Did policy makers read the study published last week by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) showing that merit-pay for teachers may be ineffective and have unintended negative consequences.
EPI economist Joydeep Roy, co-editor with NYU's Sean Corcoran of this series, noted that "Policymakers should probably think twice before they transfer to education the pay system that has helped generate the global financial crisis."
Merit pay plans are less common in the private sector than people think, research shows. Only one in seven employees is covered by a merit pay plan and most of those workers are in real estate or sales.
In the proposed plans for teachers supported by Obama and by the US Department of Education in their Race to the Top grants, merit pay plans tie teachers' pay to the scores their students earn on standardized math and reading tests. Advocates of this approach base their support on two assumptions: first, that merit pay is long-established and widespread in the private sector, and second, that students' test scores are a reliable way to gauge how well teachers are doing their jobs. Both assumptions are faulty, according to the EPI research report.
In Teachers, Performance Pay, and Accountability: What Education Should Learn from Other Sectors, researchers Scott J. Adams, John S. Heywood and Richard Rothstein examine the evidence that underlies these assumptions, concluding that the use of merit pay systems has negative consequences that often block the larger goal of improving the quality of services.
Daniel Pink, author of the best selling book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, has an great presentation on YouTube discussing what motivates skilled labor people to do excellent work and surprisingly, it isn't money.
The three reasons that people are motivated to do excellent work according to Pink are
Pink says, that "When the profit motive become unmoored from the purpose motive bad things happen -- like poor quality, shoddy work." We don't want teachers who are focused primarily on money and not on our kids.
Studies show that teachers are already purpose driven and while merit pay may temporarily improve performance over all it has no positive impact. Teachers need to be given more respect, more autonomy, better overall pay, supplies, and more classroom support to master their teaching skills. Merit pay doesn't work for the workplace and is a terrible idea for schools.
We need to stop looking for the silver bullet and start doing what we know works: supporting teachers in the classroom. The solution sounds too simple in our high tech world, but as I long time teacher, I know it works.
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Todd Farley: Teacher Merit Pay: Why Test Scores Shouldn't Dictate Salaries
The one thing that even the weakest unions mean to do is secure respect for its members as people in the workplace. Merit pay at the will of the employer is a tool of discipline. The workers and their unions tend to look upon it critically. As they are right to do.
#1 - The parents are to blame. As a group, they fail to instill a burning desire for learning in their children.
#2 - Discipline is absent in most schools. Learning is all about discipline; no discipline, no learning.
#3 - Good teachers; there are too few of them. As a teacher (corporate instructor), it has become abundantly clear over the years that some people can teach and some people just have that job description. I'd "guesstimate" that only one in five teachers is truly a teacher, the rest are just government funded babysitters.
Rewarding great teachers for their skills must be done and the sooner the better. Developing a reasonable evaluation technique won't be easy, but computerization & the bell curve are a good start on a working algorithm. That formula should include every detail of a student's history: test scores, homework grades, classroom participation grades, disciplinary records, student evaluations, peer evaluations, manager evaluations and probably a dozen other quantifiable properties.
Evaluating metrics is science. Efforts to prevent teacher evaluations are obstructionism at its finest.
Without a way to reward the performance of great teachers, how can we increase teacher pay? What we get with the "all for one and one for all method" is a herd of government turtles lined up to get a job with decent pay, health care, retirement and vacation with an absolute minimum of effort and no responsibility to produce results.
What a laugh! (No one's laughing.)
Top pay in Bellevue, WA is $82,121, BUT only if you have a PhD and FOURTEEN years experience!
I knew I wanted to be a teacher in elementary school. I went to college, never changed my major, and graduated with a BS in Education, with specialization in Spanish. Eleven years later I earned my MS in Spanish and spent two more years working towards a PhD. I have taught children as young as age 3 all the way to adults as old as 83, including, elementary, middle, high, and university. I am now 57. In all the scenarios I've mentioned, the one thing I found to be true is that teachers are not paid a livable wage, not in the public sector and not in the private sector either. (Additionally, they often work under some deplorable conditions--overcrowded classrooms, physically shoddy buildings, long hours of preparation and grading, periods of unemployment, lack of resources, etc.) In Bellevue, WA many teachers cannot afford to live in the same city they work. The residents also vote for property lax levies for education because the state does not adequately fund the schools. Merit pay is a red herring when addressing what the teachers and schools and families really need in order to improve education.
1. Good lesson plans indicate good bookkeepers, not good teachers. It's how the plan is executed that makes the difference.
2. Peer review is tough in teaching because teachers work alone. It's one of the most solitary and self-driven professions. We may have opinions of each other, but they may be baseless.
3. Student review? Students are children. They know what they like, not what's best for them.
4. Better overall pay would lure more people into teaching and away from industry. Want to learn chemistry from a chemist or from someone who took a few courses at a teachers' college? The current lifespan of a new teacher is 5 years.
5. Teachers are generally parents with families and often second jobs. I can guarantee that DEMANDING extra hours is no way to judge a teacher's commitment. Those of us who can, do.
How about linking the parents' property tax to their children's progress in school? The biggest problem teachers face is unmotivated students with parents who are so busy defending their kids' right to be undisciplined that they haven't got time to teach them how to be responsible. Students who underperform suck the school's resources like leeches. Make parents accountable for that? Do that first, THEN tie teachers' salaries to student performance. That's a plan that might actually fly.
This will never change. The system has to deal with it.
Any good manager knows that incentive schemes can have unintended consequences - in this case teachers training kids to take the tests, rather than educating them. So if standardised test scores are not a measure of good teaching, what is? If pay rewards the behaviour you want, you will get that behaviour.
So let's look at some possible measures:
1) Student progress: where a kid is at the end of the year compared to at the beginning
2) Peer opinion: teachers are pretty good judges of who is good and who isn't (anonymous, of course)
3) Student review: kids are also pretty good judges of who is good and who isn't
4) Preparation: comparing lesson plans can help distinguish good from bad
5) Commitment: hours spent on extra-curricular activity, PTA, etc
There may be better schemes, but we need some sort of scheme to reward those who do well and get rid of the time-serving or incompetent. If not, we will continue throwing good money after bad.
If this is the formulation then it clearly is misguided.
So, why don't burned-out teachers leave? Because (at least in my state and maybe in others) teachers are required to contribute to their own teachers' retirement fund. They may not contribute to Social Security. If they decide after ten years of teaching that they want to change careers, they cash out of the retirement fund only the amount that they contributed. They get NONE of the gain. And because they haven't contributed to Social Security for ten years, they get no credits there, either.
Further, they are required to join the teachers' union and to contribute the membership fee from their paychecks. Yet the union really does little for the typical teacher. If they did, you would not hear this ridiculous talk about merit pay because the union leaders would have done their job and educated the policy makers.
I wish people would volunteer just a couple of days in a classroom. Offer to help out a teacher. You'll get more education than you expected. It will totally change your perspective on the profession.
1) tie the administrator's pay with the teachers' pay (and watch the salaries go up); house the administrators in the actual school buildings -- no air-conditioned offices downtown, and
2) make every administrator teach at least one class every day -- a subject he/she is comfortable with,
at a level he/she likes.
3) refuse to hire any Phd. in "Education." But look to hire math majors to teach math, English majors
to teach English, History majors to teach history, etc.
4) do NOT make the superintendent automatically the chairman of the school board (migawd!), and insist that elected school board members NOT abstain from voting on delicate issues for frivolous reasons (the office requires a vote; don't be squeamish). No "executive sessions" either, all open to the public.
5) do NOT make the local football/soccer/baseball/squash coach the principal of the school (yes, even if he/she has had a winning season).
6) arrange teaching schedules so that every teacher has time to prepare during the day. Teachers have families of their own to look after and they need time at home for that.
7) do NOT "punish" a student by suspending him/her (migawd! that's a reward). Make the student help with the janitorial work, wash dishes, scrub graffitti, etc.)
There's more, but my blood pressure . . ..
8) Stop hiring teachers just on the basis of the sport they're willing to coach. A winning basketball team is not a substitute for educated students.
9) Invite parents to donate time as instructional aides so they can see how the school runs and demonstrate THEIR commitment to their kids' education.
10) Stop electing uneducated businessmen to the school board. If the board members weren't good students and don't "get" the point of education, how can they be expected to make good decisions about school policy?
11) The legal profession has to stop accepting the insane, wasteful lawsuits that are generally groundless and usually thrown out of court after much budget money has been spent. It's not that hard to winnow out the "good" cases from the silly.
12) And stop telling teachers that they must not hand out failing grades! No Child Left Behind was misinterpreted (sometimes purposefully) in many districts to mean No Child Fails. No Child is Left to Flounder Without Support is what was meant by the original concept. A dose of reality is seriously in order.
Also, how many jobs that DO pay for performance is the pay based on SOMEONE ELSE'S performance???
I am reminded of the story of making high quality strawberry ice cream. You pick only the best strawberries. All the others get thrown out. You use only the finest cream. Everything else is thrown out. We teachers don't get to pick our strawberries or our cream.
With those myths out of the way perhaps we can turn our attention to providing a nurturing home environment for primary and secondary pupils and to persuading those youngsters that they can have a more rewarding (not necessarily in money) life if they will do their best to get a good education.
Teachers need support and encouragement as do pupils. It's up to parents, community members, and school administrators to provide both to teachers and pupils.