velocity

Let's talk about something that has me by the proverbial nutsack right now. Let's talk about a little thing called Merit Based Pay. Merit based pay is the idea that teachers should get raises and bonuses that are equivalent to the work they do; do a good job, get a bigger raise. Sounds great, right? Sounds like someone like me, who's all fired up about education, would be all over a program like this, right? Right?

Of course, you know I'm setting you up. Let me tell you a little bit about how merit based pay affects my life as a teacher. I work for an intermediate district, which means that we don't have a specific regional base to draw our students from. We have facilities all over the Twin Cities metro area, and we provide programs for students who are loosely grouped under the heading "special needs". Most of our facilities deal with autistic, severely retarded, special education, and non-verbal kids. My facility is an ALC, or "Area Learning Center" When I was in high school, the ALC was known as "Asshole's Last Chance". We deal with kids who have drug problems, gang problems, behavioral problems, or just problems working in a regular school setting. We deal with kids who, though they may not have mental handicaps, they sure have problems. Our students are referred to us by partner districts, the geographically based school districts surrounding us who just can't deal with our students and their problems anymore.

My district does not have merit based pay. Doesn't bother me. I'm not doing this job for the money. However, our three main partner districts have just this year switched to merit based pay programs. How does this affect me? I'll get to that. First, let's discuss merit based pay a little more in depth. So teachers are paid what they're worth. Awesome. Teachers are finally going to be motivated to give their students a decent education, put in some effort, show some results, raise the educational standards for America's youth, etc. Sounds great. Who could argue against that? It's a good idea in theory, and the kind of things lawmakers love to tout as progress in our educational system, but how exactly do you determine the worth of a teacher? If you really care about education, it can be a difficult and lengthy process. But if you're lazy, you don't care how your program works as long as it looks good, and you don't really care all that much about the quality of education (ie, most lawmakers and administrators), you judge merit by test scores.

So according to merit based pay programs, a teacher's worth is decided by the standardized test scores of his/her students. This poses many problems, which merit pay districts are just starting to discover. Teachers are teaching directly to the test, critical thinking skills and creativity be damned. Teachers are competing with other teachers in their districts for higher test scores, which bring higher raises. Teachers in two merit pay districts in the Twin Cities have already been caught doctoring students' test answers.

And here's how it affects me: Teachers have been unloading low scoring students in great numbers onto intermediate programs like mine. They just push the bottom half of their bell curve out the door and make them somebody else's problem. They make them my problem. Right now, we have over one hundred more students than we did at this time last year, and we have three less staff. With a staff of twelve, that's pretty hard to manage. Not only that, but we have almost 40 new kids who are classified as special ed, and we are not a special ed school. We do not have a special ed teacher, and none of us have special ed training. We are not equipped to handle these students. They're so high maintenance that we can't give our regular students as much attention as we need to, which leads to less supervision and more gang/drug/behavioral issues. We also have a great number of new students who are non-English proficient; new immigrants and children of migrant workers. We do have an ESL teacher, but she has eight desks in her room, fifteen students, and now a waiting list over 50 students long to get into her class. So in the meantime, while these students are waiting for ESL, they go in a regular classroom. Legally, we can't turn them away.

So how do we make this work? How do we make sure that every student gets the education they deserve, and teachers are compensated accordingly? I don't know. All I know is that this is supposed to be my fun job, and it has been significantly less than fun of late. I blame it on merit based pay.