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2025-03-22 Home Front: Politix

Ramaswamy calls for implementing a first of its kind merit-based pay for public school teachers

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Posted by Fred 2025-03-22 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11141 views ] Top

#1 Having taught high school myself - how do you measure success?

Posted by Grom the Affective 2025-03-22 02:10|| 2025-03-22 02:10|| Front Page Top

#2 Teachers with tenure will cherry-pick the high performing students and new teachers will be given the challenging students. If done by test scores then teachers will just teach the test (not the worst case but still gaming the system).

The best reward system is allowing parents to move their children to the school of their choice; just break the public school monopoly and make schools compete.

Posted by Airandee 2025-03-22 06:51|| 2025-03-22 06:51|| Front Page Top

#3 Teachers are only a third of the problem. The two other big ones are administrators and the parents. Fundamentally, if the parents don't care, neither of the other two will have much effect. However, the teachers and administrators just ask for more money that doesn't solve that one major problem.

Posted by Procopius2k 2025-03-22 07:09|| 2025-03-22 07:09|| Front Page Top

#4 How does he propose getting his idea through the collective bargaining process?

Posted by Super Hose 2025-03-22 08:48|| 2025-03-22 08:48|| Front Page Top

#5 Texas private school’s use of new ‘AI tutor’ rockets student test scores to top 2% in the country

Posted by Skidmark 2025-03-22 10:55|| 2025-03-22 10:55|| Front Page Top

#6 how do you measure success?

First pass at the problem: Set the same grade-level test at the beginning of the school year and along with final exams. Measure the delta in scores, normalized for expected achievement — slow class, average class, honours class — where the class will take that label to the next grade, and individual students can be moved between levels as individual achievement merits.

Give teachers who move their class — or X% of the class — up a level a merit bonus. No bonus for keeping honours classes at the honours level, penalty for classes that drop a level. This will incentivize the best teachers to take the worst classes and show what they can do, and drive the worst teachers out of the profession.

When I was in school, one of my teachers told the story of an inner city teacher who called together her high school class at the beginning of the year, saying to them, “Listen, guys, I need to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone, ok? The school is doing an experiment: they put all the gifted kids in one class, so that the class can move faster and go deeper into the material without worrying that not everyone can keep up. This was based on test scores, not grades, because grades don’t necessarily measure actual ability to learn. This is that class. I know some of you don’t have the grades, for various reasons, so if you have any trouble with the material, come to me and we’ll get you caught up — I want to show the school what a class like this can do.” The class moved up two grades in material mastery by the end of the year, and later all the students graduated with honours. The thing is, the teacher lied — it was an average inner city class with average inner city students.

My teacher had told the story to humble us, an honours class in one of the top public school districts in the country at the time, where a good portion of the students had parents who taught at the various universities in the area. We had all the educational advantages, so our performance was expected, not something to show we were special.

Posted by trailing wife 2025-03-22 15:27|| 2025-03-22 15:27|| Front Page Top

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