Merit pay is at best a band-aid and one inadequate to staunch the flow. A response to Aaron Hanscom and Ari Kaufman.
On reading the Hanscom and Kaufman article, “Merit pay? Please,” I have to comment, although it augers accountability more than you are likely to hear from the average teacher, it still reflects a teacher’s bias regarding the quality of their product. I agree merit pay may be a useful idea; however, I don’t see how it goes far enough in solving the many ills and disincentives in modern teaching. Merit pay is hardly a panacea or formula for sweeping reform. It is, at best, a band-aid and one inadequate to staunch the flow.
My wife was a teacher for eighteen years in Maryland and five in California. She is a staunch defender of public education, teacher unions, school usurpations of parental roles, and is a socialist of the 1960’s variety. She insists the problem is one of insufficient funding, never accepting that funding has been added repeatedly, only to be misspent on ‘extras’ never contemplated. In this, she is typical of public teachers. She is not lazy and has spent countless hours preparing materials and lesson plans for her students. She chose early to work with special-ed children and did good work in that area. She is and has been a good and suitable teacher for small children and can be credited with having taught several hundred to read, write, and do basic math. Arguably, she has been an effective teacher within the limited regimen of early childhood education. However, she balks at larger challenges and chose her roles based on her own perceived limitations.
When we returned to Maryland, she had to start over and felt put out that she had to take difficult classes normally given to new teachers just out of college. She had an emotional ‘tantrum’ over it at the time that resulted in me backing her desire to quit. Bad mistake. I assumed she wanted time to regroup and reevaluate her career, but she showed no interest in starting over. She was ‘stuck’ in a mindset that eschews competition, independence, or flexibility. She never had to compete, even as a child. As a committed socialist, she turned up her nose at working in commercial venues, and her ‘professional’ status forbade her taking menial work. I made many suggestions she rejected. After all, what was the point of ‘earning’ her sheepskin if she ended up something less exalted. She even rejected a suggestion of taking clerical work within her beloved school system, making the excuse she lacked the requisite skills.
My wife may have a severe case of ‘teacher-itus,’ yet I have seen these same traits to a lesser extent in many teachers. Their problem is not so much one of a lack of energy as rigidity and ineffectiveness. The measure of ‘good teacher’ is not how much knowledge they impart, but how much prescribed information. The teacher who fulfills her quota of lesson plans and tests gets a high rating. The teacher who does not or acts the maverick by teaching outside the curricula gets a slightly lower rating. Few teachers ever get really bad ratings and no effort is made to cull them because of the need to fill classrooms with ‘qualified’ teachers. Most teachers spend countless hours preparing to teach flawed, dumbed-down, inappropriate, and PC ideas that rob children of a real education, and leave no room for contrarian ideas. They are discouraged from thinking or acting outside the box defined for them. As such, energetic teachers are rendered as ineffective as lazy ones, and may be an even bigger problem for our kids. I have listened to dedicated teachers so thoroughly convinced of patently false, revisionist ideas that I shudder to think what they are telling my kid; and who are oblivious to the disservice they render. Good teachers are leaving, not because of wages, but because they are frustrated in wanting to teach something of real value. They are discouraged by a system they believed functional, but have found is necrotic.
In today’s culture, parents are regarded by the schools as barely tolerated intruders in our kids’ education. We are routinely thwarted from having a say in what is taught or how. As a parent, I am often confronted with how I can shield or ‘un-teach’ nonsense foisted on my son as ‘knowledge.’ If I object or refuse approval, my son will be failed and refused a diploma. For example, I strenuously disagree with the way sex-education is taught in our schools over the objections of many parents. If I withhold approval, I am told my son will not get his diploma. If I chose to home-school, I am still forced to teach the offensive material in their stead and in the manner they direct. This is socio-political activism to teach value judgments contrary to our objections.
Incentive pay will only increase the rate at which kids have junk-knowledge shoveled down their hungry craws. If we motivate teachers to increase their efforts without reorienting them in what we expect taught, we will only have a harder job later undoing the mischief. To the contrary, if we aren’t going to fix what is taught, then by no means make the brainwashing machine more efficient. The only way this can change is if we take responsibility for what is taught back from a government that has usurped that function from parents.
Teachers have gotten the strange idea that if they put out substantial effort, they should be well rewarded for that effort. It doesn’t occur to many that no one is interested in paying for effort that does not produce something of value. It is the value of the product that determines payment, not the effort it takes to produce it. If it cost more than it is worth, we should have the right to refuse this ‘service.’ As it now stands, we are taxed for a service of questionable value and denied alternatives to it. This is beginning to change with charter schools, but we still have to beg government for the ‘privilege’ of opting out or pay twice for the same commodity.
Parents should have the first and final say on what our kids learn. Ours is the greater concern for their futures. No one, teachers included, has a greater vested interest in what or how well our kids are taught. No one else is there from day of birth, first spoken word, sorting out arcane homework assignments, teaching values for success in life, and launching them into independence. No one stands alongside beaming satisfaction for their accomplishments, as do parents. We (as much as any paid teacher) teach and re-teach lessons. We are there for every conference, every pageant, every expulsion, and every day spent sick. We will still be there when teachers are all but forgotten. We will be there to help them start careers, get married, get a mortgage, and teach parenting skills. We will even be there in our dotage when our roles are reversed. It is us they will bury, not their teachers. They and we will want to know they are capable in time to fill those roles. These make parents vested as no one else can be. Right now, our schools are a mess because no one is really responsible who is vested in the product. Teachers claim that theirs is the greater commitment, but that is patently false; and parents are as guilty as teachers in promoting this fiction. Teachers are committed to a stream of kids who are, one-by-one, important during their term. Parents are committed to our kids for life, and beyond their lifetimes to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. No one denies teachers take their job seriously, make strenuous efforts, or teach useful lessons. Teachers can take satisfaction knowing they filled an important role, but it is an overstated one. If by commitment we mean showing up each day, meeting assigned goals, drumming false notions into uncritical brains, and adding a splash of window dressing for parents and supervisors, no matter how energetically, then we are only minimally committed to a minimalist education.
A century ago, students had to apply to get into high school as they now do for college. High school entrance exams were formidable, and only a relative few achieved this level. Yet most of our population was literate and capable on a par with today’s above-average high school graduate. This is the measure of how far our public schools have fallen. In those years, the federal government was not involved in the management of our schools and provided no funding of ‘public’ schools. Funding came from local school districts who were, thereby, the arbiters of what was taught. Even state governments had little to say. School districts competed for the best teachers, who were free of the restrictions of unions. They selected materials based on merit and teachers were encouraged to enhance their curricula. Schools consisted of one to several teachers and, possibly, a principle who also taught class. Schools were free to hire unaccredited teachers, and often did if they were the better candidate. Schools consisted of plain, modest, unadorned structures that did not distract from the business of learning, nor contribute to an atmosphere of distraction, bedlam, and irresponsibility. Schools imposed standards of regulation and decorum that provided focus and security, and their strict policies were supported by parents who understood and approved the need. There were few school counselors, psychiatrists, nurses, clericals, maintenance, custodians, or the plethora of others “needed” to run schools today. Then, students frequently had the same teacher for several years, providing continuity and economy. Teachers were free to introduce ideas not subject to crippling curricula vetted to minimize all risk of offense. School directors were drawn from the communities they served and were leading citizens of those communities. The schools they oversaw were the same ones their own children and grandchildren attended, so they were vested in the quality of those schools. Parents who objected to the manner their kids were taught were free to withdraw them from school, find private schooling, or teach at home as they saw fit. Granted, some kids got short shrift, but, overall, kids who wanted to learn learned. Schools differed in quality, but were, again overall, superior because they were free to experiment and change. More than this, they were subject to the approval of a community of parents who could fire a bad teacher or close down an entire school that did not meet their expectations. Now, that is motivation to teach!
If you really want to change this, if you are really ‘committed’ to providing my kid with an honest and useful education, then help rid us of this misbegotten system of education. Tell big government to butt out of what is a purely local matter. Help put control back in the hands of parents, and you will see a revolution in what can be taught. Trust parents to be the best arbiters of our kid’s education and stop depriving us of that role. Change the dictum that teachers shall have certificates demonstrating they’ve taken the requisite courses and given obeisance to the gods of correctness, but not necessarily know anything worth teaching. It is not a single mechanism of modern education that is wrong, it is the whole beast. You want merit pay? Fine, leave the public schools and go private. There you can charge what the market will bear.
rstapler@aceweb.com
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