Dan Brown on Merit Pay

A couple of months ago I wrote something for the Huffington Post on the problems with merit pay following Barack Obama's comments offering qualified support to the concept.

I'm a little late on this, but now Dan Brown, the New York City teacher and author whom I interviewed at Into My Own, has followed with his own piece--much better, I'm afraid to say. Easy to see why Dan is published and I'm not! Although our arguments are similar, his are much more informed and eloquent.

The occasion for Dan's piece was the agreement by NYC teachers to participate in a pay for performance program. As Dan indicates, it's easy to understand why teachers might be persuaded to adopt a proposal like this in local bargaining: it's a chance to put more money in their pockets! That doesn't mean that the concept in general is a good idea, for the reasons Dan describes.

Excerpt follows. See my review of Dan's terrific teaching memoir and interview here, and a link to the full piece at Huff Po here.

The culture of measuring students and school solely via high-stakes testing distorts curriculum, demoralizes students, and provides incomplete, inaccurate assessments. The current testing regime's fallout is massive and ugly. The fear-inspiring culture of test prep makes kids associate school with tests, not to developing their minds.

And -- this is a serious point -- high-stakes testing devalues the joy of the learning process.

This accountability regime is the education lovechild of business sphere interests; it's numbers-driven and mechanistic. The ends are all that matter. Forget the means. (No one wants to say it, but this model tacitly encourages manipulation and cheating.) It sends to principals, teachers, parents, and students a loud, clear, and dangerous message: if you get the stats, you're successful.

I wish children could be assessed based on their actual work over the school year, and not by one week of pressure-laden testing. The only good argument against that kind of comprehensive, student-centered assessment is that one can't trust teachers to instill enough rigor in their assignments, a thoroughly cynical message.

However, there's the world I'd like to live in, and there's the world there we have. When I criticize the institution of high-stakes testing, I might as well be shouting -- like many others -- that we should get out of Iraq now. It's just not going to happen while the keepers of power and high offices want to press forward. (I'm still going to shout, though. Someone is listening.)

This concession -- that high-stakes testing is a given reality -- is reflected in this week's performance pay deal in New York. Both the teachers' union and City Hall declared victory on the compromise, since the merit bonuses will go to entire schools that meet benchmarks, and not to individual teachers. The union says this will encourage cooperation between teachers and administrators -- and that's true. But the teachers and principals will be cooperating toward the common goal of pumping up standardized test scores, a mistaken aim if one truly wants to educate children. The United Federation of Teachers has accomplished a tremendous amount to support teachers and students, but I have a philosophical disagreement with them on this issue.