What’s gonna work?
Team work!
A Facebook memory from a year ago prompted this post.
Last year, one of our school board members made statements reflecting her view that “specials” teachers are less valuable than “core” class teachers. This ties in with how incentive payments are distributed at the school.
Years ago, the State came up with something they call “Teacher Appreciation Grants.” The notion is that throwing a little extra money to a few “exceptional” teachers will create an incentive for all of them to compete and excel. Superficial free market stuff bolted onto the public education system. (Cheaper than paying the teachers what they’re worth, I guess.)
At West Side, there traditionally hasn’t been a lot of buy-in to the State’s divide-and-conquer vision of education.
With respect to these state-mandated “appreciation” grants, I think they’ve passed the money along to certified staff equally and then come up with local money to show non-certified staff they are appreciated as well. (Take this with a grain of salt – I haven’t been within shouting distance of this process in several years.)
I think policymakers are making a category error when they view “specials” teachers as less valuable than “core” teachers or when they try to enlist market forces to get teachers to compete against each other.
Specifically, they are envisioning teachers as islands rather than part of a team. A lever doesn’t work unless you have both a beam and a fulcrum. A pulley doesn’t work without both a wheel and a cable. (You can thank teamwork between the science teacher who taught me about simple machines and the English teacher who taught me about metaphors for this paragraph!)
The English teacher, the math teacher, the computer teacher, the art teacher, the gym teacher, the science teacher, the music teacher, the language teacher, are all going to need to collaborate if we want kids who are well-educated, well-adjusted, and well-rounded. Each piece supports and makes the other pieces better. It’s supposed to be a school *system,* not just a mess of individual classes.
The West Lafayette mission statement reflects that the school’s mission “is to engage students in a world-class educational experience that prepares them to be well-rounded, ethical, innovative, creative, productive, and adaptive citizens who shape our global society.” You’re going to need all-hands-on-deck to accomplish that mission.
Updated: I wanted to update this post to add a link to a YouTube video a friend shared which offers some insight into what actually motivates people. A cash bonus isn’t a great motivator for this situation. Those kind of rewards work better for rote tasks. For complex undertakings, like teaching; factors such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose lead to better performance.
This reminds me of the old adage that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. Most people are familiar with the psychologist B.F. Skinner and the famous research showing the effectiveness of the principles surrounding behaviorism. That led to folks abandoning Freud and the belief that Stimulus-Response behaviorism will solve all problems. This is so typical of so much American problem solving that the universal problem solution is “using a hammer” for all problems. That tends to follow the model of (1) discover a model, (2) apply it to almost all problems (3) gather the data regarding effectiveness after you use the model for a period of time after finding that it doesn’t work for everything as you thought and look for other solutions. Start over. A more scientific and useful model would be to discover a model, gather data regarding its effectiveness, and apply the data toward a solution for similar problems. Like so many things, we discover that our original solution is very effective for some problems but it falls flat for other problems, as was pointed out in the video. Real progress is really found when people test a range of problem solving solutions, then gather data and actually evaluate results. Instead, we want more effective schools? Elect a successful businessman, defined as “lots of money”. Ask him to adopt what he has determined to be successful and use it everywhere. Then be surprised when it falls flat at all problem sol ing.
In addition to what you said, there is a tendency toward a sort of measurement myopia where people focus only on what they can or bother to measure, then proceed to misinterpret or over-stress the data anyway. Meanwhile there are things that aren’t, maybe can’t be, measured that are important and valuable as well.
Lots of good reasons why people think that you can measure everything or that everything you measure can be useful or should be. Bothers me when I see these people that think they just because they can count, they are experts or they can apply the hammer to every problem. OR these folks who because they have been elected are authorities on everything.. Thanks so much for your thoughts. Don’t always respond, but I read them all.
See if my image embed works here. An XKCD that seemed relevant: