Parent Conference Attendance Affects Teacher Merit Pay

It’s not just about test scores.

At least 29 school districts in Idaho have developed merit plans partly based on parental involvement. Many plans also include student attendance, graduation rates, and writing assessments.

In the central Idaho countryside, Challis schools have set a goal that teachers make contact with the parents of their students at least twice every three months.

In southern Idaho, up to 70 percent of the potential bonus available to employees at Wendell High School will be based on attendance at parent-teacher conferences. More than 40 percent of parents have to attend the meetings in order for Wendell teachers to earn the maximum bonus and that goal was exceeded this fall.
  

About 50 school districts and charter schools have opted not to develop their own pay-for-performance systems but rather to comply with the state's plan, which bases bonuses on standardized test scores. In the 105 districts and charter schools that have developed or are working on their own merit pay plans, teachers will still have to meet statewide goals in order to receive their pay-for-performance bonus.

To learn more about Idaho's plans for merit pay, click here.

Is it possible to truly measure a teacher's performance? If so, how?

Standardized Tests: Are They Helping or Hindering?

This week in EducationNews, Julie Steiny compared punitive testing models to educational bullying. While she isn't directly blaming the tests, she says, “We’ve crossed a none-too-fine line between accountability—which we all want, without question—to bullying, plain and simple.”

She affirms, “Tests are not the problem. Achievement results are just information. Reliable data is great. It shows us where successful innovation might be underway. It raises red flags, confirms good work, and anchors hunches that our latest strategies are working, or not. We’ll never improve education without hard information, and plenty of it.”

“No, the problem is the bullying. Bullying has become a unique characteristic of America’s education culture. Comply or be punished. Get your students to meet federal and state proficiency standards — or else. Failure can bring public humiliation, wholesale staff dismissals, or schools being closed down entirely. States lean on districts; districts on their administrators. The public and pundits snarl at teachers. Teachers try hard not to take it out on their students.”

Tests are more than measurements for teacher effectiveness. Tests provide large amounts of valuable data, but it’s what we do with the data that makes a difference, how we better help the students understand the curriculum. As Steiny puts it, “The tests are a red flag, not a diagnosis. Test scores are just measurements until digested and interpreted by human judgment.

To read the full article from Julie Steiny, click here.

The Future of School Assessments

Standardized bubble tests have been the norm for almost all state and national testing. Numerous educators will say the traditional tests are limiting and will agree that these assessments don’t always display the true knowledge of the student. Also, as evaluations in every state are changing and evolving, these assessments are playing a larger role in demonstrating teacher effectiveness.

With so much emphasis being places on the assessments, it is no surprise that teachers, administrators, and parents are anxious to see if the new assessments being developed will actually make a difference and be an improvement from the current method of testing. So who’s in charge of creating the new assessments? Two separate groups — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium — are using the federal government’s Race to the Top Funds to come up with the new testing systems, which will be used by different states.
 

The new tests will be designed to use technology in both administering and scoring and will measure “performance-based tasks, designed to designed to mirror complex, real-world situations,” according to the New York Times. In addition to greater technology integration, the new assessments will be more performance-based and require more in-depth critical thinking.

To learn more, click here.