The Right Push for Merit Pay

No doubt the public has a right to question the role that teacher unions play in school reform. The latest salvo from Richard Whitmore and Andy Rotherham, published in an October 2, 2009, commentary in the Wall Street Journal, will surely raise a few more eyebrows. But as usual, policy analysts, sitting in comfy offices far-removed from the real work of teaching children, often miss the point. Yes, unions have challenged the use of merit pay to reward teachers — and some do so because they themselves are too comfy with the status quo. But many are challenging merit pay because the systems being proposed by such analysts as Whitmore and Rotherham are built on shaky technical ground: pay systems that do not reward the best teachers (e.g., see Houston’s ASPIRE program), or rely on unstable student test scores (e.g., see Tim Sass’ analysis of the instability of value-added measures in Florida), or favor teachers who teach in easy-to-teach in schools (see Stein’s review of the Hillsborough County, Florida program). 

Do not get me wrong: Unions need to do a lot more to promote performance pay systems that students deserve — and we (and our Teacher Leaders Network ) have been pushing them to do so.  Too many union leaders have been recalcitrant or asleep at the wheel. They should be leading teacher pay reforms — and not just saying no to proposals for change. But I wonder why analysts, such as Whitmore and Rotherham, do not report on why unions often object to merit pay — as opposed to uniformly castigating them as purveyors of the status quo. Without even-handed reporting and discourse, it is difficult to advance the conversation and implement much-needed reforms in public education.  Perhaps journalists and policy analysts might turn to teacher leaders themselves in advancing the dialogue on the future of the teaching profession.

To see the work of accomplished teacher leaders around performance pay, be sure to read the TeacherSolutions report Performance Pay for Teachers: Designing a System that Students Deserve. The forward-looking TeacherSolutions 2030 team continues the conversation in a recently published monograph and forthcoming book on the future of their profession.

Comments

[Claus]

You pose some important questions, Barnett. The biggest problems seems to be that newspaper journalists and editors have limited understanding of the issues at hand. Pay for performance is a promising idea--and it sure sounds good. That's all they know. If you point out the very real technical barriers to implementation these days, you're merely an obstructionist.

Plus--the story of epic battles between unions and superintendents makes for good copy.

[Barnett Berry]

Thanks, Claus. It would seem that Messieurs Whitmore and Rotherham know full well about these legitimate merit pay concerns — that union leaders and others raise. If we do not address these concerns then I suspect the idea of performance pay -- which is much needed — will be implemented poorly (once again) and subsequently will be tossed aside. The end result: The teaching profession - and the students our nation's teachers teach — will lose out (once again).

[dora taylor]

Teachers get paid so little for doing so much that I can't imagine giving them less. Also, if you want to pay teachers more, where will that money come from? Public school systems around the country are financially strapped so the idea of paying bonuses is pretty much pie in the sky.

In Seattle where I live, recently teachers were laid off because of the financial situation.

The idea of merit pay is an issue that is closely associated with charter schools and is a reiteration of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Basically, it requires that teachers pay be based on how well their students perform on standardized tests. For our students in Seattle, it could be the WASL or a similar test. With the No Child Left Behind Act, teachers and staff were pressured to teach much of the class work to the standardized tests. With so much focus on the test, many other parts of knowledge building, creativity and understanding of subjects and their synthesis with other knowledge had to take a back seat. For many students, teaching to a test meant that they were not able to reach their full potential which would have been far beyond the level of the tests.

No one wins in this situation.

Part of the fallout also is that if a teacher's pay is based on how well their students test, many teachers will want to teach in a school where they know that the students will perform better. Those schools are, for the most part, not the minority schools.

Some students do not perform well on standardized tests for many different reasons and yet a teacher's pay can be tied to that student's performance. High stakes testing also puts pressure and stress on the students who become burdened with the thought that they need to perform well on one test. The test becomes a focus with little opportunity to explore and have fun learning, creating and synthesizing new thoughts and ideas.

[Neil Brown]

Students are given incentives to perform better; they are graded. There is absolutely no reason that teachers should be immune from being graded and compensated based on those grades. Developing a metric to do this is obviously problematic, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. The fact that all teachers with the same number of years in the system are paid the same amount is a travesty that does NOTHING to encourage teachers to peform at the top end of the curve. Why should any teacher do any more than what they perceive to be the minimum amount of efforts, especially those among you that already feel underpaid.