The Peril and Promise of Performance Pay


Book Description

This book provides an invaluable resource for school teachers, administrators, board members, policy makers, and citizens who would like to understand what's behind performance pay, what might work and what will not, and how to build a school improvement effort that includes teacher compensation as one of its strategies.




Performance-Based Pay for Educators


Book Description

This book provides an in-depth analysis of a performance-based pay initiative and crystalizes the design issues and implementation challenges that confounded efforts to translate this promising policy into practice. This story has much to say to academics and policymakers who are trying to figure out the combinations of incentives and the full range of resources required to establish incentive programs that promote an adequate supply and equitable distribution of capable and committed educators for our public schools. The book uncovers the conditions that appear to be necessary, if not fully sufficient, for performance-based initiatives to have a chance to realize their ambitious aims and the research that is required to guide policy development. In so doing, the authors consider the thorny question of whether performance-based pay systems for educators are worth the investment. Book Features: Examines the use of educator compensation reform as a tool to improve human capital in chronically low-performing schools. Analyzes how a theoretically promising incentive program actually plays out in schools. Documents policy implementation and its impacts through the experiences and voices of teachers and school administrators. Concludes with clear and actionable recommendations for policy and research.




A School Board Guide to Leading Successful Schools


Book Description

The go-to resource for school board members' greatest challenges!, For districts striving to improve student academic performance, professional learning at all levels can make a crucial difference. This invaluable guide addresses the top challenges experienced by nearly every school board, and shows how professional learning can assist in overcoming these challenges and support positive changes. Two influential education leaders-and experienced board trustees-present an approach that helps school board members form their own professional learning community and become a stronger, more productive team. Aligned with Learning Forward's current Standards for Professional Learning (developed in collaboration with, and supported by, more than 18 national organizations, including the National School Boards Association), this resource enables board members to, Learn from case studies focused on 12 critical board-level decisions, including hiring a new superintendent, resource allocation, compensation planning, and more, Deepen their understanding of leadership and actions that advance school success and benefit the wider community, Know when, where, and how to use professional learning to improve individual and systemic performance, Benefit from best practices and tools developed to support effective decisions and successful implementation of major initiatives, Turn to this resource to assist with your continuous improvement journey and achieve greater success for all schools! Book jacket.




The SAGE Guide to Educational Leadership and Management


Book Description

The SAGE Guide to Educational Leadership and Management allows readers to gain knowledge of educational management in practice while providing insights into challenges facing educational leaders and the strategies, skills, and techniques needed to enhance administrative performance. This guide emphasizes the important skills that effective leaders must develop and refine, including communication, developing teams, coaching and motivating, and managing time and priorities. While being brief, simply written, and a highly practical overview for individuals who are new to this field, this reference guide will combine practice and research, indicate current issues and directions, and choices that need to be made. Features & Benefits: 30 brief, signed chapters are organized in 10 thematic parts in one volume available in a choice of electronic or print formats designed to enable quick access to basic information. Selective boxes enrich and support the narrative chapters with case examples of effective leadership in action. Chapters conclude with bibliographic endnotes and references to further readings to guide students to more in-depth presentations in other published sources. Back matter includes an annotated listing of organizations, associations, and journals focused on educational leadership and administration and a detailed index. This reference guide will serve as a vital source of knowledge to any students pursuing an education degree as well as for individuals interested in the subject matter that do not have a strong foundation of the topic.




Teachers Go to Rehab


Book Description

Teachers Go to Rehab examines the advice given to teachers from multiple critics both historically and recently. This book looks at the scope, cost, and impact of this advice to teachers, as well as the motives behind it. It poses precise questions about the groups that gave the advice. Who were they? What did they recommend? How did they estimate impact? How did they calculate costs? What aims did they profess? What aims did they conceal? Whom did they attract? Whom did they alienate? When did they succeed? When did they fail?




Critical Issues in Education


Book Description

Few subjects engender more strongly held beliefs and contrary views than education. The outcomes of debates over education and educational reform impact all citizens. Media coverage of these controversies is sometimes shallow and one-sided, fostering the need to develop critical thinking skills. These skills in turn open opportunities for personal growth, joining the public debate, and helping others participate in critical discussions. The authors of Critical Issues in Education present two opposing positions for each of sixteen different hot-button issues, including multiculturalism, school finance, charter schools, teacher evaluation, cyberbullying, and gender equity. Prospective teachers will find the authors’ approach eye-opening and stimulating. Ideally, they will teach these valuable skills to their students, who will prosper academically and personally from understanding and considering diverse viewpoints.




The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education - 2nd Edition


Book Description

Anyone who is touched by public education – teachers, administrators, teacher-educators, students, parents, politicians, pundits, and citizens – ought to read this book, a revamped and updated second edition. It will speak to educators, policymakers and citizens who are concerned about the future of education and its relation to a robust, participatory democracy. The perspectives offered by a wonderfully diverse collection of contributors provide a glimpse into the complex, multilayered factors that shape, and are shaped by, education institutions today. The analyses presented in this text are critical of how globalization and neoliberalism exert increasing levels of control over the public institutions meant to support the common good. Readers of this book will be well prepared to participate in the dialogue that will influence the future of public education in United States, and beyond – a dialogue that must seek the kind of change that represents hope for all students. As for the question contained in the title of the book – The Phenomenon of Obama and the Agenda for Education: Can Hope (Still) Audaciously Trump Neoliberalism? (Second Edition) –, Carr and Porfilio develop a framework that integrates the work of the contributors, including Christine Sleeter and Dennis Carlson, who wrote the original forward and afterword respectively, and the updated ones written by Paul Street, Peter Mclaren and Dennis Carlson, which problematize how the Obama administration has presented an extremely constrained, conservative notion of change in and through education. The rhetoric has not been matched by meaningful, tangible, transformative proposals, policies and programs aimed at transformative change, and now fully into a second mandate this second edition of the book is able to more substantively provide a vigorous critique of the contemporary educational and political landscape. There are many reasons for this, and, according to the contributors to this book, it is clear that neoliberalism is a major obstacle to stimulating the hope that so many have been hoping for. Addressing systemic inequities embedded within neoliberalism, Carr and Porfilio argue, is key to achieving the hope so brilliantly presented by Obama during the campaign that brought him to the presidency.




Urban Education


Book Description

This comprehensive volume provides a 3-part conceptual model in which the achievement of equity for all - regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity - is is central to urban education.




Urban Education


Book Description

Many factors complicate the education of urban students. Among them have been issues related to population density; racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity; poverty; racism (individual and institutional); and funding levels. Although urban educators have been addressing these issues for decades, placing them under the umbrella of "urban education" and treating them as a specific area of practice and inquiry is relatively recent. Despite the wide adoption of the term a consensus about its meaning exists at only the broadest of levels. In short, urban education remains an ill-defined concept. This comprehensive volume addresses this definitional challenge and provides a 3-part conceptual model in which the achievement of equity for all -- regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity – is an ideal that is central to urban education. The model also posits that effective urban education requires attention to the three central issues that confronts all education systems (a) accountability of individuals and the institutions in which they work, (b) leadership, which occurs in multiple ways and at multiple levels, and (c) learning, which is the raison d'être of education. Just as a three-legged stool would fall if any one leg were weak or missing, each of these areas is essential to effective urban education and affects the others.




Next Generation Performance Management


Book Description

There is no HR-related topic more popular in the business press than performance management (PM). There has been an explosion in writing on this topic in the past 5 years, condemning it as a failure and calling for fundamental change. The vast majority of organizations use the same basic process which I call “Last Generation Performance Management” or PM 1.0 for short. Despite widespread agreement that PM 1.0 is failing, few companies have abandoned it or made fundamental changes to it. While everyone agrees it is broken, few agree on how to fix it. Companies continue to tinker with their systems, making incremental changes every few years with no lasting improvement in effectiveness. Employees continue to achieve amazing things in organizations every day, despite this process not because of it. Nothing has worked because organizations, business leaders and HR professionals focus on PM practices instead of the fundamental purpose of PM and the paradigms, assumptions, and beliefs that underlie the practices. Companies ask their performance management process to do too many things and it fails at all of them as a result. At the foundation of PM 1.0 practices is the ideology of a meritocracy and paradigms rooted in standard economic and psychological theories. While these theories were adequate explanations for motivation and behavior in the 19th and 20th centuries, they fail to account for the increasingly complex nature of organizations and their environments today. Despite the ineffectiveness of PM 1.0, there are powerful forces holding it in place. Information on rigorous, evidence-based recommendations is crowded out by benchmarking information, case studies of high-profile companies, and other propaganda coming from HR think tanks and consultants. Business leaders and HR professionals learn about common practices not effective practices. This book confronts the traditional dogma, paradigms, and practices of PM 1.0 and holds them up to the bright light of scientific scrutiny. It encourages HR professionals and business leaders to abandon PM 1.0 and it offers up a more appropriate purpose for PM, alternative paradigms to guide them and practical solutions that are better supported by scientific research, referred to as “Next Generation Performance Management” or PM 2.0 for short.