Bill Gates & Obama favor teacher pay based on student performance - How in the world can this work?

Great Debates
1

Per this article the Gates foundation and the POTUSare in favor of merit pay for teachers based on student performance. As a commission based salesperson in commercial real estate I’ve been on “merit pay” the majority of my working life so I’m pretty familiar with the ups and downs of the concept.

I grew up in the public schools and I’ve been to both good and not so good (IMO) public schools, but most were relatively middle class schools in suburban locations. I really have no direct personal experience with inner city public schools or schools in really desperate areas with primarily minority and economic underclass populations.

Having said this and acknowledging my ignorance about these populations I’ve gotten the impression over time via news articles and studies on American education, and even some stories here by teachers in those schools, that these kids are just not that educable in general for a variety of environmental reasons, most having to do with unstable home environments and a lack of peer support for academic achievement. Good intentions aside, while a few might rise to the top, the majority are not in any way academically competitive and never will be.

How long can you grind teachers against the stone of barely educable kids before they quit? I can see that if you pay them they might hang out, but by way of analogy if I’m (effectively) on commission, and all I’ve got for sales leads are people without a dime to their names I going to be moving on pretty fast.

Why do they think putting teacher on merit pay is going to magically change all that? There is only so much a teacher can do with the product an entrenched underclass culture regardless of how optimistic and progressive they want to be.

2

I think merit pay for teachers is a great idea, astro. Indeed, why not extend it to other professions as well?

Dentists, for example:

(As a teacher of students with learning challenges, many of whom are growing up in poverty, I could see where, under the merit pay plan, I would quite possibly earn a net negative salary! So no, I’m not too happy about this.)

3

Since tough inner-city schools aren’t the only types of schools, I’m going to focus on pay for performance over-all. You obviously can’t have a one size fits all approach. If we ever get such a system then the people who craft it will have to take into account things like
[ul]
[li]Class size[/li][li]The type of school kids being taught by a teacher. (Are they teaching learning disabled kids, kids who belong to a socioeconomic group which is considered hard to teach, kids who belong to a socioeconomic group that’s easy to teach, or a mixture.)[/li][li]Other factors I can’t think of at the moment.[/li][/ul]
If such factors are taken into account then I believe it could work.

4

Had you put this into Great Debates where it would actually be worth discussing I could have given you a decent answer.

But for the effort I’m prepared to put into IMHO posts, the idea is to pay teachers based in large part upon improvement not performance. A teacher who can get one child in a class of “ineducable” kids to minimum level will earn more than a teacher who manages to maintain a class of “pass” students at a “pass” level. As such every teacher will go where their skills/work ethic are best utilised, and all children get the best education possible.

5

I actually really like the idea of some sort of pay flexibility–it’s frankly ridiculous that teacher pay comes down to years of service + educations level + stipends for extra work. The problem that I worry about is that the instruments they use to evaluate student improvement have the precision of a hacksaw and the pay will be based on measurements to the millimeter. For example, my kids (11th grade English) are tested three times: first, in mid-January on the district-provided (and monitored) semester final. Again, the first week of March on the state-wide TAKS test, and lastly, in mid-May, when they take the AP exam.

My final exam and TAKS scores are compared to “expected improvement”. According to the final exam, I am a middling teacher, with my kids showing average improvement compared to other kids in the district–my classroom is in the 55th percentile. According to the TAKS (where I have a 100% pass rate most years and never more than one fail), my classroom is in the 85%. They average those together to rate my classroom. They don’t look at my AP scores at all, where I have the highest pass rate of any comprehensive (non-magnet) school in the district, both as a % of kids who take the test and the % of the student body (suggesting that I am not cherry-picking). So am I a mediocore teacher, a fairly good teacher, or one of the best in the district?

For the most part, the tests we use are not capable of making very subtle distinctions on populations of 70-80* kids, but the merit programs will depend on those distinctions.

  • A teacher in an urban school with 150 average student load will still likely only have 70-80 kids counted because of kids that leave before the testing season, kids that came late enough in the year that they aren’t counted, the handful that don’t have to test because of language/Sped issues, and the kids that didn’t test the year before for whatever reason.
6

Here is an article by Karen Symms Gallagher, who is the dean of the School of Education at the University of Southern California. She argues that merit-based pay is essential to attracting and retaining teachers.

7

My feelings exactly. There’s a chapter on this very subject in Freakonomics—in short, in situations where pay was based on test scores, many teachers were cheating. Their transgressions ran the gamut: simple teaching-to-the-test; giving more time than was allowed; even changing students’ answers on their Scantron sheets.

The author discussed some statistical analysis that revealed which teachers were likely guilty of some form of cheating. It was a large percentage.

Whether or not the statistical evidence was accurate and did support this argument, the author did make a clear point that pay based on student performance introduces possible conflicts in interest.

8

As a teacher working in a place that bases raises on student performance, I have to say the system doesn’t work well in the real world. Because student performance is measured by student retention and grades, raises end up going to the teachers that are “nice” and help their students study solely for the tests. Not necessarily the good teachers. As others have already noted, it’s hard to measure student performance fairly or accurately.

9

Merit pay sounds like they will give bonuses to teachers that rate good for exceptional kids. I’m sure it will be more like penalty pay, where they dock the teachers pay for all the problem kids. The great kids will increase the teachers pay, while the incorrigible kids will bring it down. That should be good at doing the exact opposite of what it intends and cause emninty between teachers and students.

10

A retired teacher showed me a hilarious mock editorial suggesting that the concept of merit pay be extended to police officers. If crime doesn’t go down in your jurisdiction, we fire your ass! What could be fairer?

11

Then there is the question of rating those teachers who don’t teach testable kids. Am I going to be judged strictly on my AP sophomores, because all my other classes are seniors or electives? Hardly seems fair.

12

If a teacher’s contribution to educational enhancement can only be described as subtle, is there any reason they deserve a bonus? Shouldn’t the bonus be reserved for people who make a detectable difference to their students?

That would be actually be wonderful idea if police officers were assigned a specific population as teachers are, rather than an area where people from adjacent areas can commit crimes. Since they aren’t it’s not really a very useful comparison.

So we’re basically saying that we won’t pay teachers for their labour because they are so dishonest they will commit fraud if we try? Instead we will pay them for labour they are not providing? How about the alternative of treating the fraud like the crime against the citizens that it is? I can’t see why teachers would be more likely to commit such fraud than any other employee if they were prosecuted as any other employee would be.

13

Simple: you grade the teachers on a curve based on the student populations of their schools. Variables which are known to have an adverse impact on student performance (for whatever reason), such as household income, can then be corrected for.

So Teacher X (who turns out a bunch of C students at an inner-city school where most students do not graduate) gets paid the same amount as Teacher Y, who turns out a bunch of A students at a school in a high-income suburb where most students go to college.

14

I am arguing that the tools we use do not seem to be very good at detecting differences of any kind, and when they do the results are inconsistent.

15

In principle, I support performance-based pay for teachers. It seems that the actual implementation may be challenging.

One of the points the author made was that it was difficult to make a solid case against many suspected cheaters. Of the thousands of teachers in the Chicago public school system, there were huge quantities that showed up as statistical irregularities, and probably were cheating, but they only found a small handful that they could actually level charges against.

And since statistics are such slippery things, often twisted to support a goal, it’s good to hear that they didn’t simply fire everyone on the suspected-cheating list.

Check it out if you have a chance; it’s an interesting read.

16

No…not fired…but maybe pay based on it. If crime doesn’t go down…your pay is cut.

This is the problem with merit pay. It sounds good on the surface but the devil is in the details.

The Dentist analogy is actually pretty good and starts to capture/visualize the problems. However, the cavities the dentist’s kids have should be compared to society as a whole. If the dentists kids have more cavities as society as a whole, then his pay is cut. The roblem is…maybe he works in an area where dental health is not a priority? To raise his salary he needs to just change work locations…POOF he is a better dentist.

He could also refuse patients that are more at risk. He takes ‘good’ patients and POOF he is a better dentist with higher pay.

When I taught college, supposedly they had a ‘merit’ system where students could influence a pay raise for profs…via student evaluations. Profs with higher student evaluations received a small increase in pay (well…they really didn’t…they were supposed to but it never actually came). Leaving aside the idea that whether a prof is liked or not is what makes him better professor…student evaluations happened at the end of the semester. What could be done? Well…just make sure your weaker students dropped before the end*. POOOF…better professor. Or…you could just give all A’s…POOF better professor.

The idea of merit pay makes much sense to me. It really, really is needed in teaching. However, I have NO idea how it can be implemented and have not seen any merit pay idea that was even close to being implemented in a way that wouldn’t be abused/not work.
Then you have a problem with schools themselves. If a school as a whole lags…do you cut their $$$? If you do…HOW in the FREAKIN HELL do you expect them to get better? Do you raise their $$$ so they can become better? CONGRATULATIONS…you just rewarded failure and other schools will notice.

Schools not doing well NEED more money…they need better teachers and those teachers need to be well paid. However, the easier-to-teach-in schools are much less stress and pay more. This is ass backwards.

Teaching/Education is unlike any other activity out there…you cannot just put in some system from outside, like in the business world, and expect it to work unless you put pressure on the students as well - abandon universal education and forcibly kick out underperformers from school**.

What is needed is a solution unique to education…and I believe such a solution exists…though I don’t know what it is :(. I imagine the first step is to professionalize teachers, get salaries up and allow teachers to advance without having to leave the classroom. This will not happen…as society has deemed that teachers are shit and have little social standing/respect in society***

  • The correlation between grade received and evaluation the professor received from student evals was greater than .9

** An extremely unpopular idea that I think has real merit.

***Which is why I left teaching long ago

17

The question is how this could work. I agree that basing merit pay on test scores or improvement would probably not be effective. To be effective there would have to be a lot of input at the local level – simply giving each principal a set amount to distribute would be a step in the right direction. A system of anonymous peer reviews might be even better–teachers surely know which of their colleagues are doing a great job and which aren’t. A formula that combines student achievement and peer input, along with a little bit of flexibility from the principal, would be best. However, I think there are better ways to improve student performance, such as shortening summer break, eliminating tenure for K-12 teachers and/or expanding school choice.

18

There are also unintended consequences beyond cheating. My kids like me, and so they try harder on the state assessment. They know they are going to pass it–it’s dead easy and they are AP students–but I tell them I’d appreciate it if they tried for a perfect score because it reflects well on me, and they do. They senior AP teacher in my building isn’t nearly as well-liked, but kids and parents would agree she’s every bit as effective as I am. If the kids had to take an assessment senior year, I promise you they wouldn’t stretch themselves as far for her. But it doesn’t say anything about our teaching.

Scheduling creates weird bumps that can affect things. Regular classes opposite the athletics period are always pretty low: the most motivated/invested “average” students tend to be in some sort of athletics. The teacher that teaches that section will get lower scores than the one who has her planning period then.
In the same way, in Texas the sophomore state assessment carries no incentive for student performance–it’s just practice for them, but it’s how our school is evaluated. The junior assessment is the one they have to pass to graduate. Not surprisingly, scores go up dramatically junior year. This is not because those kids have had so much better instruction, it’s a reflection of the new incentive to do well.

19

Kind of stands to reason, doesn’t it?

20

Agreed.

In addition, it creates an animosity between some teachers and some students. Little Jenny could do better but she doesn’t care. Because she doesn’t care, Miss Teacher is less likely to get a few thousand dollars to get a normal salary*. Because of this she feels some anger to Little Jenny.

  • Let’s be honest here…the merit pay will not come over and above existing salaries. What will happen is that teachers salaries will be cut and that cut given to a subset of teachers. The average salary will be the same as before merit pay was introduced.