Obama: What have you done for us lately?

July29th

2 Comments

Obama: What have you done for us lately?

Posted in: Life

Lately I have been extremely busy moving and working on training a new puppy. Or is she training me? I guess that remains to be seen. What I am getting at is the fact that I have not had time, or the motivation, to blog lately. Everyday I tell myself that tomorrow I will post something. Is that called blog burnout, laziness, or what?

I’ve been keeping abreast of the news as always and have been hearing a lot about Ohio’s standing as a finalist once again in President Obama’s education initiative, Race For the Top.

Through Race to the Top, we are asking States to advance reforms around four specific areas:

Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;

Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;

Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and

Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.

That doesn’t sound all that bad, does it? Who among us does not what to reach these goals? The devil though, as they say, is in the details. One of the major goals of this initiative is to award schools for closing the achievement gap. They would like to do this through merit pay.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this to be honest. I do believe that job performance should be tied more closely to the ability of an educator to maintain her/his own job. But how do we make this fair? Is it fair for one teacher to be given a full schedule of honors courses while another is working with kids with learning disabilities? Does the teacher that has been awarded with students that naturally will score highly on these assessments deserve more praise, and worse, a raise?

There are so many factors that influence the extent to which a student will score highly on a standardized test that it seems difficult to judge. What about parenting? Let’s not get started there.

I think my biggest complaint is the silence of our teaching unions, both local and national, when it comes to this Obama initiative. After all, isn’t this just No Child Left Behind with more funding behind it? But our education associations sit by silently and continue to play their partisan games while a now democrat president seeks to strengthen the same types of initiatives that they screamed about when proposed by a republican in that same office.

2 Comments

Comment by Paul Lambert — July 29, 2010 @ 1:47 pm

Jason:

I couldn’t agree more, except I believe the teachers’ unions are far from silent. They’re working very hard in the halls of power to see that RttT is reduced to nothing more than a mechanism to pump more money down the same old failed process. The objective is not for better outcomes for more kids, but rather more teachers employed at higher salaries. They aren’t the same thing.

I very much like the idea of rewarding teachers for effectiveness, but there are two challenges in that statement.

One is in defining ‘effectiveness.’ Can that be measured simply with test scores? Do test scores measure the effectiveness of the current teacher, or prior teachers? Which is the harder task, raising scores by 20% for low performing kids or 2% for high performing kids?

The other is determining ‘reward.’ If a reward is something that will motivate higher performance, is money the only thing which should be considered? I came from the high-tech business world, made up of true geek engineers and Big-Man-On-Campus sales folks. The BMOCs were unquestionably motivated by money, and were dead sure everyone else was too – if they were normal at least.

The truth is that true geek engineers don’t care as much about money as they do having interesting and cool projects to work on. So offering them early completion bonuses achieves nothing. However, telling them that as soon as the current project is finished, they can start the design of a new starship, would put them on a 24/7 work schedule. Especially if you said they if they take too long wrapping up the current project, the starship project would be given to a different group, and that this group would have to do some necessary maintenance of the payroll system.

What kinds of stuff would motivate a teacher to take it up a notch? I don’t know. But whatever it is – that’s where the money should go.
Comment by Adam rowsey — August 9, 2010 @ 10:42 pm

The most disgusting part of school reform is the notion that somehow teacher’s unions care about their student’s education. These unions exist to protect employment of their members and attempt to coax the most amount of compensation for government that they can. None of these ill conceived programs like race to the too work. There is no one size fits all fix for reform. However, it shows the lack of caring in teacher’s part when they oppose any charter school of merit based pay program. why not try something that may work? Why continue to protect poor teachers. Everyday I meet adults with no knowledge of basic math, history, or worst of all grammar. The convenient excuse is that their parents didn’t care, but that is nonsense. The truth is that a succession of teachers lacked the courage to uphold standards of basic achievement. Shame in the continuing cowardice of our schools for not holding these kids back until they can demonstrate basic skills. This is out real problem.