turn in after 5 hours
ibrahim93
s1.docxTitle:
The perils of merit pay: linking teacher pay to performance can't move forward until resolution of questions regarding fairness, teacher evaluation, and the relationship of test scores to teaching quality
Author(s):
Source:
Phi Delta Kappan . 91.2 (Oct. 2009): p99.
Document Type:
Article
Copyright:
COPYRIGHT 2009 Phi Delta Kappa, Inc.
Full Text:
The U.S. Senate wants the federal government to make $300 million in grants next year to spur a movement to link teacher pay to performance. The House wants to spend $445 million on the effort. And the Obama Administration wants to up the ante to $487 million in appropriations and another $200 million in stimulus spending. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently called performance pay "my highest priority."
Such investments make sense. The long tradition in public education of paying teachers mainly on the basis of the college credits they've amassed and the years they've taught results in bad teachers earning the same as good ones--making it seemingly tougher to recruit and retain talent in public schools at a time when research suggests that teacher quality is critical to raising student achievement.
But if the logic of performance pay for teachers is compelling, reformers have been trying unsuccessfully for decades to introduce the practice in public education, practically since the concept of a salary system based exclusively on credentials and seniority gained favor in the 1920s as a way to counter the favoritism and other inequities that plagued teacher pay at the time. "Every effort must be made to devise ways to reward teachers according to their ability without opening the school door to unfair personnel practices," reformers warned President Eisenhower in 1955. So if Duncan and today's school reformers want to bring performance pay to the public school teaching profession, they'll have to avoid their predecessors' mistakes.
The last, and largest, push for performance pay came in the 1980s. Ted Bell, Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, protested in 1981 that public education's single salary schedule "demands that we pay the worst at the level of the best if we want to pay the best what they are worth." Two years later, a Bell-appointed national commission on school reform recommended performance pay in A Nation at Risk, its stinging indictment of public education. The result was new reward systems for teachers in Tennessee, California, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and a host of other school systems. But those pay reforms didn't last long.
Teacher unions attacked merit pay, as President Reagan was fond of calling the reform, largely because it violated the collectivism at the heart of the industrial-style unionism in public education. But the teacher pay experiments of the 1980s also failed because they were, at bottom, capricious. In many instances, they offered teachers the possibility of small additional amounts of money, not enough to mean much to those who got it, but just enough to irk those who didn't. The number of teachers receiving the rewards shifted with annual appropriations, regardless of how many teachers were rated high enough to receive them. And the eligibility standards for the rewards were frequently left to the whims of principals.
The absence of credible systems of evaluating teachers' performance remains a major barrier to performance pay today, no less of a barrier than continued union resistance to tying pay to performance. The typical teacher evaluation in public education consists of a single, fleeting classroom visit by a harried principal untrained in evaluation who is often more interested in classroom comportment than the quality of instruction. The result is statistics like those in Chicago, where the nonprofit New Teacher Project found that 88% of the city's 600 schools did not issue a single "unsatisfactory" teacher rating between 2003 and 2006.
The Obama Administration and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is planning to spend upwards of $500 million on performance pay and other teaching reforms, want to use student test scores in teacher evaluations, a step the New York Times endorsed in a recent editorial. There's a clear logic in giving student test scores a role in teacher evaluations: It's inexpensive and easy to administer and seemingly measures what matters most--student achievement.
Why Not Test Scores?
But test scores aren't the simple solution they seem to be. Less than half of public school teachers teach the subjects or grade levels in which students are tested, eliminating the prospect of a system that's applied fairly to all teachers. Most standardized tests today measure only a narrow band of mostly low-level skills, such as recalling or restating facts, rather than the ability to analyze information and other advanced skills. As a result, the tests tend to privilege low-level pedagogy, leaving the best teachers, those with wider teaching repertoires and the ability to move students beyond the basics, at a disadvantage.
And then there's the daunting challenge of separating out individual teachers' impact on their students' reading and math scores from the myriad other influences on student achievement and the difficulty of drawing the right conclusions about teacher performance from very small numbers of student test scores, a particular challenge in elementary schools, where teachers work with a single classroom's worth of students most of the day.
As a result, student test scores should play a supporting rather than a lead role in teacher evaluations, and any credible performance pay plan is going to require more effective evaluations of teachers in classrooms--multiple evaluations by multiple evaluators and based on multiple indicators of how well teachers plan, teach, test, manage, and motivate.
Comprehensive evaluations are especially important for making key decisions, such as granting teachers tenure, and for making judgments about the majority of teachers who are neither the very best nor the very worst. And they're key to winning teacher support of performance pay. In surveys, only a tiny fraction of teachers are willing to have student test scores play any role in pay levels. But their opposition to performance pay drops significantly when ratings are based on comprehensive evaluations. Encouragingly, the Gates Foundation is planning to make the evaluation issue a cornerstone of its teacher-reform work.
Because there have been so few sustained performance pay systems in public education over the years, we don't know for sure whether the reform would indeed improve the teaching profession. James Guthrie and Patrick Schuermann at the National Center on Performance Incentives in Education at Vanderbilt's Peabody College, an enterprise funded by the federal government during the George W. Bush Administration to study performance pay, warn that there's not yet conclusive evidence on "the power of financial awards in promoting more effective teaching and elevating student performance" or on "the long-term effect of performance awards on the supply of effective teachers." Nor, they write, do we know the "effects of group awards relative to individual performance" or the "preferable mix of financial and nonpecuniary awards"--important secondary questions.
We need to answer these big questions about performance pay rather than assume that answers already exist. We know from surveys, for example, that bigger salaries are less important to teachers than professional work environments where they feel supported and are helped to become better at their craft. A 2007 national survey of teachers by the nonprofits Public Agenda and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality found that, if given a choice between two otherwise identical schools, 76% of secondary teachers and 81% of elementary teachers would rather be at a school where administrators supported teachers strongly than at a school that paid significantly higher salaries.
Performance pay may be one tool with which to create a more professional culture in public school teaching, but it is no more than that.
THOMAS TOCH is executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington and a former guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Toch, Thomas
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Toch, Thomas. "The perils of merit pay: linking teacher pay to performance can't move forward until resolution of questions regarding fairness, teacher evaluation, and the relationship of test scores to teaching quality." Phi Delta Kappan 91.2 (2009): 99+. Academic OneFile. Web. 12 June 2014.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA210599572&v=2.1&u=tel_a_ttul&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=7f62baa2c3042239e4e1943181d02c70
Gale Document Number: GALE|A210599572
