Josh wrote: ↑Sat Aug 26, 2023 1:07 pmIn other words, a worse deal with parents, students, and taxpayers.
I recall you coming here and complaining that working people cannot earn living wages and support families in this country. The minimum starting teacher salary in Texas is $33,660
https://tea.texas.gov/texas-educators/s ... y-schedule some wealthier districts pay more but many do not. Would you consider that to be a living wage that one can support a family with in Texas? Texas school districts also do not pay into social security and the meager pension is not portable so unless you teach for 40 straight years in Texas your retirement will be worse than had you simply paid into social security.
What it means is that there are huge teacher shortages in Texas, especially in poorer rural areas. Because young college-educated teachers can make more money doing virtually anything else. Is that a good deal for parent, students, and taxpayers?
Josh wrote: ↑Sat Aug 26, 2023 1:07 pm"Pay for performance" is certainly possible. The teachers' unions simply don't want it (what kind of employee group would)? Again, the parents, students, and taxpayers get to lose, because poorly-performing teachers stick around and get paid full rate.
There are no teacher unions in Texas. A school I taught at in Texas in 2010 tried to implement it. The question is, how do you measure performance? Based on what? Test scores? Most subjects aren't tested in any standardized way, and also don't have standardized formative assessments to determine what students know when they enter your class. So there is no way to tell if you are testing learning or innate intelligence.
I was one of 3 physics teachers at that HS that year. Catherine across the hall from me taught mostly remedial and special ed students with smaller class sizes at a much slower pace. She had kids on her roster who were in juvenile detention for months at a time (but for which she was still the teacher of record), she had kids who would sporadically drop in and out, kids who had exceedingly low math and reading skills, and so forth. Kids with extreme behavioral problems, etc. I taught large mainstream regular physics classes to an ordinary mix of kids from below average to super-smart college bound kids with 4 other AP classes but who just weren't very into science. The department chair Wes, down the hall taught smaller elite classes of AP Physics 1, AP Physics 2, AP Physics C, and pre-AP Physics to very bright studious kids, many of whom were bound for Ivy League type schools and STEM And tech careers.
How do you rank and measure performance between the three physics teachers at that school? There is no state standardized physics test, just the standardized 10th and 11th grade science tests which only have physics at about an 8th grade level on them. The only one that counted towards graduation was the 11th grade one so lots of students just blew off the 10th grade one. Our student test scores distributed in the entirely predictable fashion with Catherine's students barely passing or failing. Mine almost entirely passing, and many of Wes' students getting perfect scores, but most of them could have passed it in their sleep before they even took his class.
So how do you distribute performance pay among the three physics teachers in that school? What happens is that the administrators who only have time to stop into your classroom a couple times a year anyway, are forced to do a giant amount of additional rating paperwork which ends up rating everyone equally and the whole thing is a giant waste of time. Because they have absolutely no way to measure Catherine's teaching performance against Wes'. Is Wes the better teacher because one of his students got into Yale? Or is Catherine the better teacher because one of her students who spent the first 6 months of school in juvenile detention managed to pass a state science test?
That doesn't even get into the vast majority of teachers who are not teaching subjects for which there is not even standardized testing done.
Autumn leaves & teacher strikes 
