Teachers Fight Back

New York City teachers rated “highly effective” for two years in a row would get a $20,000 raise under a proposal by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Bloomberg in his annual State of the City address focused heavily on education, challenging the United Federation of Teachers to accept his approach to weeding out teachers deemed “less effective”. The starting salary for a New York City teacher is $45,530.

Here we go again.  Money as a motivator of teachers. Who wouldn’t want an extra $20,000? If I was a “less effective” teacher, I sure would want to be a “highly effective” one.  What constitutes an effective or an ineffective teacher?  Is that based on test scores?  I would have a problem with that. Is it based on observations? Is based on a combination of test scores and observations? Is it a matter of taking more education courses?

I believe most teachers fall into one of three categories. Teachers are either incompetent, average, or excellent. There are varying degrees of those categories as well. Teachers are no different from any other profession when it comes to rankings. In any given profession, most people are going to be average.

Some people just don’t have the personality and emotional make up to be a teacher. The incompetent teachers that I have seen during my career were people who couldn’t have been an effective teacher no matter how much coaching, mentoring, or assistance they were given. These people either quit or were let go by the school district.

There are endless reasons why average teachers are average and never advance to be excellent. Most average teachers I knew would not have been motivated by money. Most of the average teachers remained average and did an effective job, but maybe not a highly effective one.

The excellent teachers that I knew seemed to have certain traits that could not come from outside sources. There was something about them that made them excellent and it was difficult to quantify. They were not motivated by money and just had a certain spark that others did not.

People can try to motivate teachers all they want with money, but in the end it is just natural that the majority of teachers will be average. There is certainly nothing wrong with average.

I would compare  teachers to people who are in artistic careers.  Some people in acting will just never be more than average no matter the amount of work or effort that they put into it.  Some painters will never rise above average. They just don’t have what it takes to be an exceptional artist. Writers are certainly not judged by the amount of time they work or the effort they put in.

Of course there are exceptions to the above examples. I know there are incompetent people in every profession who went on to be exceptional, as well as average ones who did the same. I just rarely saw it in teaching and I can’t imagine any amount of money would change that.

Artists and teachers can’t be motivated the way people are in the world of business. Why is that so difficult for people to understand? I could see that money might HELP teachers who are “whatever it takes” teachers. If those teachers made enough money so they could hire people to clean their house, or hire a nanny for their kids, or hire servants to fix their meals and do everything to free them for extra time with their students. The “whatever it takes” teachers who would tutor after school and on weekends, and make home visits at night,etc., they could certainly use the extra money. If we want “whatever it takes” teachers, we need to pay them a very generous salary.