Reply to MCPS Reaches Agreement with MCEA to Raise Teachers' Wages

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a “snobby” degree. I’m not a better teacher than colleagues who went to less “snobby” schools. I didn’t take any education classes until graduate school, while these colleagues started getting real-life practice while still an undergraduate. I had to catch up. What my snobby degree arguably did do was make it easier to transition to a new field and out of MCPS. I may have had more options because I hadn’t zeroed in exclusively on education as an undergraduate. I’m not sure young people are incentivized to seek out teaching as an undergraduate these days because they can find their way there through different tracks and preserve other options at the same time.[/quote]

Finally, someone that seems to get it. It may seem horribly unfair, but compensation for a job is only very loosely tied to how good you are at your job, or how hard you work. It is more based on your replacement cost, which in turn is associated with the compensation offered to people with similar skills/education/experience in other jobs that could do your job at a minimally acceptable level. [/quote]

Although a lot of workplaces talk about meritocracy, it's often subjective. Teacher jobs reward years of service instead of competency. This isn't to say there are competent teachers it's just not what is currently valued. [/quote]

It has been proposed a lot. The issue is how do you determine merit? You can’t use test scores as those almost completely mirror SES level. You also need more teachers in the more challenging schools so rewarding teaching in a school with higher achieving students would make the divide even greater.[/quote]

In my non-teaching job my boss has zero quantitative measures to decide who to promote. He does it based on the quality of our work as he perceives it. I make $120k after being promoted multiple times. Another colleague who started at the same time makes $60k because he never got promoted. Yet another makes $90k - she has gotten promoted but not as quickly as I have,

[b]Principals or APs could simply decide who the top performers are and give them raises because they want to retain them.[/b] No need for fancy algorithms which I agree would likely have unintended consequences.[/quote]

They could certainly do that in private schools, if they wanted to. In public schools, on the public dime, we should expect more objective standards than "Because I am the principal, and I wanted to."[/quote]

Yeah. And frankly, I'm not sure if principals and APs have the right vantage point to gauge teacher efficacy? I'm a parent, so my perspective is limited to what teachers tell me, but most teachers tell me their admins have little to no idea of what they do, hence why they're so frustrated that they're judged on the occasional observation that the admins do, which is usually in response to some complaint a student or parent has made about the teacher.[/quote]

If admin has no idea what is happening in the classroom, that is bad management.

Bad management happens in every sector. Promotions aren't always fair. But that is how you get to the salaries that people here compare teachers to. Nobody ever talks about the salaries of the ones that didn't get promoted, or didn't get hired by FAANG in the first place.[/quote]

The salaries that people here compare teachers to include the salaries of people who were promoted as well as people who were not promoted.[/quote]

Saying that doesn't make it true[/quote]

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