Yes…but you’d be surprised at the amount of supposedly smart and educated people that didn’t think of it. We actually tested it every semester and the result was always above .9. They’d shrug like it didn’t mean anything.
I actually think I saved one woman’s job by telling her the ‘trick’ of giving a hard test right before drop date and not curving. After drop date when the weaker students dropped, curve the test or allow a retake. Worked like a charm. POOOF…she became a much better prof.
Basing teacher pay on performance is a great idea in principle, but I’ve never yet seen a good way to objectively measure teacher performance. Based on grades? That’ll reward the teachers who play Santa Clause, not necessarily those who actually teach well. Evaluations? Blinking Duck pointed out the problem with that (my freshman year of college, I had a terrible professor who always got great evaluations just because he brought in food for the students). Standardized tests? Even if the teachers aren’t outright cheating, they’re going to be forced to teach to the tests, which never actually lines up with what the students are supposed to be learning. Possibly how well the students do in the next year, compared to a baseline of their peers? But then how do you rate the 12th-grade teachers?
Possibly, but I think this for this to work it’s going to require a real shift in world view for teachers, and I personally don’t think that teachers are particularly risk inclined when it comes to their pay. The nature of the profession just does not (IMO) attract that sort of person. If a teacher is paid for performance like a salesperson or athlete that is an entirely different mindset and paradigm than normally seen in education.
The good part is that you may see teachers being more creative and proactive about engaging students, the bad part is that professional salespeople, myself included, don’t like to waste their time with dead end projects and dysfunctional products. If there are only one or two potential student bonus babies in a typical underclass group of students it will be interesting to see how a rational merit paid teacher will allocate their limited time and attention.
Merit pay sounds good in theory and a great way to get maximum performance from an employee, but it’s a two way street, and merit paid personnel will be forced to started thinking about where to focus their time and attention inputs for the maximum success and the maximum probable gain. This is not (IMO) likely to benefit the maximum number of students as teachers (like salespeople and professional sports coaches) will be forced to start thinking about winners and losers in their classrooms. I would not want to be a mediocre or sub-par student in these merit paid classrooms as I don’t think the teacher would be spending any extra time to help me, and in fact it would be foolish for them to do so as I am unlikely to benefit their bottom line.
It will be an interesting social experiment to see if you can get people who are altruistic enough to be compassionate, dedicated teachers giving 100% to every student, and also be willing to gamble with their income on the bet that they can get a few “winner” students to shine. If you are going to appeal to cunning self interest and don’t expect for rational discriminating choices to be made between students I think it’s naive bordering on foolish. In the real world people have limited time resources and will allocate that time where it has the maximum benefit.
Something I’d like to see before merit pay is pay based on how difficult it is to hire a teacher for a specific subject/area.
When I have a teaching job, I teach Art and English. Much as I love the subjects and good as I believe I am, I am a dime a dozen. There are 50 teachers vying for each position a district advertises. There are, however, subjects where it’s much more difficult to find a teacher who has the subject knowledge and classroom competency necessary. Science, mathematics, bilingual education, and special education are probably the most difficult areas to fill in any school system.
That being the case, simple supply/demand laws should rule how they are paid. A good mathematics teachers is more difficult to find, hence more valuable, than an English teacher. They should be paid more. In some cases, they should be paid significantly more.
However, bring this up in education and you will have extremely upset people on your butt. The one time I brought it up I thought I was actually going to get into a fight with one teacher…he was so pissed off at the idea. “We are both teachers doing the same job” etc.
So what happens is that math people are attracted to better paying fields and weaker math types are hired to teach instead making English teachers much better quality-wise.
Seriously…Get to know High School math teachers and English teachers sometime. The Math teacher MAY have a minor in math and will be the BB coach and watch Sunday Football. The English teacher will have published 2 books and be active academically. A huge generalization but that was what I saw.
I know there is a stipend for math, science, and a few other hard-to-fill areas here in Dallas. I thought that was fairly standard. Stipends can add $1000-$3000 to a person’s annual salary. Whether or not that’s enough to make a difference is debatable.
Campbell’s Law:*
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.* There are a thousand and one examples if this in action out there, in many more places than just schools.
If you want me to teach well, you’ve got to put some subjective measures in place, and those require observers, and they cost money. If all you want me to do is get high (average) test scores, I can do that in a number of ways. The cheating in Freakonomics is only for the very stupid. The easiest way is to be such a dick to the kids I know won’t test well that they’ll drop my class…and just who does that help?
Also, it’s hard enough to get people to go into teaching in the first place. And you want them to sign up for it while knowing their pay depends on the whims of 13-year-olds?
But you aren’t. You’re teaching two completely different subjects. Knowledge in math seems to be so valuable as to allow someone with a lower level of understanding to get a much better job, versus those of other subjects.
In fact, in my jurisdiction, you can get payed to become a math teacher, and you still get the stipends. Heck, I’d’ve taken them up on the offer if it wasn’t for all the politics teachers have to face. (Math just comes easily for me. I tested out of most of my college math requirements back in high school. And I’ve taught a few classes when the teacher wasn’t there.)
Merit pay for teachers based on student performance makes sense only if the teacher has control over the factors which influence the student’s education.
Who is responsible for getting him out of bed in the morning?
Does the student have breakfast?
Is she at school on time?
Has he done his homework?
Does he have all of the supplies he needs for classwork?
Is she free from bullying between classes?
Has she had her sight and hearing checked recently?
Is he on time to class?
Is the class interrupted too often for assemblies, announcements, etc.?
Is another teacher removing the student from my classroom without permission?
Is an administrator removing the student from my classroom without my permission?
Has the student been assigned to an appropriate level of study?
Does the student stay alert during class?
Is the student free from emotional trauma at home?
How are Gates and the President better qualified than k-12 public school classroom teachers to talk about merit pay? Would they consider themselves experts in the field of medicine too? Everyone is an expert about education – or so they believe.
The problem with any merit based pay or bonuses is that it is obvious that you are giving control to the students. Merit based pay will only work when the person earning the merit is in sole control.
For instance, they had a program where they’d deduct money from welfare if the parents didn’t make the kid go to school. It didn’t take long before the kids learned of this and started holding it up over the parents head.
So the only way it will work is if the merit is in measurable goals, that is it must be strictly measurable with no leeway for opinion and it must be a product of the teacher’s ablity only not the student.
How will it work?
You need a very clever algorithm that combines many different factors and metrics. (It will NOT work if it’s some simple, bureauocrat-friendly formula.) You should probably hire Google… not AltaVista.
If I’m working and being paid based a performance metric and it’s a complex “clever” algorithm that’s not going to work. Performance based employees need to understand very clearly how and what they are being paid for or the whole “carrot” basis of merit pay is severely undermined.
It’s interesting to me in this discussion how a lot of the people touting “merit pay” as a great solution really don’t have a grasp of how the dynamics of a performance based compensation scheme needs to work to be effective. In general the more complex you make it, the less effective it is as a motivator.
Paying someone more to generate results works great if they have a lot of autonomy and control over how they operate and can make hard decisions about where to place and focus their resources (or not focus their resources). None of this exists in a public school environment.
Teachers’ impact on students is not always easy to assess. If a kid does poorly in science, it may be because his reading skills are poor. More to the point, if the kid’s family situation is a trainwreck, it may effect his performance in ALL subjects. The whole point of the editorial being, maybe teachers shouldn’t be held accountable for things they can’t control.
I always have the knee-jerk reaction, “Hell yes merit pay, make those teachers turn out a good product!” I’m wrong every time. It’s always going to be easier for teachers to game the system than it is for them to consistently raise the performance of their students.
The merit dentistry example given by Polly Glot early in the thread illustrates the positive points of the free market. All dentists are licensed and constrained by the threat of malpractice, I chose mine based on his merit.
Private and charter schools have achieved a measure of success by operating within the free market. We CANNOT give up on public education but we would do well to learn the same lessons.
I’m not going to quibble about merit-based bonuses, as many have stated up-thread, I support the principle. However, the key issue is and has always been teacher compensation. People, we are getting what we pay for.
The real purpose of merit pay is not to make existing teachers better. It is to help push the ineffective ones out the door, and let potential effective ones know they will be identified and rewarded.
A $5,000 bump in salary is not going to dramatically alter the kinds of people who go into teaching. Doubling starting salaries would, but let’s be serious … nobody is going to stomach the kinds of tax increases that would entail. More, importantly, we don’t need to. Adjusted for local economies, teacher salaries in the U.S. are compatible with western Europe, and higher than most Asian countries. When you look the reasons given by teachers who are quitting, low pay is almost never at the top of the list; most of them do not have the skills to get higher-paying jobs.
Bullshit. A complex, good algorithm will reward you for doing the right thing. Knowing “exactly” what you’re being rewarded for is just an opportunity to optimize for what is being measured rather than doing the right thing.
Good point. I think as we get better at judging when teachers are effective, it will become much easier to let them do whatever they want. And then, we’ll get some fascinating insights.
I expect existing teachers to also get much better. Either they will try harder, or they will take advantage of the lessons taught by the demonstrably successful teachers. Or both (ie, trying harder to learn from others).
Incentive pay based on quantitative performance measures doesn’t have to be a perfect mechanism to be of use when the alternatives aren’t perfect either. Peer-review? How do you prevent that from becoming a popularity contest where the teachers who are best liked by their colleagues are rewarded the most regardless of their effectiveness? Review by principal? Same problem except here it may be teachers who kiss up to their boss who get rewarded the most.
The fact is there is no perfect method of evaluating teachers which is why you want a combination of different measures with different strengths and weaknesses. A teacher who scores well on peer-review and on quantitative measures is probably a good teacher who deserves higher pay. Similarly a teacher who does poorly on multiple criteria is probably a dud who should be disciplined or fired. A performance system which rewards the best and punishes the worst is a good start to improving education.
And it’s not hard to adjust performance schemes to answer many of the objections identified in this thread. It’s quite easy to come up with controls which adjust for the quality of the student better isolating the effect of the teacher. These controls can be a combination of socio-economic variables, past performance, performance in other subjects etc.
You can add me to the list. Pay was the #1 reason I left teaching…and I was {humbly} pretty dang good from all the feedback I received. It was also easy to leave teaching because my degree (Math) had some respect in the business world and I was still relatively young that age-ism was not that bad.
That being said…pay WON’T be the reason people quit teaching because, unlike stupid me who didn’t think it through, most people are smart enough to avoid teaching BECAUSE of the low pay in the first place.
furt, I honestly believe we’re on the same page here. I was trying to be non-negative and solution-oriented. I could add a laundry list of caveats about the few good teachers that I had but for the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on the majority of the teachers I had.
These people were idiots. They were observably lazy individuals who resented and actively thwarted any attempt to force a higher standard of education.
If we dramatically raise wages for teachers, we are going to over pay many slack-jawed morons. Sadly, I don’t see an alternative. Other reforms have been attempted and consistently failed. Raising pay unfairly rewards an undeserving majority but it will help us retain the good teachers and encourage a better class of people to become teachers.
As someone who virulently opposes most taxes, I’d of course like to see a metric fuck ton of strict reform measures instituted along with a pay raise. No Child Left Behind was deemed a failure because teachers taught to the test. I’m a lay person here but I’m thinking that the solution might be to make a better test. That way, when teachers teach to the test, we see positive results.
There’s a big part of me that believes the wholesale privatization of education would yield more expedient, better results. I’m not quite ready to give up on public education though.
lol