juststuff

Shortly after I put up my previous post I came across a discussion about merit pay for teachers on CBC’s The Sunday Edition. The discussion was between Peter Cowley, who I have blogged about before, and Ben Levin, a former deputy Minister of Education in Manitoba and Ontario. Peter Cowley seemed much more reserved in this interview than in the previous one that I had heard. The fact is that both Cowley and Levin seemed to agree on all issues other than whether governments should move forward with merit pay (and their respective support for unions in general).

I was livid after hearing Peter Cowley in today’s broadcast of Grading Teachers on The Current. There are so many problems with his argument it is difficult to know where to begin. Standardized tests are universally panned in research, and in fact they are not “better than nothing.” Standardized tests, amongst other things, leads to “teaching to the test.” The UK had massive problems with this in the nineties, where up to a month or more of classtime was spent solely in prepping students for a standardized test.