Is Differential Compensation Teacher-Bashing?
(cc photo by dave_mcmt)
When I wrote yesterday that it would make more sense to pay more money to more effective teachers, Steve LaBonne responded in comments that “Merit pay is a way for ‘reformers’ to try to fellate teacher-bashing conservatives. I would have thought that was obvious.”
I think that’s really nonsense, and the implication that the idea that pay should be differentiated based on effectiveness constitutes “teacher-bashing” is bizarre. When it comes to compensation, it seems to me that there’s an easy way to distinguish between people who have a favorable attitude toward teachers and people who have a negative attitude toward teachers. If I were interested in “teacher-bashing” I would think our society should dedicate a smaller quantity of aggregate resources toward paying teachers. In fact, I think we should dedicate a larger quantity of resources toward paying teachers. That’s because I think education is important and evidence suggests that teacher quality is among the biggest non-demographic factors in determining student achievement. Under the circumstances, it makes sense to invest a lot of money in hiring and retaining teachers.
That said, once we’ve hit upon a given pot of money to spend on teacher compensation, a question arises of how it should be divided up. One way to divide it up would be evenly—each teacher could make the same salary. That would, however, be a bit weird and we don’t do it that way. Instead, we pay teachers more the more experience they have, and we also pay them more when the acquire master’s degrees. As I said yesterday, I think the only way to make sense of these forms of differentiated pay is that they’re already a system of “merit pay.” The point of paying higher salaries to people with advanced degrees has to be the belief that teachers with advanced degrees are more effective than teachers without advanced degree. It turns out to be the case, however, that research says this is wrong. I don’t think it’s “pro-teacher” to be giving teachers financial incentives to essentially waste their time acquiring advanced degrees that don’t help them. This is simply an irrational way of divvying up the compensation pot.
It makes a lot more sense to take that money and try to spread it around in ways that better track actual teacher effectiveness. One objection to this is that it’s hard to do really well. And, indeed, it’s not easy to do perfectly. At the same time, the fact that creating a better system would be difficult isn’t a very good reason to stick with a system that definitely doesn’t work. Either way, I don’t really like the term “merit pay” which I think is silly. Among other things, as I’ve said nobody I’m aware of actually believes in paying teachers on a flat salary schedule so the whole idea is a red herring. Paying more for more experienced teachers makes sense, but currently we seem to be giving more weight to seniority than it deserves. Paying more for extra degrees makes no sense. Paying more for people with in-demand technical skills makes sense. Paying more for people who take on more challenging assignments in high-poverty classrooms makes sense. And trying harder to directly measure and reward effectiveness also makes sense. But if I’m “bashing” anyone it’s purveyors of useless M. Ed. degrees.
160 Responses to “Is Differential Compensation Teacher-Bashing?”
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September 9th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Yglesias hates the teachers’unions so we don’t have to.
(Yes, I’m kidding.)
September 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
the big problem with “merit pay” is the possibility of favoritism. that’s why teachers’ unions oppose it. favoritism is particularly toxic to a union workplace because it undermines the unity that is required for collective bargaining and other collective action.
you’re right that paying teachers more for seniority and academic degrees is a form of merit pay, but more importantly, it’s an objective standard for awarding the merit pay. it doesn’t depend on the judgment call of members of the school administration, which is why teachers’ unions have no problem with giving premiums for education or seniority.
if you come up with another objective way to measure merit, teachers’ unions probably wouldn’t be opposed to that either.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
And it seems that equating favoring differntial compensation with “teacher-bashing” is good way to move people from the former camp to the altter.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I find the Merit pay argument a bit unconvincing since depending on the neighborhood and school, you’re going to come up with widely different outcomes as far as student achievement is concerned.
Since the playing field isn’t level, what does this say about ‘merit’?
I’d say the lower the test scores and attendance rates, the higher the pay and smaller the classes should be.
It’s not ‘merit pay’, it’s ‘reality pay’.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Well said. Sadly Republican and Conservative ’solutions’ are all based on destroying the publics schools and having the government fund religious schools. And the Democrats seem to be owned by the teachers union, which sadly is more interested in helping crappy teachers and denying good teachers the salaries (6 figures) they deserve.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
The same could be said for basing teachers’ salary on, say, height. It’s objective and leaves no room for judgement calls.
It also has very little or nothing to do with how effective a teacher you are.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Matt, since you understand less than nothing about education and, as is increasingly obvious, not much more about politics, who cares what you think?
You are not only incapable of coming up with a good way to do this but, it seems, incapable of even acknowledging that it’s a highly non-trivial problem. By now, that stance must be regarded as intentionally dishonest, not merely ignorant.
Paying more for more challenging assignments (a good idea that will not happen if it has to real on local district resources) is not what any of the promoters of merit pay mean by that phrase. And furthermore, you know that.
This is both irrelevant until you explain what “merit” is and how it can be divined with reasonable reliability, AND (in the last part of the sentence) assumes facts not in evidence. The lack of “merit pay” has no rrelevance to the problems of urban education. (The lack of ADEQUATE pay, tout court, often does.)
Seriously, just stop writing about education. All you produce on the subject is intertubes pollution.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
The objections to MattY’s posts on teachers come down to his assuming that merit pay is useful when no evidence supports that conclusion.
If he used a more holistic approach that started with objectives and assessed various means, he would get a less hostile reaction.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I had to address this one too. I am not one to sugarcoat the failing of ed schools (nor indeed are the ed-school professors I know) but if you think you can just walk into a K-12 classroom and teach without any kind of preparation (apart from subject matter knowledge- also a problem in your case)in how to do it, all I can say is, try it. So we can laugh at the outcome.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
And why single-out one post? The consensus of opinion is that you have no clue.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
leo is right. The more challenging the school, the more resources that should be dedicated to it. But what has happened with “equal funding” provisions is that the parents in richer school districts raise money to improve things beyond the base.
But it is also true that favoritism is a real problem in differential compensation. And it is hard to devise “objective” standards when the tests themselves are often culturally biased. And the experience in some schools with teacher bonuses has been cheating by the teachers.
Given these factors, more pay for skills in demand (math and scence) is reasonable but the rest are too hard to administer. But I’d agree to drop pay for any advanced degree that is not in a subject area.
What we really need is more research on and dissemination of what actually works. Teaching is really, really hard, especially with low-skill kids. Much harder than people who haven’t tried it realize.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Do you have anye evidence to support the thesis that MY believes this is the case?
There is considerable space between a master’s degree and “without any kind of preparation in how to do it.”
September 9th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“The point of paying higher salaries to people with advanced degrees has to be the belief that teachers with advanced degrees are more effective than teachers without advanced degree. It turns out to be the case, however, that research says this is wrong….”
This doesn’t surprise me at all. The most useless courses I took in college were ed courses. The blatant credentialism surrounding teaching does nothing more than create captive consumers for ed schools.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Discussions on “merit pay” for teachers always seem to come down to the point that there’s no objective standard for measuring teacher success. Obviously, though, that’s also true for virtually every profession in private industry as well, yet virtually every other profession at least attempts to reward success, usually basing this on administrative evaluations.
upyernoz above at least tries to explain this difference by suggesting it has to do with union participation. For the others here who are adamantly opposed to the idea, I’m really curious what the reasoning is. Why is evaluating teaching so much different than evaluating, say, doctoring, nursing or engineering? Is it the government involvement, the union involvement, or something specific to teaching? Or do you think private industry shouldn’t be trying to reward merit either?
September 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
The teachers’ unions defenders always seem to end up with the position that there is simply no objective way to differentiate good teachers from bad teachers. That just can’t be right. This turns teaching into some sort of mysterious, arcane art that can only be evaluated by its initiates. There has to be some way of evaluating performance, incentivizing excellence and penalizing crappiness.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Kindly specify exactly what you think is located in that space. And why you think it’s an adequate substitute for formal training in pedagogy.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
As I said in comments yesterday, you are making statements about the relationship between teacher training and teacher effectiveness that are NOT validated by peer-reviewed research literature. THINK TANKS DO NOT COUNT!
You are making definitive statements on subjects about which you are uninformed. You do a dis-service to public discourse. Please stop.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Matt, I agree with most of this. Two caveats:
1) You’re right to single out the M.Ed degree as “useless” and I think the distinction you make here is worthwhile: “Paying more for extra degrees makes no sense. Paying more for people with in-demand technical skills makes sense.” However, most of those in-demand technical skills are going to come in the form of a degree or a certificate in a subject other than education. Paying a high school teacher more for a master’s degree in their subject specialty makes sense.
From your own link:
Master’s degrees in math and science have been linked to improved student achievement in those subjects, but 90 percent of teachers’ master’s degrees are in education programs—a notoriously unfocused and process-dominated course of study.
2) While white-collar professions in the private sector seem to function reasonably well with annual reviews and merit-based raises, there are some important reasons to question how well this model would work for public school teachers. First of all, your peers at the private firm don’t know how much you earn; public employee salaries are public knowledge, because it’s the public’s money. Second, the only achievement-oriented metrics are test scores. While there’s a place for standardized testing in education, the critics of turning our entire education system into “teaching to the test” have a point. Not to mention that this aligns the teachers’ financial interests with cheating.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
And as I’ve stated before, they often do it badly (even counterproductively) and for no good evidence-based reason. Corporate bureaucracies are not the repository of all wisdom.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I guess the problem with “merit pay” is who decides who gets what and what merit pay is based on. I think most of us would agree that an accurate assessment of teacher value/effectiveness would be worth paying for, but it seems to me that any attempts to do that would result in teachers working towards increasing their pay (at the expense of non reimburable factors) while failing at the overall job (ie, pulling the troubled kid aside, preventing bullying, encouraging the shy child to explore their natural curiosity, etc…).
Out of curiosity, do private schools without unions pay this way, and does such pay result in teachers salaries rising or falling? After all, we have all seen universities with their own forms of “merit pay” become places where research success is reimbursed and teaching skills ignored.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I guess I can’t but think of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), written by Republican strategists and passed with Ted Kennedy’s powerful assistance. To “help the children”, of course.
Now that the full long-term effects of NCLB are coming into play and great damage is being done to the entire concept of public schools, it appears that the Republican strategists who wrote that bill were a lot smarter, and thinking a lot farther into the future, than Ted Kennedy and other supporters of NCLB who _thought_ they were reality based.
Cautionary tale perhaps?
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Damn you Word Press!
September 9th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
“The implication that the idea that pay should be differentiated based on effectiveness constitutes ‘teacher-bashing’ is bizarre” is a great sentence. It contains a three-level center-embedding, which is an extremely rare grammatical construction and very hard to process in speech (rather than writing).
September 9th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
And in teaching-oriented institutions, based on provably worthless criteria, notably student evaluations.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Matt,
Don’t the arguments for education reform look similar to the health insurance arguments? Teachers have the lowest average pay of all 4 year degree holders. Is teaching the least valuable vocation to our society? How would merit-pay compensate teachers as a whole fully for their services?
Isn’t our spending on education enough that teachers should have enough? Or are we diverting too much money to overhead costs, much like health insurance?
The US is 6th in primary education spending. Are we 6th in results?
http://www.worldmapper.org/posters/worldmapper_map207_ver5.pdf
September 9th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
> Do you have anye evidence to support the
> thesis that MY believes this is the case?
Perhaps you could tell us, since MY refuses to do so, why Mr. Yglesias is so resistant to the idea of his volunteering a couple of hundred hours at his local Washington DC elementary school this year (or any year)? Teaching is easy, right? Helping disadvantaged kids recover from those disadvantages is a snap. Why won’t MY devote 4 hours/week to doing so? Should be trivial for a Harvard graduate.
For some reason, however, he prefers to not have any knowledge of actual schools, actual teachers, actual children, and the real problems thereof. Makes it easier to come up with links to ideas for “improving” public schools that just happen to have been generated by Republican-funded thinktanks.
And of course, there is the little matter of MY seeming to have not actually read the story about professional motivation that was the primary link in yesterday’s story…
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
18: In some European countries (Portugal) all salaries are must be published (at least internally, I guess). Somehow people survive.
Steve, while it is certainly true that teaching is not easy, your apparent defense of pay bonuses for teachers with Masters in Ed is baffling. The statistical evidence strongly suggests that as a proxy for teacher performance, it is quite terrible. You may be perfectly justified in critique of the merit pay movement, but please think carefully if you want to defend the degree -> pay bonus policy carefully since this is almost completely orthogonal to that debate. And from where I’m sitting your defense of that policy is hurting your credibility.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I’m glad to seem Matt at least acknowledge (barely) objections to his position on so-called merit pay and to actually link to a study on teacher quality.
Unfortunately, the study in question looks like nothing more than an abstract and a bunch of references and is not very useful to a non-academic who does not have 6 hours to wade through research.
And Matt’s acknowledgement of objections to his position is pro-forma at best. If the dreaded teachers unions favor merit pay for seniority and educational achievement, why do they oppose it for quality measures? Are they just a bunch of jerks who hate kids? Or do they have a reasonable objection that someone who disagrees with them could attempt to grapple with?
The fantasy about paying teachers with hard assignments is really a hoot. Thanks for that. If you can convince the parents in Scarsdale to cut the pay for their kids’ teachers and send the money down to the Bronx, I’m with you. But that’s never going to happen without a state or federal takeover of school funding. Is that what you’re proposing or are you just breaking wind?
Learn about this subject or stop writing about it.
@John McG: Major Dem politicians ding the teachers’ unions every chance they get. MY’s position on this issue might as well have come straight out of the White House.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
MY’s position on this issue might as well have come straight out of the White House.
Or the RNC…
September 9th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
I do agree that Matt has a point about Masters of Education programs. They are nearly useless for public school teachers. Useful if you want to be an education professor though!
But pay for seniority clearly has benefits, regardless of whether it only rewards the best teachers. Isn’t encouraging experienced teachers to stick around a worthwhile thing?
September 9th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
The space between “no training at all” and an M. Ed. degree would include the following:
* Bachelor’s and associate degrees.
* Summer “boot camp” type of set-ups
* Apprenticeships and internships where neophyte teachers could learn from experienced teachers.
Do I know if any of these would be effective? No, I don’t, but neither do the defenders of the status quo.
MY has not volunteered to play point guard for the Wizards either. Probably because he recognizes that it is a job that requires specific skills he does not have. That does not mean those skills are best acquired via a Masters’ Degree program.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Please point me to where I said that. Thanks.
M.Ed. degrees are, in most states, REQUIRED for permanent licensure for people with non-education undergraduate degrees. If you think this is a bad idea, you owe us your explanation of an alternative system for preparing people who have never stood in front of a classroom to teach. (If you think you can “just do it” I invite you, too, to try.)
September 9th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I think the only way to make sense of these forms of differentiated pay is that they’re already a system of “merit pay.”
Isn’t there also the alternative explanation that this is a pretty standard way to maintain price supports and systematize raises w/o rent-reducing competition?
September 9th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
I guess the problem with “merit pay” is who decides who gets what and what merit pay is based on.
Bingo. Because there are no reliable objective measures of teacher merit to base it on, it will inevitably be based on subjective measures, which places excessive power in the hands of the subjective evaluators.
One possible solution would be to ban school administrators from performing the evaluations and instead have some kind of independent evaluation body that doesn’t work with the teachers on a day-to-day basis (and therefore has no reason to coerce them to do anything). But that still comes back to the problem that you have no idea whether you really are rewarding better teachers or not.
I like the idea of giving adverse conditions pay instead. If the school has a lot of poor students, bonus pay. If the teacher has unusually large class sizes, bonus pay. If a class contains unusually many discipline problem students, bonus pay.
This could be combined with a reduced version of the current seniority/credentials pay – if new teachers are assigned to the most adverse conditions, the two effects would more or less cancel out and reduce some of the backloading of teacher salaries.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
mpowell: I didn’t say that public disclosure of performance-based raises would threaten the survival of the human race. I listed it as a complicating factor. You can’t simply assume that HR practices from corporate America can be imported directly into our schools and be equally effective.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
WoofWoof,
To pick on one of your examples, there is merit pay for doctors and similar health professions? Aren’t they generally paid on a per procedure basis? I never knew insurance companies reimbursed different doctors with different rates based on how good they are …
I guess one could argue that good doctors will have busier practices and hence get more pay that way, but the market is not a magic solution to everything as I should think the last few years have amply demonstrated.
Meanwhile, I work in an institution that is supposedly focused on teaching. Certainly if I am not a meritorious enough teacher, I won’t get tenure, but beyond that, how many professors become full professors on the basis of their teaching? Part of the reason why even at teaching-oriented institutions, research becomes the basis for promotions is that it’s easier to assess merit on the basis of papers published / talks given than it is on the basis of having mad teaching skillz.
*
if you think you can just walk into a K-12 classroom and teach without any kind of preparation (apart from subject matter knowledge- also a problem in your case)in how to do it, all I can say is, try it. So we can laugh at the outcome. – Steve LaBonne
Walking into a classroom and teaching without any kind of preparation in pedagogy is what college professorin’ is all about
And we can all laugh at the outcome …
Seriously, this is indeed even an issue at the college level. I and pretty much everyone in my position (e.g. in biochemistry/molecular biology) that I have ever talked to about this subject has noted how ill prepared we are for the actual work involved in being a professor. We spend most of our grad school and post-doc days doing research. Maybe, we end up as TAs (very different to assist in teaching a class than to run the thing) or help our advisors writing grants. And if we seek it out (as I did), we have taken 1-2 semesters of a seminar on teaching. But for many of us, we go into being professors without any background in the actual work (committee service, teaching, grant writing) we are expected to do.
So I guess a good question is: how is teaching at the college level? If it’s pretty good, that certainly discounts the need for formal education training … but I doubt it. That’s not to say that Ed. Schools are on the right track, but that they do, at least in theory, have a place.
BTW — how would having a Masters in Math help one teach High Schoolers math? What would you learn in grad school in math that you would actually be teaching high schoolers? Perhaps this is more correlation than causation — the kind of person who would get an advanced degree in math also knows/loves the math they are actually teaching not only to want to learn more math but also enough to teach it well and for that love of math to positively affect student outcomes?
September 9th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I was convinced by “Outliers”. Differences in education could be seriously remedied by longer school days and changing the vacation schedule. Instead of summer break, how about a week off every two months or so?
September 9th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
As Rob Mac points out @28, providing more pay to teachers in disadvantaged schools would require much more active reallocation of funding so that the schools serving the richest students aren’t also the best-funded schools.
This is an obviously necessary step to improve school quality, but it’s not entirely certain that it will be politically possible. A federal takeover of education would definitely help, though.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
What do you do with someone who already has a subject matter bachelor’s degree but no training in teaching, and wants to teach? Perhaps:
That might have possibilities, but I think you overestimate what can be crammed into one summer. Considerable thought and reflection is required to even begin to become a good teacher, exactly the kinds of things that can’t occur in a crash course.
How do you make sure you choose the right mentors? How do they spend enough time with a novice teacher without being withdrawn from the classroom themselves, in which case you are (IF you are choosing these people correctly) depriving students of the opportunity to be taught by the best teachers?
September 9th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
I’m a teacher and a member of a teacher’s union.
Let me tell you what the repeated insistences that Matt doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that he’s embarrassing himself, etc., look like to me. It looks like fear. It’s a knee-jerk, panicked reaction in defense of an irrationally held position. The repeated use of this juvenile tactic convinces me (and other observers, I’m sure) that the critics of Matt’s position don’t feel they have a good leg to stand on—not that Matt is clearly wrong about this.
So for the sake of the discussion and your own appearance, I’d suggest that people stop pretending like Matt is just coming out of the blue on this one. In fact, many education experts and studies have concluded that merit pay, properly designed, will be important in encouraging talented teachers to stay in the profession, and that ineffective teachers are a drain on the system. You can agree or disagree with that position, but there’s no reason Matt (or anyone) has to be a teacher before holding it, any more than I have to be a climatologist to talk about climate change.
Plus, Matt has the same expertise everyone has: he’s been a student. I spent thirteen years in a public K-12, and I had great teachers, good teachers, mediocre teachers, and teachers who didn’t learn your name over the course of the year. And it’s not like there was a huge amount of subjective debate over the course of the year over who was who; no one thought a great teacher was a terrible teacher or vice versa. I’m not saying we can just poll the students, but a combination of test scores (studying improvement, not just absolute scores, so teachers in underperforming districts aren’t penalized), classroom evaluations, and peer evaluations should be able to help administrators find out what the students already know. And we’ll still have a strong union to fight abuse.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
My experience (though I am long since an ex-academic) exactly, right down to having taught in the same field. Looking back, when I started I had no idea even how much I didn’t know about teaching. And I can only imagine how much harder it is with younger students having a much larger variance in both interest and ability.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Bzzt, wrong at least in my case (since I am not employed in education in any capacity) but thanks for playing.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
“M.Ed. degrees are, in most states, REQUIRED for permanent licensure for people with non-education undergraduate degrees. If you think this is a bad idea, you owe us your explanation of an alternative system for preparing people who have never stood in front of a classroom to teach.”
Steve LaBonne, you are either being disingenuous, or you know as little about this as you accuse Matt of knowing. I don’t have the means of determining whether “most states” require an M.Ed, as you claim—Wikipedia only mentions New York and Boston—but the largest state in the union, California, doesn’t. It requires a Bachelor’s and a certification program, and gives a salary bump to those who get a (worthless) M.Ed. There isn’t any evidence that California’s teachers are more poorly prepared than New York’s or Massachusetts’s, because there isn’t any evidence that an M.Ed helps prepare teachers.
Matt isn’t proposing that teachers be thrown into classrooms without training, and you know it. Stop being so insufferably arrogant.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
“Walking into a classroom and teaching without any kind of preparation in pedagogy is what college professorin’ is all about”
I hear that, I TA’d one class in grad school before becoming a professor. Based on the smallish sample size of our department, I don’t see much correllation between grad school teaching experice and ‘performance’ in the classroom. I had the least grad school training in teaching, and won our graduate program award for teaching excellence (my second year). Another guy had tons of TAing and taught two courses in grad school, and he’s a terrible teacher (seriously. He had like 3 students in his advanced PhD-level class one semeseter and didn’t know one of the students names until the last month of class). It seems like the key determinant (at least at this level) is whether or not the professor “cares,” in some broad and difficult to measure sense of the word.
Of course, I’m at a research-oriented school, so my tenure decision will have a somewhat limited relation to my mad teaching skillz. On the one hand, I’d say that more pay/tenure decision for good teaching would not make me “care” any more at a fundamental level about the students. On the other hand, increasing my pay might change how many hours a week I allocate towards teaching, which might have some positive effects on student learning.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Yes, ALL states require formal coursework in education even if they don’t require a degree. Why you think this supports your points I have no idea.
I have no idea what he’s proposing, since he clearly doesn’t himself.
Project much?
September 9th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Why not focus on reforming the M.Ed. degree curriculum to remove the quackary? Try to replicate, through teaching it to others, the practices of teachers who are “highly effective”.
I still think merit pay is bad road to go down, largely because of the reasons in yesterday’s post and the TED lecture. Those who are still enamoured with concept of financial incentives for quality, in either the public or private sector, should really watch it. The issue is a lot more complex, and goes against more of our intuitions, than many realize.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
To pick on one of your examples, there is merit pay for doctors and similar health professions?
Yes, in many for-profit plans and clinics, doctors are salaried, and there are systems of bonuses, annual performance reviews, appraisals and merit pay increases in place.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
“the big problem with “merit pay” is the possibility of favoritism. that’s why teachers’ unions oppose it. favoritism is particularly toxic to a union workplace because it undermines the unity that is required for collective bargaining and other collective action.”
And we would still have a teacher’s union to challenge cases of favoritism where they appeared. Look, I believe that unions should take absolute positions in favor of the workers, because someone has to and workers are frequently abused. I also believe that every defendant should have a lawyer to insist that they’re not guilty (or help them cop a plea), because defendants are frequently railroaded. That doesn’t mean that I believe that all defendants are not guilty. Similarly, just because the union is speaking up for a teacher, doesn’t mean that teacher is effective.
In the New Yorker “rubber room” article, the position of some teachers—including, no surprise, some in the rubber rooms right now—is that there are no incompetent teachers in New York: none. An incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own. You and I know that’s nonsense, but some people here are essentially taking that position. Or the next step down: that the question of teacher competence is just too ineffable to be assessed. In fact, when you start paying attention, it’s easy to assess teachers—and therefore easy to see when favoritism is or is not being practiced.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Matt,
Please, please, please read some Alfie Kohn. I’ll buy you a copy of Punished by Rewards if need be.
I think Steve’s got the issue largely pegged right. It’s dishonest to promote “merit pay” without laying out how “merit” is going to be determined. For me, the real underlying issue is fairness and teacher morale. Right now paying more for education levels or seniority has the great advantage of being viewed as fair by teachers. People who are compensated fairly have good morale and do a better job. People who are compensated unfairly — say by a concept of “merit” that they don’t buy into — lose morale quickly. Another issue is teaching as a collaborative enterprise. Teachers need the input of other teachers to be effective. Younger teachers especially need mentoring from older teachers. Why should anyone help anyone else if it has the potential to hurt them financially?
September 9th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Paying more for advanced degrees is also a way for the teachers, who make very little money, to pay back the costs (in time working and loans) of obtaining said degree. The extra pay is not very much anyway. Advanced education degrees are often required for administrative and management roles, and having a pool of teachers with them is helpful for a district (to fill those roles as they become available). In fact, teachers more suited for management and such should have an incentive to get these degrees so they can do what they are good at. Very few people with advanced degrees (non-ed) would be willing to work for what even management is paid in public schools.
The unions are right, there is no way to effectively judge a teacher’s ability with numbers. Seniority pay implys that the best way to judge a teacher’s effectiveness is experience, and I think that is the most important factor in this.
If teachers start to be rated (required for “merit pay”) parents are going to start demanding their kids get the best (and the school can’t claim to not know who that is). Plus, favoritism is of real concern. Senority takes office politics out of public schools, and I think thats great.
I truely can’t imagine that the difference between a poor teacher with 2 years of experience and a good teacher with 2 years of experience is nearly as great as the average teacher with 15 years of experience and the average teacher with 2.
I ultimately have very little faith in school management’s ability to judge good and bad education. For example, I started school as the “whole language” style was inacted, and ended just as it was debunked. Result, I didn’t get a single grammar lesson in my entire public education (except from one great 7th grade M. Ed. english teacher that insisted), which may in fact be evident from my prose. What nationwide system could have possibly thought this was a good idea? Do we really want to judge merit based on teaching fads and a teachers ability to pass to a standardized test?
September 9th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
“I have no idea what he’s proposing, since he clearly doesn’t himself.”
Steve, we’re talking about the pointless salary bump that teachers get when they get an M.Ed, in states that don’t require the M.Ed in the first place. Matt put it in this near-incomprehensible, totally confused way:
Man! What is that, Greek or something?! I don’t blame you for missing his point and instead attacking a total straw man.
As for the question of who’s “arrogant,” tell me what you think of the following statements:
Matt, since you understand less than nothing about education and, as is increasingly obvious, not much more about politics, who cares what you think?
Seriously, just stop writing about education. All you produce on the subject is intertubes pollution.
thanks for playing.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Mack # 50 nails why this is important and why I care despite having no more personal stake in the matter (at least after this year when my kid will graduate from high school) than Matt does. Both the schools themselves, and the way teachers are prepared for their jobs, currently DO leave much to be desired and need a lot of real reform. Which is precisely why cute neoliberal schemes (that carefully avoid any reference to additional resources- after all we still have to pay for unnecessary wars) like “merit pay” are an annoying and deleterious distraction.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
“Right now paying more for education levels or seniority has the great advantage of being viewed as fair by teachers. People who are compensated fairly have good morale and do a better job. People who are compensated unfairly — say by a concept of “merit” that they don’t buy into — lose morale quickly.”
We might call this a “faith-based” model of teacher compensation. That is, there is no good evidence that getting an M.Ed makes one better at teaching, and so objectively it’s unfair to pay M.Ed’s more than other teachers. But if people believe an M.Ed is a fair standard, they will be happier workers—and thus better teachers! Unfortunately, this effect is not measurable, or else we would have seen some evidence of it.
The resemblance of the anti-merit pay arguments to, say, pro-abstinence education arguments is becoming stronger and stronger. Uncomfortable evidence is simply rejected, and explained away with unfalsifiable claims.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
This part certainly is:
Since in many professions differential pay for such credentials is prevalent and in those fields is never confused with “merit pay” or performance bonuses.
Fail, again.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Actually, you’ve got that backwards. The resemblance is with PRO-merit-pay arguments ,and the common factor is the complete lack of an evidential basis for the practice.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Part of the problem is that merit pay seems to be such a hobbyhorse for you, Matt. You acknowledge that there are bigger influences (”among the biggest non-demographic factors” is a whole lot of wiggle room), but this seems like the only education issue you ever talk about. Higher teacher salaries in general would help, and subsidized preschool and daycare and afterschool activities, and more support for FRL programs, and more funding for classroom technology. Any one of those priorities could be badly designed, of course, but even a mediocre, incomplete version would indubutibably leave students and schools better off than they are now. The only downside to any of them is the cost. It’s unfortunate, then, that you just happen to fixate on the one proposed education change that actually risks making things worse, probably screws over teacher’s unions, and buys the right-wing frame on a half a dozen different issues.
WoofWoof Says:
Discussions on “merit pay” for teachers always seem to come down to the point that there’s no objective standard for measuring teacher success. Obviously, though, that’s also true for virtually every profession in private industry as well, yet virtually every other profession at least attempts to reward success, usually basing this on administrative evaluations… Why is evaluating teaching so much different than evaluating, say, doctoring, nursing or engineering?
Because there’s a massive difference in what the jobs involve, that’s why. I’m sorry, but this seems so obvious I don’t see why you’re asking. The measure of a doctor is the diseases accurately diagnosed, the operations without complications, the patients who get well. The measure of an architect is the buildings that don’t fall down and sell for more money. Sure, I’m simplifying a little bit, but you know what I mean.
But what’s the measure of a teacher, the rate of students who pass their class? Great, teachers can just give a passing grade to everyone, even the morons, and they get merit pay. Student evaluations? Merit pay for the ones who don’t require homework, then. Their students’ mastery of the subject(s), as measured by standardized tests? But like Matt admitted, evidence shows that teacher quality is less important than other factors: family income, parents’ education level, location, race (I think different demographic subcultures are a better explanation than genetics, but whatever) and more. The rate of their students who get admitted to college, or do well in college, or do well in the workforce? In addition to all the previous problems, you don’t see those results for years if not decades.
According to tomemos, merit pay could be effective, but even under his description it requires more time and effort, and therefore money, than schools have to spare. Ineffective merit pay would be worse than the status quo, and if we can make merit pay effective, we can get a whole lot of other things too that would be even better.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Steve, how could there be an “evidential basis” for merit pay when it hasn’t been tried yet? What there is evidence for is that teacher quality matters more than the amount of money spent on school facilities or materials. Merit pay is a way of rewarding high teacher quality. It’s not the only way of dealing with the issue, but it is a way. And it’s instructive that opponents aren’t giving any other ways of dealing with teacher quality, but rather are denying that teacher quality exists. (You, at least, are being consistent in denying that employee quality exists in any field, but I don’t think most people will follow you down that road.)
September 9th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I’ve known people who’ve done it, and had no problem. In fact all of the people I’ve known who have done it have had no problem. They were only teaching academic courses to college bound 11th and 12th graders, though. Looking back at my own 11th and 12th grade classes, anyone who knew the subject matter, was emotionally stable, and had the ability to communicate could have taught them.
For earlier grades or for classes of students who have a lot of complicating factors, I’d agree though.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
> Both the schools themselves, and the way
> teachers are prepared for their jobs,
> currently DO leave much to be desired and
> need a lot of real reform.
What schools exactly are you referring to in this statement? Let’s keep in mind that the majority of US families today live in suburbs and exurbs, not central cities, and have decent schools that they are quite happy with. They will all tell you about that “bad district” two towns over, but the town two over will tell you the same thing. There isn’t any general crisis of US eduction or excess teachers’ union power in the US.
Cranky
Oh yeah: there isn’t any magic way of “improving” K-12 education in the US that will suddenly make US residents be competitive against 5 cent/hour labor in the PRC and a grim determination on the part of Wall Street and Washington to hollow out the US economy. Give every US kid the equivalent of the best eduction that Japan has to offer and the result will be a lot of unemployed 18-22 y.o.s with great education records.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
> For earlier grades or for classes of students
> who have a lot of complicating factors, I’d
> agree though.
Which of course amounts to 98% or more of the K-12 population!
Talk about demoralizing: a dedicated professional teacher who has put in 5 grueling years with the remedial and basic kids seeing a non-teacher retiree with a fat corporate severance package walk in and skim the cream of the 11th and 12th grade AP kids. That’s a bonus we can believe in.
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I totally support Matt on this one. Steve LaBonne doesn’t have an argument. He just fears reform.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
This seems to me to be a seriously bad idea.
The teachers’ unions defenders always seem to end up with the position that there is simply no objective way to differentiate good teachers from bad teachers.
Pretty much.
That just can’t be right. This turns teaching into some sort of mysterious, arcane art that can only be evaluated by its initiates.
The results are hard to evaluate indeed. Since it’s about teaching young human people, and the results are several decades into the future, or even in future generations.
There has to be some way of evaluating performance, incentivizing excellence and penalizing crappiness
Surely, you don’t want a policy enacted on the assumption that such a way exists?
Pay the teachers enough that you can find many enough good teachers. It won’t be a highly money-making job anyway. Let schools fire bad teachers, but not gradated “performance-based” pay unless you can define it first. And perhaps not even then.
Getting an education when you are young (and can’t pay for it yourself) is part of “equality of opportunity” of life so I don’t think money should decide what teachers you get in public school.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
“Matt, since you understand less than nothing about education and, as is increasingly obvious, not much more about politics, who cares what you think?”
Steve, stop being a dick.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
As parent I fit that demographic and I’m NOT (entirely) happy. My daughter’s English and science instruction has been pretty good, social science / history so-so, math instruction downright lousy (a major problem throughout the US IMHO). There are real weaknesses in “good”, affluent public schools. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the carnage in poor urban districts and I would heartily agree that addressing the latter is far more urgent, and addressing our huge socioeconomic injustices more urgent still.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
“According to tomemos, merit pay could be effective, but even under his description it requires more time and effort, and therefore money, than schools have to spare.”
Well, the government has money to spare on them. There’s a political angle to this: people aren’t willing to funnel more money into education wholesale (and I agree they should be willing), but they are willing to try an innovative new program to reward good teachers. You can call that “fellating teacher-bashing conservatives,” or you can call it political compromise…but unlike many compromises it has the benefit of being a genuinely good idea.
“Ineffective merit pay would be worse than the status quo, and if we can make merit pay effective, we can get a whole lot of other things too that would be even better.”
Huh? Like what? The other factors you mentioned—”family income, parents’ education level, location, race”—are out of the school’s control. Teacher quality certainly isn’t. The Obama administration is offering money to schools for everything—class size, facilities, all of it—but only if they adopt teacher evaluation standards. That seems reasonable to me.
As for your position that teaching is completely different from all other fields, and much harder to assess: I’m sorry, I don’t see it. Okay, you did doctor and architect; how do you assess a computer programmer, or a law clerk, or an Assistant VP of Public Relations? The fact is, those of us who were decent students all knew who the good and bad teachers were—who couldn’t control the class, who made the material interesting, who was too mean, even who was too easy. And if we knew, you can bet that their fellow teachers know, too. Again, I’m a teacher, and the question of what it means to be good at teaching just is not as mysterious to members of the profession as people here are suggesting.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Again, why would I “fear” something that has no personal impact on me whatsoever? This kind of comment is just stupid and merely illustrates the intellectual bankruptcy of those employing it.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
I’ve read this entire thread.
Only one comment:
I had never heard of Steve LaBonne before today. I have no idea who he is. But Steve LaBonne is an asshole. And he has no ability in rhetoric besides “I KNOW MORE THAN YOU SO @*$# YOU.”
September 9th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Steve, how could there be an “evidential basis” for merit pay when it hasn’t been tried yet?
You’re kidding, right? When I was in high school (I remember this well), one day my perfectly adequate Trig teacher suddenly became a master thespian on steroids. The reason? A merit-pay evaluator was sitting in the classroom that day. Don’t tell me it’s never been tried. It was tried in the 80s in Seminole County, Florida and it was a joke.
That said, I lost another post to the Word Press beast, in which I responded to tomemos’s defense of Matt above. I said my understanding is that he only attended private school and therefore he really does know next to nothing about public school (the actual subject under discussion). But the real point is that the post above (Matt’s post) is intellectually lazy and sloppy, regardless of the life experience of its writer.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Mostly, you pretend while actually practicing office politics (it’s a great way to pit employees against one another while rewarding management favorites.) I find it amusing that people offer some of the stupidest corporate practices as a model. It’s not as though our corporate sector is exactly a beacon for the world these days.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
@Chris
“‘I guess the problem with “merit pay” is who decides who gets what and what merit pay is based on.’
Bingo. Because there are no reliable objective measures of teacher merit to base it on, it will inevitably be based on subjective measures, which places excessive power in the hands of the subjective evaluators.”
In the linked studies it’s largely test scores that determine successful teaching. But that’s of course bogus. Thus, there is no good way to assess it in a way that would allow for merit pay. End of issue.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
@53
tomemos,
You’ve missed my point. You seem to agree with Matt that the current system is a kind of merit pay with a different criteria for merit. I disagree. I see the current system as a fair way to set up a salary scale for the teaching profession. It’s also the same kind used by our country’s largest employer, the federal government. Both the federal government and public schools attract dedicated individuals with a passion for the work they do. There is little evidence that best of them do it for the money. Fair treatment is the least we owe such people.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
There are ways to measure performance, unions do not like many of them. Granted, they are not flawless but that is true for many things. The unions seem to be defaulting to Seniority as the measurement to use, but why?
LaBonne – What are you thoughts on the Fellows programs many states have?
September 9th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
“Again, why would I “fear” something that has no personal impact on me whatsoever?”
You should ask yourself that question. Strongly opposing this proposal doesn’t show fear; the way you’re doing it—repeatedly calling people ignorant for taking a position held by many experts in education—does. Or use a different word than “fear” for reactionary, reason-free absolutism, if you prefer.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
And merit pay has been tried before. In fact it has a long history of being abandoned as ineffective.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Doesn’t matter how you try to put this point, it will always run aground on the fact that I have no personal stake in the matter. I cared in the past as a parent and continue to care now as a citizen, period.
Try addressing substance rather than motives. Your arguments have been shredded by several commenters.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
I’d also like to raise again a point I made yesterday. Most teacher do a fine job. Most public schools are good. The schools with largely poor student bodies are the ones that have the problems. Student performance is mostly a result of those pesky demographic factors Matt waves away. Are there two parents? How much money do the parents make? What is the educational attainment of the parents? These are the factors that drive student performance–not magic tricks performed by teachers.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Um, how is merit pay going in Finland, anyone? Do they have it?
September 9th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
What measurements, scales and comparisions are you using to get ‘pretty good’? Response from your daughter, amount of homework, how she scores on standardized tests?
September 9th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
@Dave 67
Yeah, I encountered this a couple months back when he tried to tell me what’s what in my own field. Whatever. But I don’t want Matt to be put off by him, so it’s good to point out dickish behavior.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
“I see the current system as a fair way to set up a salary scale for the teaching profession.”
Restricting the discussion exclusively to the question of differential pay for M.Ed degrees: how on earth can it be “fair” to reward someone for fulfilling a condition that has no correlation with how well they do their job? As John McG said above, it would be just as “fair” to reward teachers on the basis of their height. Or, if you want something that’s available to everyone, reward them based on how much flair they wear in the classroom.
You seem to be saying, “Obviously teachers need to be paid different amounts. However, it would be unfair and too controversial to pay them based on how well they teach. Therefore, we should pay teachers more if they jump through a meaningless hoop, because at least everyone can agree that they jumped through it.” You should either be in favor of totally flat pay, or in some kind of differentiation based on actual merit. (Seniority would fall under this category for me, by the way, but it should be accompanied by merit assessment.)
September 9th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
@Steve LaBonne 32
“M.Ed. degrees are, in most states, REQUIRED for permanent licensure for people with non-education undergraduate degrees. If you think this is a bad idea, you owe us your explanation of an alternative system for preparing people who have never stood in front of a classroom to teach. (If you think you can “just do it” I invite you, too, to try.)”
I believe California has a one-year certificate in place of the MEd.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I teach math in an urban high-poverty high school. I have no choice about which students I get. Yes, I can make a difference. But it’s very hard to isolate the “teacher effect” from other causal factors.
Demographics can tell you something, but it’s crude, and it generalizes to a school population a lot better than to a class of 20 or even 30. There are other things you can try, like measuring the year-over-year changes in individual student scores. But you will still be challenged to demonstrate statistically that you have isolated the effect of what I do.
Moreover, high-stakes exams notoriously fail to measure many outcomes that we associate with academic success. And if the test is poorly written, the questions often measure something other than what was in the blueprint (like reading instead of math when the problem is worded obtusely). In any case, a student’s score is simply a point estimate with an associated standard deviation, so a pass or fail evaluation of my teaching becomes rather meaningless. Again, you could address this by looking at the distribution of my scores compared to other teachers, but now you’re talking about something that complicates the matter and ultimately lacks transparency.
I know there are ineffective teachers. I was, when I first started. But “rewarding better teacher performance” is a much more convoluted task than advocates are willing to admit.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
I addressed this above. It’s still education coursework so it still refutes those who seem to believe that people can be thrown into classrooms without specialized training.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
> You should ask yourself that question. Strongly
> opposing this proposal doesn’t show fear; the
> way you’re doing it—repeatedly calling people
> ignorant for taking a position held by many
> experts in education—does. Or use a different
> word than “fear” for reactionary, reason-free
> absolutism, if you prefer.
Whereas on your side (and MY’s), you refuse to acknowledge that many of the “innovations” proposed have been tried and found wanting over many years – in some cases up to the entire 200 years of public eduction in the US. Militant teachers’ unions have their origins in the 1930s when systems very similar to those MY proposes were used to control and punish teachers, distribute political favors, and keep a young, poor, female teacher corps with few prospects generally under the thumb.
If you want to lay out exactly why things will be different _this time_, give it a try. But ignoring those criticisms, and ignoring the way that NCLB was crafted by Republicans along Norquist “drown [public education] in the bathtub” principles and sold to naive Democrats, is not bolstering your case.
Similarly, the fact that MY quoted a study (yesterday) that he apparently did not bother to read very deeply (since it contradicted his main point), and that that study resonates very strongly among the many professionals here who have experience with real corporate management structures, is not making Mr. Yglesias out to be as smart as he thinks he is.
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
“I’d also like to raise again a point I made yesterday. Most teacher do a fine job. Most public schools are good. The schools with largely poor student bodies are the ones that have the problems. Student performance is mostly a result of those pesky demographic factors Matt waves away. Are there two parents? How much money do the parents make? What is the educational attainment of the parents? These are the factors that drive student performance–not magic tricks performed by teachers.”
Rob: And you accuse Matt of being “intellectually lazy and sloppy”? He at least linked to a study showing that teacher quality has a significant impact on student outcomes. You, on the other hand, are satisfied with “Most teacher do a fine job.”
Obviously demographic questions are hugely important. But they also, to repeat, are totally out of schools’ control. In the current system, a poor school district has no way of attracting a good teacher rather than a poor one. If you’re a good teacher who’s making a difference in students’ lives, but your school pays you the same as one who you know just shows movies in class, how long are you going to stick around?
September 9th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
“It’s still education coursework so it still refutes those who seem to believe that people can be thrown into classrooms without specialized training.”
NO ONE IS CLAIMING THIS.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
@DAS
This is the case in the humanities as well, I think. In my own case, I became pretty good in grad school at teaching really bright students. But when I took my present job and got a mixed bag, I had to become a much better teacher. And I had no clue about committee work.
I’ve encountered very little bad college teaching, and much of that had to do with non-native English speakers. But I don’t generalize from my own perceptions in this regard.
“Walking into a classroom and teaching without any kind of preparation in pedagogy is what college professorin’ is all about And we can all laugh at the outcome …
Seriously, this is indeed even an issue at the college level. I and pretty much everyone in my position (e.g. in biochemistry/molecular biology) that I have ever talked to about this subject has noted how ill prepared we are for the actual work involved in being a professor. “
September 9th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
> In the current system, a poor school district
> has no way of attracting a good teacher rather
> than a poor one.
Sure they do. Pay double the rate of the surrounding suburban districts, provide a TA for each class and a good set of specialists and support staff, metal detectors and security guards both inside and outside the building, and secure parking/transport.
I have many friends who tried a few years in various tough urban districts, loved the work, loved being able to help the kids, but couldn’t take the constant violence and driving a 20 y.o. clunker while their college classmates were at Fancytown HS doing less work, no violence, and 2-3x the salary. Fancytown nowadays pays 45k to start and 90k after 20 years; up to 120k in some specialized cases. Offer $75-$200k at the poor districts and see what happens; that’s how Wall Street and the law firms do it.
Oh ho ho: CAN’T DO THAT! And why not? Well, it would cost money, that’s why, and we don’t spend money no poor people. We expect selfless hero-teachers who will work 90 hour weeks while be shot at for $30k. Who wouldn’t take that bargain?
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Matt says he is motivated by a desire to attract and reward the best teachers. However, since merit pay serves to reinforce the primacy of standardized tests in our schools, the smartest and most creative people will flee the profession. We’re talking about endless slogging through “data” combined with never ending grief from administrators and politicians over failure to meet “performance” metrics. It’s funny that the “reforms” espoused by liberals such as Matt always point in the direction of hierarchy, depersonalization, and mechanization.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
@80
“Restricting the discussion exclusively to the question of differential pay for M.Ed degrees: how on earth can it be “fair” to reward someone for fulfilling a condition that has no correlation with how well they do their job?”
I think it’s foolish game to try to pay “better” teachers more. I think any system of differentiated pay will find itself absent a correlation between job performance and pay. Look out into the rest of the world. Are the best compensated the most? Car salesmen, maybe. Is selling a car anything like being an exceptional teacher?
September 9th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
@tormemos: I think most teachers quit teaching because teaching is a very difficult (and not in the sense of being challenging) time-consuming (the noted vacation time is more than made up for by the extremely long hours at other times of the year), humiliating, and soul crushing experience. That’s certainly why I stopped teaching. My hat is off to those who persevere, but let me tell you that just about any job is better than teaching.
He at least linked to a study . . .
Yeah, I pointed out the laziness of that link in an earliery comment.
I think the fact that most teachers do a fine job is pretty much incontestable. Surveys show that parents are satisfied with their own kids’ schools. It’s all those other schools that they’re worried about.
My point is that when we talk about education problems in this country, we’re talking about poor rural or inner city schools. You dispute this?
Besides, Matt gets paid to do this, I don’t. Comparing my lack of citations to his is pretty unreasonable.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Cranky: I completely agree with you. But why is any of that incompatible with merit pay? Particularly—and let’s get cynical for a moment—when merit pay is a way of getting people to support putting more money towards teacher salaries who otherwise wouldn’t?
September 9th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I have a new approach to Matt’s education posts that I just tried out and really works: I skip the post and just read Cranky’s comments. I usually learn something new and I don’t get aggravated.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
@tomemos
“I’m not saying we can just poll the students, but a combination of test scores (studying improvement, not just absolute scores, so teachers in underperforming districts aren’t penalized), classroom evaluations, and peer evaluations should be able to help administrators find out what the students already know. ”
I don’t think this is the case. I have a fair amount of experience with student evaluations with students at the university level. They measure very little. E.g. One of our highest-scoring (part-time) faculty members was a horrible teacher. The class was all fluff, and she was quite attractive. In my experience there is at best a very weak correlation between good teaching and student evaluations. This correlation goes up at the upper-division and graduate level where students know what to look for and are in a class for more than an easy grade.
I think peer teaching reviews are useful, though not as a basis for merit pay for obvious reasons.
And we’ve already dealt with a myriad of reasons why tying merit pay to test scores is a bad idea.
(And you’re right about the inappropriateness of the tone of some of the comments.)
September 9th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
@Steve LaBonne 83
“I believe California has a one-year certificate in place of the MEd.
I addressed this above. It’s still education coursework so it still refutes those who seem to believe that people can be thrown into classrooms without specialized training.”
You’re right. You’re also right that high school teachers need education coursework.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
There is a considerable body of research that shows your skepticism to be more than justified.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
“Yeah, I pointed out the laziness of that link in an earliery comment.”
Oh, you did? Are you referring to this?
“Unfortunately, the study in question looks like nothing more than an abstract and a bunch of references and is not very useful to a non-academic who does not have 6 hours to wade through research.”
But it’s the link that’s lazy? Matt made a claim, he cited a paper as evidence, the abstract supports his claim, and the full paper is there if you don’t just want to take the guy’s word for it. What could Matt add to that that would satisfy you? Should he read it to you while you’re on your morning commute?
“My point is that when we talk about education problems in this country, we’re talking about poor rural or inner city schools. You dispute this?”
No, not at all, but I fail to see the relevance to the question of merit pay. Besides, almost all school districts (besides the richest) are at least somewhat strapped for cash these days, and I imagine all of them have plenty of dead wood as well.
“Besides, Matt gets paid to do this, I don’t. Comparing my lack of citations to his is pretty unreasonable.”
What lack of citations? The idea that those in favor of teacher assessment have no evidence seems to be a shibboleth that itself is believed without evidence.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
@ 80
I see your point. I often find myself pushed into a more reactionary position on this issue on this blog than is familiar to me largely for reasons #56 outlined in their post.
I think that what you say about the M.ED, as it is currently constuted, is probably true. Then again, however, you could probably say the same thing about any number of graduate level degrees, such as the M.B.A.. The fact of the matter is that credentialing is a pervasive feature of our society, one that is not in any way confined to the way teachers are paid.
Is it a problem? I would say yes, but I am less sure that its problem that it makes sense to exclusively focus on when it comes to education reform.
I don’t think that anybody denies that improving teacher quality would be a good thing. Where the disagreement starts, is how that is to be accomplished. The fears with a merit pay system are:
1) Since no-one really knows how to objectively measure teacher quality, an ineffective or arbitrary measure will be used.
2) Measures of teacher quality would be used to punish teachers for arbitrary reasons.
3) Paying teachers differently would destroy the moral of the profession and the cohesion among staffs.
4) Unfair systems of merit pay would be used as bargaining chips against teachers in salary negotiations, possibly by putting pay raises behind standards that are impossible to maintain.
5) Even if a system of teacher evaluation for merit pay were to be put in place, it would be easily gamed, and thus ineffective.
I really think that people who are interested in improving teacher quality would have more success in filtering out the bad teachers at the front end, before they get into schools, rather than using the schools as laboratories and waiting for the bad teachers to fail. Improving and standardizing the curriculum teachers are required to learn in order to obtain their credentials would also be a better track to take.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
@Steve LaBonne 96
I have a fair amount of experience with student evaluations with students at the university level. They measure very little.
There is a considerable body of research that shows your skepticism to be more than justified.
That’s right. Scores correlate with all sorts of factors that have nothing to do with learning.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Can you please provide link? I am really trying my best to hear the counter arguements but you yourself have already admitted to being able to asses teacher quality so we know its doable. It would seem to be a better method than paying for seniority or degrees that have little importnance toward student education. It seems as if the consensus counterpoint is ‘inertia’ plus the unions word (and maybe studies that may or may not exist).
September 9th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
“I have a fair amount of experience with student evaluations with students at the university level. They measure very little.”
I do too, and I agree. (For what it’s worth, when Texas A&M [I think] was proposing giving a financial jackpot to the teachers with the highest student evaluations, I vehemently opposed it at Ezra’s place.) But in my comment I specifically said that I wasn’t considering student evaluations (”polling students”) as a method of determining merit pay. Obviously any one method—test scores, classroom observations, etc.—has its problems, but in combination I don’t see why it would be impossible to get a pretty good idea of who’s doing the best.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
As for your position that teaching is completely different from all other fields, and much harder to assess: I’m sorry, I don’t see it.
I never said “completely different from all other fields”. The person I was replying to compared teaching to several professions in private industry which actually seem unusually easy to objectively evaluate, which is ridiculous. (He said “engineer” but that’s such a broad title that I substituted “architect” in my reply. Mea culpa, but it seemed easier to make my point.)
Okay, you did doctor and architect; how do you assess a computer programmer, or a law clerk,
Projects completed on or ahead of schedule. Number of bugs in the code or typos in the legal briefs. Praise or complaints from the client.
or an Assistant VP of Public Relations?
What Steve said at 2:43. He may be an asshole, but he’s not wrong about that. Just because teachers are harder to evaluate than most other professions, doesn’t mean they can’t be evaluated at all or that all other professions are equally easy to evaluate. I never said any of that so don’t claim that I did.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
@tomemos
I’m not saying we can just poll the students, but a combination of test scores (studying improvement, not just absolute scores, so teachers in underperforming districts aren’t penalized), classroom evaluations, and peer evaluations should be able to help administrators find out what the students already know.
The classroom evaluations part is what I was on about.
(I also think that often students *don’t* “already know”, but that’s a separate issue.)
September 9th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Many of you claim to oppose merit pay because you do not believe that the effectiveness can be reliably measured. We can therefore safely assume that you are also in favor of eliminating teacher tenure, correct? After all, tenure is usually justified by the “evaluation” process that supposedly weeds out the bad teachers. Since it is apparently impossible to discern between the good teachers and the bad ones, bad teachers are just as likely to receive tenure as good teachers. How does giving lifetime employment to bad teachers at all benefit “the children”?
If you are all right about it being impossible to judge the effectiveness of teachers, then that means there is absolutely no accountability in our current educational system. That means any hack with a college degree (and no criminal record, I would imagine) can become a teacher and get tenure, regardless of how well he or she can instruct students. That means educational degrees are worthless, since there is no way to know whether they improve teaching abilities. And worst of all, that means this situation is unimprovable.
That just sounds crazy to me. I personally reject this silly notion that it is impossible to separate the good teachers from the bad ones. I could tell the difference as a K-12 student, and talking to faculty members after I graduated showed me that most of the teachers could, too.
I’m pretty sure we can find a reliable way to identify the good teachers from the bad ones. It won’t be perfect, but nothing in life is. I think that using an imperfect justice system to deter crime is better than letting crimes go unpunished. Likewise, I think using an imperfect system to reward good teachers and remove bad ones is better than not rewarding the good teachers and letting the bad ones teach our children.
Instead of attacking the supporters of merit pay for teachers (often arrogantly), why don’t you constructively help them by suggesting fair methods for measuring teacher effectiveness?
September 9th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Eric L makes a good point, and also reminds me of a point that was made near the end of the previous thread (I don’t remember who made it): we also allow teachers to evaluate students, by assigning grades—a process which has been shown to have its own problems of reliability and objectivity, and one which can have lasting impacts on students’ lives. But just because there are problems and consequences doesn’t mean we don’t think it’s worth doing.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
@104
I think there’s a gaping hole between judging which teachers are good and using a qualitative rating system tied to compensation. You’re arguing against the former when most of us oppose the latter. Good principles can tell who the good teachers are. Good superintendents can tell who the good principles are. It works in education like it works everywhere else. Please give me an example of another occupation where a qualitative rating system is tied to compensation. I think those who promote merit pay simply take for granted that in the rest of the work force those who have been most productive are rewarded with the highest salaries. Is there any evidence that that is generally true?
September 9th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
@tomemos
Good point. We should reevaluate the role of grades in education. They may do more harm than good.
September 9th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Again, why would I “fear” something that has no personal impact on me whatsoever? This kind of comment is just stupid and merely illustrates the intellectual bankruptcy of those employing it.
Steve, calling people “stupid” is not an argument.The verbal abuse you’ve been flinging at Matt is not an argument. You are just being a troll. Stop.
September 9th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Do not pay teachers with experience more. Pay teachers in under performing schools more and let teachers bid for jobs based on seniority. That way we get the most experienced teachers where they are needed most.
September 9th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Eric L makes a good point, and
You made good points, but whatever pearls of wisdom he might possess are hidden under a heap of troll shit.
“We can therefore safely assume that you are also in favor of eliminating teacher tenure, correct?” What’s it called when you jump to someone else’s conclusion? This is a little like a jackalope, or maybe concern trolling. Nobody has said anything about tenure, and he only even mentions one reason for it, but he brought it up to show that people who oppose merit pay but not tenure are hypocrites or something. Classy. And: “That means educational degrees are worthless, since there is no way to know whether they improve teaching abilities. And worst of all, that means this situation is unimprovable.” Strawman much?
September 9th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
“Good principles can tell who the good teachers are. Good superintendents can tell who the good principles are.”
That will be news to the people who are predicting that merit pay will lead to widespread abuse and favoritism, precisely because school administration can’t be trusted. (And indeed, principals shouldn’t be totally trusted—we still need a union to combat potential abuse, and no assessment system should rely solely on one principal.)
In any case, until recently more than 95% of New York schoolteachers were regularly given tenure, so it seems that either the principals aren’t that wise or else New York is truly blessed.
“Please give me an example of another occupation where a qualitative rating system is tied to compensation.”
Well, people in the corporate world are promoted to higher-paying jobs, or given more lucrative projects. Lawyers become partners, assistant professors become full professors, and even school administrators get promoted to higher-paying positions. As for whether ratings are “qualitative,” well, all of these promotions are based on a mixture of objective standards and subjective evaluation, and I’m sure that would be the case with merit pay as well.
September 9th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
In thinking about the arguments here, I’d be much more willing to countenance merit pay (and perhaps even eliminating K-12 tenure) were teachers paid much more. If you’re making $35k, the factors (largely irrelevant to merit) determining merit pay have a huge impact on you. If you’re making $125k, not as much.
September 9th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Cyrus: On reflection, Eric’s comment is pretty snotty, what with “safely assume” and all that. Still, I do think there is an inconsistency with supporting teacher evaluations when it comes to tenure, while maintaining (as some do) that whether a teacher is doing a good job or not is essentially impossible to determine objectively.
September 9th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Being a teacher, Tomemos is probably aware that the best example of a comprehensive pay for performance system being put into place is in Denver. It’s important to note that Denver’s was an arduous process that involved the whole community, including citizens and the unions. The metrics for gauging performance are intended to honor the complexity of the teaching and learning experience, I think.
That said, it remains true that the strongest proponents of merit pay are also the strongest proponents of standardized tests. The two go together in what they perceive teaching and learning to be all about. And for them, merit pay is a magic bullet.
Some teachers are perfectly fine with this, too, or will learn to cope, and will do well in the testing-oriented environments. Many prospective and experienced teachers, though, will be extremely uncomfortable with this direction, precisely because they are great teachers whose strengths and philosophy don’t fit with our “reform” environment. We must always ask what we think education is for.
September 9th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
I think there’s a big difference between arguing that in principle teachers ought to be evaluated on something resembling merit, and actually proposing a scheme for evaluating merit.
Those who are arguing more or less for the status quo on the basis that Matt and your other interlocutors on this thread haven’t proposed a concrete alternative is kind of sad. I mean, if Matt and/or some other random wiseass on the internet HAD proposed an alternative, would we really want to adopt that? Or even make it the locus of debate? No.
The concrete proposals should be left to education researchers. Which is part of the problem. We don’t have enough of those, or an arena where they are able to experiment. We badly need more hard data, more research into effectiveness, best practices, effective measurement, etc. But we’re in a catch-22: we can’t really get broad support research and reform unless we all admit that the status quo is sub-optimal and that there ought to be a better way. But many of us apparently can’t admit the status quo is suboptimal, because no one has a ready-made concrete alternative…
Just admit the status quo is sub-optimal already.
September 9th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
@tomemos
I did say that “good” principals can tell who the good teachers are, right? For a merit pay system to work we’d still have to find the good principals, and then agree that giving them the ability to dictate salaries would be a good thing for a school. If would could guarantee that all principals and superintendents would be good at their jobs this would be a different discussion.
Other parts of the work world definitely claim they are rewarding excellence with more pay, but where’s the evidence that they actually are, and that it in turn promotes more excellence?
September 9th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
My own wiseass on the internet suggestion would be more or less along the lines of what Tomemos suggested, evaluating a combination of inputs. While any one method on its own is quite weak, the right combination should be able to get at something real.
Along with student evaluation, test scores, and classroom observation, I’d add parent evaluation and peer evaluation. (To remove stigma, the latter could consist of something like voting anonymously for the handful of colleagues you think are the BEST teachers. It’s all about getting the incentives for honest evaluation right. And over a few years even a narrow signal like that could provide a lot of good input.)
September 9th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
James S. Coleman figured out in 1966 while researching the Coleman Report that if you reward the better teachers more, you will, on average, be rewarding white teachers more than black teachers.
Are you willing to do that?
September 9th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
If I teach at a wealthy suburban school, most of my kids will probably test above average no matter what I do. If I teach at an impoverished, high-turnover school, my kids will probably test pretty poorly whatever I do. Yeah, merit pay sounds like a great idea.
September 9th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Well, that settles it. Steve Sailer points out that 43 years ago, before most of today’s teachers were born, a single study that attempted to measure teacher quality showed a racial disparity. How is it we could possibly have overlooked this vital piece of utterly incontrovertible empirical evidence?
September 9th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Telling me that I’m “afraid” of something in which I have no personal stake isn’t an argument either. And it IS, well, stupid.
September 9th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
In today’s matinee, the part of Petey was played by Steve LaBonne, who gave a standout performance.
September 9th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
“Telling me that I’m “afraid” of something in which I have no personal stake isn’t an argument either.”
I was responding to your abrasive, reactionary, panicky tone, not making an argument. Plenty of other people have been put off by you here as well, even those that agree with you; consider why that might be.
Obviously, one doesn’t have to have a personal stake in something to be afraid of change. Plenty of people respond to Obama’s various proposals with outright terror, even though they’re not affected by them.
Beyond which, over the course of this discussion you’ve simultaneously criticized Matt for posting on something he knows nothing about (according to you) and bragged about your impartiality since you’re not affected by the issue. This is inconsistent.
September 9th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
This point is worth discussing. Underperforming teachers presumably got where they are because the tenure evaluation process failed to do its job. The higher one’s estimate of the number of underperforming teachers currently in the system, the more one has to admit that teacher performance is not being adequately assessed in this context, either.
This just seems to underline the point that we need to know a lot more than we currently do about what defines a good teacher, and how to recognize one, before either a) tenure evaluations can start doing a better job of living up to their purpose and b) it will be possible to design merit pay systems that actually reward good teaching without doing needless collateral damage to teacher morale.
September 9th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Uh, no. While no longer involved in education I do have- unlike Matt- past experience of teaching (though admittedly not at the K-12 level). And I have, again unlike Matt, sent a kid through the public schools (which, I believe, he didn’t even attend).
The “afraid” business is just asinine, and you’d do better to admit that and move on rather than digging your hole deeper. What I am is ANGRY, at the kind of neoliberal tripe that Matt (like so many others) glibly promotes on many subjects. It’s the antithesis of genuine progressive thought.
September 9th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
I have a couple of good friends who are secondary science teachers, and in my past life as a college professor I worked closely with a number of high school biology teachers on summer projects and as M.S. students. I’ve heard plenty of stories about principals. Few of those stories made me think that trusting principals, as a class (obviously there are good ones, but there’s no shortage of the other kind) to identify good teaching is workable idea.
September 9th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
If I teach at a wealthy suburban school, most of my kids will probably test above average no matter what I do. If I teach at an impoverished, high-turnover school, my kids will probably test pretty poorly whatever I do. Yeah, merit pay sounds like a great idea.
Don’t confuse merit pay generally with any one overly simplistic strawman version.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
MattY should get his ass out of the blog business and spend some time in front of an inner city classroom before he starts pontificating about the teaching profession.
It’s been proven over and over again that small class size is the single most important factor in improving student performance. The most merit-compensated teachers in the world probably couldn’t deal effectively with class sizes greater than 30 (which is quite common these days, BTW). Increase the number of teaching staff to reduce the class size down to the optimal 15 to 20 students and you’ll see an immediate increase in student achievement. But no one really wants to spend the money to hire more teachers.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
> Many of you claim to oppose merit pay because you
> do not believe that the effectiveness can be
> reliably measured. We can therefore safely assume
> that you are also in favor of eliminating teacher
> tenure, correct?
If we are talking about K-12 here, or even community colleges, there are very, very few school districts in the United States that have a concept called “tenure”. New York City exerts a strong influence on the media and policy world, and if the New York City Public Schools have the concept of “tenure” that might be why it has such a strong pull (along with “strong unions”) on the MYs and EKs of the juicebox policy world. But in Illinois, for example, community college teachers lost the concept of tenure in 1979 in a strike that a friend of mine spent 4 months in jail over (and lost).
By the way, the US Armed Forces Overseas School District is a fully unionized school system with a strong union (AFL local) and it performs extremely well. Bit of a problem for the “break the union” crowd, eh?
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Don’t confuse merit pay generally with any one overly simplistic strawman version.
What version of it, if a hypothetical Merit Pay in Public Schools for America’s Security Act of 2010 came up for a vote in Congress, would get the votes?
Conservatives would prefer the simplistic strawman version. It screws over teacher’s unions, and public schools in general and inner city schools in particular. Some liberals would support it because they buy into the Republican line on this particular issue even if they don’t in general. Others would admit that it’s not perfect but argue that it’s better than the status quo, or can be improved in implementation, or has other provisions that make it worth supporting overall. That’s a lot like what is happening with health care reform. I’m not even trying to bring today’s argument into it; that’s exactly what happened with the 2008 Wall Street bailouts and the Iraq war.
And no aspersions on Matt or anyone else are intended. Maybe, on the merits, the liberal supports of a particular simplistic strawman merit pay bill would be right. On the other hand though, it’s fair to consider the likely form something will take before you advocate for your ideal version of it.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
> Well, people in the corporate world are
> promoted to higher-paying jobs, or given
> more lucrative projects.
Guys, come on. You are showing a deep lack of familiarity with the reality of the corporate world as well as an inability to read a single volume of ‘Dilbert’. Even the HR “profession”, which is deeply invested in the concept of “performance review”, has thousands of articles in its journals, magazines, and web sites discussing ‘Problems with the Performance Review System’ and ‘Performance Review: How Can We Make It Relevant?’. HR types have been routing those articles to me since I first became a manager 20 years ago! And many of the ones they routed were 20 years old then!!
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
This trend that no one should comment on this issue if they’ve never taught—add beowulf’s comment to the ever-deepening pile—is not only obnoxious, it’s also not in keeping with the “reality-based community” reputation we progressives pride ourselves on. In most discussions, we don’t maintain that someone should have hands-on experience before taking a position, as long as they have evidence and expert opinion to support their claims.
And with good reason: unions and professional organizations, while essential, by definition represent a narrow range of interests; and they’re usually against changes that might reduce their influence. The AMA is against health-care reform, prison guards’ unions are against prison reform, cops’ unions fight every police brutality case they can. CEOs are against limits on executive compensation and bankers are against banking regulations. I’ve never been a doctor, a correctional or police officer, or a banker or CEO, but I’m allowed to oppose all of these groups’ positions because (I believe) the evidence is on my side. Yet you have to be a teacher in order to weigh in on teacher evaluation? That’s just reactionary, and flies in the face of the values progressives are supposed to hold.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
> Don’t confuse merit pay generally with any
> one overly simplistic strawman version.
Take yourself down to a good business school library and skim through the corporate Human Resources trade journals for the last 30 years for articles with titles such as “Performance Review: Why it is Failing”. Read those articles. Next do a bit of research on No Child Left Behind, who drafted its language, and what affect it is having on _successful_ suburban school districts over the last 2 years. Then get back to us.
Cranky
September 9th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
I think the embittered tone that tomemos is so disturbed by stems from the fact that Matt posts on the topic of education nearly every day and never discusses any possible aspect of education problems other than teachers. And his solution always involves punishing teachers in some way–ending tenure, busting up their union, getting rid of higher pay for seniority, implementing a merit pay scheme which would be easily abused. It’s not as if this is his first post on the subject.
I have never read a single proposal from him that focused on anything else. Providing a free breakfast to all students under a certain income level would probably have a larger impact on education outcomes than twiddling with teacher compensation, but that’s not a subject that Matt ever broaches. So it seems to some of us that Matt has in in for teachers.
There is a long and rich history here. The tone of the comments that disagree with Matt has gradually escalated.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Rob Mac: Fair point.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
@129 Cranky makes an excellent point as usual. Teachers unions are not all powerful in most districts. In Florida, where I live, there is essentially no teachers union. Teachers are completely at the mercy of administrators. Talk about cracking down harder on teachers here comes off pretty different than in does in a district where a teacher have lifetime employment and earn six figure salaries.
September 9th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
@tomemos: Thanks!
September 9th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Cranky: How has NCLB been received at Chicago suburban schools? (Went to HS there.)
September 9th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Seems like Tomemos would prefer an “unreality based community” — one that’s based on preconceptions and quick fixes. There are lots of things wrong with public education, but teacher’s unions are the least of the problem. The biggest impediment to educational reform in my opinion is school administrators and Boards of Ed who believe that top-down management of curriculum and teachers will create an environment where kids can learn.
Tomemos, you’re right, I was being unreasonable to MattY. I wouldn’t wish the responsibility of teaching on just anyone. Very few people can teach effectively in the modern public school system where the management style and goals most resembles the central planning and unreality of Stalinesque 5-year plans. God bless the unions for pushing back! I left teaching years ago (and quadrupled my salary, and got out from under the micromanagement that plagues public school administrations). Why anyone would want to take up teaching is beyond me. I actively discourage young people from taking it up as a career.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Other people think he’s pretty much dead on. Otoh, I find you to be grating, arrogant, and not particularly bright. See below.
No, it’s not. It’s you making me question your credentials to be teaching. I know quite a bit about cars of a certain make and vintage. If I tell my neighbor to check his plugs first instead of replacing his carburetor, and he ignores me repeatedly and still has problems with acceleration, well, I know about the issue, I’m impartial, and I’m not affected by it. Iow, the two attributes are orthogonal. That you think there is a ‘contradiction’ doesn’t lead me to respect your contributions.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
That’s a pretty big impediment, all right, but behind it all – and the biggest impediment, imho – is the parents. If people want them some reforms, how about this: make the kids do their homework. It has been my experience as a teacher that the number one reason students perform poorly on tests and exams is . . . they don’t do their homework. Any teachers out there who disagree? And they don’t do their homework because they find it unpleasant and tedious, and there are no immediate negative consequences for not doing it. If the parents were doing their job, they’d be on this one, and they wouldn’t be so resistant to the authority that tells them this is the minimum bottom line. Sadly, parents do resist this, possibly because it’s safe to tell The Man off in this instance, possibly because they get to act the part of the ‘concerned’ parent without having to do any of the scut work that actually goes with being a concerned parent.
Let’s get the basics out of the way first before we graduate to something more complicated. Oh – in case you’re interested? If you want better results in the classroom without spending lots and lots more money, why don’t you try giving teachers a little more authority first? Give them the power to hold kids back a grade, or to kick them out of their class if they become a discipline problem or a disruptive influence. If parents complain about their kids getting poor grades, have the administration explain nicely but firmly that their teachers have the final say and that they are supported 100%. And that there won’t be any grades being changed or any teachers ‘corrected’.
My Two Cents.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
“I find you to be grating, arrogant, and not particularly bright.”
I can’t do anything about my brightness, but if you’ll point out the ways I’ve been grating and arrogant I’ll endeavor to improve in the future. I hope that’s not just longhand for saying that you disagree with me.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Objective merit pay is less problematic than arbitrary, capricious merit pay. Years of service and number of college credits are objective measurements. If your complaint is that they have low validity as quality measures, then the burden should be on you to show why your alternative criteria have better validity. But a merit scheme that depends on the whim of the supervisor is terrible. That’s what I suspect the teachers unions are against.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
BINGO!
September 9th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Of course I do agree that the parents are hugely instrumental in how their kids perform in school—possibly the biggest single factor. But, since public schools don’t hire or pay parents, what we’re looking for are ways to make sure that the best teachers—those who are able to influence kids independent of their parents—stay in teaching, while the very worst find another line of work.
I totally agree with you about supporting teachers in giving tough grades, rather than kicking kids upstairs. That will require much more school funding so that we have enough classroom space and teachers to accommodate students, which of course I support. None of that is incompatible with merit pay; in fact, it’s easier to support teachers who are effectively evaluated.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Excuse me, but what we are looking for are more effective ways of teaching our children. I’m open to anything. Matt comes back again and again to teacher performance, and teacher performance only. That’s why people suspect he’s not being up front.
How will giving teachers more support and authority cost more money than merit pay? And if you’re insistent that it’s one or the other but not both for financial reasons, what makes you think merit pay is superior to giving teachers more authority?
And why do you think that whether or not a student turns in his homework is on the teacher? That’s crazy talk. Like I said, start with knowns first.
September 9th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
“How will giving teachers more support and authority cost more money than merit pay? And if you’re insistent that it’s one or the other but not both for financial reasons, what makes you think merit pay is superior to giving teachers more authority?”
? I don’t see how money comes into this. These are both good ideas for improving education.
“And why do you think that whether or not a student turns in his homework is on the teacher? That’s crazy talk. Like I said, start with knowns first.”
It’s not “on” the teacher, but are you maintaining that the teacher can’t make any difference at all? And what steps do you propose taking to make parents better?
September 9th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Take yourself down to a good business school library and skim through the corporate Human Resources trade journals for the last 30 years for articles with titles such as “Performance Review: Why it is Failing”. Read those articles. Next do a bit of research on No Child Left Behind, who drafted its language, and what affect it is having on _successful_ suburban school districts over the last 2 years. Then get back to us.
Since I think it’s safe to say that very few of us here think NCLB is even close to the last word, or that Dilbert style performance reviews are the answer, I’ll say it to you too:
Drop the strawman.
September 10th, 2009 at 12:05 am
Speaking as the husband of a teacher now in private practice, all the talk of merit pay and eliminating tenure ignores the elephant in the room: School principals operate without adult supervision.
Without unions, and strict union rules, you end up with ass kissing as the primary determinant of employment.
My wife has dealt with principals, both as her boss and in her capacity as an special education advocate, and principals routinely demand that staff break the law, and there are no consequences for them.
September 10th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Speaking as the husband of a teacher now in private practice, all the talk of merit pay and eliminating tenure ignores the elephant in the room: School principals operate without adult supervision.
I was going to try to sneak that in somewhere too.
I don’t really know how, but it seems logical to address merit (period) for school administrators as one of the first steps. In my admittedly narrow experience, teachers and unions are probably pretty justified in fearing the outcomes should administrators be given even more…discretion. I mean, every field has its of bad supervisors, but certain school administrator positions really do seem tailor made for a particular type of petty tyrant personality.
September 10th, 2009 at 1:09 am
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but back when I was teacher (twenty some odd years ago) most vice principals and principals were formerly gym or shop teachers — who had risen to the top of the administrative heap — glaring examples of the Peter Principle at its worst.
Of course, they were ruled over by lofty Superintendents, who invariably required every one to address them as “Doctor” so-and-so. That always stuck in my craw, because a doctorate in Education is a pretty laughable degree.
September 10th, 2009 at 6:02 am
I have a proposal for an addendum to any merit pay system, but I’m not quite sure if all the incentives are appropriate. This is what excellent teachers do so we want to reward them:
Teaching compassion for a fellow student: $100
Talking with a student whose parents are getting a divorce: $150 ($100 if parents only separated).
Getting student to identify with another of a different culture: $25
Getting a student to love a piece of literature: ($100 for each novel or play, $20 for poems)
Teaching students to hold themselves accountable: $500 (end of year award)
Encouraging a student’s creativity ($30) and imagination ($25)
I’m flexible on the dollar amounts, and we can always add more if we think of any other desirable behaviors we want to reinforce with money.
September 10th, 2009 at 9:21 am
> Since I think it’s safe to say that very few of us
> here think NCLB is even close to the last word, or
> that Dilbert style performance reviews are the answer,
> I’ll say it to you too:
>
> Drop the strawman.
Since NCLB is, as of today, having a tremendous negative affect on otherwise successful middle-class public school districts, as it was designed to do, I’ll say it to you too: stop dodging substantive criticism.
Cranky
September 10th, 2009 at 9:23 am
> Since I think it’s safe to say that very few of
> us here think NCLB is even close to the last word,
> or that Dilbert style performance reviews are the
> answer, I’ll say it to you too:
>
> Drop the strawman.
Since what has been proposed over 20 times in this and the previous thread is exactly the implementation of corporate-style performance reviews under the theory that corporate personnel management is greatly superior to public school personnel management, I’ll say it to you too:
Stop dodging substantive criticism.
Cranky
September 10th, 2009 at 10:48 am
It’s been proven over and over again that small class size is the single most important factor in improving student performance.
I’ll answer your assertion with another: Not the case.
September 10th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Since NCLB is, as of today, having a tremendous negative affect on otherwise successful middle-class public school districts, as it was designed to do, I’ll say it to you too: stop dodging substantive criticism.
Why should I dodge criticism of NCLB? I’m not NCLB. I’m all for criticism of NCLB…
Since what has been proposed over 20 times in this and the previous thread is exactly the implementation of corporate-style performance reviews under the theory that corporate personnel management is greatly superior to public school personnel management, I’ll say it to you too:
Not by me. And to anyone who is*, I’ll say the same thing I said that started this exchange: don’t confuse merit with any one simplistic interpretation.
In fact, I think one thing people are assuming too much is that the only way to measure merit is retroactively, by reviewing performance in one way or another (although again, not necessarily Dilbert-style). In fact, the idea of awarding higher pay to people with better training is basically sound – and in some respects it might also be easier to weed out bad teachers and identify good teachers in the more structured and supervised academic/training setting.
The problem is just that it turns out “masters degree” isn’t currently at all synonymous with “better training”. And that seems like a bad thing in its own right – not only shouldn’t we be rewarding people for getting useless degrees, we really shouldn’t be offering the degrees in the first place. (We should be offering useful ones…)
—–
* I’m not sure anyone in particular actually has. I’ve seen vague reference to “ways merit is awarded in the corporate world”, etc. But consider that it’s possible you might might to a certain extent be conflating “performance review”, the corporate HR buzzword, with all of the various ways performance actually is reviewed and factored into promotions and so forth in various fields. Some of which, I have no doubt, are bound to be at least moderately better than blind cargo-cult credentialism, even if a certain amount of managerial capriciousness is inevitably involved.
September 10th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I’m a pretty good teacher at a top public school in my state. I’ve done my time in a struggling middle school. I thought about going back to the middle school for the challenge. However, I would get the SAME pay to go to a school where there is no parent involvement, low-performing students, and just general awfulness. Uh, no thanks.
Now if they paid me 1.5X more and let me pick the fellow teachers on my team, then I would probably make the move.
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