re: Teacher Pay Raises

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Don’t school systems have a large staff on their payroll to evaluate teachers?

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Most of the evaluations are based upon how many waves you create for the administrators.

Hierarchy.
Politicals
Administration
Office workers
Loud in your face parents
Math and Science teachers.
Teachers
Other school workers
Parents
Students
Dog crap
Tax payers

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Pay teachers more.

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I'm sorry. This is silly.

MOST teachers make a salary that attracts perfectly good teachers.

There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to raise what we pay for those teachers. What we need is to be able to attract better talent in the areas where we currently cannot due to specialty.

State funded Merit raises based on... test scores... Tests based on... state-mandated standards.

This will go swell.

before either one does any thing about raises, both rispone or jbe need to give teachers their expected base salary which around almoat 3k below what the southern average is or teachers will continue to keave the state or pursue other professions ....then u can talk about raises....that 1k raises wasn't a dam raise....Louisiana teachers are under paid as of now

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One thing we are leaving out here is tenure. For a free market system to install the merit pay concept you have to have the fear of losing a good employee. Tenure prevents this.

IE, John is an excellent math teacher. The principal doesn't recommend him for merit pay. In a company John would go to the boss and say "Give me a raise or I'm going to work for ACME."
Because of tenure John cannot get the math teaching job at ACME because their mediocre math teacher is protected by tenure. The ACME principal would like to fire that teacher and hire John, but he can't.

Any rational person will agree that across the board pay raises are the worst way to do it though easy administratively and politically.

The "you can't define merit" arguments make me a little disgusted. No, there is no perfect method. But there are several methods better than what we just did.

Salary increases based on:

1. Growth (increase of test scores)
2. Value added (doing well compared to similar students)
3. Let principals decide. And in turn, make sure the principals get paid on how well the school does.
4. Teaching certain subjects (math, science, special ed)
5. Teaching in certain areas (inner city, poor rural areas).

Any of these is better than across the board even though none are perfect. And nothing says we only have to use one method.

If all else fails just keep moving to a charter/voucher system where there is much more freedom and the accountability lies with the parents.

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You don’t pay on the final test score, you pay on what they actually taught.

Test in - test out = what is taught.

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Some of this data is here already.

My 3rd grader, for the last couple of years, her teachers have used this pretest / exit ticket system.

When they start a unit, they take a diagnostic test to see what they know about the topics in the unit.

Then every couple of days, they do an "exit ticket' which is basically a few problems to see how they are learning the material.

Then at the end of the unit, a unit test is given. This is graded.

With so much of tests being given on computer these days (My 6th grader takes every single graded test, and 90 percent of graded quizes, on a chromebook), the data is there for value added measurements.

And I think any discussion of "merit" when it comes to teachers, has to have value-added as a HUGE part of it. That's how you solve the problems with poor schools / problem students. You can't measure them against a fixed rubric. You have to measure them based on growth from a personal baseline.

That would be hard to do 20-30 years ago, but it can be done today.

However, you have to invest in such a system. You have to invest in the tech tools that can bridge into the testing systems and analyze the data. You can analyze the data and predict future scores, and then if the scores don't materialize, you have to have humans try to figure out why.

All of this costs money. It can be paid for by firing a few useless admin positions... but you have to be willing to make those cuts to pay for this new stuff.

We are near the bottom in education ratings and we have limited finances, Here in EBR we have a large number of administrators and employees hired to oversee teachers.

We provide state and local raises primarily across the board even though we pay people to hold teachers accountable.

There is no reason EBR couldn’t review every teacher ever year. The bureaucracy and politics in the parish won’t let it happen though.