When there’s a chance to speak to fairness, let’s not be silent.

Jonathan

The question of how the bonus is distributed is a separate question from whether or not the school meets the metrics to receive the bonus.

My argument was about the latter — that insofar as the measures were for the entire school, the problems with figuring out the effect of individual teachers and with the distribution of students among individual teachers were not pertinent. In other words, the school wide bonuses were well-aligned with the state of development of “value added” and our ability to identify student progress.

I have more confidence than you do in the ability of schools to see the wisdom of equal shares of the bonuses. But this will become an empirical question, and we will be able to see which judgment was more correct.

if we encouraged members in ‘schoolwide bonus’ schools to support equal distribution of the $, there would be no problem.

But since we did not, what are they going to look at? Well, many are good union people, and will try to divide equally anyhow.

But principals will bring in… that same lousy data, and this:

Since the bonuses were school based, the fundamental flaws of the DoE’s “value added” pilot project were not present.

is clearly mistaken. There is probably even greater chance of raw numbers being abused.

Jonathan