Reply to The wisdom of rewarding Montgomery’s school employees (Washington Post)

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "The wisdom of rewarding Montgomery’s school employees (Washington Post)"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]For the needs of the students to come first (smaller class size, thoughtful curriculum, excellent pay for excellent teachers (not across-the-board raises). That would be a great start.[/quote]

Teacher here (I have posted earlier in this thread).

First, I totally agree with the parents that they want more done and good for you that you do. I would LOVE a parent union in MCPS (I will be an MCPS parent next year as well). There is a lot the county is doing wrong, especially with curriculum, not keeping students back who haven't mastered skills, class size, etc. Fight the good fight. It is the higher ups you want to take it to. The teachers are following their lead - believe me, there is nothing we can do on our end.

However, you want to be very careful about the "excellent pay for excellent teachers" theory. it is impossible to prove this. Everyone wants to base "excellent teaching" off of results (test scores, grades) but then you will get 1. a bunch of teachers teaching to the test and  2. grade inflation.

In addition, you have a million factors that go into what each teacher has to deal with. What is her classroom population like? What time of day is she teaching (yes, this matters, just ask a teacher)? Does s/he have that ONE kid who sucks the learning away from everyone else in the room? There are just way too many variables to be able to grade teachers "across the board". While it would be great to be able to prove which teachers "deserve" a raise, it is impossible (and I am the teacher who said before that you can ask each teacher in the school to name the bottom three, and they could - mostly due to classroom management, but I don't know how you manage salaries that way without being completely unfair). [/quote]

I appreciate your post and appreciate how you didn't ascribe negative motives to the parents posting here.  Honestly, I appreciate it and it is a welcome change from some of the antagonism on this thread.

I hear what you are saying about evaluating teachers.  I'm sure it would require nuance and attention by the supervisor (in this case, probably the principal).  But, to be fair, we all have these issues in our own businesses.  One could say that it is impossible to evaluate any employee based on which cases they were assigned, whether or not they had the difficult sale, tougher customer, new product rollout and on and on.  Businesses must take these issues into account all the time when evaluating employees; I'm sure principals could take them into account and fairly evaluate teachers on staff.  (I agree with you that a top-down evaluation from a county-wide system would be unfair and would lead to teaching-to-the-test, but I would say that individual principals can and should be able to figure out which teachers on their staff are worthy of merit raises).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics