Re:The Case for $320,000 Teachers
by _delirium on Wednesday July 28, 2010 @11:03AM
(#1554469)
You get this in milder form in higher-level education as well. If you look at some of the recent debates over tenure, lots of professors will agree that there are dead-weight profs who basically quit working after tenure, and we ought to be able to fire them. But the crucial question is: who decides if they're a dead-weight prof, and who gets to fire them? And will this add a bunch of new non-research work to satisfy whatever process gets invented? Academics have basically zero trust in university administrators being the ones to do that--- the worry is that if tenure's abolished, people will be hired/fired for metrics-based reasons, like citation count and how many grant $$ they brought in in the past 5 years, or even for trendy university-marketing reasons ("I hear X is hot, we need more profs there, not in Y" or "we need more of the kinds of profs who get interviewed on CNN a lot").
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It is right that we should be suspicious of people who want to be paid without being evaluated. What other industries operate like this? Even "creative" industries, where everything is subjective, have cold hard metrics in place.
I'd say most good industries don't have cold hard metrics in place, and the companies with more metrics within industries are generally the worse ones. There are engineering firms that have heavily metrics-based evaluations of engineers (e.g. bug-fix counts being directly tied to bonuses), but I don't think I've seen them being called out as good examples. The better companies usually have engineering managers who are actually in touch with what their team's doing, and can give accurate subjective judgments of who on their team is contributing what and what the relative value of their team members is. It's the companies/managers who don't have any idea what's going on in their teams who fall back on metrics to try to answer those questions.
At the simplest level: if the company doesn't meet its revenue and profit targets, I don't get a bonus.
Teachers aren't even evaluated at the level of "more exams passed than last year" or overall results relative to comparable schools.
We've seen problems with compensation linked to short-term company performance. Test scores and most metrics like you're proposing have similar problems. Nobody cares about test scores; we care about long-term success of students into adulthood, and it seems that we have no idea how to predict that.