Merit Pay for Teachers: An Exchange with Marc Lampkin

Marc Lampkin of Strong American Schools wrote a piece at the Huffington Post last week about the merit pay issue, and he was kind enough to respond to my inquiry and answer five questions that I posed to him about his piece. We had a cordial exchange, and by all appearances Marc is a truly excellent guy who is passionate about public education. So I'm not going to take him to task too much here over his advocacy for merit pay.

When I conduct email interviews, I always promise to reprint the response without alteration or further response from me. I feel as though the interviewee should have the final word.

In Marc's case I have to make a one brief comments. First, when Marc talks about incentives (for example, to bring in more math and science teachers) I don't see that as merit pay, which I take to mean paying bonuses based on student performance. Based on test scores. That's what I think is a bad idea.

But Marc's answers to my questions below are very interesting, and I think he makes a strong case, which I'll respond more fully to in a day or two. (I have not embedded the pdf links because I know they can be a problem for some readers.)

1. You wrote a piece for the Huffington Post advocating pay for performance in the context of last Sunday's Presidential debate. Yet pay for performance initiatives to date have been local initiatives negotiated with local bargaining units. How do you see this in terms of presidential politics? Is interjecting the Department of Education into local teacher contracts that govern pay really an appropriate federal role in education? How do you envision the federal government having a role in merit pay initiatives?

First, I’d really like to thank you for asking such thoughtful questions and offering me the opportunity to respond on your blog. This is an important topic that deserves in-depth discussion and debate.

To answer your first question, I am certainly not advocating that the next president try to become some kind of national superintendent of schools, nor that the Department of Education get involved in local labor negotiations!



But the next president does have a unique opportunity to exercise the kind of leadership that can galvanize intelligent debate and help inspire innovative state and local efforts in this area. He or she can use the bully pulpit to raise awareness of the need to hire 2 million new teachers in this country, emphasizing that this is a historic opportunity to attract the best and brightest Americans to teaching. And he or she can leverage new or existing federal resources to give states and districts the opportunity to use teacher incentives to address their own local challenges.

Let me give you an example. About 18 months ago, Congress authorized a new program called the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), which provides grants to local districts that want to develop and implement performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools. On Monday, the New York Times highlighted local initiatives around the country to address teacher shortages. Guilford County, North Carolina, one of the places profiled, is using a TIF grant to offer recruitment incentives for math or reading teachers who agree to work in one of the county's 29 high-need schools—plus additional bonuses for raising student achievement. More about that [here] and [here] .

South Carolina recently received two TIF grants, one totaling $34 million over five years to implement a modified version of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) in 23 high-need schools in six districts and a second totaling $7 million over five years focused on Florence County.

In January, Brad Jupp, the former teacher’s union official who helped develop Denver’s new performance-based teacher compensation system, told Education Week, “This is a great first step. I’m excited to see this much seed capital out in the field.” Seed capital—be it political, intellectual, or financial—is a good way to think about the role of national leadership in this area.

2. In a system in which teachers were paid for students' test performance, how would teachers in non-testable areas be eligible for pay increases, teachers in art, phys ed, music, special ed for example?

There are two ways to provide opportunities for teachers in non-tested subjects and grade levels to participate in pay-for-performance programs. The first is to include additional measures of performance, such as doing well on objective classroom teaching evaluations. The second is to include incentives for school-wide gains in student achievement or even team-level growth in student performance (for example, teachers working in a particular grade level or on an interdisciplinary teaching team).

Let me give you just one example out of many. The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) uses multiple measures to determine performance awards, including 50 percent based on classroom evaluations and 50 percent based on student achievement growth, of which 30 percent is student learning gains in a teachers’ own classroom and 20 percent is school-wide gains. It also offers teachers considerable additional compensation for taking on extra responsibilities as Mentor Teachers and Master Teachers.

3. What other measures besides test scores would you advocate using in a pay for performance system?

First let me say that I think we need to be careful not to drive the focus too far off student learning. I agree with the recent [report]
[http://www.talentedteachers.org/pubs/successful_performance_pay_july_2007.pdf]
of the Working Group on Teacher Quality, which recommended that teachers be compensated primarily based on gains in student academic achievement.

When it comes to additional measures, we don’t take a position on which specific measures a program should incorporate. That’s really a question for state and local innovators, and I think it’s important that different approaches are being tried in different places so we can see what works best.

I will say that I believe it is critical for any additional measures to be as objective as possible. For example, the TAP evaluations I mentioned above are based on a written, research-validated framework called the Teaching Skills, Knowledge and Responsibility Standards, and teachers are observed multiple times per year by trained evaluators including Mentor Teachers and Master Teachers as well as the principal.

4. I think many teachers resent pay for performance because it suggests that their effort level is dependent upon financial incentives. How do you think pay for performance improves student achievement? How does it change what teachers do? Does it improve the performance of average teachers or simply reward the work of effective ones?

First of all, it’s important to be clear that performance-based compensation is not based on some assumption that teachers are lazy or neglectful. It’s about focusing incentives on the right things rather than the wrong things.

A huge proportion of local spending on education goes towards teacher salaries. Yet most districts still compensate teachers based on seniority and graduate school credits—neither of which do much to boost student learning. One recent [study] [http://www.caldercenter.org/PDF/1001058_Teacher_Credentials.pdf] found that teachers who earn master’s degrees are, on average, slightly less effective at improving student achievement than those who do not. We simply cannot expect to recruit and retain effective teachers in every classroom in America until we begin to value and reward teachers for the results they get on the job.

I also hear another argument a lot—that teachers do not care about money. It’s true that people become teachers and stay in the classroom for a lot of different reasons, but that’s true of any profession. And economists have shown that teachers and prospective teachers do respond to monetary incentives. Based on his own and others’ research, the Urban Institute economist Dan Goldhaber has [written] [http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/12/pdf/teacher_pay_report.pdf], “Research shows that teachers are responsive to monetary incentives,” and “There is, in fact, ample evidence that teachers are sensitive to differences in compensation, especially when they work in high-minority and high-poverty schools.”

On a daily basis, teachers and administrators are faced with an incredible number of competing priorities and incentives, many of which do not have much to do with whether students are learning. Performance-based compensation can help cut through the clutter and focus their time and energy on what matters most: student achievement and school improvement.

5. Teachers who work with at risk students often make their influence felt well beyond the school year in which they work. Doesn't pay for performance take a short sighted, instant return approach to rewarding teachers?

I think this question misses the point a bit. Measurable gains in student achievement, whether in fifth grade or tenth grade, lead directly to later opportunities for students. As we note in a [policy brief] [http://www.edin08.com/uploadedFiles/Issues/Issues_Pages/SAS%20PolicyBrief%20TestsPerfPay%20July20%202007.pdf] on student testing and pay-for-performance, education researchers and economists have documented that K-12 test scores predict the future success of students.

For example, in a [paper] [http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/April07ASRFeature.pdf] published this summer, a trio of Johns Hopkins researchers recently wrote, “achievement scores at any level of schooling predict success at the next level. This holds for high school completion, college attendance, college completion, and later successes in the labor market.” And in another recent [paper], [http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/EER.alternative%20school%20policies.pdf] the Stanford economist Eric Hanushek writes that several recent studies, taken together, suggest boosting student achievement scores by a standard deviation increases later earnings by 12 percent.

We don’t yet have systems that can track student successes or failures after high school and link such data back to individual teachers. But that’s no reason to ignore the meaningful performance measures we have now.

Again, I want to thank you for initiating this dialogue. I really enjoyed the opportunity to respond to such in-depth questions.