Can You Please Tell Me Who is in Charge Here????

There has been a lot of discussion in the educational community about creating a merit pay scale directly influenced by the outcomes of performance based standards. Who should be the one to determine how educators would be rated and compensated based on student performance outcomes? Should it be an educational administrator, a teacher, or someone outside the education sector, such as the Commissioner of Education who may come into office with limited public school experience?

Some states have established performance standards for learning that are designed to guide the instructional process.

1. How do you feel about states having different performance standards when the outcomes can directly influence pay and how much funding a school district receives?
   
2. How can federal funding such as "Race to the Top" be fairly distributed among states that have different performance standards?
   
3. Why shouldn't all states have the same performance standards for learning?

Why shouldn't this profession be treated like any other job where performance dictates continued employment, promotions, and incremental salary increases? What will happen to those in tenured positions if a merit pay scale is established and supported by the community? If they are grandfathered in, would that be enough to provide sustained motivation to improve the delivery of service to students?

This Blog was created by: Jennifer Fandino and Linda Bowles.

Testing What Works...

In trying to select academic interventions for individual students:

• How much should previous research (on interventions that show promise) weigh in?
  
• Should the students' thoughts and feelings on the problems they are having (and why these problems are there) be taken into consideration?
  
• Should their progress/what works or doesn't work for them according to their own standards be measured?

If different interventions are tested on the student while taking into consideration students preferences for the different interventions, the academic interventions may yield more successful results.

This Blog was created by: Nicole Aramando, Kevin DeJong, and Jalissa Hardesty.