I employ Google Alerts to track Performance Pay for Teachers, a subject that is near and dear to my heart. My wife retired from a great teaching career and my daughter is in her 5th year of teaching high school level science courses. I know they like her.
My mail box fills up daily with news alerts on the performance subject; it’s amazing to see how popular the topic is, including the variety of solutions. Something is definitely up, across all 50 states. The solutions are so varied; I get more and more surprised as to the number of ways one can objectively determine the good from the bad. When I was in school, it was so obvious. Are you with me here?
I’m not sure what is driving the madness, whether it’s federal money, state and local budgets, or purely a need to place the blame of performance on teachers, rather than on the entire institutional chain of state and local administrators, learning mandates, managers, department leaders, teachers, teacher’s aides, students, parents, perhaps even grandparents.
But let’s get back to the Ohio concept, which stopped me dead in my tracks this morning. Ohio’s new collective bargaining law, Senate Bill 5, replaces traditional pay structures for a system that focuses on job performance. It means that teacher evaluations would be factored into their salary arrangements, one of five factors. Get ready for this high and inside pitch: “The evaluations will include whether parents and students are satisfied with a teacher, and which may be measured by surveys, questionnaires, or other forms of soliciting feedback,” the law reads.
I don’t know about how you feel about this solution, but for some mysterious reason, I find it difficult to find any objectivity in this process. Perhaps it’s because I know how demanding parents can be when their thought-to-be straight A student brings home a couple of Bs, thus knocking Johnny out of contention for a full boat college scholarship.
The law is not in effect yet. I wonder why?
- Roger