I burned QComp

What is Q-Comp, and why would I burn it?
Q-Comp is larger than a Q-Tip, but much smaller than any real educational reform.
Q-Comp stands for "Quality Compensation," one dreamchild of Governor Tim Pawlenty. Its supposed goal for schools and teachers is to provide funds for faculty development. But there are hidden costs.
Village School where I teach is a small charter school, around fifty students. Village School would have received $15,000 from the state if we had applied for and received Q-Comp funding. It sounded like a good idea to me. We can always use more money.
I worked for two weeks straight on the proposal. There was one stipulation that troubled me, but I thought I could work around it--a substantial proportion of the pay awarded for teachers' participation in the program depended on students' progress in academic areas as measured by standardized tests.
At Village School, we despise standardized tests--but that is a subject for another blog posting. It seemed as though a teacher's effectiveness with Q-Comp could be documented with a portfolio of the teacher's work with students. And so I kept at it.
After submitting the proposal, I received comments from the state reviewers. I had left significant sections of explanation out, in particular the section about the areas of academic growth that would be measured, and the norm-referenced standardized tests that would measure that growth. There was no way I could finesse it. As I filled in the charts that included grade level of students and areas of measurement, it became clearer and clearer that a single teacher would get a raise or not depending on, in our case, a small charter school, the test scores of a single student.
Let's call the teacher "Mr. Thompson" and the student "Mary." Mr. Thompson would get a raise if Mary did well on her math test.
There could be lots of reasons Mary might not do well on the test that had nothing to do with Mr. Thompson or his ability as a teacher. She could be absent. She could have a headache. Her boyfriend broke up with her right before the test. She may have known some math, but not the particular problems on the test. The dog ate her test. She developed sudden amnesia. She hated Mr. Thompson and hoped he'd never get another raise the rest of his life.
Too many teachers are already teaching for the tests out of fear that their school will be labeled a failing school--and ultimately taken over by somebody who thinks they can do a better job, a for-profit company, perhaps. How much harder will a teacher work to teach the test if it will mean getting a bigger raise?
Some have said that Pawlenty's Q-Comp plan is not about improving teaching and learning at all, but is a Trojan Horse whose sole purpose is to change teachers' compensation schedules and undermine teacher unions. It's merit pay disguised as a faculty development plan.
Whatever the real goals of Q-Comp are, it became clear to all of us at Village School that it wouldn't work for us.
On one of the first days of school, I and three other students hauled the boxes of paper that were once our Q-Comp proposal out to the woods. We built a small bonfire of twigs and leaves, and one by one dropped the pages into the fire.
As the smoke from the burning pages rose into the sky, we offered up a prayer to protect our children from the insatiable hunger of testing corporations, and the interminable machinations of politicians.
Oops! Just kidding! There were no prayers. It's a school, remember? But there was smoke. And where there's smoke, there's fire. And Pawlenty's hot new plan adding fuel to this fire.