All for it brother. Try getting it by the teachers unions. All they care about is either A) deceving the teachers into paying more dues, or B) getting more down time for teachers that hardly work now.

Good teaching is one of the founding principles of our demacracy. It has been overrun by left-wing idealoges trying to indoctrinate our young. Don't beleive me, read The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses.

Love the idea.

What! A merit based system. What kind of bad lesson would that teach our children. Imagine, teaching our children that hard effective work is rewarded and slothful, phone-it-in-attitude is not tolerated. What next, keeping score at soccer games, having letter grades in school? Never! :-)

I'm a teacher and I'm all for it, but how are you going to judge good teachers? This is a question as old as the hills. Look at what a good thing the film business has made of it -"The Prime of Jean Brodie", Goodbye, Mr. Chips" etc.

A Tenesse Value Added Assessment System may be a possibility, but will not impress the good people of Aberdeen.

We need a universal system. Pupil votes? Parents votes? Other teachers opinions?

To reply to Lance Bombardier, the developer of the Tennessee approach now makes it available to any state through his new employer, SAS (sas.com). It's called SAS EVAAS (where the E is presumably for education).

I don't see why it is so hard to evaluate teachers. Computer programmers get evaluated, secretaries get evaluated, most employees get evaluated. Certainly an adequate evaluation process cannot be standing in the way of an improved system.

it's hard to evaluate students much less teachers by tests. In my english classes quite often the student who answers the most questions in class does the worst on the actual test. regardless, wasn't this sytem put in place by the Bush administration as part of their no child left behind program? Steven Levitt discusses it in Freakonomics. Although, as a former teacher in the u.s. I have to agree with most of the comments in this post. The sheer bullshit of the beaurcracy running american public schools is so outrageous and frankly ineffecient I just wish we could burn the whole thing down. If you want to make schools better deregulate the teachers, let them do more of what they, and the class, want. No student is the same, no class is the same, forcing shitty tattered textbooks down the throats of kids already bored with the education process just makes fucking and smoking in the bathroom all the more appealing. While I'm not opposed to having evaluations I think the first priority in our education process should to let teachers teach, localize rules I mean some schools need uniforms others need plain clothes dudes some need to switch out kids etc, and not have them upholding the latest educational dictates. The major problem with the education system is that's a top-down system in which administrators follow the dicates of abstractions like the tests your proposing and other studies. While all of these tools are fine in finding an overall pattern, I think the most effective way to increase the learning environment is to let teachers experiment with the curriculim and to let students express their views about the education process. Universal or countywide regulations just aren't effective. When Mao forced his farmers to cultivate all the crops in China according to one global pattern, the people starved. When the adminstrators decree a new county wide educational policy, children's minds begin to starve.

Why talk teachers only? Why not others as well?

Doctors, nurses, bus drivers, pilots, soldiers, police menn and others. Why only teachers should be evaluated in this system? Every public service man/woman should be avaluated, kept, fired or paid accordingly. That will make our society more bearable.

Paying for measurable results (high powered incentives) can distort behavior that should be subject to low power incentives (eg, salary). Teachers could be paid according to parent's votes, ie, as a market will award ANY professional who is good at her job. Since parents do not agree on what is valuable, using a single measuring stick (eg, test scores) would distort that feedback. "Give more money to teachers" is as popular as apple pie and mom, but it's a bad idea to give them money for potentially harmful actions.

Teachers and students are required to teach/learn a certain amount of information within a given amount of time. If the student is doing poorly on a subject you suggest we pay the teacher less? Perhaps if the students parents got actively involved in helping the student with homework. Or perhaps the student got into a study group. While one teacher may be exceptional compared to another, we should let the faculty decide who merits higher pay. They are the ones who day in and day out work with the teachers and are in a better position to judge the pay scale. The problem is everytime the budget comes up short the first thing cut is school funding! That makes it less painful for the political party to ask for a tax raise. Who's going to vote against giving our sons and daughters better education?

I would LOVE to see us reward effective teachers. My only question is how we might do this. Who determines what is effective? And for whom? My son currently has 6 high school teachers, 3 of whom treat him like an idiot. It does not matter what he does or what he says in the class, there is a regimen and all learning must be understood through this wooden-headed regimen.

Effectiveness might mean excellence, might mean clever enough to inspire self-direction as well as mastery, might means creativity....

We should be wrestling with this question every day.

Just as long as teachers are NOT "Teaching to the Test". Some teachers will attempt to make themselves look good by teaching only the questions that will be on the quiz or test. That means all the other material is skipped over.

Teacher classes should be given exams by randomized test banks administered by a random selection of other teachers not in the same field of study. This helps to remove the self serving teachers.

There may be a small union problem, but it is a great idea.

The crucial questions are 1) Will pay improve performance? 2) Will pay improve the performance we want? 3)Are there better ways to motivate performance? 4) Are teachers not performing because of a lack of motivation?The likely answers are 1) It may, and often does, but ultimately the argument rests on bringing in smarter people to the system because they see an opportunity to earn an acceptable living as teachers. 2) It seems likely that linking teacher pay to student scores on standardized scores will result in more focus on students passing tests. 3)Probably. 4) The main problem with this suggestion is that it assumes teachers don't teach well because they are not sufficiently motivated. This is unlikely to be true. A better analysis might be that there are structural problems in schools and education which prevent teachers from teaching well. For instance, a teacher of high school English whose students range from the 5th percentile in reading ability to the 99th percentile is unlikely to be able to move the 5ths up or to keep the 99ths from falling. Most people want to do well, yet many teachers do not teach well.

There are several facts to consider:

(1) the basic idea is not new

(2) the greatest difficulty in teaching in America today is dealing with kids from dysfunctional families, which is essentially impossible in a conventional school system. example: Teachers do not have the power or resources to deal with a child whose parents do not have him sleep at night.

For this reason, Newt Gingrich said some years ago that we should think about taking certain minority children from their parents and raising them in a "middle class" environment.

(3) middle class kids will learn what they have to, when they have to, in order to survive and prosper. They may wait till they're 35 before getting a college degree, but they'll get it if they know it will serve them to do so. Otherwise they'll go into construction and make their fortune that way.

(4) We obviously have the technology to replace teachers with automated systems which have dozens of ways to explain a concept, infinite patience, and no desire to bully a child. There would obvioulsy have to be some human presence, especially in the primary years.