. Expanding the program will cost $175 million—an unlikely feat as the state attempts to recover from the economic recession. The [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Pay for Performance'
Salary Schedule Slopes
At the 2008 annual meeting of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, then-Senator Barack Obama endorsed changing teacher compensation structures from traditional single salary schedules—where teachers are paid based only on their educational credentials and years of experience—to one reflecting the performance of individual teachers in the classroom. His mention of pay [...]
The Performance of Performance Pay
With Barack Obama winning an historic race for the presidency this week (and the nation exhaling in wonder and relief at his victory), Jim Guthrie and Patrick Schuermann at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College offer a timely reality check in Education Week on performance pay for teachers, a reform that has cycled back onto the [...]
Full-Service Schools
I had the good fortune to moderate a symposium on education policy in Denver last week hosted by Mayor John Hickenlooper. It was one of ten non-partisan events the host city organized in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention on wonky topics ranging from global warming to transportation infrastructure.
There were several highlights to the conversation [...]
More Teachers See Unions as "Absolutely Essential"
In recent decades, America has experienced a steady de-unionization of the private sector workforce. This is a real problem, particularly in an era of declining economic security and increasing inequality (problems that partially stem from de-unionization itself). The public sector, by contrast, has pretty much maintained a steady level of unionization, in part because governments [...]
"Technical" Objections
Over at the UFT, Leo Casey accuses us of various rhetorical sins involves caricatures, straw men, etc, in recent comments about the NYC value-added project. Their grievances lie with the methodology, says Leo, and it’s wrong to say otherwise. Okay, very well. Two questions:
1) What are the basic elements of a UFT-approved methodologically appropriate method [...]
Pay for Performance: Chicken or Egg?
AFTie Ed responds to this post below on teacher pay:
My baseline position wasn’t “we’re not in this for the money, give us more money.” Instead it’s “we don’t have the option of being in it for the money, and trying to introduce that option without making the pie bigger isn’t a smart idea.” What I [...]
Missing Link in the Teacher Quality Debate
This podcast features a panel of national experts discussing a powerful but largely ignored lever of school improvement: teacher evaluation.
Participants:
Chris Cerf, Deputy Chancellor, New York City Department of Education
Kai Ivory, Teacher, DC Preparatory Academy
Ray Pecheone, Co-executive Director, School Redesign Network, Stanford University
Marcia Reback, Vice President, American Federation of Teachers, President, Rhode Island Rhode Island Federation [...]
Paying and Evaluating Teachers
The Denver Post reports on Obama as the next great supporter of ProComp, Denver’s highly praised pay-for-performance, or merit pay, program. This issue of teacher pay has become one of the big education debates among Democrats in the 2008 presidential campaign (both Clinton and Edwards are against merit pay but support differential pay–extra for teachers [...]
Merit Pay Mania
I’m a day late to the merit pay roundabout between the American Prospect’s Ezra Klein, the Atlantic’s Matt Yglesias, and the New Republic’s Jason Zengerle. But the points are still worth discussing, particularly Ezra’s kick-off post, which begins thusly:
I’m always amused by well-paid journalists and pundits complaining that teacher’s compensation isn’t closely enough linked to [...]
Moderate Democrats’ Original Sin
In his Post column today, Richard Cohen commits the original sin of moderate Democrats writing about education.
Cohen slams the Democratic candidates in last week’s DC-based presidential debate for calling for more school funding without acknowledging that the DC school system is reasonably well-funded and still does a terrible job. Fair enough. But then he continues:
The [...]
Three Things You Should Read
I’m going to strongly recommend two new reports out this week.
One is the final report of the Teaching Commission, an independent commission established by former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner to identify and promote reforms that modernize the way American public school teachers are prepared and hired, the conditions in which they work, and how they [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.