Hey! Here’s how to fix education in America. We hire the best teachers and pay them competitively according to performace. Kinda like the private sector workplace in America. That would be the same American private sector workplace that is the most productive per capita in industrialized world, the one that despite all our economic troubles still leads the world in GDP.
How many times have you heard that? Well, here’s what happens when a well-meaning bureaucrat tries it:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials are trying their best to convince the masses that a newly christened, so-called talent effectiveness project has nothing – positively, without a doubt, absolutely nothing – to do with teacher evaluation, assessments and performance pay.
That sales pitch was going great at Tuesday night’s school board meeting, until those same officials were forced to concede that the new initiative does, in fact, couple teacher evaluation, assessments and performance with pay.
The “talent effectiveness” gambit is CMS’s attempt to reboot a pay-for-performance plan officials rolled out last year with a barrage of new student tests to be used, in tandem with other measures, for evaluating teachers. It was met with nearly universal criticism from educators and parents, helped in no part by former superintendent Peter Gorman’s clandestine efforts to craft legislation allowing the scheme to be implemented without a previously assured vote of approval from teachers.
Yes, that’s what happens. Peter Gorman had to craft it in secret. IN SECRET!
Teachers and teacher leaders began calling me outraged over former Superintendent Peter Gorman’s plan earlier this year. Yes it was big, bumbling and a bit too bureaucratic. Surely the school system could have found a better way to dole out performance pay without additional testing of students given that there is plenty of testing already.
But the teachers’ main complaint was that they’d actually be judged on performance and could be paid less than others.
And? I’d say over the phone, thinking how insane they sounded to complain about the reality every private sector worker faces every day.
And nothing. But the teachers won. They got the parents all whupped up and that was that. Now millions of dollars later, the school board has been reduced to hiding the real intent of the program — to God Forbid award better teacher performance — and actually hiring two PR people to help them obfuscate the fact that hgh performance could lead to higher pay.
I say to heck with it. If Charlotte’s parents want to fight this, rather than stand up for the concept and demand accountability from teachers, they will continue to get exactly the educational product they deserve — the one they are getting now.
It’s a shame too, because right now would be the perfect time to do it. For the first time in years, there is stiff competition among teachers for jobs. (See Dreams dashed: Recession upends hopes of aspiring teachers.) We could start hiring only the best at CMS and across the country and then judge them by performance and reward those that perform and broom those that don’t and … Oh never mind.
One thing is for sure. This ain’t about the children.
