If we Get Performance Pay Right, it will transform schools, argues William Slotnick on Education Week.
Performance-based compensation . . . must be tied directly to the educational mission of a district and must focus on how a school system thinks and behaves—specifically in the areas of student learning, teacher support and rewards, and institutional culture.
. . . Linking teacher compensation to student performance stimulates discussion about the district’s goals for student achievement and what factors need to be addressed to reach those goals. This in turn leads to change.
Doing it right requires building trust between administrators and teachers, writes Slotnick of the Institute for Compensation Reform and Student Learning.
How do we evaluate teachers’ performance? Collect and analyze the data, writes Marcus Winters in City Journal. The data-crunching techniques that helped New York City police fight crime can be used in education, he argues.
Currently, 21 states have data systems capable of matching teachers to students. Duncan has pledged to use his discretionary funds under the federal stimulus package to get more states to do the same. It seems like a no-brainer. After all, who’s against having more information?
The teachers’ unions, that’s who. They’re fighting hard against the adoption of these systems precisely because the information they reveal is so useful. The unions insist, against all evidence and logic, that no meaningful variation exists in teacher quality. Further, in a clear case of making the perfect the enemy of the good, they argue that because test scores are a limited measure of student proficiency and statistical models for evaluating teacher quality are imperfect, the information that data-system analyses produce for individual teachers are not ready for prime time.
Without the use of data linking teachers to their students’ performance, there’s no meaningful evaluation of teachers’ effectiveness, Winters writes. A teacher may be observed once or twice a year — less in some states. In a study of large school districts by the nonprofit New Teacher Project, over 99 percent of teachers were rated “satisfactory.” NTP calls this failure to distinguish between excellent, good, fair and poor teachers The Widget Effect.
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Personally, I couldn’t care less about performance pay, but if other people, especially young people want to give it a try I’m fine with that besides. If done right (and in contrast with merit pay)
“… Linking teacher compensation to student performance stimulates discussion about the district’s goals for student achievement and what factors need to be addressed to reach those goals. This in turn leads to change.
Doing it right requires building trust between administrators and teachers …”
We should listen to Chief Bratton, the father of Compstat. Data-driven policies, he says, are like chemotherapy – useful in small doses. But NYC, like the much of the rest of the country, kept it up too long and it became poison. Streetwise leaders, like Bratton, knew that the 80s drug law would fill up our prisons with non-violent offenders. As was explained so well in The Wire, it was inevitable that the system would concentrate on making the numbers come out right (“juking the stats”). And that because of institutional racism (as opposed to personal racism), our prisons would change from majority White to a majority Black and Hispanic. At that time, I was writing a book on corporate crime in Oklahoma City and people in all parts of the judicial system knew in advance how it would shake out. Public defenders, prosecutors, judges, and police all agreed that the system would scoop up a disportionate number of small fry that didn’t belong in prison. And sure enough, by taking so many (imperfect but nonviolent) people out of poor communities we further damaged families and schools, and now prison gang values are even more pervasive.
And as portrayed in The Wire, it was no surprise that NCLB would encourage the same abuses in education. After all, we’re all “featherless bipeds.”
We must reject data-driven accountability and embrace data-informed accountability. A “no-brainer” compromise should be easy if we wanted out of the cycle of blame and shame. Drop the “firewall” on teacher identifiers so that we can benefit from data. Then, create a firewall prohibitting the use of that data to drive evaluations and tenure. Data could be used to complement, supplement, confirm, repudiate, clarify and/or enrich evaluations driven by human judgments. If people don’t want the Toledo Plan, which has had the best results, then design another plan for data-informed accountability.
Removing ineffective teachers efficiently has to be a huge priority. In real hardcore schools it is even more important. But, the TNTP proposals would be a disaster.
Which reminds me, why not have some accountability for accountability advocates? When will they correct their data on the Toledo Plan? When will they apologize and correct for the incomplete use of data in the latest report, as well as the “rubber room” report.
If those two reports were submitted as masters theses or even a major undergrad paper, how many of us would have given them an F? More importantly, how many of us would have used those flawed reports as “a teachable moment” inn order to teach lessons about the use of evidence, as well as ethics?
Are individual teacher’s salaries made public in California? Are they available on the web?
Why does this article only talk about teachers? How about performance pay for the rest of the education industry?
I have no problem with performance pay, and if/when it is instituted I think it will result in positive change.
What I have tremendous reservations about is the way my performance will be assessed. Sure, I can gather data, but if the testing movement is any indication, I will be penalized for taking tough classes where kids enter deficient, but leave significantly less deficient (though still below grade level). The testing movement in education has had nothing to do with growth, but rather is only focused on achieving the final benchmark as established by an external force. People already fight to get assigned the “good” classes (honors, AP, etc), so if you kids’ performance determines your pay, who would want to take the sweathogs, who probably need an effective teacher far more than the self-driven AP kids?
On top of that add this: I’ve only taught seven years, six of those in one building in the same assignment, and have seen a revolving door of administration. In the building principal slot alone I have had four administrators. How can there be continuity of “vision” and consistent assessment of teacher performance? And I’ll throw this out there as well: there is a reason some folks go into admin…they were not effective classroom practitioners. If administration is to do the assessing, it needs to be relegated to highly trained instructional leaders, and funding/time needs to be provided to make sure the admin are instructional leaders (not all are!)
There is talk in Washington state about using teacher-leaders to be the assessors of their peers’ performance, by being on special assignment and traveling throughout a region (since teacher base pay is determined by the state, not locals) to observe, analyze data, etc. I have more confidence that if I were assessed by a fellow teacher (even from another district) that my performance would be more appropriately assessed.
If a reasonable and fair means of assessing teacher performance can be crafted…with teacher-leaders or well-trained instructional leaders as assessors or essential elements…I am all for merit pay.
pm–Not really. But, you can usually figure out salary. Most districts post pay scales on their sites. If you have an idea how long a teacher has been in the district and what his or her education level is, you should be able to get close.
Why does this article only talk about teachers? How about performance pay for the rest of the education industry?
Bingo!
If the entire organization isn’t aligned in the direction of higher performance then those who derive nothing from the incentives aren’t particularly motivated to so to the achievement of the organization’s goals.
Or we could realize that part of the problem is that we even have to consider merit pay to improve our teachers. Why do we as a society (and you can argue that this is most of the developed world, not just USA) need to be bribed just to perform as important a task as educating children and teaching them to think critically about their world? The people who should be in our classrooms are those who wish to be there, not because it’s an “easy job where you get summers off” (cliche I know, it was the only flawed reason to become a teacher I could come up with this afternoon) or the myriad of other wrong reasons an individual becomes a teacher. The people we need in classrooms are those that want to be there because they want to instill a love of learning about the world around you into a new generation of youth. Money can’t buy these people but it can buy you plenty of the wrong kind of teacher.
As long as our culture continues to glorify achieving the almost impossible “american dream” and getting rich then our good teachers will continue to be caught in a difficult position: between increasing test scores and providing students with skills to succeed in the flawed world that currently exists or to encourage students explore topics they are interested in, to think critically and creatively and not to simply blindly follow orders, skills which do not serve them well in achieving what is the current goal in society, money to buy more stuff.
Not sure why teachers’ performance should be assessed by other teachers and not their boss. Is there another profession where peer review is used for compensation decisions?
My manager is also judged by her performance, so I’m not concerned about my assessment, even though she is not qualified as an engineer. [Nor would I be a good manager.]
In my job, people fight to get the tough assignments–more opportunity to improve and therefore increase your compensation. It should be that way in education as well. How hard is it to keep a smart student on grade level?
The rewards should go to teachers and administrators that raise the level of struggling students. Those with easy assignments should be paid at the low end of the scale. Too often it is just the opposite; those with seniority and higher pay have the easiest job and no incentive to take a more challenging position.
Cliff, I don’t agree. It is just as important for grade-level and above-grade-level students to make progress as it is for struggling students. Far too many in the education field are willing to write off those kids who will pass important tests, with the phrase “these kids will do fine, anyway.” That may be true, but they also deserve to have their needs met; after all, they will be the adults who pay most of the taxes. With appropriate challenges, they will really fly. That, I suspect, is the reason they aren’t encouraged/allowed; the achievement gap will widen. Better to hold them back, force them into peer tutoring and useless busywork.
Unfortunately, not all teachers have the subject-matter knowledge to handle advanced students, especially at the middle and high school levels. I have a family member who had to stop mentoring practice teachers in honors and AP history classes; they didn’t have the content knowledge and they invariably tried to dodge or BS questions, even after being warned otherwise: FATAL. Temper, tears and/or hysterics were the usual outcomes. It was much worse in math and the sciences.
cheryl and pm,
the LA daily news published all the salary data for all of LAUSD a few months ago.
http://lang.dailynews.com/socal/lausdpayroll/
A CPRA request for any other distict is possible too.
“Why do we as a society (and you can argue that this is most of the developed world, not just USA) need to be bribed just to perform as important a task as educating children and teaching them to think critically about their world? The people who should be in our classrooms are those who wish to be there, not because it’s an “easy job where you get summers off”
True, but neither should martyrdom be a prerequisite for teaching, either.
What bothers me about these discussions is that most people seem to misinterpret or misunderstand how performance pay works in the real (private) world. There too the measures are not really objective; there too some have it easier than others; there too we want to develop collegiality and support structure; etc., etc.
Still, goals are set and evaluated. Some managers do it better, some worse. If someone feels really misjudged, one can appeal to the boss’s boss. But it boils down to the annual review and corresponding salary raise. Say the average target for a given year is set to 5%. If you did well, you may get 7% or even 10%. If you did average you will get the 5%. If you did poorly, you will get perhaps only 2%. If the boss wants to get rid of you you will get 0% and an improvement plan.
Same process works for the boss, except that s/he is evaluated on the group performance, so it is in his/her interest to have a group of achievers.
In any quality measure one can find some examples of “unfairness”, but any single event is not a major one. So you got only 4% instead 7% that you think you deserved this year — not pleasant, but certainly not deadly. Only a chain of good or bad annual evaluations has a major cumulative effect, and if you really feel your boss (or principal) regularly screws you, change department (or school). Life is not perfect.
Can one explain to me again why this can’t work for teachers and principals?
Why do we as a society (and you can argue that this is most of the developed world, not just USA) need to be bribed just to perform as important a task as educating children and teaching them to think critically about their world?
Short answer: The failure of communism.
Longer answer: All participants in the civil war in Russia after the 1917 Communist Revolution tried not paying farmers for the even more important task of growing food to feed people. They got a famine. More generally, communism suffered from the lack of incentives for good job performance (and also from the lack of information about demand and supply caused by markets).
If you prefer, you can think of it as rewarding people for performing such an important task as educating children and teaching them to think critically about their world. What is moral about failing to reward people who perform important services well? Doesn’t that imply a society made up of selfish people which expect only to take, and not to give?
“To each according to their need, from each according to their ability” is bad both from a moral and an economic viewpoint.
Can one explain to me again why this can’t work for teachers and principals?
Public education’s effective monopoly allows the organizations, and thus the organization’s personnel, to ignore performance-based criteria. When faced with the prospect of performance-based criteria they quite naturally resist since if you’re doing just fine without having to demonstrate that you’re worth your keep then there’s not much attraction in the prospect of having to toe the line.
momof4,
I agree with everything you said. Students that are above grade level are easy to teach and are held onto, used as free staff and often not challenged, but still pass all minimal testing levels; for this effort I would award minimal pay, but our current system praises schools and teachers with above average students as good, and typically higher pay for IMO a mediocre effort.
I suspect fear of an achievement gap blocks many good decisions and subsequently drives many good administrators out of education.
Ze’ev: Because we can’t change schools without major salary and possibly pension penalties. Maybe I’m sitting at step 11 at my current school, but no district will hire me at a salary level beyond step 5 (very typical). Depending on how soon retirement is coming up, I want my last three years to be at the tippity top of the salary scale to max out the pension benefits.
The monopoly slices both ways.
I know there’s no guarantee in other professions of making equal or more money when one makes a job move, but that is generally the case (when the economy isn’t in the dumpers); in teaching it is almost never the case.
I think you’d find more very good teachers in favor of more performance pay options if there were some reform in our freedom to hop districts. (The unintended consequence of such reform would be an even bigger exodus of good teachers from tough districts, however.)
Ze’ev,
I was with you until the last paragraph. What you described in business is what we call performance pay, not merit pay. We, like business, need datainformed accountability, not data-driven accountability.
Your phrase was illustrative “if the boss wants to get rid of you …”
We must distinquish between evaluation models that are good enough for bonus versus good enough for ending a career. You wrote, “Only a chain of good or bad annual evaluations has a major cumulative effect, and if you really feel your boss (or principal) regularly screws you, change department (or school). Life is not perfect.”
That would be one thing. But “reformers” like Michelle Rhee are talking about something far worse.
Let’s just say you are a building contractor and its rained steadily for x number of weeks. In theory you could get fired for lack of progress, but a) you have enough of a chance to make profits that offset that risk, and b) quality counts more because the building that is being constructed is real. In education, too often, its just numbers that matter regardless of whether they are real.
When “reformers” demand the impossible of principals, their survival is based on making statistical games come out right. If a teacher, for example, balked at those games, it would be so simple to move him or her to a class where the numbers can’t come out right. If you don’t have tenure, or your school is being reconstituted, for instance, it wouldn’t take a “long chain of events” to screw you. It would be one strike and youre out.
Now if every teacher made $125,000 a year, then people might risk those vagaries. But something tells me that that idea of Rhee was just a bait and switch. Something tells me that society is not going to gamble tens of billions of dollars on that free market experiment.
I just got a bonus check today b/c my school participates in a Texas pay for performance scheme. Would I have done anything different? Nope, I do the best I can whether they give me a bonus or not.
Slotnick’s article is nothing but platitudes and fluff. Nowhere are the difficulties of comparing one teacher’s performance to another’s addressed. He seems to be making the pitch for a lucrative consulting project. Now why – as he implies – would a pay for performance system cost more money? How do we prevent teachers under a seniority system from gravitating to assignments where they can look good under a performance pay system? If we are interested in paying for performance why would we not also be interested in paying for skills and credentials based on their market value? Of course the unions will have none of this.
Having spent my career in the private sector, I find it astonishing that the very idea of pay for performance could generate this much hand-wringing. In almost every job, “performance” is subjective. We deal with it. We invest time and energy in developing systems to measure performance and to create incentives to stimulate it.
The idea that teaching children is somehow exempt from all forms of performance review (save criminal indictment) is just mind-boggling. How could we possibly expect to get great results from a system in which extra effort goes unrewarded? Sure, there are teachers so dedicated to the profession that they spend every waking minute working harder for their students. Remind me why they should be paid the same as their less-motivated peers?