"Democrats running for president reject any mandatory pay-for-performance schemes as part of the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The candidates also reject any plan to tie teacher pay to student test scores. The candidates stated their opposition to merit pay during a nationally
televised debate in Des Moines, Iowa."
But Lampkin points out that:
...one candidate who stated his support for performance pay said teachers "can't be judged simply on standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not [...]." To me, the word "simply" means he's against using test scores as the only way to evaluate teacher performance. And the words "don't take into account whether children are prepared" mean he's open to performance pay based on "value-added" gains in student test scores -- a method that takes into account how much students know when they enter a teacher's classroom.That candidate was very careful on Sunday to say he is only for performance pay plans that get buy-in from teachers. But that is happening in many places across the country. Denver's teacher union led the effort to win support for a new performance-based compensation system for teachers there -- one that includes gains in student test scores as one measure. And just last week the New York Times published a story with the headline, "Teachers Say Yes to Pay Tied to Scores." Just because the national NEA opposes something doesn't mean that teachers in general -- or even their local affiliates -- do too.
In the long run, I think this militant anti-merit pay stance is going to be very, very bad for the NEA.
The optics are terrible, first of all. While it's true that there are few jobs where pay is tied to performance in a purely meritocratic way, it's equally true that fewer and fewer people have jobs likes those in teaching where (A) your employer is prohibited from even taking merit into consideration when setting pay, and (B) your above-inflation pay increases occur automatically based on longetivity. Highlighting this difference isolates teachers from everyone else. There's a reason this is the issue where Democrats are increasingly likely to challenge union doctrine.
In the long run, moreover, opposition to merit pay is bad for individual teachers. The unionization of teachers that occurred in the 1960s was undeniably beneficial for teacher pay, raising compensation up to at least a decent standard of living. But that flattened out in the 1970s, and since then the average teacher salary has been stagnant. While other professions shared in the huge increase in national wealth that's occured since then, teachers were left out.
But at the same time, the overall amount of money spent on teacher pay has increased enormously, because while we haven't been paying teachers more, we've been paying a lot more teachers--the ratio of students to teachers is lower than it's ever been. This makes perfect sense--if you treat something like a commodity, and people want more of it, they're going to buy quantity, not quality. The only way the public is going to spend more money than they are now on an individual teacher is if they feel like they're getting something back in return--merit. And of course there are literally tens of thousands of unusually meritorious teachers out there right now who can't be paid what they're worth because the contracts under which they work don't allow it.
The NEA's problem is that it's so big and so rich that it can get away with the kind of thing Lampkin describes. It can bully Democrats trying to win primaries and have an impact, at least for a while. But there's a difference between a group politicians have to listen and a group politicians want to listen to, and the distinction tends play out in a lot of subtle but important ways down the road. To be clear, I don't think teachers shouldn't have a powerful national union--they should. But sometimes power gives you the ability to avoid hard choices, and becomes its own worst enemy in the end.
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