JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Handled carefully, merit pay for teachers might work.”

A profoundly silly statement, Gary Mason.

First, when did school boards or public schools ever handle anything carefully?

If you can cite a significant instance, you will earn a footnote in history.

Our school boards are run by teachers who no longer want to be teachers.

And who are our teachers?

Generally, they start teaching right out of teachers’ college, young people with no experience of the world, aware of none of the complexities of dealing in the real world of business.

At the grade school level, they are mostly not well educated, being generalists having taken a lot of easy-to-pass courses, specialists in nothing, and then they spend a year in that most anti-intellectual, anti-academic, and anti-real world of institutions, the teachers’ college.

The atmosphere in public schools and in school boards is one somewhere between a monastery and the post office.

Just read the language of the education establishment, and you will read, not so much the jargon that goes with any profession, but a lot of puffed-up language saying almost nothing and high-sounding euphemisms for avoiding problems or making hard decisions.

Further, there is an almost suffocating sense of cloistered society in our school bureaucracies, of “ins” and “outs” and favoritism and “hush, you musn’t say that.” It is not an atmosphere conducive to fair and open evaluation of anything.

This includes a kind of prevailing bureaucratic dishonesty. For example, the subject of bullying is talked about endlessly and expensive materials are purchased for presentations. Yet the real solution to bullying is never, never touched: that is, every teacher’s taking responsibility for the acts which occur before his or her eyes.

Another example of this institutionalized dishonesty is the effort to deal with genuine problems by inventing some new temporary nostrum rather than dealing directly with a problem which requires sleeves rolled up and hard effort. The examples are countless.

There is the fraud of Afro-centric or other forms of segregated schools as a solution to poor academic performance. Essentially, if these succeed – as measured by grades – it will be because of reduced demands and high marks for projects which are of little value to a good education, all conducted in the “safe” atmosphere of a place with no genuine scrutiny.

There is the fraud of social promotion: a way to make no extra effort for difficult students and a way to kiss your problem good-bye at the end of term.

Ontario has report cards that are almost a joke from a Monty Python skit. Pre-written, bureaucratic phrases are pasted into each kid’s report from a list. Their actual performance is not even properly graded.

Ontario has literacy tests – created and graded by teachers themselves – rather than grappling with teaching kids to read in the first place. As they exist in Ontario, and I have both read them and experienced a foreign student’s exposure to them, they are a complete fraud, accomplishing nothing.

Literacy closets – things filled with costly special-purpose, forgettable, throwaway books created just to the purpose – rather than attending to libraries and seeing that there is good literature kids will enjoy and learn from and teachers who help introduce them to it.

The teacher-librarian – a bizarre creation which is neither a qualified librarian nor a teacher with expertise in anything, but a body sitting around to fill in holes for various teachers away for one reason or another, spending their remaining hours supposedly taking care of the library. One good look at the state of these libraries will tell you how effective they are at their job.

Now, on top of all this, add the teachers’ union, defender of dead-wood, hero organization of the non-performer.

Finally, add a school system under direct political control, whose politicians are concerned only with getting re-elected and avoiding any serious conflict, no matter what their rhetoric.

So this is an environment in which conscientious, impartial evaluations of performance can occur? Only in your dreams.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Merit pay for teachers is a totally unworkable idea, and it is that for many reasons.

If you genuinely embrace the concept of merit pay – that is, better-than-average pay for excellent performance – you must, for logical and economic consistency, also embrace less-than-average pay for under-performing teachers.

Only in that way is there a genuine incentive for improved performance at all levels, and only in that way is there a genuine appraisal of performance at all levels.

Yet that part of the merit-pay idea is never discussed: we hear only about extra pay for superior performance. In effect, such a one-sided system would be bribery for favored teachers.

Extra pay for supposedly superior teachers is guaranteed under current arrangements to be nothing but a giveaway of billions to no genuine effect.

And try selling the idea of full-range merit pay to the teachers’ union, the same organization which works day and night protecting the jobs of incompetent teachers almost the way the Catholic Church has protected its abusive priests.

And which of our generally spineless politicians would show the courage and tenacity for a fight with that monopoly organization? Imagine Dalton McGuinty standing up the teachers, a man who has done nothing but shovel money at them to keep his political peace?

And what is average performance? The way our public education is organized, it would be impossible to establish because teachers, once they are hired permanently, are never assessed. There are no meaningful measurements or standards.

You cannot use only student performance because some teachers are assigned to schools where families are successful and expect performance, providing encouragement and resources, while some teachers are assigned to schools where families are broken or unsuccessful, sometimes barely feeding their children and having no high expectations.

You cannot use the official curriculum as a standard against which to measure because it is pretty much a poor pile of generalities and frantic efforts to appear comprehensive rather than a specific set of measurable requirements.

Further, there is no qualified, experienced body of people to do the assessing. Once Ontario did have such people, but the concept of regular assessment died decades ago.

Moreover, our entire public education system is essentially run by teachers – perhaps its greatest source of weakness. Principals are generally just teachers who wanted out of the classroom. Superintendents and directors are just teachers again who’ve piled up lots of puff education courses – and truly there are few other kind at our colleges of education where academic standards are low.

There is no perspective in any of these officials beyond a kind of generalized public-school teacher perspective, and that gets us nowhere.

One assumes that the whole idea of merit pay is to increase the effectiveness of our schools. The only way to do that is to compete with world standards of performance, and we don’t do that with our present system. It will take far more than merit pay.