Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Blogfather’s note: Rachel Pickett is a teacher with the Boettcher Teachers Program.

The ProComp debate is a good one: should teachers be paid, in part, based on our performance?  (And I must confess, my limited knowledge about ProComp is based on what I’ve read on this blog.)  Will this initiative work to increase our kids’ test scores?  Will those of us who are effective in our practice shine, and will our schools become bastions of effective, innovative teaching because effective teachers will guide each and every classroom?

I see ProComp as situated in the larger context of educational reform.  Paying teachers by our performance is one idea trying to tackle the larger question ‘how do we raise all students’ academic understanding and achievement?  How do we engage in the hard work of creating school environments that are mainstays of effective, innovative teaching and learning?’ 

If ProComp is going to be effective,…

The prolific research tandem of Jay Greene and Marcus Winters – this time teaming up Arkansas Tech’s Julie Trivett – released a Manhattan Institute report today with some interesting findings. Taking a look at Florida’s strong school accountability program, the team measured the effects of high-stakes testing sanctions on low-stakes subject performance:

The primary findings of the study are:

• The F-grade sanction produced after one year a gain in student science proficiency of about a 0.08 standard deviation. These gains are similar to those in reading and appear smaller than the gains in math that were due to the F sanction.
• There is some evidence to suggest that student science proficiency increased primarily because student learning in math and reading enabled that increase. That is, learning in math and reading appear to contribute to learning in science.

Boiling it down into simpler terms, the first-of-its-kind report strongly suggests that high-stakes testing doesn’t “crowd out”…