How do we create better schools within our country? The answer is to raise the quality of teaching in the nation's classrooms. This, apparently, is no secret.
However, the question NOW is: How do we identify high-quality teaching? We all know that an effective classroom is determined by a high-quality teacher. So how do we find this teacher?
One of two ways is through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This foundation focuses on teacher effectiveness in two parts:
* research to develop and test methods to rate teachers
* experiments to try out new ways of recruiting, training, assigning, and assessing teachers
Altogether, this foundation will spend approximately $500 million within five years to identify high-quality teaching.
Another way to identify high-quality teaching is through one of four education-reforms within the Obama administration. The four key areas the U.S. Department of Education plans to target within the next year are:
* rewarding effective teaching
* expanding the learning time
* collecting meaningful data
* transforming under performing high schools
This education-reform, as well as the other three, will be conducted using $100 billion in stimulus money for education.
In a recent poll from 45 states, the top three indicators school officials would use in determining performance-based teaching were student achievement, teacher evaluations, and teacher attendance. Is student achievement defined only by test scores? What if teachers "teach to the test?" Doesn't that completely miss the point of high-quality teaching?
According to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation's second largest teachers union, acknowledges that single-salary schedules for teachers has shortcomings. The group "believes it is time to explore viable, fair, and educationally sound teacher compensation options that will raise salaries while contributing to efforts already under way to ensure high-quality, well prepared teachers for all students."
I believe financial incentives should be awarded to teachers who:
* acquire additional knowledge and skills
* agree to teach in low-performing schools
* participate in school-wide improvement
* mentor new AND veteran teachers
* teach in high-need areas
Would this cost millions or even billions of dollars to implement? High-quality teaching is all around us. All it would take is fellow teachers and administrators to say who qualifies and those teachers need to be acknowledged.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Denise,
ReplyDeleteThis seems like a touchy subject amongst teachers. I suppose it's not really up to us as a collective body. Personally, I want my boss to make those determinations and then tell me the expectations.
Since the U.S. Department of Education is technically our boss, what they set forth, we will follow. I appreciate consistency with any leader, however, with the changing of the guards every 4-8 years, we have changing policies. This can be good and bad in my opinion. As quickly as we settle into the new requirements, such as NCLB, we all know they will change. The restrictions and rubrics used to identify quality can vary largely depending on the background of the evaluator.
It reminds me of the first year I taught and our district would hold grade level meetings to identify qualities for our rubrics used to grade student portfolios for success. The funny thing, well not so funny, was that those meetings always ended up in arguments after nobody graded the same portfolios with equality even after the rubrics were created. We thought we nailed down a good survey of ideas and thoughts so opinion would not change a portfolio's judgement. That couldn't have been further from the truth. All that after paying an East Coast expert tens of thousands of dollars to consult us on how complete the process.
I just hope that our government can come up with a good rubric and one that doesn't exclude people who don't look good on paper, but have serious skills in reaching students on a daily basis.
I hope there are viable ways to promote teachers and increase salaries as corporate America does, but if the administration is disgusted by corporations giving bonuses, I sincerely doubt they'll give education any such bonus.
Thanks for the blog. Have a good week.
Randy B.