Reformers led by Gov. Chris Christie are now trying to employ practices that have worked well in the private sector — competition, accountability and reward — to raise the academic performance of these schools.Yes, these things have worked so well in the private sector...
Yeah, that's working just great.
The governor also wants to hold teachers accountable for their performance, in part by tying their tenure to objective measures of effectiveness, such as how their students perform on statewide tests and how much academic improvement they make during the school year.Because it's a great business practice to base evaluating your employees on measures that they can't control and have error rates of 35% percent.
Let's just ignore the fact that merit pay has never worked in schools and just keep "clapping harder" for the Merit Pay Fairy!This brings us to Christie’s plan for merit pay for teachers. It would set up a system to base teacher compensation partially on demonstrated effectiveness in advancing student learning. It would also provide financial incentives for teachers who choose to work at a failing school or teach in a subject area that has been identified as difficult to staff.Merit pay is one of the most important principles for managing a work force, whether in business or government. If employees are paid the same amount whether they do a good job or not, it won’t be long before much of the work force loses motivation.
Honestly, I can't continue. It's not just that guys like this have no clue what they're talking about. It's not that they have no standing to make these pronouncements that only serve to make them look stupid.
It's that they are demonstrably bad at their own jobs. A guy from the "New Jersey Business and Industry Association" thinks NJ businesses are doing so freakin' well that he has the right to come into my world and tell me he's going to "fix" the "problems" in my schools? Is he serious?
Dude, you're the problem. You can't even put together a decent system to employ people in this state and pay them reasonable wages. You can't even come up with a way to punish corporate pirates who run their companies into the ground before they steal away with millions from their shareholders. You can't even keep the air and water clean and keep food safe and not destroy infrastructure without whining like a bunch of babies that somehow it's all the government's fault. You've can't even treat your employees with enough respect to allow them decent health care and retirements.
Clean up your own mess before you start coming around and blaming me for all the problems YOU'VE created. Man up and accept some responsibility for once.
If you can't, then just shut up and go away.
Nothing could be truer. Bankers & corporations were bailed out and rewarded for their screw-ups that placed millions families in poverty, and we pick up those pieces in the classroom while being literally forced to teach to tests that we know are harmful to our students, and will in the long run, give them such a poor education that will force them to serve those same corporate monsters that screwed them in the first place.
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Very well said but we all know that the governor's true motivation is really just to whore out our schools to his corporate pimp friends. This became evident the moment he hired his old boss, Chris Cerf.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to know when the governor is going to let the people who blindly support this scheme of his, exactly what it's going to cost and where he's going to get the money to do it. New Jersey is broke, remember? And we all know that if a pimp puts out a pile of money upfront that they are expecting a huge return.
Do the math. Currently, we only test and report data for one test a year in 4th, 8th and 11th grades and for only 3 subjects. This plan would require 2 tests per year in all subjects. Someone will need to be paid to develop the tests, grade them, and them analyze the data. Then somebody will have to weave this information into teacher evaluations. I wonder who they have lined up for this task and if their name happens to be Wireless Generation?
Dude, you are SO Jersey. BRAVO!
ReplyDeleteIf we are to be held accountable for our work via merit pay...I only think it would be fair to hold politicians accountable for what they accomplish or do not accomplish. I also feel that there should be truth in advertizing for these guys. If they say, "I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor.” Then so be it. This way we could start to maybe believe what politicians say to us when they desperately want the votes.
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