Tuesday, October 25, 2011

School district in Oregon turns down grant for performance pay experiment

On another post Anonymous wrote:

"A school district with integrity:

Oregon City School District walks away from $2.54 million grant for performance pay

http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-city/index.ssf/2011/10/oregon_city_school_district_wa.html"

5 comments:

Angry Taxpayer said...

I'm guessing they didn't hire Two Bell LLC for $150,000 and Alvarez for $250,000 to figure this out.

Voice of Reason said...

I'll analyze performance pay for you, and it won't cost $250,000 or even $150,000. I'll do it for free.

Performance pay works when all the workers involved have identical working conditions and identical opportunities to excel.

For example, consider salespeople working at the same car dealership and selling identical cars.

Performance pay would make sense in this case. It would be a fair way to compensate employees.

Now consider teachers teaching algebra. Would these teachers have identical working conditions?

No way! One teacher might have many disruptive students in the class, where other teachers have few or none.

Or a teacher might have a high number of students with attendance problems.

Or a teacher might have a high number of students with a weak math background. Those students would need more examples in class. Nothing wrong with that, except that it would slow the class down, causing it to cover less material and so score lower.

This list of possible class differences is almost endless. How could performance pay possibly be fair? It would just lead to anger and frustration. Morale would go down the tube.

Anonymous said...

This poor uninformed school district. They may have decided to pursue this ultimately unsustainable grant - and get their Superintendent's name in Education Week next to Michelle Rhee and "reform" - if only they "Believed" or had "RISEN."

South Hills Stan said...

All the glitter seems to be falling off of these "reform" and "non-traditional" superintendent's one by one:

Illinois Probing Standardized Test Irregularities In Chicago.
The Chicago Sun-Times (10/26, Golab, Rossi) reports, "The Illinois State Board of Education is looking into whether disciplinary action should be taken because of 'test irregularities' found in 33 Illinois public schools, including nine in Chicago," noting that a spokesperson stopped short of saying that the irregularities amounted to cheating, but did say that the test scores were disqualified. The spokesperson "said all the incidents being investigated were self-reported" and "involved 'Schools and districts that called us and said something happened, some irregularity during testing season, what do we need to do about it?'"

Anonymous said...

one reason turn down grant it is base on a student test scores and everything is base on results to give rewards here we go again kicking the can down the road in PPS case regarding grant money we did not do a fact finding we just went for the money$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
now you see what happen to PPS i commend school dist in Oregon they did their HOMEWORK !!!!!!!!!!! meaning did not kick the can down the road