Describe How You Think a Merit Based Pay System Would Work

• Gblock

  fan_from_texas;680978 wrote:Why do you think that? I'm curious.

  
  It will remove health care from bargaining and instead permit school boards to to govern health care for employees....our board now isnt bad but it always hasnt been that way and i know some cooky school boards.
  
  Eliminate senority as a sole criterion for Rifs reduction in workforce. while this may sound good at first. what prevents districts from getting rid of high salary teachers and keeping all staff with 5 years or less experience. you dont want all rookie teachers teaching your kids although ill say they are coming out better prepared than ive ever seen . especially from ohio state.
  
  Allow public employers to hire permanent replacement workers during a strike
  
  Allow a public employer in "fiscal emergency" to serve notice to terminat, modify or negotiate a collective barganing agreement.
  
  Limint barganing to issues of wages, hours and terms and conditions of employment.
  
  Allow local school boards to determine leave time.
  
  Eliminate continuing contracts for teachers after the bills effective date....
  
  Im actually fine with all of these if that is what you want to do....but do it only for those who will be notified of these changes before they decide to become a teacher. i feel bad for those currently in college who might have chose another field if this bill passes.
• bonelizzard

  Gblock;680960 wrote:bone lizzard let it go...if you go back to every teacher salary thread since we were all on jjhuddle....fanfromtex, manhattanbuckeye, and otrap will speak out against teachers and unions and usually take up most of the posts on those threads.

  Well, I guess that's too bad.. seeing that his wife is a teacher. Why would he support SB5 if he supports his wife the teacher? I don't get it? Sounds counterproductive or hypocritical to me.. But, what do I know, I'm just a teacher.. right??
• Manhattan Buckeye

  '.fanfromtex, manhattanbuckeye, and otrap will speak out against teachers and unions and usually take up most of the posts on those threads."
  
  And we have a weird thing of making logical arguments that you ignore. How many times do we have to explain that your salary is paid by taxpayers, and right now taxpayers are hurting? No personal offense meant (I really mean that), but if you are calling me out for speaking against teachers (which I have NOT) I'll call you out for your naivety. We're in the middle of a bad recession with not a whole lot of sunlight on the horizon. I just can't believe that any worker, public sector or private can't pick up a newspaper or watch CNN and see that we have a funding/debt crisis? No one is immune or exempt from reality. Jeez, you have a college degree, don't you notice houses foreclosing, businesses shuttering, etc. over the last 3 or 4 years? This will affect everyone - even public servants.
• Gblock

  FFT i applaud you working with JA that is a great program the kids probly love you ....do you see any bad teachers at the school? Do the kids tell you about any bad teachers? My thing is if there is an underperforming teacher at the school then it is the parents and communities job to complain/point it out.they are pretty easy to spot imo...i know if i had a child i would visit regularly and ask to see lesson plans/gradebook and examples of classroom work. any good teacher should have no problem doing so for you. In our district we have the PAR program if you arent doing well or just arent very good you have to go thru PAR(peer assistance review) which means someone comes to your class randomly twice a week and then meets with you and gives you performance objectives to meet throughout the year. it is a pass/fail program. if you fail you have to do it again the next year. it is the same program that first year teachers go thru before being fully hired to our district. if you fail it twice you are fired. So essentially it takes two years to fire someone if they want to go thru the program twice...most dont they just quit.
• Gblock

  Manhattan Buckeye;681011 wrote:'.fanfromtex, manhattanbuckeye, and otrap will speak out against teachers and unions and usually take up most of the posts on those threads."
  
  And we have a weird thing of making logical arguments that you ignore. How many times do we have to explain that your salary is paid by taxpayers, and right now taxpayers are hurting? No personal offense meant (I really mean that), but if you are calling me out for speaking against teachers (which I have NOT) I'll call you out for your naivety. We're in the middle of a bad recession with not a whole lot of sunlight on the horizon. I just can't believe that any worker, public sector or private can't pick up a newspaper or watch CNN and see that we have a funding/debt crisis? No one is immune or exempt from reality. Jeez, you have a college degree, don't you notice houses foreclosing, businesses shuttering, etc. over the last 3 or 4 years? This will affect everyone - even public servants.

  im also a taxpayer im hurting too...and i have two degrees that im still paying for
• ernest_t_bass

  

  sleeper;680993 wrote:You make a very good point. If I'm working for a pharmaceutical company, and the demand for my product goes down, and in turn my salary goes down, the government should step in and give me the same wage. Market forces are terrible things, let's make sure we avoid it at all costs.

  
  LOL, you're twisting my words. I didn't say I disagree with market forces. I said, if you were to experience that kind of cut in wage, wouldn't you expect to see a drop in employment? Please don't twist my words.
• fan_from_texas

  Gblock;681012 wrote:FFT i applaud you working with JA that is a great program the kids probly love you ....do you see any bad teachers at the school? Do the kids tell you about any bad teachers?

  
  The teacher I worked with last year was pretty bad--he was approaching retirement (had 2-3 years to go, I think) and didn't want to put in any effort. He insisted that I rearrange my schedule for routine meetings, etc.; my general impression is that he may have been a good teacher when he was younger, but was throwing in the towel at this point, and was pretty out of touch with how the private sector works. E.g., he would want to have hour-long meetings at 2.30p, when he finished with school. Several times I asked if we could do it in the morning before school, or over lunch, or on the weekends, or in the evenings, because I'm not always able to drop everything in the middle of the workday and drive half an hour for a meeting. No dice. He also would cancel last-minute on some of our sessions (I think he canceled 4 of the 10), after I had carved out my morning to show up there. It's a bit frustrating for me to bail on work and get ready for it, do some prep, etc., and then get a call 10 mins before that he thought it would work better if we just skipped this week.
  
  Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that he just wasn't very knowledgeable about economics. (E.g., he was a big conspiracy theory guy, and was convinced that the US gov't was supplying WMDs to Iraq so that we were justified in invading so as to spur on our economy by producing more war material--this is what he was teaching his class).
  
  I was teaching kids about what a bank is, what a checking account is, how to use a credit card, stuff like that. He wanted to quiz me to ensure that I knew enough about econ to teach his class . . . it kind of caught me off-guard . . . I'm a volunteer who spends all day long dealing with the regulation of complicated energy trades, and he insinuated that he wasn't sure I knew enough about what a checking account was to teach his class. Strange guy, but a good experience--some portion of the kids were really interested in this and gained something out of it, I think.
• sleeper

  

  ernest_t_bass;681018 wrote:LOL, you're twisting my words. I didn't say I disagree with market forces. I said, if you were to experience that kind of cut in wage, wouldn't you expect to see a drop in employment? Please don't twist my words.

  
  My post was sarcasm. You're example is very narrow minded. Essentially, you don't disagree with market forces, but you disagree with this bill which is meant to make public employees subject to market forces.
  
  In other words, its much easier to call you a hypocrite than it is to actually have a rational, logical discussion with you for which I give FFT, Clowntrap, and MB props for trying.
• O-Trap

  

  bonelizzard;680997 wrote:Well, I guess that's too bad.. seeing that his wife is a teacher. Why would he support SB5 if he supports his wife the teacher? I don't get it? Sounds counterproductive or hypocritical to me.. But, what do I know, I'm just a teacher.. right??

  I don't, at all, discount your intelligence, so I'm not sure what the last sentence was all about.
  
  I support SB5 because the private sector, by definition, runs cleaner and more efficiently than the public as a rule. My wife is a top-notch educator, and the school in which she's working would have a shit storm on their hands if she left and they had to replace her with someone less competent.
  
  She's currently handcuffed in terms of what she can make, because there are people who have been there 15-20 years who make a lot more, despite the fact that they no longer even hide the fact that they don't care. One (and I've walked into the building and seen this) actually reads the paper for a good chunk of the day, and he apparently has no fear of being replaced. His tenure there has essentially provided him immunity, short of some indecent act against a student or faculty member.
  
  My wife has a competitive spirit, and she spends countless hours investing SO much time and effort into her kids, and that's just outside the classroom. It, frankly, pisses me off that she, along with a few other teachers at that school, bust their asses while others just sit on their asses, and in the end it doesn't make any difference whatsoever in what anyone gets paid.
  
  And what do you suppose is keeping that system in place?
  
  Here's what I'd love to see: I'd love to see some sort of split test. Take a large enough sample of schools, segment them by size and socio-economic climate. Use the control group (with Union presence and influence) and the test group (without Union presence and influence) for five years ... and see what differences happen in some of the more tangible data (standardized testing, grades on identical class material, graduation based on that material, aptitude, etc.). Naturally, the biggest challenge would be to hide the fact that a test was happening (once you let it be known that the teachers are being "tested," it skews results).
  

  Gblock;681012 wrote:FFT i applaud you working with JA that is a great program the kids probly love you ....do you see any bad teachers at the school? Do the kids tell you about any bad teachers? My thing is if there is an underperforming teacher at the school then it is the parents and communities job to complain/point it out.they are pretty easy to spot imo...i know if i had a child i would visit regularly and ask to see lesson plans/gradebook and examples of classroom work. any good teacher should have no problem doing so for you. In our district we have the PAR program if you arent doing well or just arent very good you have to go thru PAR(peer assistance review) which means someone comes to your class randomly twice a week and then meets with you and gives you performance objectives to meet throughout the year. it is a pass/fail program. if you fail you have to do it again the next year. it is the same program that first year teachers go thru before being fully hired to our district. if you fail it twice you are fired. So essentially it takes two years to fire someone if they want to go thru the program twice...most dont they just quit.

  Maybe it's my location, but I see a TON of sub-par teachers at the middle schools that feed into, and in itself, Akron North HS. I work with a local youth outreach, and I've been to North a few times, and it's disappointing every time. I don't see anyone getting fired, though, unfortunately, because the KIDS are the ones losing out when the teacher does nothing in class all year, and then passes them along to the next grade level without the tools necessary to excel in the next grade level.
  
  I work with middle and high schoolers that can barely, or cannot at all, read. 17-year-old kids that can't do multiplication of two two-digit numbers. Almost NONE of them can write in cursive ... something I learned in second grade.
  
  There are great teachers out there, and the fact that they're already at a school (don't need any transitional phasing, and are established with the student body as well as the faculty) is more than enough incentive for the school to keep them ... and even ensure that they are financially able to continue working there.
  
  Other teachers, however, have NO place in education ... because I have yet to see ANY evidence of them helping a single child in his or her education. Yet, they continue to be employed, making a little bit more every time I turn around.
  
  You wanna talk about the kids being the ones that suffer? Then explain to me how a Union-influenced school has allowed a group of kids who are almost able to drive to reach 8th and 9th grade without being able to read, despite the fact that when I'M working with them, they are found to be both intelligent and willing to learn. What about the ones who don't know how to figure percentages? Don't know where Egypt is (one boy last night pointed on an unmarked map ... to eastern China)? Don't know when the Declaration of Independence was signed?
  
  It's not that North teachers don't make good money. They do (considerably better than I do, on average). They aren't earning it, though, and it seems like they know they don't have to.
  
  By the way, my wife agrees. She supports SB5 as well.
  

  ernest_t_bass;681018 wrote:LOL, you're twisting my words. I didn't say I disagree with market forces. I said, if you were to experience that kind of cut in wage, wouldn't you expect to see a drop in employment? Please don't twist my words.

  
  Actually, no. Here's why (and this is an example from the private sector):
  
  A drop in wage is likely going to be across the board, so it isn't as though there are greener pastures to attract them away. Moreover, this probably means that times are hard, so the odds are that even non-education jobs will be scarce, because companies will be looking to get by with as few employees as possible. Finally, if the school sees cuts, odds are that not only will all schools be seeing cuts, but all INDUSTRIES will be seeing cuts ... and those cuts will probably be proportional. So if the teacher doesn't see fit to leave when cuts are existing nowhere, it doesn't make any more sense for them to leave when cuts are existing everywhere.
• bonelizzard

  kudos O trap to your writing ability.. I guess you can thank a teacher for that. You write very well. So you are a hypocrite for supporting SB5 being that your wife's a teacher? right?
• O-Trap

  

  bonelizzard;681136 wrote:kudos O trap to your writing ability.. I guess you can thank a teacher for that. You write very well. So you are a hypocrite for not supporting SB5 being that your wife's a teacher? right?

  
  I owe most of that to hard-working, private school, non-union teachers, yes. Even in college, where I learned most of what I know on writing, I learned it from private college, non-Union doctorate-toting professors.
  
  The bulk of my education has come through classes with non-Union educators. Of the ones in high school (the only public education I received), I can think of one, maybe two, teachers who taught me something unique, that I hadn't learned before or since, that has stuck with me to this day.
• sleeper

  

  bonelizzard;681136 wrote:kudos O trap to your writing ability.. I guess you can thank a teacher for that. You write very well. So you are a hypocrite for supporting SB5 being that your wife's a teacher? right?

  
  Right, because teachers wouldn't exist without Unions. This is almost as lame as "Ohio's working families support this bill". What does that even mean? The unemployed don't support the bill? The rich don't have families? This is why I vote Republican.
• O-Trap

  

  sleeper;681150 wrote:Right, because teachers wouldn't exist without Unions. This is almost as lame as "Ohio's working families support this bill". What does that even mean? The unemployed don't support the bill? The rich don't have families? This is why I vote Republican.

  
  Most of my teachers DID exist independent of Unions.
• bonelizzard

  O-Trap;681148 wrote:I owe most of that to hard-working, private school, non-union teachers, yes. Even in college, where I learned most of what I know on writing, I learned it from private college, non-Union doctorate-toting professors.
  
  The bulk of my education has come through classes with non-Union educators. Of the ones in high school (the only public education I received), I can think of one, maybe two, teachers who taught me something unique, that I hadn't learned before or since, that has stuck with me to this day.

  
  kudos to your wealthy parents for being able to afford buying your private school education.. that is until HS I guess.. why not private HS as well?
  I will say that you are the minority when it comes to education. Most of the general public can not afford a private education. I feel bad for you for not learning anything in HS from your teachers. There's something to be learned everyday. Maybe you just knew everything. LOL Still no comment on the hypocrite comment. Is your wife in the union of her school? Do they support SB5? I bet they don't.
• fan_from_texas

  bonelizzard;681136 wrote:kudos O trap to your writing ability.. I guess you can thank a teacher for that. You write very well. So you are a hypocrite for supporting SB5 being that your wife's a teacher? right?

  
  You should probably quit while you're not too far behind. O-Trap is a smart guy who so far has been generous and not destroyed your poor logic and thinly-veiled insults.
  
  Advancing bad arguments utilizing terrible logic to attack someone who has been gracious, logical, and reasonable on your thread doesn't put teachers in a good light.
• O-Trap

  

  bonelizzard;681159 wrote:kudos to your wealthy parents for being able to afford buying your private school education.. that is until HS I guess.. why not private HS as well?
  I will say that you are the minority when it comes to education. Most of the general public can not afford a private education. I feel bad for you for not learning anything in HS from your teachers. There's something to be learned everyday. Maybe you just knew everything. LOL Still no comment on the hypocrite comment. Is your wife in the union of her school? Do they support SB5? I bet they don't.

  
  Private elementary because my father was a teacher there ... a non-Union teacher that made a decent living and had good benefits ... not extravagant, by any means, but because he worked there, I was able to attend for a greatly reduced rate.
  
  Why not private HS? Because they couldn't afford it. However, I do find it interesting that my elementary teachers were not required to have nearly the educational foundation that public are, and again, they didn't really have the option of being Union. Interesting that they still taught better ... probably because there was nobody to muscle the school if they didn't ensure that their classes were performing.
  
  Nobody I work with at the youth center could afford such an education at the elementary, middle, or high school level. That's why (as I said earlier in this thread) I'm more than willing to invest tax dollars into the same kind of system. Teachers in the public school system ... who have to prove their value as an employee to keep their jobs ... just like the rest of us.
  
  Well, I did learn what classes I could get by in and what classes I had to work for. I took a LOT from high school biology classes (two of them, taught by the same teacher), and a lot from an English class. Those teachers acted like they cared ... they acted like my private school teachers had. They pushed all the students far and beyond what any others did.
  
  In reference to the hypocrite argument, I don't address it because there is no hypocrisy. I agree with my wife that teachers should bargain on their own and be weighed on their own merit. I fail to see the hypocrisy, because I'm not living on the wage of someone who is afraid of fending for herself as a teacher (unlike many teachers I've been in contact with, which I state in that long post on which you commended me, though never addressed). If I didn't support SB5, THAT would make me a hypocrite.
  
  To answer your question about my wife, no, she is not. Those who are at her school do not support SB5, and guess what? Many of them are the ones who would have to worry about their jobs if SB5 were to pass ... because their performances as teachers are grossly inadequate.
• O-Trap

  

  fan_from_texas;681168 wrote:You should probably quit while you're not too far behind. O-Trap is a smart guy who so far has been generous and not destroyed your poor logic and thinly-veiled insults.
  
  Advancing bad arguments utilizing terrible logic to attack someone who has been gracious, logical, and reasonable on your thread doesn't put teachers in a good light.

  
  FFT, honestly, I am genuinely more about discussion than argument, which is why I try not to go into "debate mode" whenever I can avoid it.
• dwccrew

  

  ernest_t_bass;680986 wrote:If a lawyer made $40,000 per year, and they saw a $300 decrease in their pay, every pay... would you expect there to be a decrease in the # of lawyers? Serious question, not trying to be an ass. That is what I personally could be looking at under this bill. Yes or no, pretty please.
  
  Let's see if you can actually answer a question with a "yes" or a "no."

  It is not a simple "yes" or "no" answer though. There are many factors in this equation. Attorneys, for the most part, do not need to depend on tax dollars to support their wages and benefits. However, teachers do rely on tax revenue. So if tax revenue goes down, teachers salary and benefits packages are likely to be reduced.
  
  These are risks that a person should think about before entering either field as a career. Attorneys performance has everything to do with how much they make, teachers not so much. Again, you are making an argument FOR merit pay. Teachers would not need to worry about CBA if they performed well.
  

  bonelizzard;681159 wrote:kudos to your wealthy parents for being able to afford buying your private school education.. that is until HS I guess.. why not private HS as well?
  I will say that you are the minority when it comes to education. Most of the general public can not afford a private education. I feel bad for you for not learning anything in HS from your teachers. There's something to be learned everyday. Maybe you just knew everything. LOL Still no comment on the hypocrite comment. Is your wife in the union of her school? Do they support SB5? I bet they don't.

  
  Even if O-trap's parents were wealthy and could afford to send him to private school, what does that have to do with this topic? Are you insinuating that his private education is better than public? If you are, you are basically destroying your own argument. Most private schools are non-union and if you admit that they provide better education, you just supported an argument IN FAVOR of merit pay and SB5.
• Manhattan Buckeye

  "I feel bad for you for not learning anything in HS from your teachers. "
  
  "I agree with my wife that teachers should bargain on their own and be weighed on their own merit. "
  
  This is the point that just nails it IMO, why do teachers tolerate crappy teachers because of the union? Almost everyone that went to public schools had teachers that not only didn't teach anything (per the first quote), they actually hindered the learning process. My jr. high science teacher was terrible - he was there to collect a paycheck and didn't give a rat's butt about teaching anything. I think I'm actually dumber for being in his classes. To be honest grades 6-8 were pretty much worthless in general in our district. On the other hand, I had awesome HS math and SS teachers - it grinds my gears that they got paid the same as the ineffective ones. I don't get it...in few professions do the excellent workers tolerate and defend the poor workers.
• bonelizzard

  thanks for all of the humorous dialogue. I do appreciate all of your opininons, and appreciate how the other half thinks. Are some teachers bad teachers? Yes. Are some Dr.'s bad Dr.'s. Yes. Are some lawyers bad lawyers. You got it.. Yes. All public schools teachers are evaluated by administrators regulary. If those teachers are found to be doing a bad job, they should be placed on some sort of improvement plan, per negotiated contract.
  I teach in a wonderful school district that I love. I love going to work everyday and I love what I do. I hope that I'm not a minority when it comes to my occupation, teacher. I hope that most teachers feel the same way that I do. Do I know that some buisnessmen love doing what they do every day? I don't know and I can speak on that because I just don't know.
  Unions are not the problem. Collective bargaining is not the problem. Merit pay will not work in education. Politicians please stop using public employees as your scapegoat in these difficult economic times.
  My 2 cents.
• I Wear Pants

  ernest_t_bass;680440 wrote:How does a special education teacher make money on a merit based system? A SPED teacher's kids could keep getting worse and worse, with no increase in "test" scores. A core teacher has test results, but school "classes" differ in intelligence. What about elective teachers? Teachers of the Arts?

  Not by test scores for the love of god.
  
  But you act like there's no way to identify competency in teachers. If that's the case then how in the hell do they do things like evaluations for student teaching?
• Fab4Runner

  

  bonelizzard;681232 wrote:
  Unions are not the problem. Collective bargaining is not the problem. Merit pay will not work in education.

  
  
  Sorry, but you're just not providing any proof that this is the case. Merit based pay works in the private sector and said sector is ridiculously more efficient and well run. All I hear are excuses as to why it just can't work when there isn't a shred of evidence to back that up. On the other hand, there are literally millions of examples of merit based systems working.
• bonelizzard

  In the corporate world. We're not producing chevys. Our product is your kid.
• queencitybuckeye

  bonelizzard;681256 wrote:In the corporate world. We're not producing chevys. Our product is your kid.

  
  In some private sector jobs, the product is life and death, and the concept works just fine.
• Manhattan Buckeye

  queencitybuckeye;681258 wrote:In some private sector jobs, the product is life and death, and the concept works just fine.

  
  And you have choices. If a car company sucks I don't have to buy their product. If I'm unhappy with the school system, I have to move or pay for private school.