Grey Templar wrote:Perhaps Teacher salary should be standardized so there isn't a disincentive to teach in poorer areas.
Which comes back to the issue I raised on the first page - because counties fund schools richer counties can provide better education and better salaries for their teachers. Poorer counties, the ones who really need the extra resources, cannot. Fixing this problem will require a complete review of how schooling is funding, to get the standard teacher salary you suggest you'd have to take funding away from counties entirely and put it entirely in the hands of state governments.
Also maybe some sort of incentive bonus should be given if students show improvement in certain areas. But it wouldn't be measured through a standardized test. It would be simple analysis of the normal work the students turn in.
If a teacher has a certain number of students that are flagged as struggling(certain grade or below) and later those same students showed improvement the Teacher would get a bonus. Or perhaps it would be what determines if pay raises are issued.
The only way to increase your salary is to improve your student's grades.
I think at some point we as a society need to get a better handle on monetary incentives, and when they do and don't work. They work fine when the thing being measured is entirely (or at least mostly) in the control of the employee, and when it represents the whole (or at least the overwhelming majority) of what that person does. So, for instance, if you have a machinist producing widgets all day long, then paying him a bonus based on the number of widgets he produces that meet quality control requirements is a good incentive scheme.
But teachers just don't have that much control over the performance of their kids. Most variation in a classroom comes from the talents and home lives of the kids, not from the teacher. You're basically paying someone a bonus to turn up and teach kids who are pretty good, and penalising someone else for having a classrom of less capable kids.
And just as importantly, much of the value a teacher provides doesn't immediately pop out of their tests straight away. A teacher who can engage kids and get them passionate about learning might not see results straight away, especially if she does so by teaching the kids stuff that isn't in the final test. That kind of excellence won't show up in testing, or even in work the students hand in. But in the long term there grades will improve, and teachers in years later will get paid bonuses for the good work of these kids.
