subject: How Much is a Teacher Worth? [print this page] How Much is a Teacher Worth? How Much is a Teacher Worth?
What is your child's teacher worth? This is a question that many people seem interested in answering lately, as state departments of education aspire to implement teacher performance evaluations that directly correspond to student success.
Since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, a greater emphasis than ever before is on student achievement. High standards with growth-based goals for students of underperforming racial and economic demographics have made it difficult for many states to pass federal performance markets that enable them to continue to receive federal funding -- so teachers whose students fail to achieve growth projections must have their performance monitored to analyze why the shortfalls continue. Many school districts and some entire states have done away with the traditional tenure based job security teachers once enjoyed after their fifth year of service in a state, making it easier to replace teachers whose students fail to perform up to standards.
The other side of the coin is performance based pay for teachers who do keep their jobs. Even though, under a value added system, teachers would not be legally required to know whether they could expect a job to return to once a given school year ends, those teachers who had high performing students in their classes would be eligible for pay increases. This is heralded as a great improvement by many teachers who believe they should be able to earn salaries that are in line with their ability to help students succeed. Many teachers feel this makes sense.
Unions and other critics suggest performance based pay would isolate teachers from one another, and lead to a breakdown in collaboration among professionals who would find themselves in competition with one another for raises. The theory is teachers will be less likely to share winning strategies when they are all competing for the same financial perks. This makes sense as well.
The one thing most people can agree on is that the criteria used to evaluate teachers' performance should not be their students' standardized test scores only but should involve a wide array of evaluative measures that take all aspects of a teacher's talents and skills into consideration; unfortunately, the value added system most often is used by administrators and state officials to do precisely the opposite and it all becomes a game of test scores. When so many factors go into how well students perform in a given classroom, it is often difficult to look only at the numbers and expect to view reality. Hopefully, the states will evolve better methods for teacher evaluation in the future, so that no child will really be left behind.
