Emma Hedges's List: Persuasive Speech

• • factoryworkers/real estate agents

• • cooperation between teachers, existed since 1700s

• National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University's Peabody  College of education and human develoment in partnership with the RAND  Corporation.
• Paying teachers bonuses based on their performance has been a controversial  issue nationwide since the 1950s
• middle-school math teachers
• If teachers know they will be rewarded for an increase in their students' test  scores, will test scores go up?
•   Approximately half of the nearly 300 volunteers were randomly assigned to  a "treatment" group, in which they were eligible for bonuses of up to $15,000  per year on the basis of their students' test-score gains on the Tennessee  Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP).
• The other half were assigned to a "control" group not eligible for these  bonuses. Teachers were evaluated based on an historical performance benchmark  for MNPS teachers, not on competition with one another. All teachers in the  treatment group had the chance to earn bonuses.

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  •       The annual bonus amounts were $5,000,  $10,000 or $15,000.
• Overall, 33.6 percent of the original group received bonuses, with the average  bonus being approximately $10,000

• While there was no overall effect on student achievement across the entire  treatment group, the researchers found a significant benefit for fifth graders  in Year 2 and Year 3 of the experiment: fifth graders taught by teachers who  earned bonuses did show gains in test scores. However, the effect did not carry  over to sixth grade when students were tested the following year. Springer said  this finding raises questions about what is different about fifth grade and what  factors -student development, curriculum, teaching and classroom structure - may  have played a role.

• "We believe there is an important lesson here: teachers are more likely to  cooperate with a performance pay plan if its purpose is to determine whether the  policy is a sound idea, than if plans being forced on them in the absence of  such evidence and in the face of their skepticism and misgivings," Springer  said.

8 more annotations...

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  Merit Pay is an economic incentive program that has gained much traction with  the current education reform movement. In basic terms, teachers are awarded a  bonus to their salary based on their performance in the classroom, typically  measured using a combination of live observations by department heads, grade  level coordinators, or administrators and a system of record-keeping for teacher  professional behavior.

   

  
  

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  Most schools with a merit pay system do not link the incentive to student  performance, but to the professional practices of the teacher. In most  applications, it is an effort to ensure that teachers are meeting minimum  standards for things like answering parent emails and phone calls in a timely  manner, keeping their classroom enviorment organized, interacting professionally  with colleagues, and so on. Some merit pay systems also include professional  development practices as part of the criteria. Teachers must provide evidence  that they are pursuing graduate level credits, attending conferences, or  engaging in other professional development activitites.
• those that are motivated to excel do so because they have a burning passion for  the subject matter and will collaborate with like-minded people for free (or  close to it). Research has shown that economic incentives are only effective for  the most basic, lower level cognitive tasks. With teaching being both an art and  a science, measuring a teachers

• effectiveness based on upholding the minimum standards for professional  practice is certainly a "race to the bottom".

   

  
  

2 more annotations...

• • Dr. Brown, child development specialist

• • teacher initiative fail

• • google news