And I would argue that it is short-sighted to sacrifice collaboration and mentoring of new teachers for an idea that appeals to some.
Not sure what you mean here.
If mean that mentoring and collaboration are substitutes for objective assessment, I disagree. They have their place, but not in assessment. And I never said that mentoring and collaboration should be disallowed.
I agree that merit pay shouldn't be based only on test scores. If a teacher does an incredible job on some random project, s/he should get some kind of appropriate bonus. If a teacher consistently takes on extra work and does it well, s/he should be rewarded (such as with a promotion to a higher pay grade). I don't understand why there's so much resistance to this idea.
Teaching is a non-profit, tax-payer funded profession. When you start talking about merit-pay you are talking about making teachers compete for a very limited piece of the pie...
People in the military are rewarded for doing their jobs well. So are people at the FBI, the forest service, scientists at federally funded labs, tenure-track scientists and technicians at state-funded universities...the list goes on. Why is this practice okay in these places but not okay for teachers?
Banning merit-based bonuses, promotions, and other rewards is extremist and protects mediocre people while providing disincentives for going beyond the call of duty. When there's no reward for doing a really good job, many talented people will seek employers who recognize their talents ---
just like the parents of many gifted kids opt out of public schools in favor of educational environments that recognize the talents of their children.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to be recognized for doing good work. Appropriate recognition is healthy. Yet you implied that the only two choices are taking no credit or narcissism. This is close to a straw man argument, as I never said anything like this.
...but I do not find it at all alarming that they aren't top scorers on GREs. ...I doubt very much that overall GRE scores would be a strong indicator of teacher effectiveness, at least at the K-8 level.
"Aren't top scorers?" They're the
bottom scorers! That bothers me. And given that the GRE is measuring pretty basic stuff, it really bothers me that they don't know this stuff.
The GRE does not measure many of the skills that make a teacher great.
So you're using this as an excuse for not knowing subject matter? It's wonderful if Miss Smith relates well to her 8th graders, but if they don't learn much from her because she doesn't really understand algebra, what's the point?
I get frustrated when discussions about teachers are framed along the lines of "it's better to have someone who's good at teaching than a subject matter expert."
Teachers don't have to be experts, but they have to be competent. A person simply cannot teach something effectively without knowing how to do it very well. The average GRE and SAT results among future teachers are too low to imply competence.
Anyone teaching fourth grade math and up should know algebra and geometry very well (and both are tested on both the SAT and GRE). Really, they all should. You have to know a lot more than your students in order to really understand their mistakes.
(Note that I have teaching experience and am not just making all this up based on some theory I have).
