I still don’t get how merit pay can work for teachers. The teacher who gets to teach AP courses filled with motivated and intelligent students will always look better on a merit sheet than the teacher who’s stuck with the sweathogs.
The push to privatize public schools by corporations and well funded foundatiions, is on. Unions will be marginalized. Tenured,mature,great teachers will be replaced by “Teach for America” newbies who are non-union, low salaried, short term,non-certified classroom” monitors “of the transformation of public education to an e-learning, computer generated top down system of life long learning (control) takes over.
A lot of planning will have to go into distributing the crack-babies and transients evenly among the classes in each grade so teachers have an equal shot.
Yes in principle, no in practice. A teacher stuck in a ghetto school with the spawn of uncaring “parents” will not look good on paper; a teacher in a neighborhood with citizens who value education and demand performance of their children can’t help but look good. Unless, that is, you use a baseline unique to each school. But that would require a whole new bureaucracy to establish.