Shopping at Macy’s

Shopping at Macy’s is a metaphor for teacher merit pay. Sales associates at Macy’s work on commission. For every item they sell they get X percentage in addition to their base pay. Teacher merit pay (or pay for performance) would provide a teacher with X percentage in addition to their base pay for every one of their students with an acceptable test score.

Macy’s had a holiday sale on menswear. I needed dress pants. I don’t shop for clothes often, so when I do, I linger. I try on, select, try on, select, and so on until I have what I need. My process of selection can be painfully tedious for any salesperson so I usually just go it alone. It is just simpler and more enjoyable for me that way.

At Macy’s a salesperson cordially asked me if I needed help. I asked for directions but declined any additional help. Because of the way I shop I circulated the department several times; so several times passed her area of the department. Each time we would make eye contact and acknowledge each other. She would ask if I needed assistance, I would decline.

When I was ready I happened to be in this salesperson’s area so went to her register. She was helping another customer, so I waited. After ten minutes, another salesperson asked if I needed assistance. I responded that I needed to pay for the items I had selected. He offered to ring me up.

However, before he could do so, the first salesperson came back and politely but firmly said, No. She informed both the second salesperson and me that she had been “helping” me and that she was going to ring up my items. I had to wait another fifteen minutes for her to “help” me while the other salespeople floated around the floor.

The belief that merit pay will create better teachers and better learning environments is wrong. In the incident described, did I receive better service? Was a better shopping experience created for me? Or did the introduction of commissions simply create a more aggressive staff who may have been more knowledgeable about the products but ultimately focused on competing against his or her peers instead of helping me?

Teacher merit pay will certainly create more aggressive and competitive teachers. However, more aggressive and competitive teachers do not guarantee richer, more successful learning environments. In fact, merit pay teachers will have the opposite effect. Ambitious teachers seeking recognition and merit pay will close off their classrooms to guard against perceived competitors. They will divert their energies from teaching to making strategic alliances to eradicate new competition and maintain or advance their own stature with their administration.

Content will suffer. Skills will suffer. Merit pay teachers will focus on advancing test scores (the currency with which they buy credit) over advancing inquiry and creative problem solving in the core disciplines (the skills their students need for future success). The merit pay system may inevitably serve to deter potentially great teachers from entering the classroom, because they lack the social aggression necessary to succeed in the newly “reformed” profession.

The Tribe of Babas

There was a rally in front of my children’s school. Many children (despite having gone through a lottery and been placed in a Pre-K class at a school) are being told they can no longer attend that same school for kindergarten.

It would be easy enough to tell my son that the DOE was run by an inbred tribe of brainless babas who would without conscience or hesitation brutally rip a child from the warmth of his nurturing environment and cast him aside until convenience served their needs.

It would be so easy to string together the most demeaning insults to be compiled from the last decade of SAT vocabulary tests and condemn the NYC DOE with scathing poesy – But what good would it do?

I want to say that the number one rule in the art of the insult is to insure that the object of your affront understands enough to be insulted. However, I don’t. Instead I tell my son what I always tell him when things don’t make sense. I tell him that sometimes people do bad things thinking they are doing good things. And they do this not out of a lack of concern but out of ignorance or ego.

When my eldest completed Pre-K he was threatened with expulsion. Not for an infraction on his part or a punishment meted out by his school’s administration. But because his attendance at the school inconvenienced the DOE. The DOE decided to centralize admissions with kindergarten as the entry point to a school. Regardless of my son’s performance and socialization at the school, he would be treated as if he had no relationship to the school. He would be expelled from the school and forced to re-enter the lottery system that had originally placed him there.

I am still unclear as to why the DOE would subject a child and his family to this stress. I know the word “equity” has been bandied around. The word “equity” is always bandied around when a government agency wants to make inconvenient changes. It is the wave of a magic wand by government to cast a spell of complacency on their public. However, the wand is only so powerful and the public (rightfully so) is particularly protective of their youngest members.

I don’t think there are many who will contest the positive impact of Pre-K experiences on preparedness for future school academics and associated social involvement. In fact the current debate is not on the merits of Pre-K but on the overburdening of first school experiences with academics. With this stated why would the DOE jeopardize a child’s educational success by eliminating Pre-K programs? Or subjecting him to the stress of a move? There have been studies done on the negative impact of relocation on student academic performance.

With the national push towards Universal Pre-K and growing documentation of the positive impact it has on student academic performance, why isn’t Pre-K the point of entry into public schools? How is it equitable to bar a child from returning to the school where he began his academic life?