RAISE Act Of 2016 Is Fatally Flawed (Larry Lee)

While I have yet to learn who is responsible for cobbling together the proposed RAISE Act of 2016, one thing is evident.

They know precious little about what motivates teachers and the realities of today’s classroom. At its heart, this legislation assumes that money is what motivates a teacher’s performance. That is laughable and {sic: as} has been substantiated by countless research efforts.
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Today, 730,000 students sat in Alabama public school classrooms. NONE of them had the same specs. Instead, teachers had to do the best they could with what they got from 730,000 different suppliers. So making the claim that a classroom and an assembly line are one and the same is foolhardy and shows how detached someone is who believes they are.
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Look at this study, Incentive Pay Programs Do Not Affect Teacher Motivation or Reported Practices; Results From Three Randomized Studies. Researchers looked at incentive pay programs in Nashville, Texas and New York City. Incentives for teachers were as much as $15,000 in Nashville.

Here are some conclusions: Teachers did not consider their programs as motivating. Teachers did not have high expectancy that their personal efforts would lead to student achievement gains due to concerns about the influence of family environment on student achievement. Analyses did not find that any of the three programs had affected teachers’ reported instructional practice or number of hours worked. (However, teachers in Nashville did report they put greater emphasis on test prep.) It is difficult to obtain teachers’ support of incentive pay programs if they think the performance measure is problematic.
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more: http://www.larryeducation.com/raise-act-of-2016-is-fatally-flawed/

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