An interesting article in the New York Times featuring a ‘Republican’, Florida governor Charlie Crist, who is currently vying for a Republican seat in the senate, just vetoed a bill that would have essentially based teachers’ pay on results, primarily students’ test scores. It would have also eliminated the general, long-term tenure granted to teachers. It is simply another example of people wanting to be paid, regardless of their performance. If teachers were paid according to their students’ success, we would see a significant increase in their preparation, care, and time spent with students. It would also eliminate those teachers who create a suck on state budgets, as well as an overall improvement in education. Since the public education system has decreasing returns to scale and down-sizing is what they need, this would provide a channel to get rid of poor educators.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/04/15/us/politics-us-usa-politics-florida.html?_r=1&hp
(Dr. Tufte, for some reason blogger isn't letting me hyper-link the article, so it's here instead).
3 comments:
I found an earlier article on the same subject as the post. The article makes a fairly compelling argument for merit pay for teachers, its unfortunate that the bill was vetoed. It would have been interesting to see how the Florida school system faired with the new system. There was an excellent quote in the article it stated "It is about teachers, but ultimately it’s about students." I think the current unionized system has caused the education system to care more about teachers than about the students they are trying educate.
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2010/mar/20/teacher-merit-pay-makes-good-business-sense/
Why can't they get the picture that if people aren't good at what they do and they should get fired or at lest not get as much compansation as people who really try and want the kids of this nation to flurish.
-1 on Whidbey and Elijah for punctuation errors.
I think Charlie Crist is symbolic of everything that's gone wrong with the Republican party over the last decade. He really doesn't seem to have any anchor, other than choosing which policy will get him reelected.
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