USA Today has a blockbuster story, and you should read the whole thing. Michelle Rhee, the DC superintendent appointed by a Democratic mayor, and lauded by liberal pundits, tried out all kinds of conservative ideas like Merit Pay for higher student test scores. At one school, Noyes Education Campus, the merit pay was pretty high:
Twice in three years, she [Rhee] rewarded Noyes’ staff for boosting scores; in 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.
But there was a reason Noyes’ test scores went up so dramatically…
A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.’s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
The incentive to raise test scores motivated someone to falsify higher scores. For all the talk from Rhee and the big liberal pundits touting conservative “reforms” for education, in the end, those kids in DC’s public schools were treated like props in some big powerpoint presentation. Rhee got her positive headlines, and these kids & their families just got false, confusing information about just how much they really knew.
Merit pay is an incentive to cheat on tests, and it has no place in public schools.
…but I’m not going to give up and say how horrible it is based on people NOT following the rules, especially in what appears to be closer to anecdotal rather than broader research. Then again I’m not sure test scores are the best determining factor for merit pay. I’m not sure I’d automatically call merit pay a conservative idea. Attracting better teachers by holding out the prospect of pay hikes based on performance sounds like a pretty liberal thing to do.
Christopher,
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p>There’s a quite a bit of evidence, not just anecdotes, that this approach not only fails to improve educational quality but degrades it and corrupts the teaching and learning process. The evidence is widespread in education and extends to other arenas as well.
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p>Researcher Jeffrey Pfeffer, for example, testified before Congress that pay for performance systems “often ‘effectively motivate the wrong behavior,’ increased pay differentiation ‘lowers performance,’ and the schemes eat up management time while they ‘make everybody unhappy.’ I realize this sounds counterintuitive to many in the U.S., but the evidence is quite strong.
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p>FairTest summarizes just some of the evidence in a fact sheet with references, here.
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p>Best,
Lisa
You can read it here.
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p>Among other things, he says this:
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p>
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p>Amazing how little interest there is on the part of policymakers in looking at the evidence that exists.
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p>Lisa
As I said, I’m not sure test scores are the best indicator, partly because they are manipulable and partly because there are a lot of contributing factors to test scores besides quality of teaching. As to your first comment, it’s fine that there is broader research, but the diary didn’t indicate that. The diary’s argument came down to one school in one district gamed the system – therefore the system is bad. Big time logical fallacy.
it’s likely that they were as concerned for their students as much as they were for themselves. And it was probably fear of sanctioning, rather than merit pay, that resulted in cheating. As a union official is quoted as saying,
As the article remarks,
If this was cheating, blame the management (Rhee, principals, etc.)that put employees (teachers) in a no-win situation in which their jobs were at stake. S**t runs downhill. And the hijinks of administrators in gaming tests has well-documented. Linda Darling-Hammond has written all about the scams they ran in Texas.
for whom bonuses only bring out the very most exemplary behavior. This is why we are fortunate that the House has taken such a strong stand against regulating them.
Teachers, OTOH, are defended all the time, and deserve it. To say they are too venal to be trusted with the temptation of merit pay is ridiculous.
that in making public policy, one must think of social and systemic effects. Just as here, conservatives tend to reduce everything to individual virtue and failing.
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p>It’s a poor guide.
First, to me, arguments that propose action based on systemic effects and social macro enviornmental factors sound like arguments on Star Trek about not violating the Prime Directive in order to keep the universe on an even keel.
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p>The crux of the argument here is that ‘merit’ pay, recognizing that some teachers do a better job than others, is wrong because there are too many factors beyond the teacher’s control like intrinsic intelligence of current crop of children, student home enviornment, etc. Yet all other teachers face the same variables, and some do better.
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p>Why should individual virtue not be recognized if it copes with the common variables in a more effective – and possibly transferable – manner?
with individuals.
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p>Social policy does not deal with individuals.
This doesn’t appear to be a particularly effective argument against paying meritorious individuals more.
It appears to be dodging the issue. Merit pay is a fine idea, I think.
I get that you’re not persuaded by the evidence that merit pay increases cheating, but I’m still wondering why you think it’s so fine, especially after reading Diane Ravitch’s nice new summary of some of the solid evidence against it here.
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p>Is there a basis for your belief, or is it just a belief?
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p>Diane points out:
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p>* Merit pay didn’t increase test scores in the most rigorous study to date from the National Center on Performance Incentives.
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p>* A recent Harvard study that showed merit pay had no impact in NYC schools.
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p>* W. Edwards Deming, the iconic business maven, concluded merit pay is bad for corporations because “It gets everyone thinking about what is good for himself or herself and leads to forgetting about the goals of the organization.[This seems like a particularly bad thing for teachers to do.] It incentivizes short-term thinking and discourages long-term thinking. [Also a bad way to approach children’s learning.]”
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p>She references Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, and Daniel Pink, author of Drive, on why a sense of purpose is a better motivator than cash [makes sense this would be especially true for teachers].
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p>Diane concludes: “Merit pay is the idea that never works and never dies.”
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p>You seem to be good anecdotal evidence of that, sir.
I think it is misguided to think of merit pay as way to motivate teachers to do better. It assumes that teachers aren’t really putting out their best effort without it. Teachers who aren’t really trying that hard, probably should be replaced rather than motivated with carrots and sticks.
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p>Rather, I see the purpose of merit pay is to recognize the high-achieving teachers, to make sure they are less likely to quit to work at another school or leave the field entirely. That is more or less how it works in the private sector. Higher pay and bonuses in the private sector are aimed at hiring and keeping the best employees, not to turn average workers into great ones.
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p>A better way to structure merit pay for teachers would be to grant ranks or titles like “master teacher” based on past achievements recognized through an array of measures but definitely including the assessment of peers, administrators, parents, and even students; such a rank would provide public recognition and validation for the teachers skills and would also reward them financially.
I’ll trade merit pay for expeditious removal of the non-meritorious.
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p>But then gee, aw shucks, there is no way to prove non-meritoriousness to some goofy legal standard deliberately set to be unmeetable except in truly awful cases. The entire notion of merit pay arose because of this particular problem.
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p>Thus, parents approaching Grade Z know that if they draw Mr. Y their choices are (i) fall behind; (ii) hire a tutor; or (iii) get out of the public schools. Mr. Y may even have much to do with the size of Grade Z at the local parochial schools is significantly larger than the size of Grade Z-1.
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p>KBusch’s data and wholistic approaches generally seem to translate into: hey, you’re about to be screwed and screwed again, but it is really for the greater good, as you can see here on my chart. To wit, the decision last year to downsize AP programs in our district, despite the availability of funding, because such funding came with stipends for the AP teachers.
and bad ideas after data.
How do you know that merit increases are the most effective form of recognition given the social not individual goals we are seeking and given the studies we have available?
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p>Making facile moral arguments and complaining about how it hurts your poor head to think on a larger scale are just plain ineffective means of choosing policies.
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p>And yes, by the way, I’m in favor of pay equity.
If the sole basis for “merit pay” is “improved test scores” one problem appears to be faulty metrics.
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p>If improved performance required:
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p>A. Improved attendance.
B. Improved graduation rates (H.S. and junior high)
C. Improved student retention rates (elementary)
D. Improvement shown by a match between grades and test scores and a drop in the number of students repeating grades.
E. Improved percentage of participation in after school activities.
F. Improved attendance by parents at parent-teacher meetings.
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p>I suggest that “improvement” needs to include A-F and a formula weighting A-F in order to be meaningful “improvement” that will make the lives of students better and their likelihood of success higher, and the school itself a truely improved learning environment.
There is no information as to what the criteria are. IS it test scores alone, is it a component, what?
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p>From my reading of the post, it seemed that the test scores were a COMPONENT of a merit pay system, but the argument was that it should not be a factor at all, as teachers will cheat. It’s not clear if they would cheat on other factors as well, like marking kids present in order to produce a record of attendence that meets merit pay standards.
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p>I agree that there should be such a formula, but how to cope with the teachers who will game the system?
Don’t you think that there may be opportunities to cheat in ordered to gain incentive bonuses in the private sector?
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p>I don’t think that an occasional bad apple – who is publicly exposed and punished – is a very strong argument against merit pay. Unless you can show that the abuses outweigh the benefits, and have shown that there is no way these abuses cannot be prevented through other means, you seem to just be making a knee-jerk argument.
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p>The problem here is that whenever a large organization demands “measurable” results according to some narrowly defined, and perhaps inappropriate metric, people in that organization are going to jump through hoops to at least appear to be achieving their goals, with or without merit pay, because it will affect the future careers of administrators.
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p>We have already seen several cases of teacher/administrator sponsored cheating on the MCAS, and I am not aware that merit pay was a factor in those cases.
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p>The fact is that, when there is testing, there will be attempted cheating. The higher the stakes of test, the greater the incentive there will be to cheat. All you can do is to make it difficult.
if you don’t believe me. He talks about how things like merit pay can persist despite widespread evidence of harm.
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p>You make the point precisely–the higher the stakes of the test, the greater the incentive there will be to cheat. That’s just one of the problems with high stakes testing.
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p>Testing itself does not promote cheating, but high stakes testing does. Not only that, it makes the resulting data unreliable–or the higher the stakes, the more unreliable the data. We no longer know if the data is the result of more general learning and higher student achievement, or if it resulted from narrowly focused test preparation, students being left out of the testing pool, being forced to repeat a grade, pushed out of school entirely, or outright cheating on the test.
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p>And now this resulting unreliable data is the basis for deciding student graduation, intervening in school management, turning schools over to outside “turnaround” specialists. The newest bad idea is to evaluate teachers based on this suspect data, which will in turn increase the stakes that much more, make the data even less reliable than ever.
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p>Low-stakes testing, e.g., the National Assessment of Educational Progress, provides more reliable, informative and useful information, though still not all the information we need to judge school quality.
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p>Lisa
Based on that article alone and what is written in this post, I do think it is fair to call this reaction “knee jerk”. There may be conclusive evidence that merit based pay is more bad than good, but I don’t see that being cited here.
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p>I am not totally convinced that high-stakes testing is necessarily bad, but it is very clear that it causes a lot of problems and creates incentives to cheat. I definitely wouldn’t want to give up high-stakes testing for college and grad school entrance exams, medical licensing, legal bar exams, etc. Given that, students bound for higher education will eventually have to be comfortable with that kind of testing.
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p>It is also not the case that merit pay has to necessarily be tied only to test scores. There are many other ways that you could measure or recognize talented teachers than test scores or grades.
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p>I really dislike the oversimplification of the issue to “someone cheated therefore merit pay is bad.
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p>
…testimony before Congress about pay for performance and its negative impact. This was in my first post in this discussion–scroll up. Then I provided a link to Pfeffer’s Congressional testimony, which cites other evidence.
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p>Yes, you are right. There are certainly other ways to measure and recognize talented teachers, better ways than pay for or evaluation based on test scores.
If you are an American who —
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p>a) has a kid or kids in school (public or private)
b) owns property
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p>– then you are absolutely clear on where you stand on “merit pay.” You are FOR it, unions be damned.
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p>So, as a supporter of unions, I strongly recommended new terminology.
Not sure what terminology issue you are referring to.
“Do you believe the union should protect bad teachers, or that there should be merit pay in schools?”
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p>Unions will say that they don’t protect bad teachers, but in the public mind the opposite of merit pay is just that.
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p>
A little leading, wouldn’t you say?
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p>No, unions shouldn’t protect bad teachers, and systems shouldn’t use approaches like pay for performance, if there is strong evidence that they make education worse, not better.
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p>What should we do if we learn that merit pay based on student test results is likely to keep bad teachers on the job and get rid of the best? See Mike Winerip’s excellent New York Times article on this, here. He describes a New York teacher, Stacey Isaacson, described by her principal and colleagues and students as one of the best, but judged by that system’s “value added” system to be way below average, in the 7th percentile. Winerip describes how the system works:
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p>
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p>Yes, this is anecdotal but illustrates the issue well.
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p>Democracy is based, in part, on the idea that the pubic mind, given good information, can make good choices.
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p>http://www.time.com/time/natio…
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p>If there’s a problem with the concept of merit pay, the message is not getting out there.
“We can’t scale teacher compensation to merit, because they’ll cheat” — even if true– seems like a rather tough sell to parents with kids in the schools.
…not whether good teachers should keep their jobs and be well compensated.
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p>There are many parents with kids in the schools–the public schools, that is–who are aware of the problems with using test scores to measure and reward merit and are mobilizing against these destructive policy proposals.
We are also painfully aware of which teachers are good and which are not– we are now approaching the annual season of active intervention designed to ensure that we have Mrs. X rather than Mr. Y next year.
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p>And we are also aware that every alternative is a poor one: subjective performance review by supervisors will inevitably founder because Mr. Y will claim that the negative review is due to some illegitimate prejudice on the part of the reviewer; objective standards–testing– are rife with problems of their own. But the overall concept remains alluring, especially for people frustrated that we may be stuck with Mr. Y, our efforts to the contrary notwithstanding.
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p>And so while the various ideologically driven parties pee back and forth at one another, we are left to wheedle our way out of Mr. Y, lest we need to spend a fortune on tutoring next year.
Most of those controlling the message delivery systems are enamored of these tried-and-failed approaches and seem immune to evidence.
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p>The fact that the message isn’t getting out doesn’t make the evidence any less strong that these approaches have been tried in the past and don’t work to improve schools.
So what does improve schools?
Teachers in Finland, whose schools are praised for their equity and excellence, are well prepared, treated like professionals, have tremendous autonomy to use their knowledge in the classroom (not forced to deliver scripted curriculum), assess learning in the classroom and are not required to and thus don’t waste a lot of time giving standardized high-stakes tests. They are certainly not evaluated based on high-stakes standardized test scores. Finland often comes out on top in international comparisons.
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p>Linda Darling-Hammond has a great piece in the Washington Post Answer Sheet on how “the United States has been pursuing an approach to teaching almost diametrically opposed to that pursued by the highest-achieving nations [e.g., Finland].”
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p>
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p>The argument, which I know will come, is that we’re not like Finland, too heterogeneous, what works in Finland won’t work here. It’s true that the U.S. is plagued by horrific and worsening income inequality, which is probably the biggest obstacle we face to the goal of equity and excellence in public schools. (Trend lines on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests actually show that our achievement gap closed the most during the decades when our income inequality started to decrease, before it started to increase again, and the achievement gaps started to widen again.)
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p>So, no, unless we reverse our trend of more and more families slipping into poverty, we won’t have outcomes like Finland, but I suspect that more of Finland-type approaches and less of what we’ve gotten ourselves locked into with NCLB would help even here.
How many ‘FSL’ classes do you think there are? SPED?
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p>Not only is 93 percent of the population of Finalnd white, 86 percent are Lutheran.
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p>Your other example, Singapore, is also a homogenous culture.
Finland had an achievement gap, which they decided to address is ways that are very different than the ones chosen by U.S. policymakers. They had success.
schools systems such as Lynnfield or North Reading perform so well. It isn’t just that the teachers are inspiring the students to superior performance, but that the very nature of their school population is such that the raw material is there to achieve, as opposed to a much poorer inner city school system made up of largely immigrant students who don’t have academic support at home, and often move from school to school as their parents relocate. It’s not conducive to good achievement in school. A teacher in such an inner city system might be performing at a high level, but given what he has to work with, does not produce the MCAS results desired by reviewers, while one in a wealthy, stable system could be just loafing along and still get the numbers that reviewers like. How do systems equitably assess teachers for performance under such constraints?
The messaging has been LOUSY on this. Even when a teachers union attempts to adopt a non-stereotyped position, they get drowned out by others that do. The various unions are thus collectively self-defeating on this.
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p>Last year, MTA actually came up with a seemingly reasonable, or at least thoughtful, proposal that at least demonstrates that the issue isn’t a simple non-starter among the teachers union.
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p>But then some other union– AFT? — proceeded to pour cold water all over the notion, and the general impression left was, once again, Teachers Unions Oppose Evaluations, see Page W45.
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p>I’m not sure that anything ever came of it. In any event, MTA should be making its position more widely known.
It’s absolutely not getting out there, which is why there are merit pay proposals before several state legislatures. It’s a case of “sounds good–let’s do it–evidence be damned!”
The problem with the messaging is that the term — “merit pay” — has obviously been crafted to elicit a positive response. Those who oppose “merit pay” are seen to be against “merit” itself.
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p>Why not call it “commission-based teaching”? That’s what it boils down to. Student performs, you get paid. Student doesn’t perform, you don’t get your commission.
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p>Anyone who understands anything about commissions knows that salespeople will exercise every loophole to get their highest commission, even if it is bad for the company. If it isn’t prohibited, it is fair game. I once worked for a company where the sales staff was rewarded for closing the deal — nothing beyond that. So what did they do? They lowered the price of the proposal and pushed up the delivery dates, and then dumped the mess on the product managers. That company is no longer in business, by the way.
Merit is motivating children to want to learn.
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p>Merit is making a classroom an exciting, safe, yetinteresting place students want to go to.
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p>Metrics based on test scores don’t actually evaluate er a teacher’s compassion, motivational success, or quality of classroom.
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p>I speak as the daughter of a long-retired teacher in a school in Detroit (now demolished for an expressway that in turn became a pitted wreck – Mom is 95 now…) where 95% of the kids got free lunch, she taught 2nd grade and kids came back to see her for 8 years. She tracked down medical care, where “her kids” ACTUALLY lived, and put in easily an 80 hour week and was as frustrated as anyone about the teachers who didn’t grade work, and just coasted.
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p>She was keyed in and cared. She had been an orphan herself, who had survived severe neglect after her mother died when she was 18 months old – in 1918 during the great flue epidemic. So if there were hygiene issues (etc.) for her it wasn’t judgmental – she got the kid taken care of.
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p>There were kids who came to her second grade classroom not knowing how to read – and she made sure they learned, I cannot really even tell you how except that she was often at that school in that old trailer until 5:00 PM or later. Maybe there weren’t so many rules in those days, I don’t know.
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p>But I am grateful for that union because she has a pension and really good healthcare at 95 – sadly she has Alzheimers by the way.
it’s outcome.
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p>Since the federal Department of Education has tried to hijack our education system in the 1970s public education, despite the billions of dollars thrown at it, has failed our children. Precisely because it’s about feelings and not learning. Let’s get back to actually teaching students the basics and not care so much about their feelings.
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p>It has turned out to be more cruel to care about their feelings, because we are setting them up for a lifetime of failure.
If a kid is HUNGRY they don’t pay attention and they don’t learn.
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p>If no one tests vision and the kid needs glasses and cannot see (somethingy mother took care of so many times I lost count) they don’t learn.
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p>If they cannot read, they are lost in an American classroom. Your coment is a hijack and adds no value.
because it implies that most kids who do poorly do so due to some easily cured handicap that we could remedy with a bit of glass, or some food.
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p>Right.
…before the federal “takeover”? Education is a NATIONAL issue tied to both our competitiveness and security. I’m embarrassed as an American how far below other nations we rank in some areas, for supposedly the number one nation on the planet. Plus, I care about the education of every American child, not just Bay Staters. I have yet to see the kind of federal takeover I’d actually like to see.
Schools have improved dramatically over the past four decades, when the Fed Govt began funding education. We have data from the NAEP, which was designed specifically to measure the trend. Here’s a snapshot:
In Math among 9 year-olds, the average score among white students was up 25 points, the average score among black students was up 34 points, the average score among Hispanic students was up 32 points.
(page 35 & 36 of the pdf here)
On the NAEP, a change of 10 points is roughly equivalent to a grade level.
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p>So, the Federal Government’s efforts to improve education, as part of the liberal tradition of LBJ and Ted Kennedy, are working.
That’s not “hijacking.”
Your argument seems based on emotion. It’s somewhat like saying God exists because everyone in fox holes believes in Him.
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p>Some people produce much better work for financial rewards.
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p>Thought workers, not so much. There’s a lot of evidence that financial rewards (rather than prestige, recognition, and the like) can have a significant deleterious effect.
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p>I’m reminded here of how people try to treat cats as if they were dogs. The same structure and hierarchy that will make a dog thrive will make you and the cat quite miserable.
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p>So too here: treating teachers like salesmen does not produce better teachers.
We’ll keep that in mind during negotiations for the next teacher contract.
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p>Hey! Maybe the’d like to have a nice certificate or a new title instead of a raise!
I suppose you got carried away with that long tradition of conservatives advocating for equal pay for women.
and I can’t agree that financial awards are at all likely to have a deleterious effect on my performance. Being recognized as employee of the year definitely feels nice, but getting a bonus or raise really shows that your company recognizes your work.
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p>There is always a risk of being complacent, but that is true even if you don’t get any raises or bonuses.
For years, this kind of crap was justification for paying women lower wages – “Oh, they don’t support a family or anything. We can get away with just giving them a nice award or call them a pretty name. They just want to know we appreciate them, they’re so emotionally needy, the poor dears. It’s not like they were digging ditches or really WORKING or anything…”
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p>And guess which ‘thought worker’ profession was dominated by women? TEACHERS.
are an incentive to robbery. Most people don’t do it, even so.
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p>I appreciate you bringing up the article, Joel; and indeed there’s a Vanderbilt study questioning whether performance pay raises test scores. And it would seem to be another leak in the Good Ship Michelle Rhee.
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p>But I have to agree with the other commenters that “incentive to cheat” is not your strongest point.
Anytime you increase a punishment for failing a test, you increase the chance someone will try to cheat. That’s not the strongest argument against test-and-punish that’s out there by a long shot.
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p>As said elsewhere on this thread, the test-and-punish system dreamed up by conservatives and adopted by some progressives is diametrically opposed to what other countries are doing (I won’t say “better-preforming countries” because Massachusetts holds its own against Finland, Singapore, etc., when not dragged down by Texas et al). And irony of ironies, the test results of Michelle Rhee’s own students were undistinguished enough that Ms. Rhee would be a likely casualty of the system she’s now promoting.
Talk to anyone in retail. Many workers steal from the company registers. If you know what to look for, you can spot this quite often. Watch someone ringing up a dollar amount, open the drawer, and then hit “clear” on the register. This kind of theft is rampant among minimum wage workers. If there is no inventory control system in place to discourage it, they steal more.
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p>The plans they come up with to steal are amazing. I once read that the beer jockeys at Fenway used to be monitored by how many cups they had left — they compared the number of cups sold to the to the money in the register. So what happened? Employees began fishing cups out of trash cans so they could sell beers without putting the money in the till.
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p>People do what they have to do to not have their lives ruined, especially if they think they’re getting a raw deal. If a teacher gets put into a classroom of transient students and is told “you will no longer be a teacher if these kids don’t pass the test”, and that teacher feels that the evaluation is unfair, I think a fair amount would resort to either cheating or using highly questionable tactics to achieve the goal. Keep in mind that most teachers in low-performing districts teach to the test — something that basically circumvents the whole concept of testing.
that this USA Today article is part of a larger series of articles; they’ve been doing research for months (the links internal to the article take you to various other articles). I’ve been following this closely from Worcester (for obvious reasons).
JimC and CMD suggest that union messaging has been ineffective. In part, that has been true. The other part is that education policy is the most demagogued policy in the state. For the last 20 years, we’ve been bowled over by a neo-liberal juggernaut, a market-oriented tsunami that has left little room for pinricpled dissent. Educator criticism concerning ed reform has always dismissed as the self-interested blather of unionized employees.
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p>I agree with Dad when he states that the MTA has taken a more proactive approach. The recent education evaluation proposal that came out of the DESE’s task force is remarkably thorough and don’t factor test scores any more than their reliability deserve.
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p>JimC cites a Time poll:
Stated this way, only an idiot or someone who is well-informed would disagree with the statement.
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p>You’d get a different answer if respondents were asked, “Do you think teachers should be paid according to their students test scores?”
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p>You’d get a different answer if you asked, “Given that student test scores can be off by as much as 20 points, do you think teachers should be paid according to their students test scores?”
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p>You’d get a different answer if you asked, “Should teachers teach to the test in order to earn higher pay?”
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p>You’d get a different answer if you asked, “Should teachers be paid for test scores if the result is a narrowing of the curriculum?”
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p>You’d get a different answer if you asked, “Should teachers receive merit pay for test scores even if they don’t teach students a subject that is tested?”
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p>I’m teaching Plato and epistemology in preparation for Orwell’s 1984. Let me tell you, the philosophy wouldn’t be on the MCAS test, which even on the best questions, doesn’t care much about the ability to reason or apply a critical lens. If I were paid for test scores, I would personally be better off doing test prep. I’m actually a whiz at MCAS prep. The real question is, are my students better off?
I am highlighting a terminology problem.
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p>On one side, teachers unions and elected school board busybodies.
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p>On the other side, “merit pay.”
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p>All these speeches you guys are making are great, but we have already lost this one. We better think about reframing.
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p>
But the war isn’t lost. At least not here.
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p>The proposed evaluation system the DESE task force, for example, is rigorous and fair. It would improve teacher effectiveness and student learning.
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p>The issue with its implementation will be cost because it requires more hours spent on observing teachers, and administrators already have more than enough to do.
we’ll have to train administrators to do a better job on evaluations.
And it’s all going to cost more.
However, when a teacher’s union does get on board with a comprehensive proposal — which is why the privatizers around Deval will never adopt it, it’s comprehensive — it’s pretty much ignored by the media.
Does anyone have any evidence that merit pay results in teachers teaching better?
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p>In the case of the really good teachers I know, they are already taking the extra steps to make their students successful (in both measurable and non-measurable ways). Offering them extra money beyond what a peer earns doesn’t seem likely to make them do even more. But that’s only the teachers I happen to know.
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p>I’m all for higher pay for teachers, but I don’t think that pitting them against each other is the way to do it.
Why would merit pay pit teachers against each other? That would be like discouraging teachers from getting an advanced degree that would qualify them for a higher salary, because it might take away from other teachers.
Well, the new ideology is that higher degrees are less important than innate talent or youthful idealism and energy, or something. And yes, merit pay would pit teachers against each other.
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p>The assumption seems to be that there are certain exceptional teachers who can be identified by these [pseudo]scientific methods and then would be paid more for their merit. Their “added value” can be isolated from all other factors and influences. Other lesser teachers would be paid less or gotten rid of quickly, once teachers unions are rendered toothless.
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p>There’s also the argument advanced by Bill Gates and Arne Duncan of late that with a really good teacher, class size doesn’t matter, so the small and shrinking pie can be allocated to these good teachers fronting really big classes.
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p>Many teachers understand, however, that their ability to succeed with their students rests not only on all the teachers who came before them and laid the foundation for later learning, but on their colleagues, including teachers whose subjects are not tested but may be having a huge influence on a particular kids’ interest in school, self confidence or feeling of self worth. For kids with special needs, any success on a math or reading test might be influenced by the occupational therapist, who works with a kid on sensory integration, or a physical therapist, who helps make it possible for a kid to sit through an exam. How do you tease out all these, and a myriad other factors?
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p>It is truly a collegial profession and a collaborative enterprise, like so many others.
And you assert a finite and shrinking ‘pie’.
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p>Is this like that ‘societal impact’ way of judging outcomes?
PP, whether by design or accident, you’ve summarized my point for me. We’re experimenting on kids by using ideas dreamed up by people who are not educators but assume their ideas will work, with no data to back it up.
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p>I like what I read a few days ago, maybe here or somewhere else. If all of these smart CEOs think teachers should be rewarded based on outcomes, why not try that experiment on them in their jobs first?
Here’s a example, which I will argue is typical, of a student with whom I am very familiar.
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p>When in third grade, she was convinced that she could not do math. She would complete her assignments quickly, without worrying about whether they were done correctly, in order to get to something else she understood or enjoyed more. It was not a matter of ability – it was purely an issue with effort, and math required more effort out of her than the other subjects.
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p>By sixth grade, she was pulling straight A’s in math.
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p>If you just looked at the test results, the merit pay would probably go to the teachers in the latter grades. Yet it was her third grade teacher who, coordinating with her parents, recognized the problem and worked with her to realize that she could do the work if she put the time into it. It took a few years for the lessons to sink in and for her to “catch up”. But it is really that third grade teacher who deserves the most credit for the later math successes of this student. Yet the only people who really know this are the parents.
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p>So, for merit pay proponents, how do you propose to identify the educators who are most deserving?
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p>I wouldn’t exactly call myself a “merit pay proponent,” since I’m not necessarily convinced of its efficacy, but I’d suggest that the best way to identify the educators is by giving the principal more discretion to determine merit pay distributions. That way, it’s not just all about a test without considerations of mitigating factors.
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p>I have to agree, and even go further. In some cases, I think the tests fail to identify the causes of a student’s success (and even reward the wrong party) as in my example above, and I believe the biggest losers in such a system are elementary teachers. These are the folks who set the foundation for what comes later and testing at that grade level will not show the true impact of those teachers. A student who develops a love of reading by third grade will likely have great speed and comprehensive skills by high school. She might do well in a HS class that isn’t taught well because she can get through the material quickly and effectively, not because of who teaches that particular class.
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p>Another thing to consider is the extent of the mitigating factors. A really good teacher in a class where the majority of the students live in families near or below the poverty line might deserve an extra something for simply keeping the kids in school and their heads above water.
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p>I think that accurately assessing teacher effectiveness can be done, but doing it right is way too “squishy” and subjective for those who are currently driving the education reform wagon.
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p>They teach the students who have stable family lives, live a community that prioritizes education, and enjoy the greatest socioeconomic advantages.
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p>Wait, you mean that isn’t it?
For those who want to read even more, there is a related post on DKos: The broken legged donkey of education reform.
Well, this excellent thread is now so long, it’s hard to pick up the thread. Based on my 35-years in the public school classroom, I would only make these three modest points:
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p>1) We had a merit program in my school back in the 1970s. Pretty much every agreed that the bonuses were handed out in an arbitrary manner and it was abolished.
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p>2) Decent pay was important to me because I needed to help support my family, but it had zero to do with how hard I worked in school. Do you even want teachers who will work hard only if they get paid more? I’d say, they should find another profession.
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p>3) The purpose of the current proposal for test score based evaluations and Merit Pay is not rooted in a concern for the standard of living of teachers, but rather it is all about chaining teachers and the very meaning of education to these state standardized tests.
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p>By the way, I do believe in rigorous classroom evaluation.
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p>Bill Schechter
It’s kind of funny that teachers generally don’t want merit pay. It’s being thrust upon us.
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p>I make 10-20 thousand less than friends with a similar amount of education that work in the business sector. As long as my salary keeps up with inflation, I’m happy enough. I know people who make three times what I make, but I chose to teach.
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p>I know fringies will say we reject merit pay because we’re lazy and unionized and don’t care about what happens to children, but the fact is that we want to be paid “enough,” not an indefinite amount more. The fact is that most of us are intrinsically motivated to do a good job. Most of us can improve, most everyone everywhere can improve, but the issue isn’t the lack of incentive.
I have enough confidence in what I do that I’m pretty sure my salary would go up. I’m just waiting to read about an accurate way to measure the merit of a teacher.
particularly.
Leavitt pointed this out in a whole Freakanomics chapter focusing on CPS, it failed miserably and led to wide scale cheating. A more recent example, paying teachers 100k a year entry, but getting rid of tenure (not unions), seemed better. Basically, teachers were evaluated they are now, and it was not a ‘merit’ based system but scores and quality went up. Bad teachers could be more easily fired since tenure did not ensure them lifetime jobs regardless of merit, but the unions still could protect teachers and establish a good level of rules and regulations to deal with discipline issues. It seemed like the best of both worlds between upping teacher pay and reform, although it was implemented on a small basis in NYC and thus the class size decrease might play a role in the results.
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p>I’m not blaming you, jconway, but that’s another privatization myth. Teachers can be fired for cause, but schools aren’t willing to take the time and care to do it. Instead, they fail miserably and then blame the system for their own incompetence. It’s akin to blaming the manufacturer for making it too hard to change the oil — without having read the manual before giving it a shot.
As long as the law treats these jobs as a property interest, then it is expensive and cumbersome to remove poor teachers. Hence, not a myth.
I’m not sure what you mean by “a property interest”. And it’s not really law as much as it is contract — which tend to treat teachers as “expensive to replace, so let’s not fire someone because our nephew wants a job”.
Two people reading the newspaper in rooms with 15 kids and paying dues is twice as much dues as a teacher in a room with 30 kids so lets not fire anyone ever.
Mind you, I’ve seen more relatives of little talent working in the private sector than two people reading a newspaper in rooms with 15 kids by a long shot.