Texas districts reject merit pay

Texas school districts are pulling out of that state's merit pay scheme, leaving only a third of the districts in the state participating, according to the Dallas Morning News. (Registration required.) The sticking point seems to be the matching requirement: local districts are afraid they will be forced to pick up the tab for the state program if state budgets get tight. It's a real concern: educators tend to be famously wary of fads that find budgetary favor one year, and disappear the next.

What struck me about the story though was this:

More than 100 school districts have changed their minds and dropped out of Texas' new merit pay plan for teachers – leaving just a third of the districts in the state to help launch the $148 million program next year.

The decision by so many districts to bail out of the plan – mostly because of financial concerns – means there will be more money for the districts that are staying in.

For example, the Dallas school district will get almost $1 million extra for a total of nearly $8.2 million.

Districts decide how to distribute the money, but the recommended minimum bonus is $3,000.

Look at that figure again: $148 million. Not breaking the bank in a state like Texas, but still plenty of money.

It's amazing how much money legislators can find for their ideological pet programs, isn't it?

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Time Cover Addresses Merit Pay

A Time Magazine cover story this week addresses the issue of merit pay, one of Into My Own's pet issues. For some reason they didn't quote us. Funny, isn't it?

Anyway, the story provides a good overview to the issue, including some background on why the merit pay plans in Houston and Florida have flopped, while the plan in Denver has been very popular. (I'll give you a hint: one of the three proposals was developed by teachers.)

Time also explores the presidential candidates' positions on merit pay, even though none of the group has spelled it out clearly. Obama unfortunately has opened the door to merit pay (I bashed him for it here, and have become more forgiving of Obama since), but at least he says merit pay shouldn't be based on standardized test scores. Don't know what he will base it on then, but we'll see.

Excerpt below. Click on the "merit pay" tag to see the full extent of my obsession with this issue.

Traditionally, public-school salaries are based on years spent on the job and college credits earned, a system favored by unions because it treats all teachers equally. Of course, everyone knows that not all teachers are equal. Just witness how parents lobby to get their kids into the best classrooms. And yet there is no universally accepted way to measure competence, much less the ineffable magnetism of a truly brilliant educator. In its absence, policymakers have focused on that current measure of all things educational: student test scores. In districts across the country, administrators are devising systems that track student scores back to the teachers who taught them in an attempt to apportion credit and blame and, in some cases, target help to teachers who need it. Offering bonuses to teachers who raise student achievement, the theory goes, will improve the overall quality of instruction, retain those who get the job done and attract more highly qualified candidates to the profession—all while lifting those all-important test scores.

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Why Merit Pay Doesn't Work, Pt. 8,736,399

Two more examples of why merit pay doesn't work.

In Houston, there's a battle over whether merit pay bonuses and the scores assigned to teachers are public record or not.

Should the public know who got bonuses and who didn't?

There are a couple of reasons why Houston school officials might want to keep secret how they disbursed $23 million in teacher bonuses: They might want to avoid hard feelings on school campuses or dampen challenges to the controversial merit pay program. Neither of these is in the best interests of the taxpayers.

The district's stated reasons for not wanting to reveal names of employees who received the payouts and the amount of individual checks is that the information supposedly is confidential under the state's public information law. Before disbursing the checks, the district asked to keep the information private because the amounts were only estimates. Employees received those estimates this month, so they could appeal any mistakes before checks went out Jan. 30.

Now that those estimates have been converted into actual checks, this contention looks more like a stalling tactic than a legitimate argument.

Then there's the other merit pay crucible, Floriday, where districts are required to rate teachers based on student performance. One district is making a mockery of the rule:


State law requires that there be some way to rate teachers based on how their students perform.

To comply, the Polk County School District decided to use an average of students' grades to help determine how teachers are doing.

Both teachers' representatives and the district say that system isn't great, but they say no one was able to come up with a better way to do it.

Critics of the plan say teachers of students in Exceptional Student Education classes and teachers with students from lower socio-economic groups are unfairly penalized.

"They (teachers) hate it," said Marianne Capoziello, president of the Polk Education Association teachers' union.

"They don't hate it because they are afraid of performance being assessed; they hate it because it doesn't seem to be a level playing field, especially for teachers working with at-risk children."

Bill Strouse, the school district's director of professional development, said the evaluation's not perfect, but officials are only abiding by state rules.

Merit pay sounds good on the surface. But the logistical problems in making it fair and reasonable are serious. And real. And as these examples show, the devil is in the details.

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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.

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Merit Pay on the Ballot in Oregon

Here's a good way to turn good teachers into financial planners, insurance agents, real estate agents, or entrepreneurs. Or retirees. Full-time grandparents. Anything but teachers.

...the Oregon proposal, backed by anti-tax initiative machine and teacher's union foe Bill Sizemore, is much broader in scope. It would make all teacher raises dependent upon the loosely defined criterion of "classroom performance," instead of on experience or seniority levels.

Years spent in the classroom, in other words, would no longer matter.

...Sizemore said the criteria could include classroom testing, but could also encompass peer review, supervisor evaluations or demonstrated student improvement over a year's worth of work.

"The goal is simply to move teacher pay and job security to some kind of performance related basis rather than seniority," Sizemore said. "All I want is to ensure is that they keep the best teachers, not necessarily the teachers who have been there the longest."



Because people will quit. If this passes, plan on a teacher shortage in Oregon.

Keep in mind also, this will drive the average teacher salary in Oregon, if it passes, to the lowest in the country. That's all this really is, just a means of slashing teacher salaries.

In other news, Hillary comes out against merit pay. Sort of.

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Merit Pay during Democratic Debate

Nice of CNN to give the first ten minutes of the debate to Barack and Hillary. But here's the candidates takes on Merit Pay:

Dodd against merit pay: Right on. Explained that we shouldn't reward teachers financially for being in the wealthiest districts with the wealthiest families. Great answer on Education.

Kucinich asked about unions. Really stupid question, "are there any issues with the unions that you disagree with?" Why he wasn't given a chance to address the merit pay issue I can't understand.

Richardson: Minimum wage for teachers. Didn't address the merit pay issue.

Hillary on merit pay: school-based merit pay (she means rewards for working in underserved areas). Reward collaboration. She's right: we need to get rid of ineffective teachers, not just reward the good ones.

Biden: An excellent teacher should be judged by whether they increase their skills on their own. Problem with merit pay: who makes the decision? We should demand more in terms of participation before school and after school. Starting salaries for teachers not competitive. Show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value.

John Edwards: Screw you, Edwards, you don't get to answer!

The ohdave award for excellence in answering the question on merit pay goes to:

Chris Dodd.

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George Miller has his panties in a wad because the two major teachers' unions won't support his merit pay proposals in the NCLB reauthorization draft.

“You’re both aware that the language in the legislation is the language that NEA and AFT negotiated and accepted and has promoted and asked members of Congress to support over the last couple of years,” Rep. Miller said, after having asked few questions of the other 43 people to appear before the panel. “It’s identical to that language.”

You know why they don't support it?

Because they heard from their members: Paying teachers based on test scores is a horrible idea. Teachers won't have control over their own destinies, and that isn't fair.

Take it out of the NCLB bill, George.

I'll have more to say about this important Edweek piece later.

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Merit pay bonuses go to affluent schools; other merit pay news

In Orlando, it appears that teachers in white schools were more likely to earn a bonus under a merit pay system that went into effect there. One of the obvious dangers with merit pay is that it rewards teachers of students who were already doing well. The Orlando (Orange County) system was supposed to account for that, by used a system that rewarded improvement, much like our own value-added system.

It also appears that teachers of electives were at a disadvantage... but that seems to be a quirk of the system.

Interesting analysis. Here's a quote from the Sentinel article.

The Sentinel's review showed that teachers at predominantly white and affluent schools were twice as likely to get a bonus as teachers from schools that are predominantly black and poor.

It wasn't supposed to work that way.

Florida education officials promised that imbalances along racial or income lines would not happen under the state's beleaguered and now-defunct merit-pay program known as Special Teachers Are Rewarded, or STAR. Officials said the best teachers could win a bonus no matter where they worked or what they taught.

"It certainly doesn't inspire much confidence in the system," said Mark Pudlow, a spokesman with the Florida Education Association, a teachers union.

Makes you wonder a bit, doesn't it, what will happen when Ohio goes value-added? Will the value-added formula simply reward districts that are already doing well? Experts say no, but...the proof will have to come later.

A second article describes the problems teachers of electives (art, music, p. e., language) had in earning bonuses--another of my arguments against merit pay:

The Sentinel's review of the STAR plan showed only 7 percent of high-school teachers in elective classes -- such as Spanish, art and geography -- won a bonus though they made up 35 percent of the teachers who qualified for the money.

That would be pretty discouraging to teachers in elective areas, although to be fair, the article suggests that the discrepancy had to do with tests used for the pay system that were poorly designed.

That said, does anyone else see a problem with designing a test simply to determine whether teachers get bonuses?

Meanwhile, Houston's program also highlight some of the problems associated with merit pay programs. They have gone through multiple formulas to try to find one that's fair to the teachers affected by it:

HISD officials said they've gone to great lengths to find formulas that are fair for all teachers. One major element of this plan, for example, looks at performance gains over three years.

"Just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's smoke and mirrors," board member Dianne Johnson said.

Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, still isn't sold.

"Anything would be an improvement. It's one of the few programs they had that couldn't get worse," she said. "But it's still got the same flaws. It's still very complicated and still, as a teacher, I can't sit there with this plan and tell you how much I'm supposed to improve."

The plan still puts too much emphasis on test scores and doesn't fully reward those who teach non-core subjects, she said. But Fallon said she doubts many teachers will opt out.

For a merit pay program to truly affect teacher behaviors, teachers have to believe that their efforts will be rewarded... and if they don't think the formula is fair, they won't believe that they'll be rewarded if they improve student performance. And if their previous efforts to improve student performance aren't validated by a merit pay system... well, that's pretty disheartening. Does more harm than good.

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Study shows merit pay works... or does it?

A new study coming out will show that merit pay improves student performance.

Color me skeptical. But I'm willing to listen. The quote from one of the study's authors sounds promising:

"We can't say, 'Do this; or this is the right way to do it,'" he said. "However, the preponderance of evidence, when you look at a variety of sources, including the limited number of evaluations and the evidence we have on the variation of teacher effectiveness, suggests that it (merit pay) really is something school districts should be exploring or piloting. Every one of the evaluations has been virtually positive. They all suggest there's a positive response in terms of outcome measures -- including test scores."

It will be interesting to see the study in more detail. It's interesting to note, by way of contrst, that I just read about a study that showed that financial incentives didn't help improve teacher attendance. So if both studies are correct, financial rewards can help improve student achievement but not teacher attendance. Sounds paradoxical, to say the least.

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One more on merit pay: At the Huffington Post

I wrote a piece at The Huffington Post on the issue of pay for performance in education. This is a theme I've hit the last few days, and I think I've made my point now. The piece at Huffington Post is in response to Marc Lampkin's piece last week, and Marc was kind enough to appear here with responses to a few of my questions.

(Update: and what do you know, I go to Crooks and Liars and find this great story about merit pay. Check it out.)

Here's the post from Huffington:


I was surprised to hear that Barack Obama was sticking his big toe into the merit pay waters at the NEA convention and again at the most recent Democratic presidential debate. While Obama has not to my knowledge advocated "merit pay" by name or outlined a specific proposal, his apparent openness to the concept has excited advocates of pay for perfomance who are anxious to see a major figure on the left like Obama defy the prevailing Democratic wisdom and counter the NEA's opposition to the concept.

Marc Lampkin of the Strong American Schools campaign, nobly promoting the idea that education should be at the heart of the presidential discussion, took the NEA to task for suggesting that none of the Democratic candidates in Iowa for ABC's debate supported the concept of pay for performance. However, the candidate Lampkin points to -- Obama -- was rather circumspect in his support. In saying that pay shouldn't be tied to "standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not," Obama is trying to have it both ways, giving the appearance of supporting some vague pay for performance standard, but also insisting it not be tied to test scores. There's the rub: a pay system not tied to test scores isn't really a merit pay system at all.

Other kinds of financial incentives, such as paying teachers extra to work in high poverty districts or scarce fields like math or science, can't really be considered "merit pay" systems in the common parlance. Those are incentives to attract people to certain districts or fields. Pay for performance means an adherence to some type of evaluative standard, whether it be test scores or supervisors' evaluations (which are bound to be tied to test scores). And that's the problem.

The use of test scores for evaluation of teachers is fraught with difficulties that should be obvious to any outside observer. First among them, you can't pick your students upon whom your salary might depend. Those in favor of merit pay often use the private sector as a comparison point, saying essentially that most people are paid by how hard they work or how many cases they win or how much they sell. And all that's true. But a salesman isn't forced to spend his time on customers who clearly don't want to buy his products. Lawyers don't typically take cases they can't win. But the logic of paying teachers based on performance is similar to saying to a car salesman, "here are 30 adults chosen at random. Your salary depends on being able to sell all of them cars -- a standard car, at that -- regardless of their needs, desires, or ability to pay." Or to tell a lawyer, "you must win the next 30 cases that walk through your door, using limited resources, regardless of the merit of their suits, or the expense required to prosecute their cases."

Teachers don't get to choose who walks in their doors, like the hapless lawyer or car salesman in the examples above. It's the luck of the draw. Teachers (good ones) certainly believe all children can learn, and want them to. But success in terms of test scores depends on many factors, mostly too obvious to mention, outside the teachers' control. Not the least among these, and perhaps less obvious to outside observers, is the support of fellow practitioners. In many cases, a child's learning requires the support of others besides just the classroom teacher. It depends on an administrator who can effectively create an climate for learning in the school. It may depend on reading specialists who can help students comprehend their textbooks. It may depend on intervention specialists who help devise strategies for learning disabled students to make more effective gains. It even depends on successful foundations provided by teachers in previous grade levels. How do merit pay advocates propose to disaggregate the work of a classroom teacher from the support staff around her? For that matter, how would art, music, physical education or special education teachers be judged under a pay for performance system? Would we need to implement standardized tests in those areas?

I could go on and on about practical and logistical difficulties associated with merit pay. But the strongest arguments against it are philosophical. At a time when many progressives are questioning the effectiveness of high stakes testing mandated by NCLB, should we really be talking about entrenching that drill and test regime taking over education today by connecting it to teacher compensation? The real debate today should be about whether the schools created under they tyranny of NCLB are the kinds of schools we want to have. Do we really want high stakes tests driving our definition of education? And driving our definition of quality teaching?

I am always suspicious of merit pay arguments because they seem to insinuate that a teacher's effort is dependent upon his or her level of compensation. Instead of rewarding teachers for maximizing student achievement -- as most would insist they are trying to do anyway -- the right approach would be to reward activities that help teachers become better trained and more competent. For example, most local salary structures reward teachers for attaining a higher level of education -- teachers who earn a Master's degree earn more than teachers with similar experience who do not. Likewise many states offer annual stipends to teachers who achieve National Board Certification, a rigorous process which requires teachers to demonstrate and reflect upon their classroom practices. These sorts of rewards make sense to teachers: they understand the connection between professional development and effective instruction.

I find that merit pay advocates also hope that a compensation structure will do that job of evaluating teachers that should properly be done by effective building administrators. We shouldn't simply withhold monetary rewards from teachers who are ineffective: we should help them improve or evaluate them out of the profession. The canard that teachers' unions protect bad teachers from dismissal is not true: bad administrators protect bad teachers from dismissal or non-renewal. But teacher evaluation is more complicated than simply looking at test scores. It requires careful examination of specific teacher behaviors in the classroom, of how a teacher relates to students, and his or her command of the subject matter they are teaching. This cannot be judged simply by looking at test scores, which may be high in some cases in spite of uninspiring instruction: it requires an effective and highly skilled administrator who knows what she is looking for when she observes a teacher interacting with her students, and who is skilled at helping teachers improve. In short, pay for performance provides an easy way out when quality supervision of instruction is what should really be taking place.

Finally, the discussion of merit pay in the context of a presidential campaign continues a disturbing trend of increasing federal involvement in local decision making. Teacher salary structures and evaluation practices are negotiated locally between a board of education and a bargaining unit under the broad general guidelines of state law. If Denver teachers agree to a merit-based system, then good for them. They've decided in agreement with their board on a system that makes sense for them and their community. These kinds of contractual decisions are and should remain local, not the subject of federal intervention. An important reason why the NEA objects to merit pay proposals is precisely this -- that it takes away control from a local bargaining unit to decide their own fate. If Barack Obama truly believes that education proposals need the support of teachers, then those proposals should continue to be locally decided, not a subject of debate in a national election, unless it is clear that the debate is purely philosophical, and not bearing on any public policy he would enact as president. The federal government certainly has in important role in education. It establishes policies and guidelines that protect the education of handicapped children, for example, and provides funding to support that education. The federal government supports research in education and provides grants to support high poverty schools. But dictating the terms of local teaching contracts should not be a function of federal policy.

The debate about merit pay isn't the debate we need to be having right now. With the demands for charters and vouchers from the right, and the ongoing problems facing education in high poverty districts, the very existence of public education is being threatened. We need to be talking about why public education still matters, and what it should look like in the 21st century. Gimmicks like pay for performance are only getting us off track.

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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.

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Obama and Merit Pay: A Bad Idea Whose Time May Have Come

This is a long post, so bear with me.

I guess I should be researching the candidates a little more carefully, because I didn't realize until I read Chuck's post today at the Chief Source that Obama was in favor of merit pay.

(And I want to say before I go any further that I think Chuck is a smart guy, and a great blogger. I don't disagree with him often. I just disagree with him, albeit strongly, on the issue of merit pay.)

Now it turns out that Obama isn't really calling it that--but it seems pretty clear that he's endorsing some sort of pay for performance scheme, although he says it won't be based on test scores. It's a pretty interesting idea, and I will be interested in seeing how he develops the proposal. But let's be clear about one thing: Merit pay is a horrible idea.


I'm going to attempt to address this as fully as I can based on my experience and professional observations, but first, this is a bad idea on a purely philosophical level. Obama is really advocating here a huge new federal role in education, far more intrusive to local and state decision making than has ever been proposed before. Is Obama really suggesting that the federal government get involved in pay structures for local and state systems? I realize it's popular to talk about increasing teacher salaries (at least in some crowds--around here it's not so popular!!) but should the federal government really be in the business of telling districts how to pay their teachers? Based on some of the reactions I've read, many people on the left and right seem to think this is a good thing. To which all I can say is, Wow. So much for local control.

Now, on to the specifics. How would anyone design a merit pay formula? Chuck writes that merit pay would be a combination of evaluations from supervisors, students, parents, and student performance. (And most merit pay proposals are based on some combination of these.) Let's take them one at a time.

Let's see, basing your pay on your boss's evaluation. All right, what if my boss is a Republican, and doesn't like the fact that I drive to work with a Kerry sticker on my car? What if my principal doesn't like the fact that I organized a group of faculty to protest his discipline policies? What if he or she doesn't like my union involvement? In other words, how can we protect teachers from arbitrary decisions by administrators? In the evaluation process, teachers are afforded certain protections based on due process and case law that has grown around the evaluation and dismissal process. But those kinds of protections don't exist for merit pay proposals, and it's incomprehensible to me that we would want to see teachers subject to arbitrary treatment like this. Sure, I hear some of you saying, "hey my boss makes arbitrary decisions about my pay and I just have to live with it." Or, "people in any profession can be treated badly by their bosses." Those things may be true, but that hardly seems like an argument to subject teachers to similar treatment. If bosses in the private sector treat their employees like shit, those employees should organize and fight back! Instead the argument I hear often is that teachers should be treated as badly as worker in other professions. Arent' we supposed to be the pro-labor party?! Not the "treat your employees arbitrarily" party?

Student and parent evaluations. Hey, I have an idea. Why don't we just give raises to the teachers who give everyone A's and don't assign too much homework and have ice cream parties every Friday. Then will we all be happy? Jesus H. Christ. This seems obvious to me, but let me explain it anyway. Teacher and students and their parents don't exactly have a customer/service provider relationship. And the reason is that teachers exist not only to instruct but to JUDGE performance. Now everyone hates Simon Cowell. But let's be honest, who gives the most accurate and meaningful assessments of the singers? Is it Paula Abdul who thinks everyone is great, or Randy Jackson who just says, "hey, that's not your song, dog." Look, sometimes the best teachers are just plain pricks. I had a professor in college, we'll call him Dr. K, that I absolutely wanted to punch in the mouth. Every time he called on me--I would never have dared raise my hand to volunteer--he started yelling and interrupting: But WHY, Dave? What do you mean by that? No, no, what do you mean by that? Don't just look at me answer the question. What does that word mean? But he was one of the best professors I ever had at actually getting me to think. At the same time, there were teachers I had who were all jokes and fun and helped me score well on tests but didn't teach me shit about what was important.

And that raises another point about merit pay: education isn't all about instant results. It wasn't until much later that I realized how profoundly Dr. K influenced my thinking. Above all else he insisted that I be CLEAR. And it was a tremendously valuable gift. But I hated him for it at the time. Merit pay insists that the lessons we learn in school be instantly appreciated, instantly demonstrable. But learning isn't really like that, if any of us will be honest with ourselves about the lessons we had in school (or in life) that really meant the most. We can't always know within the span of a school year whether a teacher has really done his or her job.

Ok, test scores. That's another way to judge teachers. Doesn't merit pay highly incentivize a teacher to work at getting the plum teaching assignments? If I get a full slate of AP courses I am SET!! Now we can get fancy with value added assessments and find out where students are at the beginning of the year and whether I've added to them by the end, so the selection of students in my class doesn't quite matter as much. What matters is whether they did better at the end than at the beginning. A lot of assumptions are built into this approach. 1, that the tests we're giving are worth a shit. And given the current state of affairs, they probably aren't. 2, That the students give a shit about doing well on the test, and therefore pumping up your salary. (In fact, if I hated your guts, I might just be inclined to tank the son of a bitch on purpose.) 3, That the student, in response to my terrific, mindboggling, and downright Socratic instruction, has upheld his or her end of the bargain by working hard, doing homework, not getting pregnant and missing 6 months of school, not getting sick, not getting sick on the day of the test, not getting high on the day of the test, not having his boyfriend or girlfriend break up with him/her the night before the test, eating regular meals, not getting his ass kicked by his dad all year long while the heroic teacher is trying to do his or her job, and not getting bullied all goddamned year by the bitches in the girls restroom right before class to the point of not being able to think about anything but getting home without losing a fistful of hair--Jesus, don't these kids value education?

Sorry about the language, but the more I write the angrier I'm getting.

When did we decide that we just want to quantify everything? Make everything a rating, a ranking, a percentage, a point? Teaching isn't all about numbers and it isn't all about tests. And teaching isn't even about pleasing everyone all the time--in fact, with grade inflation the way it is, there's way too much of that already. The reality is everyone wants schools to be better, and everyone wants schools and teachers to be something other than what they are. But instead of just throwing around proposals that sound good we need to have a long, thorough conversation about exactly what we want out of schools, and that isn't happening. By default, what we're getting is a numbers game, a bunch of meaningless standards, and we're cutting the very heart out of teaching, turning it into a mindless exercise in which we produce kids who can answer a discrete set of pretty unimportant questions. We might as well be preparing students for a really dull quiz show. All merit pay is going to do is pad the paychecks of the ones who play the game right. It's a gimmick, and it's a pretty stupid one at that.

I like Barack Obama. I really do. It's ballsy to go into an NEA convention and talk merit pay. And I like his nerve. But if you want to improve the quality of teaching there are a hundred better ways to do it. Maybe a big federal stipend for National Board Certification. Maybe we need to have more discussion of what teachers know and what they should know. Let's talk about how students are divided up... why do we give the newest teachers the hardest classes? That isn't fair. Let's talk about special education, and gifted, and how to support those students and the teachers that work with them. How can we support the kids that are not safe at home? How can we get them more ready to learn? Maybe we should give teacher tuition reimbursement so they can earn Master's degrees if they don't already have them. Or Ph. D.'s. Let's talk, instead of wages, about reducing the course load teachers have so they can focus more on their instruction and the feedback they give kids. Let's give teachers the resources to build their own websites to support their instruction.

There are other ways besides Merit Pay. Let's keep looking. And if anyone wants to take me on in the comments, have at it. I'm your huckleberry.



(One more thing: there are a few places that have experimented with merit pay for administrators, and I haven't seen any results that are earth-shattering. The reality is that most administrators are already held accountable, mainly by their school communities and by their bosses, and merit pay doesn't really add to that accountability. Most administrators I know resent the implication that they would work harder if they had financial incentives to do so. Most of them, like most teachers, feel like they work pretty hard already.)

(Note: I wrote two pieces similar to this last year called "Why Tenure Matters", which deal with some of these same topics.)

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