The Brooks

It looks like Barack Obama is making waves by advocating merit pay for teachers. Andrew Sullivan agrees with Obama. He cites Lewis Solomon, who asks an important question for merit pay naysayers:

“If adults (teachers) should never be affected by how well children (students) do in school, does that mean that teachers are not responsible for student learning? Performance-pay opponents are running out of arguments and allies.”

The real problem that critics have with merit pay have to do with measurement-driven instruction (MDI) and high stakes testing. Having been to teacher’s college for a Master’s in Education, I’m familiar with the arguments for and against MDI.

Many educators believe that MDI will lead to “teaching to the test.” This means that educators will become so preoccupied with their students scores on high stakes tests that all they will do is teach disparate facts they think will appear on the final standardized test. This argument doesn’t work on me. First, teaching to the test is better than teaching to nothing. It sets a consistent standard of accountability for all teachers. My guess is that excellent teachers will continue to do what they are doing, going above and beyond the call of their profession, all the while having their students outperform others. Teachers who cannot get their students to master the basic content of their subject areas will be culled from the ranks. As a teacher, I don’t see this as a bad thing.

Another problem that critics of MDI have is the misconception that all standardized tests are dominated by multiple choice questions which critics deem to be an inadequate measurement for assessment. This is incorrect. Multiple choice questions are part and parcel of standardized tests, but so are short answer and essay questions. The belief that merely learning answers does not necessarily imply understanding is also misguided. Learning answers is much better than both not knowing the answers and not understanding the answers, which was the impetuts for MDI in the first place.

Another problem educators have with MDI is they believe it will supplant critical thinking from the curriculum in lieu of just knowing facts. Whenever I have heard this, I’ve always asked, don’t you need to know accurate facts in order to think critically about them? Knowing correct information is always a precursor to thinking critically. As mentioned before, the good teachers will end up doing both. For others, the bottom line will be raised.

In teacher’s college, I wrote a very short reflection paper on MDI. I think I will post this tonight.