Down to Brass Tacks on Teacher Pay

Leo Casey has weighed in on "Frozen Assets," Education Sector's recent report on the fiscal consequences of teacher contracts. Or as he puts it, "yet another" Education Sector report. Sorry, Leo--plenty more where that came from! No rest for the wicked!

It seems like just a couple of days ago--oh wait, it was just a couple of days ago--that Leo laid out some sensible ground rules for substantive, informed blogging on education policy, such as the fact that union critics are not wrong by definition. So it's a little disappointing to see him dismiss the research cited in the report as "old thin gruel by the anti-union, anti-public education short order cooks." There have been cease-fires in the Middle East that lasted longer than that....

But Leo's post is nonetheless useful, because he quickly gets down to the heart of the matter: merit pay. "Frozen Assets" isn't a merit pay manifesto by any means, but it does put the idea squarely on the table, and it does criticize the seniority-based single salary schedules used by the vast majority of school districts. Even though research clearly shows that teacher effectiveness tends to stop increasing after about five years in the classroom, salary schedules keep bumping up pay for years or even decades beyond that.

To his credit, Leo concedes this point. But he defends perpetual seniority-based raises on the grounds that they're needed to retain teachers, particularly after all that goes into getting them past the five-year threshold. And to do that, we have to "take into account the mid-life financial pressures faced by teachers, as they pay home mortages and send their own children to college."

In this one sentence, once can learn a great deal about why issues of teacher pay are so contentious and hard to resolve.

I suspect that teachers unions often wonder why people keep obsessing over merit pay, particularly when they concede, as Leo does, that it would be okay to have differential pay for other things, like working in hard-to-staff schools or getting National Board certification.

The answer, I think, is that getting paid based on how well you do your job is so ubiquitous and inherently sensible that to deny it on principle is to fundamentally dissociate onself from both logic and the common experience of workers and professionals in this day and age. In that sense, merit pay is about more than the issue at hand. It's a litmus test for reasonableness, an indicator of whether you're serious about schools and educators being driven by performance, about whether you believe that teachers should or should not be compensated in basically the same way as everyone else who has a job requiring similarly high levels of education, professionalism, and dedication.

Leo can object to merit pay "schemes which seek to replace the entire structure of teacher salary schedules with pay differentials decided by subjective supervisory judgments and by poorly crafted standardized tests." But I think we all know that it goes deeper than that, that even if the schemes became plans and the supervisory judgments became objective and the tests became well-crafted, the basic issue would remain.

The vast majority of people who work, particularly in professional jobs, are paid what their labor is worth in the open job market, no more, no less. That amount can often seem arbitrary or divisive or insufficient or unfair. And all those things are frequently true. But in the end, they don't get paid more than their colleagues who do work of the same value, or more, just because they happen to be of a certain age or have kids in college and a mortgage to pay. That's the world we live in.

Perhaps Leo think that's the problem in a nutshell, that teachers unions have achieved a more enlightened way of doing business, one that keep workers together instead of pushing them apart, one that is more stable, fair, and humane. Which makes merit pay a litmus test of a different kind, an indicator of whether people want to preserve the past victories of labor and build on them, or attack those victories and tear them down.

I believe in unions. As I've said before, I think the final reckoning of the last 100 years will show that unions are disproportionately responsible for much of what's decent and honorable in the working lives of Americans. But on this issue, I think teachers unions are trying to do too much, at too great a cost. The best way to help teachers with kids in college isn't to pay them extra, it's to fully fund Pell grants and keep tuition low. Unions can, and should, push for increasing the overall amount of money teachers are paid, which I think is too low. But the dynamics there are not the same as, for example, increasing the minimum wage. And banding together to collectively fight for higher wages doesn't preclude teachers from making distinctions about those wages based on something as elementary as performance. Unity and uniformity are not the same thing.

In the long run, performance has to matter in education. If you tell a group of people that their status and salary will be determined in a manner that is indifferent to how hard they work or what they ultimately accomplish, they will, collectively, accomplish less. In the long run, teachers unions are going to have to concede this principle. That doesn't mean that there are no difficulties in transforming the principle into practice, or that teachers shouldn't play a major role in making those decisions. They absolutely should. But as long as unions stay on the wrong side of this line in the sand, they're going to be fighting a losing and increasingly lonely battle.

Update: Sherman Dorn comments here. Briefly: Sherman gives Leo (or me, not quite sure which) too little credit here--I actually think Leo does a good job of engaging seriously on the ideas, which distinguishes him from some of his colleagues. I just think his ideas are problematic. I'm not sure what "significant logical flaws" Sherman is talking about--does he mean Leo's comments about the NYC class size limitations? Of course eliminating a class size reduction or limitation policy would increase class sizes. That goes without saying, doesn't it? What else could it mean? What the paper says is that there's little in the way of research to suggest that marginal class size reductions, along the lines the 1.5 or 2 per class that Leo describes, have significant benefits. Big reductions below a certain threshold, yes. Small reductions that don't reach that threshold, no. Therefore, that money could potentially be spent for other, more productive purposes--like increased teacher salaries.