I was a public school teacher that worked in a district that attempted to measure teacher value add. There was limited pay for performance based on that metric. And the district I worked in was majority racial minority and majority living in poverty.
"Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher
quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement."
"The main dataset contains information on the universe of Wisconsin teachers,
linked to student test scores to calculate teacher VA."
"Student Test Scores and Demographics.—Student-level data include math and
reading test scores in the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE
2007–2014) and the Badger test (2015–2016), for all students in grades 3 to 8, as well
as demographic characteristics such as gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic
(SES) status, migration status, English-learner status, and disability."
What this study is saying is that paying teachers more for improved performance by their students on standardized tests results in higher standardized test scores of their students. That does not surprise me. In my experience, this system encouraged teaching to the test (focusing the majority of instruction on test prep rather than traditional instruction) and widespread cheating. Both of these efforts raise standardized test scores. The study assumes that standardized test scores are a direct measure of teacher quality and student achievement. In my experience that is not true.
A secondary question is: is the pay increase high enough to induce more talented people to become a teacher?
If all it does is pull higher quality teachers from other places, it is zero sum and all you eventually end up with is the same quality schooling for a higher price.
I do think teachers as a whole should be paid well, but that is a separate discussion.
When I left teaching my salary went up 50% on day 1, to 100% after about a year, to 150% after 2 or 3 years, and has continued climbing significantly since. If I had stayed my salary would have lagged inflation. The pay for performance bonuses I've heard of have never been more than 20% of a teacher's salary. I'm not typical because I have CS and Math degrees, but still, I have no intention of ever considering returning to teaching.
Not part of this discussion, but I did work with people who left public schools to work at charter schools because you could get 25-50% more there, but they rarely stayed more than 2 years because of the working environment being more toxic than at public schools.
What if the standardized tests aren't administered by the teacher? That seems like it would be an easy solution to get around the cheating problem.
As for teaching to the test, what's the real downfall of doing that? Colleges use standardized test scores as the biggest or one of the biggest criteria in admission.
> What if the standardized tests aren't administered by the teacher? That seems like it would be an easy solution to get around the cheating problem.
In order for the test scores to be granular enough to be used as measure of performance of individual teachers, the testing would have to be done fairly often. The schools and school districts that are already lacking funds for basic stuff like maintenance and teacher and staff salaries would have hard time to pay an additional subject to administer the test.
With the frequency and volume of testing, it would likely be too costly to do the testing in an external testing facility (which most districts do not have), so it would have to be done on site. I remember my kids telling me that every time before they took a standardized test (it happens once a year around here), the teachers told them basically "we cannot give you the answers, but look around, the answers may already be there, there may be a poster hanging on the wall or something else like that that may be helpful."
The schools are free to design their own pay packages right? The state isn't mandating that pay be tied to tests. This is mostly just an assumption that that would be the only metric used.
Test questions are written to test varying levels of competence from basic recall to true mastery. It's partially why so many people hate word problems, they don't actually understand the concepts. Many others just can't read.
Test questions can be written to assess true mastery, although it's not so easy as you're trying to make it sound... especially if you want the test to take a sane amount of time, be consistently gradable by different graders, and have any kind of reasonable signal to noise ratio. But sure, you can get there, or at least go a long way toward it.
If you try to actually create tests that way, you will discover that the institutions and political atmosphere around you will punish you harshly. It's "unfair" to give a test that you can't pass by memorizing things, you see. And the people who will ultimately make the decisions about what you're allowed to do with your test are rarely going to care much about actual mastery, and often wouldn't be able to recognize mastery if they did care.
In practice, standardized tests are always going to be easily gamed, so if you make people's and institutions' rewards dependent on them, you will end up diverting more time, energy, and other resources away from actually teaching mastery and into meaningless gaming.
Standardized tests spend the money and time to get those quality questions that are consistently graded. It's not some random folks making minimum wage coming up with questions.
Teaching the test narrows the subject matter significantly. Some of the most important things I learned in school weren't directly on tests: critical thinking, fallacies, cultural studies, how to avoid being exploited.
That said, in some circumstances only teaching the test could be an improvement.
One of the problem is that you can train the students to overfit any test, and that's worse than cheating which represent only a small number of students usually.
So by incentiving the teachers to make the students perform well in some tests, why teach real lessons when you can just throw at them cheat codes for the test.
If a teacher knows or suspects what questions will be on the test, they can drill their students to memorize the answers the week before the test. That's cheating and it doesn't matter who proctors the test.
I once taught a class for teachers and after so many failed to be able to apply the quadratic equation, I told him that it would be the bonus question for the next test.
After so many then failed I told them that just writing the formula would be the bonus question on the next test.
Very few people got the bonus question.
In order to drill students to memorize, that students have to be present enough and interested enough for it to stick...
When I was in my teaching Masters program, we talked a lot about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is when you want to do something for yourself, e.g. you enjoy the satisfaction of solving a problem. Extrinsic motivation is when your reason for doing it comes from outside yourself, e.g. your parents tell you they'll give you $20 for every A you get on your report card. The district I worked in experimented with extrinsic motivators to get students to attend school and perform well on the test with rewards like food, gift cards, and electronics. That was enough to get some students to try to do better, but usually only the students who already had some intrinsic motivation. The students that they were really trying to motivate were the ones with no intrinsic motivation, and they largely ignored the rewards offered.
_Punished by Rewards_ is a great book on the topic. For your experiment, I curious how you controlled for suppressing counter motivations (e.g., peer pressure, pride, etc.)
The class was a required class for teachers to get their education degree. Back then, they had to have that degree in order to teach in the schools.
I doubt that many of them were thrilled for math, especially the more foundational topics we were going through so yes, their intrinsic motivation was mostly not high.
However their extrinsic motivation should have been off the charts. They literally couldn't get their degree without passing the course. Many were repeating the course having failed it before, so their chances were running out.
I do not recall any of the students being the normal 18 to 21 college students - - they were all older. They better understood why they were choosing their degree (looking back, based on demographics, I suspect many were divorcees prepping for a career or moms whose children had started school).
I gave the memorization question as a way to see how much of it was the work they were putting in and much was my inability to explain the difficult material in a way they could understand.
It may be that the manner in which you are teaching that topic is itself failing. Your students don’t understand, investigate how to improve your approach in explaining which results in them understanding. Decompose the steps to see where that understanding is not happening.
It was decades ago so the advice is too late. As I taught other students successfully at the time (in that most seemed to grasp the material), there may be some other problems.
I boiled it down to "just write the equation down" to see if it were my teaching or their desire.
The inability for many to successfully replicate the formula indicated to me that they weren't putting the time in to memorize.
Since these were more adult learners going for their teaching degree, and many repeating the class having failed to pass it the first time, my observations beyond "I wasn't capable" are:
- the course material was difficult (a rapid survey of math foundation, including some group theory)
- they couldn't make the time because of other life commitments, exacerbated by being a summer course where we met every day.
I had one student, who had never scored higher than 50 on a test, show up after the final to ask if there was anything she could do to pass the class as it was required and she had flunked now 3 times and couldn't repeat it. "All I want to do is teach 3rd grade, I don't need any of this" she explained. There was nothing i could do...
First you have to define teacher quality. What should a good teacher provide to their students? Knowledge, ability, curiosity, safety, integrity, self-worth, honor, respect, kindness? Can these be quantified and compared against each other?
None of those other ways can be done without effort and extra costs. And as nowadays everything has to be done cheaper and quicker, it will stay as that.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
Please read guidelines link at bottom of page. So many of your past comments are simple anti-capitalist opinions that are not gratifying intellectual curiosity. Not a mod: just hoping for better discourse here.
Even in a non-capitalist society, you still need high quality teachers and ideally some way to measure them. And it's not like eliminating capitalism in any way would prove to end poverty.
If you define pverty as earning less than 15 % of the median country wage and then pay 90 % of people 2 dollars a day and 10 % of the people infinity dollars a day you have no poverty by definition. Some variation of that is how every other system of government/economy has beaten poverty. There is no point engaging these people unless you are a psychiatrist trying to help them with their mental illness.
Even easier than that, simply define poverty as a property of capitalism and if anybody says that poverty also exists in your communist society, you throw them into the gulag for spreading capitalist propaganda.
Assessing teacher quality sounds a lot less destructive. You know, fewer people getting summarily executed for "crimes" such as owning property, being disliked by their neighbors, etc. That kind of bloodshed is what makes commies so red.
The question is whether test scores as a measure of teacher quality is better than the next best alternative. The authors suggest that this would be seniority, but it could also be subjective measures like complaints from parents, likeability, and office politics.
I agree that there are problems with test-based evaluation, but overall I believe it's the least bad solution. It gives teachers a tangible incentive to figure out why what they're doing may not be working and try something different.
They are the general population, look around. Teaching no longer provides a stable middle class life in most areas. They live paycheck to paycheck, struggle to afford housing, feel crippled by student loan payments, and have little opportunity for advancement.
It's easier to be incorruptible by money when you already have a lot of money.
One of the big societal problems with pushing down wages for 50 years is that it makes society less ethical because people aren't comfortable enough in their finances. When people aren't comfortable with their finances, they are less likely to be able to quickly ignore unethical things that might help their financial situation even a little bit.
Quick example: You see a guy drop a $20 when stuffing his ATM withdrawal into his wallet. I would say, "hey bud, you dropped a 20." Someone else might just let him walk out and pick it up for themselves because it would help them a lot more than me.
Where I live schools are commonly for profit, so shareholders and bosses exert pressure to get higher grades.
It works, without the students learning more. Our universities are complaining that students arrive that can hardly read even though their grades say they are able to.
And yeah, we have standardised tests administered centrally so we can actually to some degree measure 'grade inflation' too, and know very well that employment/pay based on grading undermines whatever slim value grading would have otherwise.
The sick idea that profit is the onlyway to motivate humans is historically idiotic. It is an outcome of pathetic efforts to legitimate capitalism, a system of exploitation.
I agree but I wouldn't pin all the blame on the big C.
Marxism places a lot of emphasis on materialism, which was always one of the biggest targets for its critics. One man's profit is another's stolen labor value. Both systems of economic (that should be the clue here) thought are very materialist and don't do a good enough job assigning value to intrinsic motivation, believing in something, following a passion, etc.
> This paper has studied the effects of the introduction of flexible pay for pub- lic school teachers on the composition of the workforce, teachers’ effort, and
student achievement. A switch away from seniority-based salary schedules toward pay-for-quality in a subset of Wisconsin school districts resulted in high-quality teachers moving to these FP districts and low-quality teachers either moving to dis-tricts which remained with the salary schedules or leaving the public school system altogether. As a result, the composition of the teaching workforce improved in FP districts. Effort exerted by all teachers also increased and, subsequently, test scores improved.
I understand that using test scores makes for easier science, but I grew up with some level of "teach the test" and in my anecdotal experience you turn schools into the dullest cram schools when performance is measured this way. I did fine on tests but I hated it. The only reason I didn't drop out was because I didn't realize I had the agency to do so.
This. My kid is naturally curious and she can tell you everything about the things she gets curious about. She'll spend hours digging for information on a subject. She absolutely hates school though.
I saw this discussed on Marginal Revolution today as well.
My main question is whether the gains are fundamentally zero-sum, at least in the short term. Some districts implement flexible pay and some don’t, and then the best teachers move to get paid more. And the places that get left behind…?
In the long-run, increased pay ought to lead to more high-quality teachers entering the profession. But in the short term, this scheme seems likely to redistribute talent in ways that reinforce existing patterns of inequality.
An other more direct issue is Goodhart’s law: if teacher compensation is linked to a specific metric, then that metric is what you’ll get. If the metric is test scores, then you’ll see:
- teaching to the test rather than educating
- trying to get rid of left behind, slow, or difficult students (already an issue for generations in test-oriented private institutions — as opposed to the more remedial “last chance” ones)
- ignoring the groups which have the lowest odds of contributing to the metric (which groups it is depends on the weighting / averaging between pupils)
I agree that this sounds like a different kind of voucher/private school resource transfer. Private schools are able to self-select their students and aren't required by law to take ALL students that want to come. This makes it trivial to be both cheaper and show better test results while at the same time removing resources from the students that actually need help.
The problem is that people in power thinking that this is mostly a teacher driven problem. This would be the same approach as saying that a the amount of money a doctor gets paid should be based on how much weight their patient loses (e.g.) Anyone who thinks teaching is so easy should go try it for a month. This kind of approach also misaligns incentives. The fact is we have good teachers and bad teachers, just like every profession. We need to rethink two things for our education system. Is it to just push kids to college or is it to maximize the number of students who can become gainfully employed and self-supporting adults. Then we need to restructure our resources towards that goal, specifically in terms of class size and ability level and extra help. The main change we need to make is to move investment of resources much more towards elementary age where it can have the longest compounding benefit. (Source: I'm from a family of a dozen current and retired public school teachers)
I do agree that if we increase the pay and benefits for ALL teachers, then we'll create incentive to get better quality teachers in the profession and that competition will get better results in the long term.
> But in the short term, this scheme might judt redistribute talent in ways that reinforce existing patterns of inequality.
Aren't you assuming that rich districts with higher grades implement flexible pay? I think it would be the poor districts with worse grades that would be most likely to want to shake things up.
The main characteristic of poor districts is that they’re poor, which means they don’t have the means to implement high pay schemes. Rich districts do.
The school district I worked in had impoverished students but high per pupil funding, which is pretty common. What reinforced the inequality in that district was that teachers who were able to, self-selected to have the best behaved students, who were most likely to see improvements in test scores. The teachers who ended up with 90% of their students starting the year multiple grade levels behind and with severe behavioral problems would rarely stay in the classroom more than 2 years.
You think of it in terms of inequality, which is one perspective. However, if seen from the perspective of the best behaved students, the ones who want a positive learning environment that will maximize their talents and success, this situation seems greatly preferable to the alternative, which is a sprinkling of problematic students disrupting the learning equally in all classrooms and making overall outcomes more mediocre. This is Ontario's public school system lately, in a nutshell.
Regardless of district the US spends more per student than most other countries.
The issue is that this gets eaten up by bureaucracy and teachers are left living in poverty, hence them clinging to unions like a drowning woman to a straw.
Additionally it’s a side channel way to simply pay most teachers less and some teachers more, saving money in cash strapped districts. Accountants and MBAs love that sort of stuff.
> this scheme seems likely to redistribute talent in ways that reinforce existing patterns of inequality
Only if school districts that implement flexible pay are also those with higher SES indicators. Which could very well be the case, although the study did try to control for these factors.
I do agree that unless you increase teacher pay vis-a-vis other professions, the effect will mostly be to rob Peter to pay Paul.
My sister is a very talented leader/organizer who went to teachers college and would love to teach but the pay isn't good enough for what she could get elsewhere.
Yet she still obsessively talks about how bad the teaching systems is here in Ontario, Canada and follows all the studies.
I could 100% see a large increase in talent/quality jumping into the system and taking over the culture. Or at least heavily influencing it. The gaming for tests is also probably a short term effect as well, the old guard doing what it knows best, just more of it.
But Canada will be the last place this sort of reform would happen. The unions completely dominate discourse.
This does definitely seem like a setting with a large risk for zero-sum outcomes, as the current state of the art seems to only be able to identify the bottom percentiles and then have them discarded. So current understanding hasn't identified why anyone became a good teacher, so we don't know how to make the bad ones better.
This is a problem because even a bad teacher is very likely better than no teacher, so we can't actually discard very many of the bottom teachers before making things worse.
Sure, but if the gains in an experiment come from cannibalizing other districts, then it's not a good guide to what will happen when everyone's in the experiment. Do you attract more people to the profession? Or do people get discouraged by seeing variable outcomes they can't predict ahead of time?
How would it reinforce existing patterns of inequality if low-income school districts move to a flexible pay model, thereby attracting better teachers?
good performance and putting in extra effort should be rewarded over those who just do their job at the minimum effort levels.
That's a fundamental problem with teacher pay, there are no bonusses, there are hardly incentives or room for raises. It's all just tenure based. Once you're in, you're in.
Does standardized test score outcomes measure this behavior or does it favor teachers who teach test taking and have less challenging demographics in their classroom?
Performance based pay in professions whose performance is difficult to measure directly leads to bizarre outcomes. I’m not disagreeing in general but I’ve seen this again and again in my career, and I spent a long time on Wall Street where bonuses -really- matter. That extreme brought out the extremes in how incentive pay distorts behaviors in unexpected and undesirable ways, which gets worse the further you get from a directly measurable outcome like PNL.
As a parallel example, hospitals who specialize in extremely difficult diseases with high fatality rates generally have abysmal patient outcome metrics over hospitals that punt anything complex to a specialty hospital. This plays out in policy spaces punishing the speciality hospitals despite the fact they are well known to be top of the industry in terms of performance and “extra effort.” Nominally though they should be shut down by all metrics.
This absolutely plays out in education. Not every classroom or school or district is equivalent in terms of the challenges they deal with. A teacher with a very challenged class who is a high performer and puts in extra efforts will be punished simply because their baseline was much lower than a teacher who punches the clock in a class of affluent students who have private tutors.
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) awards school districts for things like students earning industry IT certifications. This can be more than $1k per certification.
Teachers know what will happen if they try to excel in these areas: they will be fired. Coworkers explained this to me, but I did not listen.
I explained to a school board member that I was going to try to get my 9th graders certified. He replied that if even one student failed to earn their certification that I would have failed and he would have to fire me. I tried to reason with the idiot, but he made Dilbert's point haired boss seem competent.
I managed to get about half of my students Microsoft certified.
I left that school district in part because my life was hell there. One secretary in particular was very offended because she had to figure out how to spend the school district's money on certification exam vouchers and had to add students to a field trip to compete in an electronics competition. We took 2nd in the state, and I left the school district. Now I'm an adjunct at a community college.
If you want to fix Texas Public Schools, elect competent school board members.
If you want teachers to perform well, reward them instead of punishing them. When a teacher brings state money into the district, give them at least half of that money.
This is an interesting example of how there is a difference betweena policy being a "heat pump" and a "resistive heater", and that both can occur simultaneously.
The problem with "heat pumps" is that they necessitate a "cold" side, from which they "pump the heat" to the "hot" side. Their goal isn't to increase the overall "heat" in the system, it's to move the "hot" all to one side.
A "resistive heater" can add "heat" to the system more evenly, but is less efficient and you won't see "temperatures" rise nearly as quickly.
We frequently put the burden on teachers and “the system” for outcomes, but rarely do we talk about improving our cultural and societal attitudes towards education. If you come from a family and community that does not value education and views it as free child care, how good your teacher is does not matter very much.
If they want to improve teachers performance - reduce the $hit modern society is making them deal with. They're very under paid.
How would you like to deal with corraling 23'ish hyper nut jobs all at different levels? That you have to be their parents, psychologist, DEI, identity fosterer, special education teachers etc.
Funding in many schools isn't there now for specialists to do these roles.... because teachers wanted to earn more after inflation, so cuts made - more responsibilites to teachers.
So the teachers are having to take on the role of many of society's "dump bucket" of stuff that parents should be taking care of.
When I worked in a relatively well to do suburban district I had class sizes up to 35 students. Because I was a math teacher, administration did their best to keep our class sizes under 30, teachers of other core classes were more likely to have 30+ students, and classes that didn't have standardized tests might have more than 35. If I recall correctly, every year I taught 9th graders, who are often hyper nutjobs.
> Funding in many schools isn't there now for specialists to do these roles.... because teachers wanted to earn more after inflation, so cuts made - more responsibilites to teachers.
This seems as though you're implying that it's the greedy teacher's fault that our school systems shove ever-increasing responsibilities upon them. As if the total pot of money in the system is a fixed, immovable sum, and so that if a teacher wants a raise it must mean that something elsewhere has to give.
Is there any shred of evidence to support that kind of thinking, though? We can quibble about salaries and outlier districts all day long if you want, but fundamentally it's not like teachers are the most highly-paid group of workers out there. And governments manage to find money to increase funding to other systems year after year (the police, for example).
>This seems as though you're implying that it's the greedy teacher's fault that our school systems shove ever-increasing responsibilities upon them.
I believe the opposite. I believe teachers are underpaid, not greedy at all, and under staffed. Often education is under funded (in areas of the country such as mine).
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Districts have placed individual responsibility to the teachers in many cases with a strong DEI push - even stronger than had existed pre-covid.
While it's difficult to study in a controlled way, any serious, considered attempt to improve the status quo in state schooling is an extremely good idea.
I adverse using metrics for value people, while I do not adverse metrics per se, as a companion information for statistical purposes. The issue with metrics used for something it that they became a target, not a measure anymore. They push toward conformism, witch happen to be antithetic to innovation.
Using metrics to understand at a large scale what happen, if a method work or not, where to improve etc might be useful and harmless. Using them as a way to prize or penalize have regularly very bad results.
The ancient quis custodiet ipsos custodes it's equally valid for metrics, who evaluate those who design the measure?
>However, psychological research suggests that >>>excessive<<< rewards can in some cases produce supra‐optimal motivation, resulting in a decline in performance. To test whether >>>very high<<< monetary rewards can decrease performance...
It seems like the only way to really assess a teachers performance is by evaluating the outcomes of their students over time.
Since teaching career progression in the US is mostly tenure based I've always wondered why there wasn't a more longitudinal approach to their assessment.
The product is the students ability to achieve over time. One batch of good test results doesn't measure anything other than the teachers ability to get good outcomes for the test.
There's a very interesting chapter in the _Freakonomics_ book about catching cheating teachers. The authors use it as an example of incentives gone wrong: to hit their bonuses for high test scores, teachers have cheated in all manners of ways, from helping their students during standardized tests or literally changing their answers after students hand in the papers.
Hot take: you need to define performance and you can't without market feedback. So being about to freely chose a school and direct your money to it has to be the first prerequisite to even thinking about performance based pay. Some bureaucratic performance definition will just have people optimize for that.
The USA has the largest tax haul of any nation on Earth at $5.5 trillion. That the US government squanders that tax haul is indicative of the corruption, incompetence, and malevolence of the US government’s officials and bureaucrats.
Countries that fund education more can pay enough to attract a larger pool of candidates, and then choose only to hire the best of that pool. Unlike the current state of most school districts in the US, who will hire anyone that can meet the minimum qualifications, but still have huge numbers of vacancies. Many districts have lowered the requirements so they can bring in even less qualified people.
From my reading, the Nordic countries view teaching as a high value profession on par with doctor and lawyer, and this results in potential teachers having to work very hard to land a job and keep it.
Canada (or at least Ontario where I live) pays teachers relatively well, hire on merit, but results are quite mediocre when measured objectively (and, for what it's worth, correlate with my own subjective anecdata). This is at least partly due to perverse incentives introduced by the seniority system. You can hire the best, but if you promote and give raises to the ones who put in the most time, the best won't necessarily stick around nearly as much as you want them to.
According to the main rule of taxation, you're going to get less of what you're taxing. I we can generalize it and say that you'll get more of what you're incentivizing.
More people need to be encouraged to become teachers - full stop.
Its a valid concern that there are some teachers that are not good, and would be weeded out by performance based metrics. However - everyone else at the school knows who the bad teachers are. They're obvious. They're the ones leaving their class unattended. Doing the bare minimum.
These people can't be weeded out right now because there's a shortage of teachers. The need to keep a warm adult body in that room outweighs the need to discipline and then fire teachers that aren't doing their jobs.
As a thought experiment would we also suggest performance based police salaries? Or do we acknowledge that being a cop potentially sucks and that one aspect of making sure we don't only have bad cops is making the job attractive enough that we're not just picking from the bottom of the barrel.
/edit
To be clear - I'm suggesting we encourage more people to become teachers by paying them more and secondarily making them deal with less bullshit.
I hope you intend to encourage more people to become teachers by incentivizing them with higher pay (however that is distributed within the profession). Moral suasion can only get you so far, and is kinda suspect if you're encouraging people to walk into a bad situation.
Hire mature and experienced people as teachers. It is easy to assess someone mature based on their life achievements. No need to attract greedy ones as greed isn't the most desired competence for people who will work with children.
I'm speaking from the experience of being married to a teacher at a very large highschool in a medium sized city here in the US. In all the years of her talking to me about her work I don't think she's ever mentioned her union. Maybe she's just not at the admin level and dealing with it but given the number of vacancies at her school (which is considered one of the best in our city) - I don't even think the union is coming into play. They need staff.
Substitute teachers typically aren't part of unions but schools are forced to keep bringing in the ones that don't care at all because there's just not enough.
I'd suggest more any familial units with manners and respect - regardless of wealth or race. Lots of white kids who act poorly in rich & poor neighborhoods the teachers don't want to deal with but have to.
Hard to think of an argument why they shouldn’t be.
You can argue the raw materials are something they can’t control but plenty of other industries have the same issue, real estate, hiring, and we still pay them on performance.
Think we’d see accepting poor behavior, teachers writing off or actively bullying students tank if this were implemented properly.
A real estate agent or a hiring manager can still walk away from a really bad property, candidate, etc. A teacher can't walk away from a really bad kid (or really bad parents!) without leaving the profession entirely.
While they can have input, the goals of the administration and district don't always aline with the goals of the teachers. Teachers want good outcomes for their students. Administration wants to avoid issues that negatively impact budgets, like getting sued by parents.
I can not overstate how much I love LLMs. The important bits for those of us with a busy day:
The key findings of the research include:
Higher Salaries for High-Performing Teachers: Districts that adopted the flexible pay scheme offered higher salaries to high-performing teachers, which attracted quality teachers from districts that did not adopt the scheme.
Improved Teacher Quality: The introduction of performance-based pay resulted in improved overall teacher quality in districts that adopted the new pay scheme. This was due to both the attraction of high-quality teachers and increased effort from current teachers.
Enhanced Student Achievement: There was a noticeable improvement in student achievement in districts with flexible pay schemes. The increase in teacher quality and effort directly contributed to better academic outcomes for students.
"Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement."
"The main dataset contains information on the universe of Wisconsin teachers, linked to student test scores to calculate teacher VA."
"Student Test Scores and Demographics.—Student-level data include math and reading test scores in the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE 2007–2014) and the Badger test (2015–2016), for all students in grades 3 to 8, as well as demographic characteristics such as gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic (SES) status, migration status, English-learner status, and disability."
What this study is saying is that paying teachers more for improved performance by their students on standardized tests results in higher standardized test scores of their students. That does not surprise me. In my experience, this system encouraged teaching to the test (focusing the majority of instruction on test prep rather than traditional instruction) and widespread cheating. Both of these efforts raise standardized test scores. The study assumes that standardized test scores are a direct measure of teacher quality and student achievement. In my experience that is not true.