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?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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?

True, but neither should martyrdom be a prerequisite for teaching, either.