> It hasn't solved Chicago Public Schools' problems.
sure but it probably has solved many financial problems for Chicago teachers, which is a good enough reason to implement a tool like this.
sure but it probably has solved many financial problems for Chicago teachers, which is a good enough reason to implement a tool like this.
Maybe that’s the stated reason, and maybe it’s used to drum up political support, but it’s never the real reason.
The existing seniority based pay system completely decouples money as an incentive, doesn’t it?
On the other hand you have systems that you describe that are not at all calibrated to performance, and only care about seat time. Such as, toxic school systems or government agencies.
But, somewhere in between, there is a tremendous amount of happiness, equity and productivity. Such as, the customer service representatives that have worked for Amazon in Germany in the same roles since 1998. Or, airline pilots who, setting aside the various labor and equity troubles for a second, get great performance results from a seat-time oriented approach. Or someone that happily worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Rome for 20 years. In USA there's also a good deal of civil servants that have faithfully served our local societies for decades with a high quality of labor and life. The USPS mail person that delivers to my parents' house has been running that route for like 2 or 3 decades, he's still great at it and spends as much time playing with my parents' dogs as he wants.
I don't know what the perfect formula is, but I do think it involves outpacing inflation for compensation increases regardless of performance, and some amount of performance evaluation too. But maybe not too much of either.
Just my two cents, not an economist, etc.
A teacher is supposed to teach. We want to pay them more because they keep saying that if we do they'll teach better.
We don't owe them money simply because they exist.
Given a choice, would you prefer the teacher of your kid paid 30k or 60k? I'd prefer the second option even if it would be the same person teaching, because do you really want your kids to be raised by people in dire financial situation?
A prospect of smarter folks becoming teachers (or staying in the field if they're there already) is a nice bonus.
It's way harder to find high-performing teachers when you lowball salaries. It's actually way harder to find _any_ teachers when you do that. So if you're not willing to raise pay, you'll take what you get and you'll like it.
> In the rest of the professional world we have to earn our salaries.
As someone who worked decades in the professional world before giving up a huge chunk of salary to pursue my passion for teaching, this is not entirely true. There are tons of slacker leeches in the professional world. I've seen it worse than in teaching.
Now, that's hard and I get that, just deciding how to measure teacher performance is difficult, but if it can be done it should be done.
The few teachers I had that left a lasting impression on me I value greatly, I wish more teachers were like that. And that's a teachers job, isn't it? Without a lasting impression most of what was learned is lost, so then it's not really teaching, just busywork.
I will say that there are probably a good number of teachers with the drive just beaten out of them by the bureaucracy. When you go into your profession to educate and you spend more time dealing with authorities, paperwork and silly requirements, that has a tendency to drag your performance down. The flip side of that though is ofc that that bureaucracy was largely created by teachers, probably the ones who would get fired without it protecting them.
Also, there was some inflation.
To ask another question: (presuming our hands were to be tied to give out that free money) Had we instead given that money directly to teachers and other low income individuals, essentially doubling or tripling the proportion we actually gave them, would we have seen the same level of fraud or waste? I can't imagine so. Would the economy have been better off? I feel like probably, but I'm no economist. It's a supply side argument and I have a hard time believing those based on the results of 'corporate socialism' experiments.
You mean the people who went to great lengths to be considered non-essential, so they could work remotely? We know the result of that was historic learning loss for American children. They don't deserve another dime.
So, from the perspective of businesses and individuals that live where the teachers do, yes, the largest taxpayers do usually burn money.
(Quite literally, in the form of things like very expensive-to-operate private planes, such as to attend the recent 'super bowl')