Re: [Phys-l] Kozol fasts to protest NCLB

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

At 13:07  -0400 9/13/07, RLAMONT wrote:
> However, one of the frustrations I had during my brief stint teaching at
> the high school level was that there was no reward for excellence (not
> that I personally deserved it). The teachers who were known for their
> skills and adaptability got exactly the same pay raises as those who
> should have been fired years ago. This is where I think NCLB is weak.
> The carrot and stick are applied to the schools, not the teachers. There
> is little a "manager" can do if the individual teachers are shielded
> from accountability by a strong union presence that prohibits merit pay.
I seldom agree with anything Bob says, but I think he has a point 
here. However, there is a solution to it that doesn't just give a 
principle the power to set teachers' salaries, and thus enable him or 
her to curry favor with certain teachers, or vice versa.

I came to teaching after a 22-year career as a naval officer, having, 
every few years to face a selection board of my (only slightly more 
senior) peers, who considered whether I was worthy of promotion (and, 
I might add, I wasn't always successful, which is why my career ended 
after 20 years rather than 30). What I observed was a system that, 
while far from perfect, did an adequate job of promoting the most 
competent and those with the highest chance of success at more 
challenging positions.

The method is not dissimilar to that used in universities, but I 
think it was less driven by politics than the university system seems 
to be.

Salaries among the members of the uniformed services are set by 
congress and are fixed--no deviations are allowed. They are based on 
two criteria--rank, and time in service. So every couple of years you 
got a raise simply by virtue of surviving that long. But those raises 
were only moderate. If you wanted your salary to increase 
substantially you needed to be promoted, and this was done by the 
service-wide selection boards (I think this is different from the 
Army and Air Force promotion schemes, so I won't comment on those--my 
remarks will be limited to my experiences with the Navy's system).

The selection boards were given a list of those elligible for 
consideration for promotion and the number of promotions that could 
be accommodated within the grades being considered. Once selected, 
the promotions were spaced out over the next year so that the number 
of people at each grade could be kept reasonably constant. The actual 
process of the selections was complex and not worth going into here. 
And it was carried out by humans, so not every good candidate was 
promoted and not every bad candidate failed promotion. But, by and 
large, I think it worked pretty well (even though it ultimately 
failed in my case :-().

It seems to me that a district-wide system of teacher promotions 
could be introduced into the schools, based loosely on this model. 
Teachers could be separated into different levels (I would think more 
than the four common to university systems), and only considered for 
promotion to the next level after spending a certain umber of years 
at the present one, with longevity raises every couple of years of a 
modest amount and more substantial raises upon promotion. This would 
have to be accompanied by sensible district policies to determine how 
the teachers at various grades would be distributed among the 
schools, so that the newest teachers wouldn't end up in the poorest 
schools, as happens all too often in the present system. New teachers 
could be put in situations where they would have fairly close 
supervision by more senior teachers, and only sent to the difficult 
schools when they have enough experience to be able to handle 
difficult situations.

I think a scheme like this could go a long way toward creating a 
system that rewards quality without allowing too much cronyism to get 
in the way of maintaining a quality faculty. Any selection system 
would have to be done at least on a district-wide basis, or even 
state-wide for smaller states, so give the process some statistical 
validity and keep it reasonably objective. And a more realistic 
evaluation procedure would have to be developed that didn't depend on 
some scheme that allows the evaluator to simply follow a checklist 
and fill in blocks on a form. The selection boards would need to be 
made up of teachers as well as administrators, with a majority being 
teachers, and all the teacher-members would need to be at the grade 
level being selected for or higher.

There could be rules that required that all administrators be drawn 
from the senior teacher ranks, so that failed teachers would not end 
up as administrators, as frequently happens, and also rules about how 
lateral entry teachers would be handled, both to allow 
career-changing teachers to enter at something above the entry-level 
(much like the navy does in creating officers at ranks above the 
bottom level for senior enlisted personnel who they want to 
commission), and also to make it difficult for wealthy districts to 
cherry pick younger teachers from other districts and bring them in 
at higher levels in order to pay them more (a real morale-buster for 
the teachers by-passed by such trickery).

Lot's of details would have to be worked out, but I think such a 
system could work and go a long way toward meeting Bob's objections, 
which, I think, have some validity.

I actually proposed such a system for my school shortly after joining 
the faculty. Needless to say it landed with a thud, and the idea was 
never heard from again. So much for good intentions.

Hugh


--

************************************************************
Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Hard work often pays off after time. But Laziness always pays off now.

			February tagline on 2007 Demotivator's Calendar