Teacher Merit Pay

Should teachers be paid based on merit?

The common counter-argument I hear from teachers on pay-for-performance is that they shouldn’t be held responsible for the bad apples, or that this will do nothing more than encourage them to ‘teach-to-the-test’.

On the first note, so long as the performance is measured by relative achievement, i.e., improvement per student over the year compared to some baseline, rather than absolute achievement, then yes, a teacher should be held responsible for a bad apple. If someone comes in dumb and leaves dumber, that’s the teacher’s fault for not reaching the child.

On the second, I agree, this will encourage ‘teach-to-the-test’ however, what’s the alternative? Keep in mind, the status quote that’s being upheld as some sort of golden standard is seniority based pay and seniority based promotions. Why on earth does simply being alive longer mean you’re a better teacher? This system does not encourage experimentation or innovation but instead rewards compliance and not rocking the boat. We can do better for our kids.

So we’ll start ‘teaching-to-the-test’. At least then we’ll have a single standard we know we’re teaching to. We’ve shrunk and changed the problem – the test has become a verifiable, concrete goal we can measure performance on and teacher’s jobs are now not quite so fuzzy and arbitrary. This simply means that we need to keep up efforts to ensure that what we’re testing is realistic, practical and useful – things that should be a part of any education – and prepare our kids for jobs in the public and private sectors, academia and elsewhere.

Fructose? In MY Corn Syrup? It's more likely than you think.

Context courtesy of UrbanEconomist.


Gah, I hate it when my free market sensibilities and scientific
sensibilities go head to head. Fact is HFCS is vilified for
absolutely no good reason. But at the same time - if people don't
want it, they don't want it. I like how populist movements like this
do science - basically, they take advantage of the P < .05, and just
keep funding study after study until one of them, by pure chance,
shows HFCS is bad for you. Then we all decide "see! I knew it all
along!"

I *love* these fanciful streams of thought:
“Our bodies have been adapted over the years to metabolize sugar,
which is natural,” Mr. Royster says. “But the body doesn’t know what
to do with high-fructose corn syrup.”

Such a misunderstanding of evolution, especially when talking about an
omnivore who's 'body' adapted to withdraw calories from pretty much
anything it could put in its mouth that wasn't poisonous - and some
things that are. The 'body' is not this delicate system that requires
special care, it's a pretty ruggedized utilitarian machine that will
make due with anything it can.

And I'm all for giving both sides free say - but when one side is
presenting a huge mountain of scientific evidence, much of it coming
from folks who's biases usually lie elsewhere like the Center for
Science in the Public Interest (who believe me, if there were any
shred of evidence against HFCS they'd be on it), and the other side is
some guys facebook group who is simply "convinced diabetes has
something to do with HFCS", its laughable. This is magical thinking
people.