It’s not about the money

Perhaps the last in a series on national education policy.

I have long been of the opinion that when it comes to teacher compensation, for the most part, it’s not really about the money - although compensating those willing to work in particularly challenging circumstances seems like a good investment.

What we pay our teachers, however, is not unimportant - teachers ought to make enough money to live comfortably and have status in the community in which they teach. But the cliché is true: few educators go into the field because it’s a steady job, or because they get the “summers off”. So we ought to be skeptical of the idea that financial rewards for teachers who produce higher test scores are going to accomplish as much as one might hope

Having said that, I’m not opposed to rewarding good teachers for results: perhaps “master teacher” status – and, along with some additional responsibilities for mentoring younger teachers, etc., an appropriate increase in compensation

The big question is: how do we measure those results?  If we base teacher incentives strictly on standardized test scores, then what we’ll get are better scores, but not necessarily better students.

The other point: if we are going to start rewarding teachers for performance – or penalize them for the lack thereof – then teachers ought to have a central role in deciding what criteria we’re going to use to measure their effectiveness. If we’re not going to give teachers at least that much respect, our efforts will be doomed from the start.