UNLEASH

ED

Tag: performance pay

  • No More Sense from Seymour

    And so it begins.

    The non-sensical dribble spews forth from the under-secretary of Education, who gets into a lucrative position on the back of one electorate described on Wikipedia as an “exclusive, affluent suburb of Auckland”.

    That’s right. Mr. Seymour is at it again as he launches the ACT Party campaign.

    We will pay good teachers more. And great ones even more. No doubt David will be the judge as to which teachers make good teachers and which ones make great ones. I would put money on schools not being able to decide that themselves, and even more money on it being based on student results i.e. National Standards ala Performance Pay.

    Of course, one can see his point when he opens with the statement that the average teacher is paid a pittance, and deserve to be paid more.

    To fix that, the party is proposing an extra $1 billion in funding for education. “ACT’s proposed good teacher grants will give your average teacher a pay rise of $20,000 per year,” Mr Seymour claimed.

    But to receive the extra money, schools “need to opt out of the centralised payroll system and collective agreements”.

    This has rubbed a lot of people (in particular teachers) up the wrong way. No surprises there.

    But here’s why his solution makes no sense.

    Hypothetically Synonymous Seymoronous

    Let’s assume that schools go for this, and EVERY school in the country pays their teachers an average of $20,000 per year more than they are already. That is going to cost a lot.

    However, none of that has anything to do with collective agreements, the unions, or any centralised payroll system. They are not synonymous with each other.

    It’s illogical.

    In fact, under Seymour’s scheme, teachers could stay in the union with the collective agreement, and they could still get paid $20,000 more if he really means it; just get a new collective agreement ratified between the government and the union, or have both – give a bit more to schools to ‘top up’ teacher salaries that are paid through the collective agreement. It’s only because ACT are notoriously anti-union that he is dangling the carrot for principals and teachers to consider.

    Pay more Seymour

    The second factor is that given the current climate in education, there are teachers leaving in droves, and not always because they aren’t being paid enough. On many occasions, the workload is too much. Refer to this article in March. As a teacher, like many others, I would probably take less workload over getting paid more to ‘compensate’ for the increased workload that is currently expected of us.

    In Conclusion

    While paying teachers more is a genuinely nice touch, Mr. S, if you really cared and were really in touch with the education sector, and you actually wanted to value teachers, then maybe the first step is to work with the union rather than trying to sabotage it into non-existence.

    Illogical. Blackmail. Numpty.

     

  • How should teachers be rewarded?

    Education reformers (or deformers) have begun using the idea of ‘rewarding’ good teachers to whittle out the ‘bad’ teachers by using student data, achievement rates, and other variables that are almost completely removed from the ability of a teacher to effectively teach. The notion of ‘reward’ is hard to argue against. Yes – good teachers should be recognised for their ability.

    But should they.

    I read a quote by Alfie Kohn. It reads like this:

    “So how should we reward teachers? We shouldn’t. They’re not pets. Rather, teachers should be paid well, freed from misguided mandate, treated with respect and provided with support they need to help their students to become increasingly proficient and enthusiastic learners.”

    The quote inspired me so much, that I turned it into an impact graphic. I added some of my own personal thoughts on the right hand side. Please feel free to download and distribute the graphic, tweet it, facebook it, share it on pinterest; whatever you need to do to spread the word.

  • Student achievement to be used to fund schools under new model

    How well students perform in the classroom will soon play a part in how much funding a school gets.

    Source: Student achievement to be used to fund schools under new model | Stuff.co.nz

    Here we go. All the haters out there get ready. This isn’t going to be pretty.

    Essentially this has been on the tables for a while.

    Now, before all the scaremongerers get going; this is not Teacher Performance Pay, so we’re safe for now. As soon as Teacher pay is based on student achievement, we will see a both mass exodus of teachers, and a massive push of teachers towards ‘successful’ schools with ‘successful’ students. It will also lead to a complete demolition of the National Standards, as teachers will be forced to resist temptation to inflate their own results. What teacher in their right mind is going to mark students as well below, when that could affect your pay?

    An interesting side note, as I check out the glorious photo of the Minister in mid speech, I can’t help but notice the Public Achievement Information (PAI) in the background. These have been recently released, and I have it on relatively good authority from someone in the profession who has gone through the data with a fine tooth comb, that the data in the PAI are inaccurate with that which schools have sent in. Go figure!

    Credibility long gone…

    As has come to be expected from the Minister’s office; a big contradiction 18 months after making this statement:

    “This morning, Parata said there was no shift to performance-based funding, instead it would be a “recalibration” of the decile system.” – 17 March 2014

    I’m guessing, by “no shift” she meant “no shift today”, and “recalibration” should have been “complete removal”. Can we believe anything the Minister says, if in 18 months time she’s going to renege on any decision she’s made?

    Are you listening?

    There is an incredibly beautiful editorial in the Listener that was written around the last time the idea of performance pay came about, back in March last year.

    It puts forward the arguments much better than I could ever hope to. So I’ve picked and chosen some of the key points below:

    With the changes still hypothetical, it’s important not to lose sight of the brick wall such a policy would have to hurdle: the dearth of appropriate data. As Treasury warned Bill English in 2011, if we want to go down the performance-pay route, we need to collect a different sort of data. At present, “the ministry cannot identify which schools add the most value to their students”.

    Unless Parata has some secret assessment system waiting in the wings, she will be relying on NCEA and National Standards.

    Both are unusual in that they are largely set and marked by teachers. The OECD’s highly influential education frontman, Andreas Schleicher, whom Parata bounced the last performance-pay policy off before it was publicly announced, has flat-out said they can’t be used for anything resembling performance pay. Doing so would “distort” the assessments, he warns.

    …

    There’s a good reason why police, lawyers and judges, for example, are not incentivised on the basis of securing convictions: it would make a mockery of the justice system. The same precautions need to apply in education.

    Stumbling blocks abound. How to compare a school where all the students sit NCEA with one in which half the kids opt for Cambridge or the International Baccalaureate exams? How to compare a school where a large proportion of NCEA credits come from exams and traditional academic subjects with one that leans heavily on less-demanding vocational courses?

    It is possible that this is what PaCT will essentially become for the Ministry – a way of quantifying National Standards and the “OTJ” to make it an “OCJ” – or Overall Computer Judgement. This might be the “secret assessment system waiting in the wings”.

    Poorer Performance needs the help

    One gets the impression from Ms. Parata’s statements today, that the “Performance Pay” she is hinting at is to give greater support to the schools that need it. This is actually one thing that I as a teacher can agree with; possibly the first thing she’s alluded to that I can say that since she has been in office. But the Minister did not come out and actually say it. But by reading between the lines, she alludes to how they can support students to do better.

    “You can’t have a funding review of a New Zealand education system where how well kids are or aren’t doing wouldn’t be a part of it,” she said following the conference on Thursday.

    “Obviously where we end up might be a very different place but my desire absolutely is to take count of how well our students are doing in the system and how we might support them to do better.”- 1 October 2015

    It is definitely interesting times in education. We all need to be aware of the decisions being made, (or not being made) and be careful not to assume too much. As Parata says, it is still in it’s infant stage of being developed.

    Who knows, in 18 months she might change her mind again.

  • Natural Standards


    Natural Standards

    I don’t need to say anything else.

  • Performance Pay for Education

    Here’s a visualistion of my blog post from yesterday.

    performance-pay-2012

  • Performance Pay Gets in the Way

    In Education in New Zealand over the last couple of months, we have heard the threats of performance pay, and bumping up class sizes, and developing better teachers. This has been well documented in the press, with recent articles on Stuff outlining the intentions of the current Government.

    www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/6930082/Bigger-class-sizes-announced – 16 May, 2012

    www.stuff.co.nz/6936035/Bad-report-card-for-bigger-classes – 17 May, 2012

    Please take your time to read both posts, and then my thoughts regarding the future of New Zealand’s education. There are also further links to similar articles at the bottom of this post.
    If you think that this doesn’t affect you, you may be right. But this will be affecting your child, your son, daughter, or your niece, nephew, or your friends children. You will know someone, some child that this will affect, and it would pay to be thinking of them when you consider these points.

    From these articles, there are three major changes that the Government is pushing. They are wanting Better Teachers, so there are going to be changes to educating teachers to be better. They are introducing larger class sizes, so that there are less teachers to pay. And finally they are wanting to introduce performance pay for teachers, as a “reward” for good teachers.

     

    Better Teachers

    Part of the intentions of the National led government, (who don’t even make up the majority of this country’s support!) to try and sell these policies, is to say that they want to make better teachers. No one is going to be able argue that having better teachers is not a good thing. Aside from that, it is incredibly insulting to the profession so suggest that teachers at the moment aren’t “better”.
    And how do we define “better teachers”?
    How do we assess whether one teacher is better than another?
    Well, the government would say “By results against the National Standards”, which we know is a load of crock, because National Standards are a set of unfounded and unjustified guidelines for failure not achievement. Add to that the fact that National Standards are based on an “Overall Teacher Judgement” , which surely enters into a conflict of interests, where results are used to determine if you are a better teacher than someone else.
    Enter National testing. This will be the next line of changes to the system, as Teachers will not be trusted to make the decision as to where the students are at, so we will have a National Standardised test that every kid in New Zealand will sit.
    The other thing the government would say regarding how you assess whether a teacher is better than another is this coin word called “Engagement”.
    My first, and only question will be – “How do you plan to measure engagement?”. The answer to that will be so flimsy and washy that even tree huggers would be ashamed.

    So how else will we get “better” teachers? By educating more teachers (of which there is already an excess of; or is it to replace all the good teachers who leave because of this)? They are also talking of making additional study requirements of existing teachers, on top of teaching a class, and raising the achievement of that class so that they can get paid? Is anyone else getting this!? It sucks. Yet its happening.

     

    Class Size

    This is a planned red herring for these changes. They’ve set this one out as a mouse, so that everyone dances and screams, whilst across the room they sneak through the lion which is performance pay. The major change isn’t the raising of the class size, but that schools will be funded based on the class size. See, changing the class size requirements in Year 2 to 10 classes from 23-29 pupils to 27.5 pupils isn’t going to make much of a difference. I started this year with 28, and am now down to 27 (essentially 27.5!). In years gone by I’ve had 29, and even a term of having 31. It’s not like they’re making class sizes 35, 40, 45…. Yet.

    Yet what a difference it makes when I have a class of 22 -24. The room is quieter, which means there are less distractions, and more learning productivity. The students are more relaxed and more focussed, and so tend to be more “engaged” – if that can be observed. The teacher is more relaxed and has a better headspace, and is less likely to be having to deal with the niggles that occur in larger class sizes. We get through groups quicker (or can cover more learning in extended group times) allowing me to touch base with students one on one and see how they are going. The students get a long better, its easier to keep an eye on them. Everything is better. There is not a single downside to having less students in the class – if you are focussed on the benefits for the students.
    However, if you are not focussed on the benefits for the students, and are instead focussed on the red number at the end of the leger, then of course, larger class sizes to take in every child in New Zealand,  means less teachers over all, which means less salaries to pay, and salaries take up 80% of the budget.

    But larger class sizes mean less one on one time with the teacher than they already get, there’s more noise, which increases distractions, and lowers learning. There are more niggles in the class, which raises the teacher’s stress levels as they try and contend with keeping on top of things. Students realise this, and also notice that they can get away with little things while the teacher is busy dealing with other problems. Less quality time is spent on teaching, and more on crowd control.

    Two principals commented in the latest article on Stuff today. One said that he started teaching “…he had a class of 40 and that was not conducive to modern teaching methods. ‘It was `Sit down and do this’. There was very little discussion and very little of what makes teaching effective.’”

    The other makes an incredibly good point, one that I hope everyone else can come to realise, in that larger class sizes means that “The very group that the Government say they want to work with most – Maori, Pacific Islanders, special needs students – we know that when there are large classes, it is harder for them to achieve.” – Bad-report-card-for-bigger-classes – Stuff, 17 May 2012.

    But politicians will argue that a “good” teacher will be able to teach any number sized class. Some university proffessors who also haven’t had any teaching experience in the last 20 years, will also try and tell you that “research suggests” that quality teaching is more important than class size.
    So let us get the “best” teacher in the country, and put them in front of 35-40 students. Not for a day. For the year. According to these politicians (who have never taught a class, or if they did, they left and became politicians – says more about them than they think!), this teacher should have no problems raising achievement against National Standards, while continuing to teach other subject areas, complete reports, analyse data and provide differentiated learning for the class, whilst maintaining control of the behaviour in the classroom.

     

    Performance Pay

    Today (17 May, 2012) it was announced that performance pay would be decided on, not just by an appraisal system, but also based on achievement results of National Standards.
    I find it relatively humouring, but I am very much annoyed that this has been somewhat hidden by the whole uproar over class sizes, as it is quite clearly a much bigger issue.

    Before I begin into my rant, I want to make it clear that I understand the need for a performance pay type model. There are some “bad” teachers out there, and there does need to be a system for working them out, and removing them from the system. The good teachers do deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, and often are in the areas of being given units for the additional work that they do.
    So I do agree that poor teachers need to be whittled out, and the good teachers do need rewards.

    However, performance pay based on results is not the way. Especially when those “results” are going to be based on National Standards, which still have not been fully developed or implemented properly or fairly, and have so far been able to tell us nothing about achievement, but instead, have given us a very good picture of failure.

    Basing performance pay on results is ridiculous. And here’s why:

    Some students are behind the eightball when it comes to learning. A list of factors would be longer than my arm, but a few would include such things as;

    • mental disabilities or challenges
    • being hungry due to lack of breakfast/food at home and school
    • stresses at home (mum and dad split/fighting/depressed/drugs/alcohol
    • abuse (verbal, physical, emotional)
    • unhealthy living environments that cause regular illness and misses out on school
    • lack of support at home, where value placed on education is minimal, and so student is often truant

    Many of these things are out of the school’s control, and are out of the child’s control, and sometimes even out of the parents control. No one can be blamed for any of this happening – not even the government. It’s called life.

    But what will end up happening?

    I have had students in the past who were well below the National Standard. There is no hiding it. The parents were made aware of this, and there were no real surprises at all. Every teacher that had been before me, and myself, had worked hard to raise the level of achievement, and had done so, but at a very low pace. And nothing would have changed that. The student, at the end of the year, had made a year’s progress, but was still well behind the eightball when it came to National Standards.

    I have a privileged view of this whole issue. I have worked in classrooms for the last 3 years. I know what it is like. What is scary is that the people who are making these decisions, not only don’t have any experience of what it is like, and are merely concerned with making the red figure at the end of the leger smaller, but they don’t want to listen to those who actually have some idea about it.
    But I get that. Why would you listen to teachers? Of course teachers are going to complain about being paid based on performance. Of course teachers are going to complain about having larger class sizes.
    But what about listening to what has happened in the past? Look at the education system in the UK. A mess. Why? Because of the National Standards that they introduced into their country, which has completely destroyed the hope in teachers and students over there.
    Look at the education system in the US. A mess. Why? Basically because of Charter schools and performance pay (from what I’ve read – I could be wrong…)
    But why are we taking our world leading education system, with it’s curriculum that was world beating, and developed for a decade to be flexible and adjustable to suit EVERY classroom in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and completely changing it to be based on National Standards in Reading, Writing and Maths (3R’s… which I thought had been dispelled with the inkwell and cane in classrooms of old). Not only that, but then we go and base our whole education system on models that have been complete failures in other countries.

    How stupid do we have to be to follow a bunch of sheep off a cliff?

    What really scares me even more, is the notion that there might be a chance for parents and students to have input into the performance pay of a teacher. “[Ms Parata] revealed that parents and even students would soon get the chance to review teacher performance…”

    Evidently my 9 and 10 year olds are the best kind of people to decide if I’m a good teacher or not, and whether I get paid. Who knew? Next there’ll be a National Standard in “Reviewing your teacher”.

     

    Finally

    I wonder how politicians would react to the tables being turned.
    Maybe, we set a baseline salary for MP candidates.
    And let’s introduce performance pay to that.
    So a salary of $144,000 a year (which is the pay check one receives (2012) if he or she is just a member of parliament, with no other responsibilities…) will be available, but the percentage of that salary is decided upon how many votes you received. So if you get 100% of the vote in your electorate, then you should be entitled to 100% of the pay. But, if you got 59% of your constituents vote, then your salary would be $84,960 a year (which is nothing to shrug your shoulders at). The left over $59,040 could then be put into a fund that will supply services such as Health, Education, Police, with the funding that they deserve, or at least help contribute towards it.

    I bet they probably wouldn’t like that.
    I bet they’d probably complain about it.
    I bet they’d probably complain a little like what the teachers are complaining like now.
    I bet they’d decide against it.

     

    So thank you to all of you out there who voted this government in. Thank you to all the teachers who blindly voted National because they fit in the pay bracket for tax cuts. The only thing we can do now is sit back and watch the future of this country plummet into the depressing depths of “Well Below” and “Below”, as the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer (in every aspect, wealth and education).

    Is it that dire? Or can we actually get out there, and support the teachers?
    Your child has a teacher, who works hard, works weekends, takes work home, and sacrifices their time, their money. If you don’t have a child, you will know someone who does, and that child also has a hard working teacher trying to make a living. And for those living under a rock and think that teachers work from 9 until 3, and get heaps of holidays and shouldn’t be complaining, you need to get a reality check. I am assuming you have a 9-5 office job. Teachers work 8-5pm most days of the week, just like you. We often have to take work home on the weekends (although I try to avoid this as much as possible, because like you, I am trying to have a life as well!), and as for holidays, they are not. We work in the first week finishing off things from the last term. And in the second week we plan and prepare for the next term. The school holidays are just work without kids, which is exactly what you and the majority of the rest of the workforce does day in day out.

    What now?

    I want to encourage you to be active, if not for your child, then for me, a teacher. Write to your local MP, expressing your concern over these changes. Write to John Key (the current Prime minister) and express your concern and lack of support for these changes. The worst thing you can do is sit there and do nothing. Actually I lie. The worst thing you can do is sit there and blame teachers, and complain about how we are complaining about our future.

    And what can teachers do? Well, we can bring the country to a stop by all walking out on our classes, together, as one. Parents all over the country will be forced to take the day off work. Production will go down. And no doubt, there will be complete and utter blame put on Teachers instead of the real cause of the strike, which is the Government’s decisions. But the reality is that I don’t want my teaching ability to be judged by the results of 9 and 10 year olds against an unproven and unjustified National Standards which have nothing to do with achievement, and everything to do with failure.

     

    Related Reading

    Teacher Performance Pay under fire – 17 May 2012

    Concern over teacher performance pay – 17 May 2012

    Principals criticise move to bigger classes – 17 May 2012

    Education Changes: video – 16 May 2012

    Teacher performance pay gets tick – 3 May 2012

     

    Please Note: I am a registered teacher in New Zealand. I have been teaching for 3 years in New Zealand classrooms. The views I have expressed here are my own, and not necessarily the views of the school I currently work for, nor the Board of Trustees of that school.