Wednesday, October 20, 2010

From the TER archives: Merit pay.

Just in case you are new to education reporting and think this debate is new, I present some all-stars from my old files, soon to be crayoned over now that I have them bookmarked online:

Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job, a 2006 Brookings report by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger. Many elements of the recommendations are reflected in policy today.

Volatility in School Test Scores: Implications for Test-Based Accountability Systems and The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures, written by Kane and Staiger in 2002. Diane Ravitch warns of the disruption to testing from distractions, but I forgot that Kane and Staiger  the same thing once too. The pair’s concerns refer not to test data being linked individually to teachers, but to the volatility of measuring schools as a whole.

—A bunch of 2006 news stories about performance-pay plans that feel a lot like what is being written in 2010.

—Henry Braun’s 2005 report for ETS, Using Student Progress to Evaluate Teachers: A Primer on Value-Added Models.

Better Pay for Better Teaching, which Bryan Hassel wrote for the Progressive Policy Institute in 2002.

—Not about teacher quality, but I wonder whether many of the concerns about the testing industry presented in Margins of Error, Tom Toch’s 2006 report for Education Sector, have been solved.

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