Teacher: Grant plan might 'subvert a quality education system'
Editor, Townsman:
One might think that the typical Andover public school teacher would buy into the Race to the Top Memorandum of Understanding. Connecting teacher compensation to student test scores in Andover, where MCAS scores are in the top tier of Massachusetts schools, would provide teachers with bonuses not common in public education. However, the Andover Education Association Executive Board voted unanimously to reject the proposed grant application. On the surface, this seems inconsistent; could the teachers have an ulterior motive not connected with their compensation?
One possibility is that teachers take the pedagogical part of their job seriously, and the memorandum in question is not so pedagogically sound. Hypothetically, teachers may think matching compensation with student test scores creates an incentive to avoid special needs classes, or to separate students who have difficulty with testing from students who excel (on tests). One deductive leap later may have teachers imagining a situation in which the faculty races to teach only top students in advanced classes, while needier students are pulled out into remediated test-taking classes. Maybe these classes have struggling test-takers, but also begin filling up with students that have behavioral problems. If students succeed in these classes do they return to the sequence of regular-education classes, or have they fallen too far behind? With money tied to scores, would teachers be entrepreneurs, unlikely to invest in classes with unknown variables? Maybe teachers working in this environment would not share ideas or best practices if it meant giving a competitor a leg up in the race for the top test-takers.
School Committee member David Birnbach states that "We all have a responsibility..." to win some of this grant money. I wonder if it's responsible to subvert a quality education system and send diversity, creativity, and rich lesson-planning down the drain for a few extra bucks. I wish I could think of an example in which a few members of a professional community take bonus pay at the cost of an entire system so I could envision the potential consequences more clearly.
Matthew Bach
Malden
The writer is a social studies teacher at Andover High.
