Dissent of the Day

A reader writes:

I am a regular reader of the DD and I normally either agree with or respect much of what you write about. But I felt the need to give you some insight on why I think merit pay for teachers based on test scores (as proposed now) is an absolutely terrible idea. I was a public school teacher for 8 years, teaching in the barrio in San Diego and in southeast Washington, D.C. (Benning Road if you’re familiar with the area), places not known for they exceptional schools. I am now in law school but my final year of teaching was spent at a for-profit charter school in D.C., open to the public but the school had the right to choose it’s students. The school had implemented a merit-based pay scale; teachers would meet with the principal at the end of the year with their students’ test scores and make the case for why they should get a raise and how much of a raise they should receive. There were ripple effects to this as experienced teachers would fight to get the higher proficiency classes leaving the lower classes for the inexperienced or rookie teachers. The lower performing classes tended to also be the discipline problems and therefore many young teachers simply would get frustrated and leave the profession.

Additionally, teachers were more competitive with each other as their goals were based almost on a law school type curve where it wasn’t enough to just do well, you also had to do better then the next guy. One of the obvious results of this merit pay system was that the weaker students who needed the best, most experienced teachers were left with newest, least experienced ones. A similar trend has been seen over many years with city versus suburban schools, where many teachers would do their time in a city school and then vault to the easier and better-paid suburban schools. Merit pay based on test scores will further this flight of teachers and cause this to happen within schools themselves. A merit based system would pose the question; why would any teacher possibly want to teach in a low performing school or take a low performing class if there were not going to get a raise at the end of the year?

The only option I’d even begin to consider to be realistic is if the merit pay were based on improvement, not targets as proposals are set up now. With an improvement-system more reward would be given to a 7th grade teacher who has students enter reading at a 2nd grade level and who exit reading at a 6.5 grade level, (a substantial increase, even if not the 7.8 grade level targeted by most merit based systems), than a teacher who improves his/her students’ scores from 7 to 7.8 (the standard amount of improvement expected). An additional idea mentioned, and I don’t remember by which candidate, is higher pay for teacher that go to lower performing schools (after a few years acknowledging that it can often take a few years to change the environment of a school). Acknowledging these huge flaws in a merit-based system is anything but "whining". If we really want to leave no child behind then we need a system that will achieve that, merit pay as proposed now, does not.

Understanding Cheney

Cheneymandelnganafpgetty

Ross has a thoughtful response to my suspicions about Cheney:

Cheney may have misled the public about how solid the intelligence was that led him to draw the conclusions he did – and I don’t mean to defend such conduct – but I’m willing to bet that he believed those conclusions as strongly as Bush did, if not more strongly.

I cannot know this and neither can Ross, and therefore I’m not ruling it out. The threat of WMDs after 9/11 was obviously grave and one can understand why many in the administration with access to the internal intelligence decided that they couldn’t risk a misjudgment similar to that of 1990. But my point was a subtler one, I hope. It is that Cheney may have thought that removing Saddam was critical to national security, but that he also knew from the data that we didn’t have solid proof and that many parts of the government were skeptical of what proof we had. In a matter as grave as going to war, even if you want to make the case for action, it seems to me to be very important to be totally candid with the American people. If Bush had said: look, we don’t know what WMDs he has for sure, but we need to make sure he’s no threat down the road, then he’d be in a much better place today. Either the public would not have bought it, and we would have held back; or the public would have bought it, and the war would not have been so fatally damaged by the revelations of no WMDs after the invasion. Honesty is always a better policy. In going to war, it is the only morally defensible policy.

I think Cheney knowingly took a risk in papering over the caveats, was profoundly embarrassed after the fact and terrified that the evidence would prove his own lack of prudence and indeed cherry-picking of the data. That’s the only convincing explanation for the reckless Wilson-Plame over-reach – when he should have been focusing on the incipient insurgency in Iraq instead of Beltway hardball in Washington. I should also add that the war-plan itself, while it did include some minimal protective armor for troops,  in no way prioritized securing suspected sites of WMDs. Many were indeed left to looters. That’s a pretty good sign, I think, that the president and his generals were not too worried about WMD use. If they had told us before the war what the WMD premises were for the invasion, i.e. not to worry, the invasion might never have happened.

Something smells here. I wish it didn’t. But the trust has gone. And Cheney, more than anyone, destroyed it.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Save Kurdistan

Mosulmauriciolimaafpgetty

Tom Friedman cautions against a semi-occupation of Iraq. He may well be right. The details of redeployment are what we now need to focus on. How we do it is in many ways more important than the fact of our failure in Arab Iraq. But it seems to me that there’s one policy around which we should all be able to unite: a commitment to protect the nascent Kurdish entity in the north. The Kurds had their civil war in the last century. They have a fledgling democracy. They love the US. They are Sunni Muslims. Hemmed in by Persians, Arabs and Turks, they need an external broker to defend and secure their achievement. One obvious option for US troops is to redeploy to Iraq’s territorial borders to deter an influx of foreign agents, but primarily to defend and police Kurdistan. In this, we need to hold Turkey’s hand very tightly and patiently. They too are a critical ally, deeply suspicious of Kurdish aspirations and critical to restraining the centrifugal frces of Iraq. The Turkish-Kurdish border needs NATO troops to keep it stable and prevent incursions from either side. If we are going to cut our losses among Iraq’s Arabs, and I see no alternative, then that is no reason to abandon the one clear success story of this entire gamble.

If we rescue Kurdistan, moreover, it does retrieve a sliver of the original hope.

They will be free of Saddam; they will be a Muslim democracy deeply grateful to the United States; they will be a Sunni society that is not hostile to the West; their economy could boom; their freedoms could flourish further. The Turks and the Kurds can become an arc of hope for some Persians who want to live in a free society and lack an obvious regional role model. I fear, alas, that Arab culture is simply immune to modern democratic norms – at least for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discourage democrats or liberals; but that we should have no illusions about their viability in Arab society. Mercifully, the Middle East is not all Arab dysfunction. The Turks, the Jews, the Kurds and the Persians offer much hope. It seems to me we should be investing in those places that have a chance, rather than further antagonizing those regions that have yet to develop any politics but violence, paranoia and graft.

(Photo: children in Mosul, by Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty.)