A system of seniority-based pay, negotiated between two monopolistic cartels, does not sound like the best way to ensure that someone is paid $100K for being a "good teacher".
The problem is, it's a heck of a hard task to determine who is a good teacher. How would you do it?
Give bonuses and raises to teachers who's students perform well on standardized tests? That just encourages teaching to the book.
Student evaluations? Then the teachers are obliged to suck up to the students for good ratings.
Leave it up to administrators? That creates huge potential for bias and currying for favor. At least when that happens in a for-profit company, the free market will shake out the worst cases eventually.
Seniority is not a great way to determine pay, but it's not an absolutely terrible way either, as generally, more experienced teachers ARE better teachers.
Seniority is not a great way to determine pay, but it's not an absolutely terrible way either, as generally, more experienced teachers ARE better teachers.
I don't actually know how long the teachers I had in grade school had been teaching, but if experience can be roughly estimated by age then I am not convinced there's any correlation between experience and quality. I had a lot of great young teachers and a lot of rotten old ones.
I like the idea of comparing a students score on a standardized test before and after the teacher. And, adding in a long term effect so students from 2+ years down the line also impact your evaluation. IMO, it's going to be hard to teach to this test and next years test without covering the subject in some detail. Also by inspiring students to really enjoy the subject you will improve their long term performance. Basically take 30 students at 50% up to 55%, that's great, and if they keep getting 55 percentile for the next 5 years you probably did a great job.
PS: Students at the edges students will tend to regress to the mean, so you can still measure performance on a class that scored 95% last year.
Its easy to train students to perform better on tests by teaching them things orthogonal to the actual material.
Further, you can "teach to the test" by giving students only classes of problems that will appear on the test and drilling them in that and little else. I imagine that you could end up with lots of functional-illiteracy type issues where students would only be able to do a task in the tightly controlled circumstances that they have been trained on but have difficulty generalizing.
A simple multiple choice test covering vary limited subject matter is one option, but we can do better than that. I remember taking a vary comprehensive series of tests when I was !10 years old that included such things as attempting to sound out words that don't exist in English. Granted, the possibility of extremely high quality testing in this country is one thing, I suspect the actual creation of standardized tests in the public school system has become extremely political.
PS: I think AP tests are fairly good indicators of their subject matter. Even teachers who "teach to the test" still cover the subject to an acceptable degree.
Pretty much any test is teachable. I raised my ACT scores by 3 or 4 points with some studying. Even IQ test are teachable. I believe taking the WAIS IV for a second will invalidate it if taken sooner than six months prior to the first testing date.
If there's no way to determine who is a good teacher, and no way to pay good teachers the right amount of money, it seems to me that we ought to cap teacher salaries at $30K plus a cost of living adjustment. I know a lot of people who want to be teachers and don't care about the money; I know plenty of teachers who complain that they're overpaid, but can't find any job that matches their skills and pays more than about 40% less than they currently make.
And if you pay for seniority, you're rewarding people who know how to make themselves hard to get rid of.
