A new pay-for-performance program for Florida’s teachers will tie raises and bonuses directly to pupils’ standardized-test scores beginning next year, marking the first time a state has so closely linked the wages of individual school personnel to their students’ exam results, the Washington Post reported.


The effort, now being adopted by local districts, is viewed as a landmark in the movement to restructure American schools by having them face the same kind of competitive pressures placed on private enterprise, and advocates say it could serve as a national model ...




I have friends, siblings and other relatives who are teachers and school administrators, and not one of them is a lazy-bones. So I’ve been asking them for their reactions.

They all come to the same conclusion: Basing a teacher’s raise specifically on how well students “test” is foolishness.


One of my sisters, a middle-school math instructor in Pennsylvania, said teaching is “about so much more than test scores. It’s about relationships, life skills and life lessons — like learning to love learning — in addition to basic math and reading skills.”


And frankly, she noted, not all tests are good ones. A recent state “standards”-oriented math test for middle-schoolers, for example, included an open-ended section so confusing even teachers were baffled by it.


Let’s talk, too, about rich and poor. Here’s one puny example: Some schools provide calculators to all students during math tests; others do not. My sister’s school asks the students to buy their own. There are four calculators available in her classroom for those who can’t afford them.


More than four of her students, however, arrived for a recent state-standards test without calculators; their parents just didn’t have the money. If Pennsylvania follows Florida’s lead, should my sister start investing in Texas Instrument to ensure a pay raise next year?


And what about teachers who work in districts that can’t afford calculators at all? Those kids are still expected to meet the same state standards as schools that hand them out to everyone! Poor students are likely to keep the teachers poor under a plan like Florida’s.


If pay is raised solely on test scores, I wonder if there will be enough teachers, like my sister, who are willing to help struggling students find academic success? Would there be anyone left to try something new and “untested” in an effort to put the lightbulb over the head of a child formerly left in the shadows?


Shouldn’t “No Child Left Behind” mean that each child can learn at his or her own pace?


If you have 50 learning-support students in your school, the pressure to keep them on “grade level” might mean those kids will need to move through two grade levels in a year, according to that Florida plan. Ludicrous!


I have another sister who teaches kindergarten. In Florida.


Teachers there are frustrated because they have to teach “the test,’’ she observed. “So many teachable moments are being ignored and skipped! How is this helping our children?” she asked rhetorically.


“To look at children as a product,” she added, referring to the hypothesis of the new program, “is both humiliating and disgusting.”


And what about the teacher who is “stuck” with transfer students who weren’t instructed toward “the test”? Uh-oh. There goes the raise. A teacher’s goal should be that all students show progress; but these across-the-board tests are not the way to measure it.


My daughter, an education major, will graduate from a Florida college in May. She loves Florida; she’d like to stay there. But she’s concerned.


“Primary students already have so much pressure on them and the schools have taken away beneficial ‘fun’ time because of the tests that Florida already requires,” she said. With the new program, she fears, “students would not have time to learn — by just being kids — because it would be drill, drill, drill.”


The pay-based-on-test-scores issue hasn’t even been put in place yet; but, in Florida, the emphasis on standardized-testing is already overwhelming.


“The FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) begins in third grade,” my Florida sister noted, “and I, as a kindergarten teacher, have not gone one single day without hearing the term (FCAT) in either a memo, an e-mail or among teacher and/or parent conversations.”


Many schools now hold elaborate pep rallies for students before the tests, the Washington Post reported.

“... Put a little FCAT in my life ... I’m doing good on FCAT. Yes I am.”


That’s not as pure as it might sound. Some children as young as third-grade are getting so worked up about doing well on the tests, my sister said, that they are actually vomiting.


Now there’s a gut reaction.




Anne Koenig is editor of the Sunday News Living section. Write to her at akoenig@lnpnews.com. blog comments powered by Disqus