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Tag: merit pay (Page 2 of 2)

Five Myths About Merit Pay for Teachers

The regular Five Myths column from the Sunday opinion section of the Post addresses some statements of “truth” on the topic of merit pay popular with politicians and education “experts”.

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And the five are:

1. Merit pay has a strong track record. [That one’s not even true in business]

2. Teachers unions are the biggest barrier to merit pay. – Yes and no. But the merit pay experiments of the 1980s also failed because they were, at bottom, capricious.

3. Principals are good judges of teacher talent. [In my experience, many principals are more building and business managers than they are educators, especially in high schools.]

4. Student test scores offer a simple solution to the evaluation problem. [Crap!]

5. Teachers are most motivated by money. [More crap!]

This is far from a comprehensive assessment of the misinformation thrown around in the debates over merit pay but it’s worth a few minutes of your time.


Image: number 5 by Leo Reynolds, used under a Creative Commons license.

Past Performance Might Predict Future Returns

Larry Cuban looks at one of the current hot topics in education reform, merit pay for teachers (what he calls “pay for performance”), and reminds everyone that there’s nothing new here.

In touting pay-for-performance plans, federal and state decision-makers fail to point out (or ignore) past efforts to link teacher performance to money that have been a series of disasters plainly seen by those who know their history. In fact, an honest reformer’s advice to would-be buyers of these schemes would be: The lousy record of pay-for-performance plans does, indeed, predict the future. [his emphasis]

Consider England in the late-19th century, the history of merit pay plans since the 1920s, and U.S. performance contracting in the 1960s. Using cash to spur teachers to get students to learn more, faster, and better, these plans stumbled repeatedly in narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, and sowing distrust among teachers and administrators. Ultimately, policymakers abandoned the plans. Few researchers and knowledgeable policymakers would dispute these previous failed efforts.

Back in the early 90’s our overly-large school district tried a merit pay scheme.

And while I personally benefited from the program (full disclosure: I enjoyed having the extra cash! :-), overall it was a major waste, time as well as money, and did nothing to improve learning.

Paying individual teachers for the performance (aka higher standardized test scores) of students currently sitting in their classrooms is wrong in so many ways.

It ignores the educators who worked with the kids in past years as well as the other staff members in the school who are contributing to their learning now.

Much worse than that, it reinforces the traditional concept of the teacher as an independent contractor, working in isolation, solely and completely responsible for the learning of the children assigned to them.

Cuban is right that the current salary system used in most school systems, one where everyone gets the same based on the arbitrary factors of longevity and continuing education credits, is wrong.

However, any new system needs to get beyond the view of teaching as an individual process and focus on the collaborative effort that goes into any child’s education.

The Economics of Merit Pay

On Monday’s edition of the outstanding NPR podcast Planet Money, the hosts looked at the issue of teacher pay.

During the program they reviewed the many factors that might go into differentiating salaries and spoke with an economist about how the system under which most K12 teachers in the US are paid compares to employee compensation in the real world.

planetmoney

This short discussion is one of the best overviews of the subject I’ve ever heard, possibly because it’s coming from people who are not teachers (although the mother of one of the hosts is), politicians, or education “experts”.

It’s well worth spending 20-minutes of your time to listen.

And if you’re at all interested in an approach to understanding the economy and personal finance that’s very different from what is produced by the talking heads channels, subscribe to this podcast.

No Merit In This Idea

Along with all the schemes for fixing the economy, President Obama (along with his secretary of education) has been out selling his plans for improving education in this country.

And one piece of the proposal that seems to be getting a lot of attention – and which is possibly the worst of a bad bunch – is merit pay for teachers.

While there are many reasons to hate this idea, one in particular stands out for me.

Merit pay for individual teachers further cements in place the concept that teachers work alone in a classroom, that they and they alone are responsible for student learning.

That makes absolutely no sense given what actually happens here in the real world.

Look around any successful school and you’ll find lots of great teachers.

You’ll also find a principal who understands what great instruction looks like and does everything they can to make sure they have all the tools necessary to make it happen.

Very likely that school also has many other excellent staff members – librarian, department chairs, counselors – plus strong parental support and any number of other important factors that make up the complicated process of educating children.

I’ve ranted about this many times before but it’s still true that the story of the solitary teacher who single-handedly defies the odds and brings their kids to incredible academic success is a Hollywood myth.

If you’re going to pay bonuses, they should go to teams of educators, to all the people in a school who make large contributions to improved student learning.

But this doesn’t mean I don’t believe in differentiated pay.

Any educator who voluntarily works in low income neighborhoods, who works with special needs children, who are in high demand fields, should be paid more.

Heck, I think every Kindergarten teacher deserves an automatic 10% increase. :-)

However, in the end teacher pay is like the many other pieces of the puzzle that make up educating children: there is no simple solution that fits into a one sentence talking point.

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