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.1 DIFFERENTIATED STAFFING
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Preview Question
By what criteria ought teacher's salaries be determined?
Today I have a tough job. That is to convince you of a practice that isn't at all popular, but which should be the wave of the future. I'm talking about differentiated staffing. This is perhaps the most biased lecture you'll get this semester because I believe that unless we have differentiated staffing, we can't have any of the breakthroughs that's needed in the teaching profession. I feel that this proposal is very important, but I warn you it's my bias.
The major idea behind differentiated staffing is that different teachers should be paid differently according to how well they do their job and the different responsibilities they complete. How else can you get teachers doing the kinds of things they need to do to be great teachers, unless you differentiate their pay and their responsibilities? I am not speaking about merit pay. Merit pay is awarded to excellent teachers who do outstanding work, but beyond receiving a financial bonus, they continue doing exactly the same work that other teachers do.
In differentiated staffing, once you identify the best teachers you have earmarked a precious resource. The task at hand is to get these outstanding teachers to influence the lives of more kids. Under the old system, the reward for consistently good teachers was to reduce their class size because it's easier to teach a smaller class. That results in a great teacher influencing fewer kids. The other common result of being a great teacher is that they go on to become administrators, which ends their teaching of any kids. That's the wrong direction. I want to take those great teachers and figure out how we can get them to teach and influence even more students. I'm going to try and convince you that there are ways to do that.
I've been working for 25 years to bring my proposal into effect and unfortunately I've been quite unsuccessful. For example, at one point I controlled the budget to initiate my reforms! I was chief consultant to the National Defense Education Act and had 500 million dollars to be spent on differentiated staffing. I was dismally unsuccessful. We arranged the project so that schools would be granted a share of the money if they could show that they were practicing differentiated staffing. You wouldn't believe all the scams that the teachers in the schools around the country played in terms of avoiding a new system of differentiated status and pay for differentiated responsibility. The majority of the schools just changed the names of programs they already had going, made them sound like differentiated staffing programs, and walked away with their share of the money.
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How is merit pay different from differentiated staffing? | |
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No
ferret question
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