The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union, has been working hard to distance itself from its competitor, the National Education Association, which tends to resist sensible reforms.
The federation’s president, Randi Weingarten, set the contrast quite effectively with a speech last week in Washington, in which she offered a proposal to reform teacher evaluation. She not only echoed Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s call for evaluation systems that take student achievement into account but also expressed support for “a fair, transparent and expedient process to identify and deal with ineffective teachers.”
The shortcomings of evaluations were laid out last year in an eye-opening study by a New York research group, the New Teacher Project. Where they can be said to exist at all, evaluations are typically short, pro forma and almost universally positive. Poorly trained evaluators visit the classroom once or twice for observations that last for a total of an hour or less. Nearly every teacher passes and the overwhelming majority of teachers receive top ratings. Yet more than half the teachers surveyed said they knew a tenured teacher who deserved to be dismissed for poor performance.
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Please identify any school district in the United States whose teacher merit pay system has been meeting its objectives for 3 years.Negotiating a merit pay plan for teachers means paying more to get Union agreement-more benefits etc.I have nothing against the concept of rewarding talent and hard work,I just havent evidenced a workable program.I would prefer to have School Boards asking their Superintendents how many teachers were terminated for cause in the past 5 years and discussing the numbers of addicted/impaired teachers are teaching in their schools.