Officials of the U.S. Department of Education are hoping to work with Congress to introduce a new program that will alter the reporting requirements currently used to evaluate teacher quality. Since the late 1990’s, states and higher education have been required to report on teacher preparedness under standards set in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Currently, Title II requires institutions to gather roughly 440 data points from teacher-candidates in the admission process, thought by opposers to merely burden institutes with useless data. The president’s 2012 budget request addresses the need for a new formula to measure the outcomes of teacher-candidates with the new $185 million program, called the Presidential Teaching Fellows program.

Merit pay for teachers is under heavy debate but still being considered as a program that could be implemented within the next four years with Race to the Top dollars, according to a recent Times Herald article. Current teachers would be given the option to choose between the merit pay plan or stay on the same pay scale, which is currently determined by education level and years of teaching experience. Some teachers and most unions are against the push to turn teaching into a merit-paid industry because it discourages the collaboration most school communities work so hard to build and maintain. The merit-pay idea sprouts from a basic economic theory that people will work harder if their work is tied to monetary gains. However, teachers are also afraid the administrators who are responsible for spreading the bonuses are not only unqualified to decide whether a teacher is deserving, but they don’t have a system to accurately measure which numbers add up to student success.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer concluded the $75 million spent on the New York City experiment for teacher merit pay did nothing to increase student achievement. Researchers used math and English scores to gauge academic achievement and found scores worsened since 2007, when the monetary incentive was first put in place.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-08 and 2009-10 schools years, before it was quietly phased out. For students, there were negligible outcomes in attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and graduation rates.

Researchers believe the reason the initiative failed in the US, while proving to work in other countries, is because it was unclear which and how many of the test scores influenced teacher pay.

Philip Greenspun, computer scientist, educator, and early internet entrepreneur, writes on his blog, “… I was surprised that anyone thinks merit pay will work. Restaurants aren’t very important to our society or our future. Great empires have been built by countries with bad restaurants. Yet nobody would propose having restaurant compensation be determined by a government bureaucracy assigning ‘merit’ to each restaurant. We allow citizens to choose which restaurant to visit and eventually the bad restaurants wither away and disappear due to lack of customers.”

Where do you stand in the debate? Is there something you would do to improve a merit-pay initiative in your state? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.

In the recent Hechinger Report article, “Why school leadership matters” researchers reflect on how the trickle-down effects of improving superintendents and principals has been proven to come second only to teacher quality in the fight for improved student achievement. In the last few decades, school reform experiments have taken place on a wide range from local to federal, but only until recently have researchers looked to the important role school leadership plays in improving the entire school environment. The report shows leadership starts at the very top with superintendents who are consistent and layout groundwork for principals by:

Over the last decade, the idea of incorporating global and 21st century skills in curriculum has grown from an experimental initiative to a requirement for student success. In the journal, District Administration, Sarah Jerome, superintendent of the Arlington Heights and former president of American Association of School Administrators, says she thinks school leaders have become too complacent, especially in the area of allowing foreign language courses to get pulled from the curriculum.   On this past weekend, the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Corps, which promotes worldwide service and understanding, it is appropriate to think of how all students can learn and act globally, especially in the United States from learning a language, to working overseas, to volunteering for causes that are strong around the world.