Testing for Competence Rather Than Research Proposal

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It is all well and good in one sense for the school district to launch a pay-for-performance system in order to get the most out of the teachers -- who in turn are motivated to get the most out of the students -- but how are the executives in a district going to determine the amount of value that a teacher adds to the school?

If the teacher simply "teaches to the test" -- an all-to-common approach in some schools -- it will be basically cheating a pay-for-performance system. A teacher "teaches to the test" by knowing ahead of time the specifics of the questions, issues and subjects to be covered in the end-of-school-year examination. With that information at hand, the teacher in this particular school pounds the answers to those questions into the student's heads so they do well on the test. Doing this will do damage to the credibility of schools, of the teaching profession -- and worse yet, teaching to the test is robbing young people of the education they should be receiving.

Meanwhile, McClelland (p. 6) writes, "But now we have an alternative explanation of college-going -- namely, socioeconomic status which seems to be as good a predictor of this type of success as ability." Speaking of socioeconomic status and how that paves the way for admission to colleges and universities -- or, conversely, keeps low income students out of good four-year schools -- an article in America's Untapped Resource (Carnevale, et al., 2004) carefully researched college and universities' admissions between 1979 and 2000. The findings would line up very nearly perfectly with McClelland's as far as the unfairness that befalls young people on the short end of the financial stick.

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Even though the researchers in the article found that racial minorities are "underrepresented" in colleges and universities, the "underrepresentation of low-income students is even greater" (Carnevale, p. 102). In fact, schools' preference for minorities and the "economically disadvantaged have fallen off over the past thirty years," the article states. And the authors report (102). That many selective colleges "purport to provide preference to low-income students and say they would like to admit more if these students were academically prepared." However, the reality is that "on average the top 146 colleges do not provide a systemic preference" and hence they could, if they wished to, "admit far greater numbers of low-income students…capable of handling the work" (p. 102).

Again, kudos go to the late Dr. McClelland, for stating (p. 6) "Belonging to the power elite (high socioeconomic status) …helps a young man go to college and get jobs through contacts his family has." And as for the low-income student, good luck kid.

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