Barack Obama, the President of United States, has promised to enhance the whole US educational standards in order to be an example to other countries. He pointed out the educational standards have been varied from states to other states since the federal government used the student's test scores as a measurement of each school's performance in order to allocate the budget to schools. The higher scores the students got, the larger amount of budget that the school will get from the federal. Unfortunately, they lack of central controls of educational standard. Undoubtedly, some school show high test scores of students in favor of the incoming money. Barack has proposed various solutions. One of those is that applying the merit payment for good teacher; that is good teachers will get more money when their students's achievement improved. On the other hand, bad teachers will be penalized by stop teaching.
After I have finished reading this news, I then compared with Thailand's education system. Since the Ministry of Education Thailand administered the national examination for high school students as the measurement of the university admission. The scores from the national test will be combined with Grade Average Point from the high schools in order to be evaluated for university admission. Some students from relatively lower education standard schools tend to have higher GPA than those from highly competitive counterparts. I understand that every school desires to help their students to have a better chance to get into university. If this unfair GPA continues, I assume that most of students in Thailand will be increased to nearly 4.0.
Another interesting point is that the merit based payment for high school teachers. I am not sure about the average teacher's salary in USA. But in Thailand, the high school teachers receive only little money. And the evaluation conducted in the schools is not effective to distinguish between well-qualified and low-qualified teachers. Then the teachers are likely to have less incentive to enhance the student's achievement. This merit based payment would be a good idea for Thai education system. However, I haven't done much research abouth the details of merit pay and I don't know much about how it works. And I didn't mean that my observations about the teachers' performance and salary will apply to all teachers.
So I would like to share my ideas with you.
What is your high school education system? Is it similar to Thailand or USA? And do you think the merit pay for teachers would be a good alternative for improving the educational standard?
I will be very happy to hear from you.
References
The teacher-in-chief speaks. (2009, March 12nd). The Economist. Retrieved on March 18th, 2009 from http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13279059
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
3 comments:
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I don't think that it's a good idea. Think about the standard of evaluation. How can we assess the quality of teachers? Is it possible that academic achievement of students to be a standard? It’s ridiculous. I don’t think the academic achievement can’ tell the quality of teachers. In Korea, the situation is very similar. The teachers have to force their students to study hard. And some teachers are only interested in students' academic achievement. That became tragedy. There’s no relationship between teachers and students, and there’s no friendship, but only competition in school. Many people worry about the future of Korean school.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sunny. Some schools in Thailand are nearly similar to Korean schools. Almost all students have high score, but teachers don't teach their students much. They get high score because they competitive each other. Fortunately, there are some relationship and friendship on them.
ReplyDeleteIn Japan, some years ago, people say children should not compete each other. They were tought that the most important thing for children was not to become the No.1, to become the only one. Teachers didn't let them compete. However, people have begun to rethink if it's right or wrong because it came to their score derectly, and also their behavior as well. They don't work hard and give up anything soon because they think they ddn't need to win, the important thing is to be the only one! I think it's sad, I mean if they don't know that they are loser, they'll never know that they can be winner. There are so many people who studied under that kind of atmosphere and they are struggling to adapt to the real world. It doesn't seem to be getting on the right track, but I just wondered how about in Thailand and Korea. Which one is important to be the no.1 or to be the only one?
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