Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Point to ponder: Question for teachers: What if you were paid by the student number instead of just a salary?

Union teachers whine incessantly.

Whatever we pay is never enough.

Whatever their benefits are is never enough.

Whatever their hours are?  Too many.

Whatever their retirement is?  Not enough.

Class sizes?  Too big.

OK, swell.

Instead of just giving these lumps a lump sum salary... what if we paid them based entirely on the number of students in their class?

I've heard over... and over... and over... that each teacher has too many students in their class.

OK.  Let's pay them by the student.

Each student in the state of Washington comes with $12000 or so, more or less.

If we were paying a teacher, say, $200 per student per month... would teachers still be whining about how many they have in their classrooms?

Or would they, as I believe, cut each other's throat to pack as many as possible into each class?

After all, as they go on strike for higher pay, acting like they had no idea what the job paid when they took it... they incessantly yammer that this extortion is "for the kids."

Well, that would go out the window if it were based, instead, on the number of butts in the seats.  And somehow, I'm thinking the endless bitching and moaning that teachers subject us to every year would disappear at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Think about it:  The more kids, the bigger the paycheck.

How long would it be before we started seeing classes of 40 or more kids in them?

Those who actually BELIEVE in the idiotic "classroom size" argument would be APPALLED.  

But the reality is that your typical unionist teacher cares a great deal more about their paycheck than they do the outcomes in their classrooms.

Why else do most of those outcomes suck so badly?

I'd love to implement a program like this in a school district or two.  What an experiment in human nature THAT would be.

Classroom size... indeed.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It's a pretty good idea... or, perhaps, have the students take a standardized achievement test at the beginning of the school term, and again at the end... then pay the teacher on the basis of the improvement in the student's learning.

Though it was many, many years ago ... my parents recognized that the school district where we lived was one of the most pathetic in the whole U.S. (for a medium-sized city)... Fortunately, with a last-minute opening, I was enrolled in a Lutheran-run school. The school had a total of 105 to 110 students, split into 3 classrooms and 3 teachers. First & Second grade were in one room, Third, Fourth, and Fifth grades in the second room and the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth grades were in the third room -- and taught by the school principal. (Total school staff, 3 ... plus a part time janitor.)

Each teacher had between 33 and 36 students in the classroom. (The primary grades usually had the most "attrition" so that classroom was the largest.) At the end of each school year, every student took (over a couple of days as I recall) the Stanford Achievement Test to determine individual and class progress. What I found particularly interesting is that every one of the 8th Grade graduates scored "12.9" on the test -- a score of 12.9 was equivalent to a high-school graduate.

I went on to attend the public high school...

The point is that dedicated and professional teachers were able to educate students in orderly classes with more than typical levels of distraction (3 classes with different lessons and levels of work for each) ... and all the students got individual attention and "enrichment" needed to carry forward. Students were primarily from members of the associated church (church members got a significant discount on tuition) and included students from all levels of affluence (about 10% of the students were from lower income homes, where scholarships helped with their tuition).

I really don't understand what these teachers are complaining about....