Teachers must be paid based on performance.

[The Joker]

Agreed, or disagreed? Why?

[welcome_to_chaos]

Disagree...strongly disagree. my mom used to be a theacher before budgit cut so i am well informed of this plan to base salaries off student test scores. which i find rediculous. say a teacher decides to go to and underprivledged section of town and teach in a school there. one that already has an f or d rating. they would be just throwing away that bonus. its not because of the teachers that students get good testing scores. its strictly up to the students. if this is true then why pay or not pay the teachers for the doings of someone else. thats my oppinion on this matter.

[Atonement]

This gives too much power to the students who could elect to fail any tests that they know their teacher's pay is based on. Though good in idea to weed of the terrible teachers, this is not the way to do it.

[Amnesiac]

This gives too much power to the students who could elect to fail any tests that they know their teacher's pay is based on. Though good in idea to weed of the terrible teachers, this is not the way to do it.

Agreed, while we can't let teachers get away with doing a terrible job, we can't pay them totally based on it either. Performance reviews are fine, but not paying all teachers based on how their students do.

[The Joker]

This gives too much power to the students who could elect to fail any tests that they know their teacher's pay is based on. Though good in idea to weed of the terrible teachers, this is not the way to do it.

How do you suggest we weed out terrible teachers?

[Amnesiac]

How do you suggest we weed out terrible teachers?

Random, secretive performance reviews. Secretly place cameras in the classroom and monitor the teacher's performance. Sending a guy into the classroom to evaluate performance makes the teacher purposefully act differently to pass.

[Ender]

This gives too much power to the students who could elect to fail any tests that they know their teacher's pay is based on. Though good in idea to weed of the terrible teachers, this is not the way to do it.

I agree with this.

How do you suggest we weed out terrible teachers?

Yes. I believe random administrative checks on teacher performance, and administration actually taking action on those who do not pass the checks should become more common. In all honesty, some teachers should not be teachers.

[Jess]

This gives too much power to the students who could elect to fail any tests that they know their teacher's pay is based on. Though good in idea to weed of the terrible teachers, this is not the way to do it.

This.

I agree with this one *nods*

[Sage]

A great idea in theory but there is no fair and just way to implement it.

[Zephyr]

I agree that teachers should be paid based off of performance. However, I do not think that it should be based off of test scores. At my college, they do it this way, and I think that it is a very good way: a mix of students evaluating the teacher on several areas (it's anonymous of course, the teacher never sees the original forms), final grades and a superior coming in and monitoring what goes on in class once in a while.

Obviously the above mentioned isn't going to work in K-12 since the students arn't there by choice; That's why it works at the college level though, the majority do want to be there and pay to be there, so they are going to be more genuine in reviewing a teacher for the benefit of other students.

With K-12 there's really no fool proof way to evaluate, so looking at student performance is the most effective way. If you judge by overall final grades rather than by a single test, it makes it harder for a student to intentionally fail just to make the teacher look bad; Any half intelligent person isn't going to fail on purpose just to make a teacher look bad, otherwise they'll just have to repeat the course, an entire year or making it harder to get into a college due to bad grades.

No matter how you decide to pay teachers, the system is going to be flawed, but I'm largely in favor of them being paid by their performance. There's nothing worse than seeing somebody who sub par getting paid better than somebody who does the job better just because they have been there longer; Anybody with a job knows where I'm coming from when I say that.

[starbrite5]

I don't think they should be paid based on performance, especially when this is judged by test scores. I've had some horrible teachers whose classes would have pretty good test scores. And a lot of kids just don't test well for whatever reason, so you can't properly judge the value of what a teacher has taught them.

[Azunite]

Agreed, but thing is, everyone can calculate diffrent performances on one teacher.
For example, all students can say that Science teacher'S peformance is awful but other teachers can say she is good