You provide a mechanism for teachers ascending into the higher ranks of teaching more quickly (though seniority will still be relevant in that teaching experience makes one a better teacher), yet the underlying problem (public school teachers as a profession get shitty pay and benefits) remains.Master of Ossus wrote:How is that a contradiction? I'm trying to lower the financial gap fir high-skill, high-talent people who are thinking about going into teaching and going into business. Offering them the immediate opportunity to raise their salary with good performance is an effective way of doing that, and it would be a reasonable replacement for a system of salary based on seniority.
These incentives are actually somewhat problematic, in that schools which do poorly get trapped in a spiral of decreasing funding.Schools are given substantial incentives based on their performance compared to similar schools; teachers should be offered the same.
I agree. Public schools, however, are chronically underfunded, and the more expensive you make good teachers, the more they may have to be sacrificed in favor of cheaper but merely competent ones. It's shitty, but it's true.Moreover, we're trying to improve the PERFORMANCE of the schools, not trying to maximize the revenue brought in.
Why couldn't this be done in the status quo, with schools hiring lots of new teachers instead of a few senior teachers?Drawing in skilled teachers to replace shitty ones is an effective way to do that, but it would also give schools with exceptionally poor teacher:student ratios the option of hiring lots of competent teachers as opposed to some competent but senior teachers, giving schools much more flexibility to address their specific needs.
Here is how colleges and universities measure teacher's performances:Colleges and universities have no problems measuring teachers' performances using any number of benchmarks. I won't pretend to have some perfect system for judging how good an individual teacher is, but a meritocracy is superior in terms of results to any system of pay based only on seniority.
1) Works published and their prestige.
2) Evaluation by others in their field. This only works in the university system because of tenure. Without tenure, would-be professors would have to be evaluated by professors who might end up competing with them for a job, creating a conflict of interest.
3) Student evaluations. I don't think these work very well at the high school and lower level. First, a lot of kids are too young/too immature to do fair and accurate evaluations. Second, many kids are in the classes who don't want to be there, unlike university. They're likely to penalize teachers who give out challenging assignments, and reward teachers who give easy grades or pass out candy or whatever. Third, in high school, there's often a sense that good grades are more important than actually learning something, which is less present in college. This also causes kids to prefer teachers who give easy As to teachers who challenge students.
Can you elaborate on why this is true in public school teaching?Bullshit. That's not the way labor markets work. In fact, in labor markets it is frequently possible to lower costs by hiring and retaining expensive people.
I tend to think of the incentives as being the other way around, actually. The counter-incentive is the fact that you save a lot of money if you fire a good teacher, while getting rid of dead weight doesn't help all that much.Think about it for a second: in a seniority system, the ONLY reason one person is paid more than another is because they've worked for a long time. If I'm a principal, I can fire the old guy and get a younger (and therefore much cheaper) and potentially better replacement. In a meritocracy, if I get rid of my highest-paid teachers I'm also eliminating my BEST teachers, creating a counter-incentive.
Teachers are seriously divided vertically as well as laterally (ever heard of "department chairs?"). I can tell you straight up from personal experience that teachers who are high on the pay-scale teach better and more important classes than ones who have no seniority.
This is not actually universal in my experience. But if "well-paid teachers teach better classes", then there's no problem.
Sure, but the nature of the business world is quite different. People are expected to move from job to job much more, and there are things like severance packages. School districts are currently set up to penalize teachers who switch districts, but provide teachers who are at least competent with jobs within their district, on the basis on seniority.Moreover, old people in business who don't earn their keep are fired or laid off ALL THE TIME. A seniority system actually encourages this to happen more than a meritocracy.
Thinking about it more, I'm willing to concede that getting rid of the seniority system isn't an necessarily a bad thing. Still, the following things need to be considered. First, that there isn't a great way to rate teacher ability. Second, that while the seniority system may be a deterrant to talented young people entering teaching, there are a lot more and bigger deterrants standing in the way of a leap forward in teacher quality/number. Third, you can't just eliminate the seniority system on its own. The seniority preference system, at least in WI, extends beyond just pay scales, and it's entangled with the way school employment is set up. Just eliminating it will fuck over teachers, and it may fuck over schools as well.
