Judging by recent Facebook posts, Matt Damon said something about teachers and incentives and some people agreed and others did not. It's the same old debate, a tangled mess of test scores, job security, teacher performance, and teacher pay. I'm sure we've heard it all a million times. One one side, teachers aren't paid enough for the hours they work and the crap they endure from test-score obsessed administrations, unmotivated students and unconcerned parents. On the other side, teachers are paid amply for the hours they work and should be held accountable for the jobs they perform - or fail to perform.
As a homeschooling parent, I may not be qualified to comment on this subject, but then again, as an educator and a parent, maybe I am. I've watched from the sidelines, at some times less attentively than at other times, but I've watched. Or rather, I've listened, and there are some things I haven't heard, most importantly, that both sides make some good points.
On Teacher Responsibility
Yes, teachers should be held responsible for how well they teach. Teaching is their job, and they ought to do it well. In any profession, if you aren't making the cut, you get cut. Teachers should not be excluded from the common sense practice of ensuring that important jobs are done well. They are, after all, educating our darling children and the future leaders of our world. The problem is that teacher performance can be very difficult to measure, and particularly difficult given large classrooms of children of varying abilities and contrasting learning styles, not to mention differing levels of parental support and other outside factors that might adversely affect a student's academic or behavioral performance. Someone had the bright idea of standardized testing... We see how that has worked out. (Epic Fail) Standardized tests can no more measure a teacher's ability than a scale can accurately measure a person's health. Multiple factors determine both a person's physical health and a teacher's proficiency in her job. To hang the funding of a school or the security of a job on the single factor of test scores is ludicrous and detrimental to the overall intellectual well-being of our nation's children. I don't want my children or my neighbor's children or, when you get right down to it, any children learning how to take a test. I want them learning how to think, and how to do it well. (I also want them learning the differences between "there" and "their" and "they're," so we can put an end to the homonym abuse that so plagues our world, but that's a different soap box). I do believe teachers should be held accountable, but not by the test scores of their students. Their job performance should be assessed by those most qualified to assess it, their peers and superiors, perhaps with a little input from parents. Someone else has to have thought of this, but perhaps it isn't as simple as it sounds because we still have this debate raging over how teachers are assessed. I don't have an answer, but there has to be a way to reward good teachers and get rid of rotten ones, and neither test scores nor lifelong job security is the answer.
On Teacher Pay - Oh, whatever... If we could figure out Point A, Point A being "How to Structure the System So Good Teachers Are Free to Teach Well and Bad Teachers Can Find Another Profession," then maybe we'd be thrilled to pay teachers $100,000 per year or more. (As an added bonus, maybe we'd have more good teachers because they won't flee a stiflingly discouraging system or stick around only to become jaded). The good ones work hard all day long and are still working hard in the evening. The good ones look at your "creative" kid who can't sit still and find ingenuis ways of accommodating, even celebrating, his "uniqueness." The good ones know that a child's education is a partnership they share with you, the parent, and expect you to keep up your end of the deal, as you should. The good ones have earned a summer break, and the good ones spend a good portion of that break planning for the year to come. None of these things is measured by a standardized test. The good ones know this, but continue to work, to imagine, to demand excellence, simply because they are not willing to sacrifice the title of Good Teacher for the accomplishment of good test scores or any other treat for which they must jump through ridiculous hoops to the detriment of their students. If you believe such a teacher is worth her weight in gold, click here for an reasonable teacher's salary. That might put an end to the debate over teachers' salaries. :)
Seriously, though, teachers perform a very important job, and we ought to pay gladly for their services, provided their services are up to par. If we could settle on a reasonable, reliable method of evaluation, maybe they could give up the business of fighting for and about their jobs and get back to the joy of teaching our children.
Well, not my children... but you know what I mean! :)
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