When I first read Dale Morejon’s letter to the editor published
Feb. 1, I was tremendously disappointed. At first glance, it seemed
that he had not understood my plan for fairly determining which
teachers are most deserving of merit pay.
When I first read Dale Morejon’s letter to the editor published Feb. 1, I was tremendously disappointed. At first glance, it seemed that he had not understood my plan for fairly determining which teachers are most deserving of merit pay.
This unnerved me, because I had thought my plan to be simplicity itself, readily comprehended by anyone. Mr. Morejon, as I know from our previous encounter, is quite bright, and if indeed he had not understood my idea, perhaps I had failed to present it clearly.
I re-read his letter, with particular attention to his final clause, and an alternative hypothesis occurred to me. Mr. Morejon is no longer a Gilroy High School biology teacher. He is now a union flack. Perhaps he is just affecting not to understand, so he can mouth the straight union line and muddy the waters with irrelevancies.
Possibly there is a third explanation, and Mr. Dale Morejon is being neither dumb nor devious. I will play it straight, and answer his questions.
First: to reiterate: merit pay should be awarded to those teachers who teach best. We can determine this by measuring improvement in their students’ standardized test scores over the course of the year.
For example, suppose a Luigi Aprea teacher has a second-grade class of 20 students. At the beginning of the year, 16 of them were reading on grade level. The mid-point MAP scores show that 18 of them are now reading on grade level, an improvement of 112.5 percent. By the end of the year, 19 are. That is very nice.
However, over at Glen View, a second grade class of 20 students started out the year with only two students reading at grade level. The mid-point MAP scores show that eight of them have achieved that bench mark, a 400 percent increase. Perhaps by the end of the year 14 will be reading at grade level. This is a huge improvement; the Glen View teacher has earned merit pay.
I hope this example clarifies my basic plan.
Mr. Morejon asks how this plan works for teachers at the middle schools and high schools. Answer: the same way, except that instead of looking at the improvement in all scores for the single class taught by the elementary school teacher, we look for improvement in the single subject-specific scores of all that teacher’s students.
Perhaps a sophomore English teacher has 158 students in five classes. We could, for example, see how many of that teacher’s students pass the English portion of the CAHSEE. That would be enlightening. Or we could use the API scores, comparing the scores at the end of the previous year to the scores at the end of the current year to calculate improvement.
Mr. Morejon also drags a red herring across the debate chamber. He asks, what about the “program specialists, counselors, psychologists, academic coordinators, literacy facilitators, and nurses?”
Simple. Non-classroom teachers, no matter how certificated, do not get merit pay. Merit pay is a means to reward exemplary classroom teachers. If a counselor wants merit pay, he can leave his cushy office and take a classroom position.
For too long, exemplary classroom teachers have been lured out of the classroom into positions such as literary facilitator or mentor teacher, where the pay is higher, and their impact on the students is diluted or lost altogether. Perhaps merit pay for teachers would encourage the best teachers to stay in the classroom, where they could teach the students well. What a concept.
Here are some questions for Mr. Morejon, or Ms. Michelle Nelson, or any other union flack who cares to answer.
Why does the CTA defend a pay system that prevents rewarding outstanding performers? Why defend inflexible work rules that prevent a district from pursuing excellence?
Why support a tenure system that precludes getting rid of bad teachers? Why oppose charter schools unless they promise to use only union teachers?
Is the teachers union really interested in the education of students, or only in promulgating itself and expanding its own political muscle? In short, why support the status quo, when the status quo gives us the second-worst results in the nation?
