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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Unbelievable how much American culture hates education.[/quote]

I hate entitled groups who bully by punishing.  If 100% of the teachers in my school were evaluated as the highest performing and the dropout/illiteracy rate was not so abysmal and embarrassing to our country, I would gladly redirect my charitable giving toward a bonus pool for teachers.   The idea of tenure for k-12 education is a ridiculous concept and should never ever have been adopted. Too many concessions for too long and we remain in a mess.[/quote]

The issue in Chicago is not about tenure.  It is about the pay scale.  And the reason that performance pay is difficult to administer is that it's extremely difficult to demonstrate whether performance is the result of the class or the teacher.  And it means that the best teachers will no longer take on the tougher assignments but cherry pick the easier ones.  In business that kind of problem happens all the time.  For example, in utilities you want your best crew working on the toughest line breaks  But if you measure them on time to repair, it will kill their performance scores.  You counter by attempting to adjust for difficulty, but you can't quantify it.  So the crew starts complaining that the weaker crews don't do the tough jobs, and then you have to spread the work around so you don't drive them off.  And then the customer has a longer power or phone outage.

No one has cracked the performance testing dilemma.  The best teacher might make very limited progress in a classroom with troubled kids.  In fact, if she does her job well enough she might actually cause some of them to not drop out, further lowering her score.  They can add in year to year statistics for the same cohort and it still doesn't correct the problem.  In the end, there are 30 or so people involved in those test scores, and most of them don't have compensation riding on the outcome.  They are just waiting for the bell to ring so they can leave.[/quote]

The tenure point was not about Chicago negotiations, it is a general viewpoint - even if CPS doesn't have a tenure system, it should be eliminated in every k-12 school district in the country.[/quote]

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