February 10, 2005

NEXT POST
All Hail the Vocal Minority? The January 2005 issue of Laptop magazine has a column by Joel Johnson with the above title, except for the question mark. I added that. Mr. Johnson's point is that the very knowledgeable tech users push vendors to provide benefits and value that they would otherwise withhold to maximize profit. His specific example is Verizon deliberately crippling the bluetooth capabilities of a new phone so users would have to pay them to do things like moving phtos taken with the phone's camera to a printer or laptop, rather than using the inherent capabilities of bluetooth to do that directly. Amazingly, Verizon even admitted that was what was going on and that it was only a vocal minority who noticed or cared. Here are some passages from the column: And that’s fine, because customers have a way to respond in kind: by not purchasing these items if the overall experience is unsatisfactory. If I can avoid being too preachy, though, I think it’s important to point out that being the sort of person who understands when a company is slighting its customers also has a certain responsibility—or at least opportunity—to be as vocal as possible. Some companies will take their customers for granted, focusing on what “fits in their revenue model” over what is a fair value. Others, however, will listen to those of us out there on the blogs, review sites, Amazon, and even the Web sites of the companies themselves, making as much noise as possible about the short-shrifting...
PREVIOUS POST
Experts (?) on Merit Pay for Teachers One of my Google Alerts brought me the material below. I know two of the ten experts. I often disagree with James Guthrie and often agree with John Stone. In this case, I disagree with both of them in two ways. First, I disagree that merit pay for teachers is a good idea. As I noted in my book note on True Professionalism: Pay for Performance: This is a hot topic, with some states going so far as to mandate that districts develop some such approach. Maister indicates that high-performing professional firms tend toward group financial incentives and social controls for individuals. He suggests that individual pay-for-performance schemes are often a way to avoid the hard work of controls: "In essence, individual performance-based reward systems represent, in many cases, a perfect excuse to abdicate responsibility for coaching, counseling, and assisting (i.e., an excuse not to manage)." p.86 I further disagree with the use of value-added analysis in this regard. TVAAS and similar systems are wonderful for providing data to help education leaders and practitioners reflect. It can raise some wonderful and powerful questions. In a small percentage of cases, it may even contribute to teacher evaulations. But it is certainly not structured to handle the weight of "merit" pay. ROUND-UP: PERFORMANCE PAY FOR TEACHERS Following are experts who can discuss the use of performance pay for teachers' salaries. Some school districts are raising teachers' salaries each year based only on whether they set and fulfill performance goals, as opposed to...

Recent Comments