The same English teacher, Chris Gilbert, whom I referenced in a recent post just wrote yet another great piece in The Washington Post.
He writes about an automated phone call he received informing him (and the rest of his colleagues) that the top 25% of teachers in his district were to be offered four-year contracts and an additional and annual $500 in exchange for relinquishing their tenure rights. This, was recently added to another slew of legislative actions in his state of North Carolina including, but not limited to, another year without pay increases (making this the 5th year without increases), no more tenure, no more salary increases for earning master’s/doctoral degrees, and no more class-size caps.
The problems with just this 25% policy, however, and as he writes, include the following: the “policy reflects the view that teachers are inadequately motivated to do their jobs;” this implies, without any evidence that only an arbitrarily set “25% of a district’s teachers deserve a raise;” this facilitates a “culture of competition [that] kills the collaboration that is integral to effective education;” “[t]he idea that a single teacher’s influence can be isolated [using VAMs] is absurd;” and just in general that this policy “reflects a myopic approach to reform.”
