Should teachers be paid purely based on years of experience?

[Josie]

Simple question. Maybe a simple answer.

Should teachers be paid purely based on years of experience?

If so, why?
If not, how would you revamp the salary schedules if you were in charge?

 

[Kandahar]

Simple question. Maybe a simple answer.

Should teachers be paid purely based on years of experience?

If so, why?
If not, how would you revamp the salary schedules if you were in charge?

Their salaries should be based entirely on merit. Not on years of experience, or advanced degrees, or anything else. We pretty much have the worst possible system right now. Paying people the same regardless of performance (and making it impossible to fire the worst performers) pretty much guarantees that we'll get mediocrity.

 

[spud_meister]

They should have a base salary, but have that go up based on experience and merit.

(though I'm not sure how you could work out if they merit the merit bonus or not)

 

[molten_dragon]

No, teacher's salaries should not be based solely on experience and education. They should also be based on merit. How to judge that merit, however, is quite difficult.

 

[AGENT J]

Simple question. Maybe a simple answer.

Should teachers be paid purely based on years of experience?

If so, why?
If not, how would you revamp the salary schedules if you were in charge?

of course not that would be totally stupid

Teachers should be paid based on many things experience is only ONE

Experience
Education
Results
Performance

these should be the foundation and startinf point

 

[Orion]

What would "merit" look like? It's hard to quantify teaching styles.

 

[Kali]

No way! Some of the very best teachers are new fresh outta college

 

[The Giant Noodle]

Teachers in Illinois are FAR overpaid. WAAAAAY overpaid. NO pension! And they should be paid per MONTH. To me their yearly pay based on 9 months of service should be no more than $40K. PLUS they should pay for their health insurance like the rest of America. 20% of their pay should go to health insurance. These people dont do it because they LOVE it (for the most part). They do it because of the AWESOME pay, pension, benefits and 3 months off. And its a fairly EASY JOB!!!!!!

 

[spud_meister]

And its a fairly EASY JOB!!!!!!

:lol: No it ain't, not if there is anybody else as remotely annoying as I was when I was in school.

 

[RosieS]

Merit pay is two-fold. You get extra pay, or not, based upon proving academic progress of your students that year. Standardized tests do that. Plus you can add on a parental rating component, where the parents give their child's teacher a numerical ranking, as well.

And you also standardize tests for teachers, whether performance-based thru classroom observation, written testing, or a combo of both. These would be an every three or five year offering.

It's about student improvement first, teacher improvement second.

Regards from Rosie

 

[Slartibartfast]

I can't see how quantifying merit would work unless we could also quantify the performance of parents, the child, and the community in its interaction with what the teacher does. Overall, we should be putting less emphasis on the teachers and more on the children and parents to get their butts in gear and stop expecting teachers to take up their slack.

I believe that until society values education again, its not really going to matter what we do. We should be celebrating scientists and engineers. Not athletes, talk show hosts, and music stars.

 

[Aunt Spiker]

Teachers in Illinois are FAR overpaid. WAAAAAY overpaid. NO pension! And they should be paid per MONTH. To me their yearly pay based on 9 months of service should be no more than $40K. PLUS they should pay for their health insurance like the rest of America. 20% of their pay should go to health insurance. These people dont do it because they LOVE it (for the most part). They do it because of the AWESOME pay, pension, benefits and 3 months off. And its a fairly EASY JOB!!!!!!

$40,000 to teach my kids?
That's low.

I think the good teachers are far underpaid - and the bad ones are far overpaid. It's perspective and changes based on who you talk to or about. I can point a few fingers at teachers which I think need to go from my kid's school system . . .thankfully it's not actually up to public opinion.

Special ed teachers shouldn't be held to a different standard, either - in fact - they shouldn't be trucked around school to school.

 

[earthworm]

Interesting.
Experience does have a value, but more in some professions than others.
Being an effective teacher is a gift from heaven, the idea is to quickly detect this and use it to its fullest..I do not think that 1000 tests and 100 years of experience will change this. .
Maybe it is also a gift that makes it possible for another man to see this..

 

[Infinite Chaos]

-- They do it because of the AWESOME pay, pension, benefits and 3 months off. And its a fairly EASY JOB!!!!!!

Noone who's ever stood up in front of a large class or had to motivate disruptive kids or work with children who've been horribly abused at home will ever say teaching is easy. Even if you had the most motivated kids around and they had aspirational parents - teaching isn't easy.

As to the thread title - "merit" sounds great but if you teach top of the league kids with rich parents you're going to get pretty high grades every year. Does that mean you should be paid more than someone who is in an inner city motivating kids off crack or out of gangs to attend school or getting kids with horrible backgrounds to pass even a basic exam?

For example - little Johnny passed all his exams with grade A* so teacher A gets paid extra for the efforts of parents, after class tuition and the expensive equipment his parents paid for while teacher B has managed to get Joe (who could barely read or write by 16) to pass one single exam with a C grade?

The trouble with "Merit" is that it's so widely misunderstood and even then only based on exam results at the top end of the scale.

 

[earthworm]

"They should be paid more for every year that they teach".
That thinking, so-called at best, is what has cause so much financial trouble.
No matter what the profession, more pay and security due to tenure ALONE is NOT a good idea.

 

[Arcana XV]

I messed up my vote. I meant to vote NO of course. :doh

A teacher's years of experience in dealing with kids is no doubt very valuable, but that is not the only thing that should be taken into consideration. Merit is probably extremely difficult to judge in this particular field, though. One would have to wait quite a few years to assess what teacher's class consistently comes out ahead of the others in the school and/or area. A teacher deals with different little human beings each year and the class dynamics might vary greatly from one to the next, often due to a couple of disruptive elements. Every child learns differently and it takes a great teacher to make sure they all finish the school year having learned and understood the basic curriculum.

I think salaries should go up slightly based on years of experience, but a system of bonuses for the consistently exceptional teachers should be put in place to reward those who do a great job at least 3 to 4 years in a row.

 

[earthworm]

of course not that would be totally stupid

Teachers should be paid based on many things experience is only ONE

Values
Experience .................0.1
Education...................1.5
Results..................... 7.4
Performance...............1.0

these should be the foundation and startinf point

"Its all about results". But we need people who can evaluate these correctly...Its more than just number crunching.
"Performance"? More for machines than men.
"Experience" has little value, IMO.
"Education" does.
These numbers can then be used to determine pay.

 

[earthworm]

No way! Some of the very best teachers are new fresh outta college

This is what I mean by "a gift from heaven".
Maybe some colleges have a lot more "on the stick" than others.
Identify, if possible.

 

[earthworm]

Teachers in Illinois are FAR overpaid. WAAAAAY overpaid. NO pension! And they should be paid per MONTH. To me their yearly pay based on 9 months of service should be no more than $40K. PLUS they should pay for their health insurance like the rest of America. 20% of their pay should go to health insurance. These people dont do it because they LOVE it (for the most part). They do it because of the AWESOME pay, pension, benefits and 3 months off. And its a fairly EASY JOB!!!!!!

I suspect that you, the Giant Noodle, are about as far removed from the teaching profession as a stink bug is from the love of mankind...
Obviously, however, the old way was to shove buckets of money to the professions.
This does not work.
It takes a lot more than a shovel of green.
Lets try respect.

 

[Josie]

Noodle, I agree with you that sometimes teaching is an easy job. Sometimes it's hell. I tend to think you probably don't know a lot about what you're talking about.

That being said, I think I'm paid very well for my job. There are days I think "I should be making 2x my salary for this!!" but then there are other days when I think "I got paid to do THAT?" There are more of the latter days than the former.

 

[Kandahar]

As to the thread title - "merit" sounds great but if you teach top of the league kids with rich parents you're going to get pretty high grades every year. Does that mean you should be paid more than someone who is in an inner city motivating kids off crack or out of gangs to attend school or getting kids with horrible backgrounds to pass even a basic exam?

For example - little Johnny passed all his exams with grade A* so teacher A gets paid extra for the efforts of parents, after class tuition and the expensive equipment his parents paid for while teacher B has managed to get Joe (who could barely read or write by 16) to pass one single exam with a C grade?

No. There are ways to control for those variables, so that a teacher's performance is based on the IMPROVEMENT in their students' abilities (relative to how much an average teacher would have got the same students to improve).

I understand that standardized tests are no panacea, but they are the best measurement tool that we have at the present time. If you know of a better one, by all means suggest it. But we need to have SOME kind of quantitative measurement. It is very difficult to improve things if we have no way of measuring success or failure.

 

[Slartibartfast]

No. There are ways to control for those variables, so that a teacher's performance is based on the IMPROVEMENT in their students' abilities (relative to how much an average teacher would have got the same students to improve).

And if Johnny's friend moves away or his parents have a divorce and he is in no mood to do school work that year, what than?

 

[Kandahar]

And if Johnny's friend moves away or his parents have a divorce and he is in no mood to do school work that year, what than?

The average teacher has at least 25 students (even more in the upper grade levels). The circumstances of individual students even out in the aggregate, and would not affect the teacher's overall performance. Besides, the risk of something like that happening to lower a teacher's performance review occasionally is simply not as important as making sure that children have decent educations.

 

[Slartibartfast]

The average teacher has at least 25 students (even more in the upper grade levels). The circumstances of individual students even out in the aggregate, and would not affect the teacher's overall performance. Besides, the risk of something like that happening to lower a teacher's performance review occasionally is simply not as important as making sure that children have decent educations.

This would have to be based on the assumption that only one or two of those students are having issues though. Also, it is incredibly unfair to blame a teacher for something that is beyond their control.

 

[jamesrage]

Simple question. Maybe a simple answer.

Should teachers be paid purely based on years of experience?

If so, why?
If not, how would you revamp the salary schedules if you were in charge?

I picked no. Teachers should be also paid on results and what type of classes they teach. For example if they teach special ED(emotional disturbed) LD(learning disability) , or some other classes that require a bit more of expertise to deal with the children then those teachers should get paid more than your average teachers. If a regular teacher has a higher than average number of students fail the class and grade level state tests(so that way we know the teacher is not just passing kids to earn more pay) then that teacher should be paid less and if results do not improve that teacher should be fired. If a teacher has a higher than a average number of students pass the class as well as state tests then that teacher should be paid more(this of course assuming the teacher is not deliberately keeping more advance kids to pad the number of passing kids in his class).