[quote=ocrenter]NPR had a segment in 2012 where an experiement was done in a struggling school district. They gave bonuses to all of the teachers at the beginning of the year, if the teachers do not meet certain academic criteria, the bonuses would have to be returned. This is compared to teachers that were promised bonuses if the same acadmeic criteria was met. The result showed if the bonuses had to be returned, the students ended up doing much better.
So the question is would unions actually say yes to something like this???[/quote]
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To say the least, Michelle Rhee’s time in DC was controversial. Needless to say, you have some strong feelings about the lady.
Did you at least get a chance to look at the NPR piece on performance based bonuses that need to be returned if certain goals are not met?
Obviously we are all eager to see positive changes with the schools. So please don’t minimize the problem (by saying bad teachers are rare and far-between). I didn’t bring up anything controversial. Just a simple research that showed an effective tool at improving academic performance.
As a die-hard union supporter, is that something the union would say yes to?[/quote]
Sorry, OCR, my response there was to AN. I neglected to directly answer your question. Let me first include some more information, after which I will address your point.
I have very strong feelings about Michelle Rhee because she is one of the most powerful tools of the privatization movement — a movement that is NOT designed to help students, but rather to shift all of that education money toward corporations where owners/shareholders will make millions while teachers work as “at will” employees for $10/hr with no labor rights. Look to Ms. Rhee’s long series of failures for proof of that. Her B.A. is in government, and her M.A. is in public policy — she is a corporate-friendly, profit-seeking politician/corporate tool; she is not an educator, nor is she an advocate for students. If she really cared about the students, she would be in the classroom collaborating with very experienced teachers in an attempt to find ways that genuinely help many different types of students.
So, I ask you: How is someone with three years of educational experience — and much of that very controversial, as she would have been a failure by many measures — suddenly thrust into the political and media spotlight as someone who holds the answer to all our educational ills? The answer is that she is a tool being used by millionaires and billionaires who see the billions in educational funding as an untapped source of revenues for their private corporations. They have to get the buy-in of the public, though, in order to shift these funds to private entities like publicly-funded private schools (charters and vouchers), and test developers, and publishers, and “expert” consultants (often with little/no real educational experience, like Michelle Rhee), and curriculum developers, etc. Enter Michelle Rhee and Waiting for “Superman.”
Quite frankly, these corporate-backed “school reformers” who most often have absolutely NO educational experience (and some don’t even have children of their own, much less a total lack of educational experience!) should not be given a voice at all. Why are we not hearing more from REAL, properly credentialed teachers with 20-30 years of experience in the classroom? If anyone could give us an answer to our problems, they could. Where is their voice in the media?
Here’s an article on some of the money behind the privatization movement in education, and there are even more millionaires and billionaires that I’m aware of who aren’t listed.
Now, to answer your question, what we do not know about the bonus clawback story is what was happening in the classroom and/or test site that made these gains happen in the first place. Were the students and/or teachers cheating? One would think that desperate teachers who had already spent that money would certainly be more inclined to cheat than those who would get bonuses after the fact. Were other subjects dropped so that the teachers could “teach to the test,” instead? Were they drilling students, day after day, on their math facts instead of teaching literature, social sciences, art, or even math that is not being specifically tested?
We would have to know the details in order to determine if this would really work or not.
Ask any teacher about the main influence on a student’s (and their school’s) success, and they will all tell you that the parents are the ones who determine success. Look at the neighborhood and/or demographics of any successful school, and you will almost always see the same pattern: kids with well-educated, involved parents (this does NOT mean that they micro-manage the teachers, BTW) who are often from upper-middle to upper-class backgrounds.
If you want to see children succeed, then you MUST address the issue of bad parenting. This ranges from parents who refuse to back teachers when their children misbehave, to parents who are doing drugs and/or abuse or neglect their children entirely. This is the most important and most influential thing we can do to improve student outcomes.
