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As Teachers Struggle with Obama’s Reform Agenda, ‘Merit Pay’ Gets a Demerit
More input = more output. Pay more, get a better product. Unfortunately, the rules of the market economy don't translate well in a classroom, where the input may be an overworked, underpaid teacher, and the output springs from an unpredictable mix of fickle young minds, multiple cultures and languages, and the pressure of standardized tests, tattered books and not enough chairs.
Could that exhausted teacher do a better job if she got extra pay? For years, schools and policymakers have experimented with controversial "merit pay" schemes that tie salaries to students' test scores and other measures of achievement. But critics say merit pay only perpetuates an anti-intellectual obsession with punitive tests, reduces teaching into an antiseptic assembly-line process, and erodes the authority of educators, unions and communities.
New empirical evaluations of "pay for performance" programs in Chicago and New York City uncovered a counter-intuitive result: more pay doesn't seem to yield corresponding gains in academic achievement or stabilizing the teaching workforce.
The latest findings could impact national education reforms, since Education Secretary Arne Duncan is now crafting teacher incentive policies that reflect his experience with merit pay schemes as head of Chicago public schools. The administration has integrated teacher-incentive programs into its guidelines for schools seeking a bite of the Race to the Top fund-a pot of several billion dollars dangled before states to encourage them to follow Duncan's reform blueprint.
Race to the Top rewards school districts for "innovations" aimed at the aggressive overhaul of the "lowest-achieving" schools and revamping academic standards and testing systems. While these programs are framed as common-sense improvements, grassroots education activists chafe at the competitive, market-based ideology that has carried over from the Bush administration's brilliantly incompetent No Child Left Behind.
In the Chicago study, the research group Mathematica examined the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), which offered bonus payments in K-8 schools averaging $1,100 in the first year and about $2,600 in the second. The money was awarded based on promotion to "mentor" positions, along with "value added to student achievement and observed performance in the classroom." Comparing the teachers' performance over two years with that of a control group, the study found "no significant impacts on student achievement or teacher retention." Researchers also conceded that the study was limited because they "did not have reliable data on the quality of teachers retained" and did not track teachers who left their schools.
The New York study, led by Columbia University researchers, focused on a cluster of high-poverty schools with a reward system based on schoolwide bonuses for improvements on state reading and math exams. As with Chicago, the investigation found "little effect... on student achievement in the first or second year of the program."
In their discussion on possibly reasons why the project might fail, researchers argued, "Performance-based compensation is only feasible when reasonable measures of inputs or output are available," and that unlike, say, piece-rate factory work, "Education is a complex good."
Indeed, the quality and quantity of student learning is near-impossible to measure strictly through tests or grades. The school experience is contingent on many social factors outside the classroom, including the quality of a child's previous teachers, along with social and environmental factors like parental involvement and the child's health.
In both studies, researchers flagged possible flaws in the design of the programs. For example, incentives can get muddled when tied to schoolwide gains as opposed to individual teachers' performance. This suggests that rewarding the entire school for improvements might encourage individual teachers to "free-ride," with little motivation to change their routines.
Whether the problems stemmed from faulty implementation or the basic theory of merit pay, the studies skirt the fundamental question of what constitutes "merit" in a society in which intellectual development is increasingly at odds with consumer capitalism.
Bill Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and longtime education activist, told In These TImes that financial incentives for teachers tend to treat education as a mere commodity. In a market economy, he said, "If you sell more used cars, you get a bigger bonus." School, where teachers tend to be underpaid and overworked, isn't as straightforward.
"There's not one teacher I know in America who is going to work harder because they think they're going to get a bonus," Ayers argued. "They're working plenty hard, they're killing themselves, with very little support. They're having their autonomy stripped from them, and they're having the meaning of their work reduced and constrained."
Like the media assault on teacher unions and the proliferation of overhyped charter schools, Ayers said, differential pay policies feed into a broader agenda to privatize and homogenize education, reducing a humanistic endeavor to a commercial one:
The change they envision is going to destroy not only the school system as we know it, it's going to mean that only the wealthiest kids and the kids in private schools will have access to art and physical education and sports and games and creativity, and the rest of us are just getting trained to be drones in the system.
Mark Simon, of the education advocacy group Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership, said that proponents of merit pay "assume that something good will happen if we reward teachers for high test scores, when in reality only bad things happen when teachers know that they can get money for bumps in test scores by their kids." Suggesting that arbitrary bonuses encourage schools to cheat the system, he added, "The curriculum is narrowed and indefensible things are done to meet the need for score gains."
Still, while progressive education activists and unions have generally chafed at the concept of performance pay, some reform advocates, such as the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, insist that bonus schemes can be targeted to help struggling public schools by attracting more effective teachers and in turn raising the quality of instruction for underserved students. Earlier research, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, indicates that such incentives could work if they are more holistic, "based on a variety of measures of teacher performance, including both student growth on standardized assessments and rigorous evaluations of teacher performance."
But none of these studies broach the ethical question at the heart of the merit pay debate: who benefits when we turn schools over to the rules of the marketplace? New York University education scholar and activist Deborah Meier said pay-for-performance policies aren't focused so much on enhancing the educational experience, but pushing a perverse ideology onto kids and teachers. "The value system is simple," she told ITT. "Whatever promotes your financial interest is good."
All sides of the reform debate believe teachers who succeed in building children's minds should be paid fairly. But how do we place a dollar value on teaching a child to read, to think about the world outside their neighborhood, or to challenge injustice and question authority? Bonuses for "performance" might look good on a balance sheet, but the really important lessons are priceless.
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35 Comments so far
Show AllLook. I have taught for 35 years. Love it. Respect what I do. And...I'm doin' just fine, thank you very much! I give my students a private school education in a rural southern school environment. Proud of it too. Merit pay is not going to change that!
These policy people are concentrated idiots. They have no clue what it takes. But, they are going to FIX IT. It is so much political fodder for their next campaign, that's all.
Spare me.
The joke is this. George Bush had no clue. But, HE was going to fix this education "problem."
Now, we have 2 basketball playing jocks, Arne and Barach, and they are going to fix the problem. Cryin' shame. The more I watch these policymakers, the more frightening they become. They strut onto the national stage and proclaim this and that. The rest of us run around trying to make sense of what they are hotairing.
Cryin' shame.
weary one
Well said!
The smell of JOCK STRAPS is already overpowering in our public schools, and the gas of two more SUPER JOCKS like Barack and Arnie, add to the stench. Quality teachers are already wearing gas masks. Good teachers will not fold under the gas attack, but instead, thrive through creative insubordination.
Keep saying it teach. And thank you for your service to your country.
Joe
If only a limited amount of extra money is available and teachers' merit pay absorbs much of it, then teachers within a school are competing for the same scant resource. Does competition make for a good learning environment for students? I cannot think so. If a teacher came up with a great lesson plan, how willing would he/she be to share it with other teachers? Maybe not so much. We all work together to educate students; we are not simply individuals each out to get as much as we can. Merit pay highlights those characteristics that our present threadbare capitalistic system rewards: greed and selfishness. It fails as a way to reach all students.
We agree on the bad "merits" of merit pay. You'd have administrastion rewarding cronies, numbers being juggled just like NCLB, etc.
How about we start by firing bad teachers? Most bad teachers are well known within their schools. Most produce poor results unless their students can overcome them and learn in spite of them.
When teachers are first hired, they are on probationary status. They do not have tenure. In my state, probationary status lasts for five years. There is plenty of time to not rehire incompetents during this period of time.
After getting tenure, teachers should not be summarily dismissed without due process. That is essentially what tenure is. It means that deficiencies are identified and methods of improvement are outlined. Evaluation becomes an every year phenomenon rather than once every three years. I believe teachers should be given this sort of due process. If no improvement is made after two years or so, the teacher may be dismissed. This does happen, in spite of what some conservatives say.
It is important to understand how "bad teachers" are identified and it's not as easy as you think. Are "bad teachers" unable to stimulate interest in a subject? Do their students perform poorly on standardized tests? What if they put in little effort but their students do OK? What if they are splendid coaches but cannot teach? What if they are hated by students but still teach the subject reasonably well? What if teachers can reach one population very well--say, those with learning disabilities--but cannot do much with other populations? It is never as easy as people outside of education imagine.
"It is important to understand how "bad teachers" are identified and it's not as easy as you think"
Point taken. I shouldn't have given the impression that I thought it was easy. I would say that after getting tenure, some teashers "quit" as you know.
I live in a right to work state and I don't see any real difference between getting rid of teachers here and in a union state. Unions aren't the problem.
I also think that many teachers are limited by decisions made at the state level and also by their own decisions to teach what they please sometimes.
It is not that hard to determine the educational level of students with a comination of standardized tests containing questions that any student should know and Socratic questioning.
PE and sports are very imnportant and hire people to teach that.
In "Right to Work" states unions cannot compel all teachers to join the union within an organized school district. There is an "open shop" in which some teachers will pay union dues, while others will not--even though the contract bargained by the union usually applies to all teachers. That means some teachers will pay all the costs of getting a decent contract, while others go along for the free ride. In practice contracts are not as advantageous for teachers in "Right to Work" states.
Tenure is a state-wide law that exists in most states. I believe Wyoming is a state that lacks tenure. I have had no first-hand experience with that state, but some years ago I talked with a teacher who taught there and he said that teachers could be not rehired at the end of a school year for many reasons including disagreement with the superintendent over personal issues, different social and political values, too high a salary, etc. I do not know if that situation still exists or not. If it does, it is a good argument for having tenure on the books.
Good point.
The mechanism for that is already in place - has been since the start of teachers' "unions" and education laws. With Due Process, a bad teacher can be let go. And the first 2 years of a teaching contract are probationary.
The problem is that many times they are not let go, not that they can't be let go.
Look what capitalism is currently doing to our society.
Who would want to promote this ecological, political, and economic disaster that we have on our hands?
The people who are already benefiting from the broken system, not the kids.
Maybe we can start by firing bad administrators who don't "get results" instead of blaming everything on the workers in the system. I think Arne "I can crash Chicago's public schools in ten years or less!" Duncan.
Only when society recognizes that teaching is a profession--the same as medicine, social work and law--will the education problems find a solution. Professionals have to police themselves to weed out the bad practitioners. But unfortunately, most citizens have more contact with teachers than they do any other profession. Those who think they never benefited from those years of education are the first to jump on the bandwagon of politicians who scream about "overpaid" teachers. Those of us who recognize the benefits of education also can identify four or five (or more) teachers in our experiences who ignited the fires of curiosity or turned us on to reading or convinced us that math or science was within our grasp. All the discussion about "bonuses" or "performance incentives" ignores the professionalism required of good teachers. And this will continue until such a time as administrators are required to spend at least 40% of their time teaching in classrooms. Trying to change the system based on past experience makes for a system that used to work instead of one that works. As in any profession there are tried and true things that never change, but adapting them to an ever changing world requires knowledge of that world. This current system rewards those who "escaped" the classroom for the "office". So most of the administrators are persons who either failed as teachers or lost their sense of professionalism and chased after the buck.
A simple solution is available. Double the salaries of every teacher in the public schools in the country. That would make the job a "profession," one that people would respect because the teachers would make a reasonable amount of money.
To those who object to giving more money to the bad teachers, I respond by saying they will eventually retire and be replaced by very bright young ones, ones who might have become engineers or doctors, but who would rather teach. And the schools of education would have to change because the brightest students would not put up with the crap the schools have them do now.
Unfortunately, this solution cannot possibly be implemented because the school systems (about 5000 of them) are locally controlled, and are run by yahoos like the ones who just rewrote the history curriculum in Texas.
I think the main reason teachers go into administration is for the money. I've seen good teachers become principals and bad teachers, too. One outstandingly bad teacher who later ascended to administration arranged his classroom such that he never had to teach. He simply created a box of "lessons" based upon study of the textbook which were kept in a box beside the door. Students filed in, grabbed their "lesson" and spent all period digging out the answers from the text. This went on for weeks. Of course, since the room was quiet, passing administrators would praise him for his classroom control. Can't say as the students attributed much enthusiasm to the man, though. They hated the class.
Perfect example.
Why are administrators paid so much more than top tier teachers? Their jobs really don't justify it at all.
They are paid more because they carry more responsibility. That is, all the activities at the school need to be approved by the principal in accordance with district policies: athletics, field trips, discipline, classroom learning activities, and more. Their work year is slightly longer than teachers. As a former teacher, I believe they actually deserve a salary bump over that of teachers. I, for one, would not relish the confrontations with parents and unruly kids on a daily basis. Teachers have occasional set-to's with them, but principals have to deal with them all the time. It was not for me. I'd rather teach any day.
Sigh, it's really too late for Merit Pay. Wall St. has shown that "failure" gets the bonus.
The " myth of the bad teacher," yes, that is always around. If the class fails, then fail the teacher? Well, as the article states, first factor in the parents, the economics, the neighborhood, the languages, and you see, there are not enough fingers on both hands to assign blame.
What to do, what to do? Ah, how about treating the cause? As each child comes to the end of the school year, a retention test is given. Those who fail, return the following year to repeat the same grade. NO EXCEPTIONS!
Peer, pressure and fear of being the REAL child left behind does wonders! When I was in the 8th grade and in a public education school, we were told that if WE didn't pass the Constitution test, then WE were coming back to that same junior high the next year. WHAT! we would have to hang out with those dorky 7th graders? HORRORS! WE were ready for the magic, grown -up world of high school; WE weren't "little kids" anymore! Amazingly, everyone passed.
The high school exit exam is supposed to accomplish the same thing. It too, is amazing as so many are now claiming exemptions for their child. I think if I hear this phrase one more time, by educators, media, pundits etc., that " Failure will hurt their self esteem," then I really think that I am going to have a projectile vomit attack!
PLEASE, people learn more from FAILURE than from all of those warm and fuzzy USELESS awards to make everyone FEEL GOOD, and at the same time too.
Factory farms, factory schools...what a future we have. Give us the poor, the tired, the huddled masses LEARNING to breathe smog of the "bubble test," and America, energes into the 21st century as the "Airhead Wonder."
PLEASE America, no more transparency, we need INDIVIDUAL STUDENT ACCOUNTABILITY and we need it now! NO EXCEPTIONS!
"Merit pay" isn't either, but a way to increase central control over the behaviour of students and educators.
Ah, the model of the market place! Enron. BP. Goldman-Sachs.
General Motors. AIG. Toyota. Lehman Brothers.
Such quality and success to emulate!
Such results to deserve "merit pay"!
As a retired teacher who worked for 32 years in a public school district and loved teaching, I realize that our antquated, inefficient, unfair system of funding our public schools by ever-increasing property taxes is a huge part of the reason for the attack on public schools and teachers.
Meanwhile, the Ruling Class, including Obama & Arne Duncan, would like nothing better than public "schools" (factories of indoctrination) which use standardized tests instead of teaching critical thinking skills to "produce" assembly lines of unquestioning worker-bees for the maintenance of the U.S. Global Empire. Meanwhile, most of those in the Ruling Class send their children to expensive, exclusive private schools while they cut budgets for public education.
The result is a perfect storm of attacks on public school education. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, we DO need to reform the ways students are taught. We know there are different kinds of intelligence as well as different styles of learning, and our children are learning all the time from the various media of our culture, both positive and negative. But the ideologies behind these attacks on public school education are anti-education as well as anti-democracy. Educators, especially those who have spent many fruitful years in classrooms, not know-nothing political hacks and justifiably angry taxpayers, should be spearheading educational reform. But that would endanger the ideologues' plans for indoctrination factories.
Thank you..great post..
Well said. And thank you for your service to your country.
Joe
Excellent post!
The first step in giving the US a decent educational system is to give the teachers a professional salary. AFTER that and only after that it will be possible to turn the schools into something worthwhile.
Who determines "merit"? Administrators? Politicians? Will the best teachers prevail or the best at ingratiating?
One of the major problems with the public school system is the inability for educators to teach how to make abstract lessons into something useful and practical. The students understand this and lack the enthusiasm or the ownership because it is alien to them. The teacher however, cannot teach anything truly practical because it is not part of the curriculum which is designed for the high stakes testing. Furthermore, the good creative teachers eventually leave the classroom because they cannot afford to remain teachers therefore, perpetuating this dysfunctional system. Dr. Alan Singer of Hofstra University has been writing numerous articles on this subject matter and has stated what Chen has stated in this article that Duncan and Obama do not want to look at the real issues of poverty because then they will be forced to do something about it. It is the old mantra out of sight out of mind.
Perhaps we should junk the Department of Education? It seems to cause more problems than help.
Thank you. You made two very important points.
Testing distorts the curriculum away from what has been found to be most effective kinds of teaching, especially in science, which is my interest. Obama did not appoint a Comer or a Ravitch to lead on educational policy. He appointed a basketball buddy and yuppie minded administrative type. They are both willfully ignorant about pedagogy. The main discernable goals of this "Race to the Top" policy are to privatize schooling and to break unions. They do not want those annoying teachers to have any say in how schools are run. Teachers must obey and keep their criticisms to themselves while the administrators, good, bad, or clueless, fully implement the undemocratic corporate model.
Poverty is the gorilla in the room when it comes to education. Poor students come to school (or skip it) with too many problems like untreated physical, mental or emotional illness in the family, no money for food or to do laundry, no hot water to wash or bathe. They often have to do child care on school days. I could go on. Merit pay for teachers will not help this because no matter how good teachers are they cannot fully compensate for the problems the kids have. So on the average merit pay will drive teachers to work in neighborhoods with a higher level of parental health, education and income. Likewise privatization and more testing will not help.
What works? Stable funding, rich curriculum, small classes, decent pay and professional treatment for teachers and respectful collaboration between school and parents. Obama and Duncan know this. After all that is what Obama and all the politicians choose for their own children. The day that politicians choose public education for their own kids is the day when we will know that any reforms make sense.
Joe
An important problem facing American education today is spawned by the No Child Left Behind Act: merit pay. Among undesirable spin-offs is the rise of such enthusiasts as Willard R. Daggett and Phillip C. Schlechty whose books present a negative assessment of public education and promote radical reinvention of schools.
The proposals are consistently from the top down and begin with the premise that the NCLB and its state assessment tests are a trumpet call for shaking up the schoolhouse or redesigning the school and their true agenda is to publish and sell their products and books. The sales techniques bury both the agenda and the negative assessment philosophy beneath the sugar-coating of packages named Successful Practices Network or Character Education or catchwords such as Rigor, Relevance, Relationships and Reflections (Reconstitution—wholesale replacement of staff).
What such “charismatic” leaders accomplish is a deflection of resources and a skewing of the real solutions needed in the classroom. There is no method or technique or package that can replace a well-educated teacher adept in his subject area.
Daggetteers find fertile fields in America's school boards wherein to plant their disinformation and almost extreme religious devotion to breaking with orthodoxy. Of our five-member local school board, one never graduated from high school! And school administrators? Their high salaries do not indicate anything satisfactory about their educational accomplishments. Our newest superintendent (our FL district has had 9 since 1973 when I arrived) has a starting salary of $240,000 plus benefits and the spoils-system-hiring of two lackeys for $170,000 each, not to mention his making room for and importation of a principal, an assistant principal, and a custodial service from his adopted home state, Tennessee.
It's interesting to note some data to undermine the popular regard most communities extend to such education bosses: Mean Verbal - 429, Mean Quantitative - 520, Total - 949
Those are the mean Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores of applicants for graduate study in Education Administration tested between July 1, 2000 and June 30, 2003. Of 51 intended areas of graduate study, applicants in 45 fields had higher Total GRE scores than applicants in Education Administration. Candidates in 5 fields — Home Economics, Social Work, Student Counseling, Early Childhood and Special Education — had lower total GRE scores.
Verbal and Quantitative scores follow the same pattern. Applicants in 46 fields had higher Verbal scores than candidates in Education Administration. Applicants in 4 fields had lower Verbal scores. (The data seem to explain why books, articles and Op-Eds by education administrators are rarities.) What these figures mean is that school boards and school administrators are ill-equipped to fend off the wacky plans proposed by such charismatic speakers as Daggett and Schlechty. The consequences are truly horrible for students and their communities.
Billions of tax dollars buy the radical school redesign packages adopted by such organizations as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
The merit and incentive pay for educators is only one example of how effective such "groupthink" is in promoting schemes that merely place billions of tax dollars into the wrong pockets—and cause untold agony for teachers and their “teams.”
Good information, dwyerj1. "Successful Practices Network or Character Education or catchwords such as Rigor, Relevance, Relationships and Reflections (Reconstitution—wholesale replacement of staff)." I hate this self actualization marketing talk, usually backed up by nothing but hot air or perhaps a Powerpoint slide show.
Thanks.
Joe
BTW: I've taught 41 years. My students, their parents, and most fellow teachers would place my merit very high. Administrators would not. I've always had a great aversion to the practice of osculum infame. So most administrators--and I've had hundreds--have had a great aversion to me. They also seem to resent my having four degrees in my subject from a first-tier university.
Why oh why does America keep putting idiots in charge?