Kayla Murphy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/education/02teachers.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=education

As more and more states are reevaluating their pay systems to make merit pay more important than years of experience, by using test scores, I have to wondering if something in the educational world has been lost.  We all know that a teachers success cannot be based on one test, a whole years work boils down to three days …

But can teachers be monitored in order to receive merit pay?  Teacher are assessing students daily and are constantly changing and reworking lessons based on data collected from daily assessments, can all of these data be used?  We can truly monitor every student that is being served by our public educational system and keep a track of each child’s daily improvements, and tailor each child’s education; however even though teachers do this everyday, this data is never asked for.  This solution will never be considered.  It will be seen as too hard, too much paper work, and non-standardized.