Merit Pay Mania

I'm a day late to the merit pay roundabout between the American Prospect's Ezra Klein, the Atlantic's Matt Yglesias, and the New Republic's Jason Zengerle. But the points are still worth discussing, particularly Ezra's kick-off post, which begins thusly:

I'm always amused by well-paid journalists and pundits complaining that teacher's compensation isn't closely enough linked to performance. Is Megan [McArdle, like Matt an Atlantic blogger] hauled into [Atlantic Editor] James Bennet's office once a week, presented with updated traffic numbers where traffic boosts and drops are disaggregated from intra-Atlantic links and general noise, and then paid less or more depending on her performance? Of course not.

Ezra continues in this vein, writing a variation on a point that is often made by merit pay critics, which goes something like this:

"People are always saying teachers should be paid based on merit like other professionals. But other professionals aren't paid strictly or objectively on merit; they're paid based on all kinds of subjective and irrational bases, or they're paid for being more experienced and well-educated, just like teachers. You're faulting current teacher pay systems for falling short of a standard that doesn't actually exist."

This is true in the strictest sense, but it isn't a good argument against merit pay. The most damning critique of the standard teacher pay system is not that it falls short of some perfect, objective, rational ideal. It's that it fails to incorporate merit in any way whatsoever. More specifically, it precludes merit. Even if a school or district has all the evidence in the world that Teacher A is twice as good as Teacher B, data no reasonable person would dispute, and it has a strong, obvious interest in paying Teacher A more as a result--to recruit her, retain her, motivate her, whatever the reason may be--it may not boost her compensation.

This simply isn't true in most professional jobs. I've worked for five organizations since I left graduate school--two in the public sector, three non-profit--and in every case managers had discretion to pay their better employees more, either when hiring them or giving them raises. The quality of the process varied a lot, and that's important, but at least they had the option. Broadly speaking, I'm guessing this is true for nearly all professional occupations except for K-12 teachers.

This problem is compounded by the fact teachers are generally quite limited in availing themselves of de facto merit pay through professional advancement. Ezra and Matt both cite the supposedly non-meritorious nature of compensation for journalists, as well as the fact that "merit" itself in that field is hard to define. But the bottom line is that there's a clear hierarchy in journalism that is sensitive to merit and positively related to pay (this is Jason's point), particularly if you expand the field to include book-writing and editing. I'm guessing James Fallows has done okay for himself financially over the course of his career, because he's a really good journalist. Matt himself is another obvious example--if you graphed a blogging-related salary histogram of the all the bloggers in all the world, you'd see a flat line at $0 going straight across the page from left to right, until finally in the 99.99th percentile or so it would tick up into positive numbers, and include Matt, who gets paid to blog precisely because he's one of the best bloggers in the business.

The principle applies to other fields as well--you can move into management, or to a wealthier firm, one that's wealthy not because it happens to be in a wealthy area, which is why schools are (or are not) wealthy, but because it's better at what it does, and thus has more money to pay, not least because it hired and paid particularly meritorious people in the first place. Law firms, consultants, and accountants work this way. For most professionals, merit pay is a function of both individual merit in your job and your ability to get hired and paid by a meritorious organization.

K-12 teacher compensation, by contrast, is relatively flat and uniform--you can get close to poor as a teacher, but you can't get near rich. Opportunities for advancement and outside earnings are relatively few, and even then you still don't get paid that much extra. While the median salary for journalists and many other professions is modest, there's at least a high upside at the top, which has a big impact on incentives for the best and brightest to enter the profession. Nothing like that exists in teaching.

Other professions, moreover, have less objective systems for paying teachers because they naturally don't lend themselves to objectivity as well. By contrast, the main goal of teaching--improving student learning--is, in fact, measurable to a considerable (although certainly not perfect) degree of accuracy. We should evaluate the objectivity and precision of teacher pay systems against what is possible for that profession.

All of which is the longest possible prelude to saying kudos to the United Federation of Teachers and the management of New York City Schools for announcing a new merit pay plan yesterday. This is, as Eduwonk said, an important moment, coming from the cradle of teacher unionism and the nation's biggest school district. It's easy enough for people like me to harangue union leaders about merit pay, but a lot harder to hammer out agreements in real-world political settings that meet the needs and priorities of rank-and-file teachers. I hope it works well, and that the meritorious schools and teachers in New York get the additional pay they surely deserve.

Unions, Pay for Performance and No Grapes

A new report from the Citizen's Commission on Civil Rights highlights four types of teacher union initiatives that have the "dual purpose" of improving student learning and improving the working conditions of teachers: pay for performance, decreasing the role of seniority in hiring practices, involving parents and the community in decision-making and enhancing teacher professional development. Pay for performance is a bit of a sore thumb here, as the most controversial of the bunch, but the point really worth highlighting from this report is that local teachers unions and districts are, at least in some cities, collaborating to develop strategies that satisfy both "sides".

Does this spell hope for reformist district leaders and unions that are butting heads? Maybe, but the debate is still pretty intense. Which makes sense-- people feel strongly about schools and they feel strongly about unions. Put them together and you've got a firestorm. As someone who grew up with a picture of the Sacramento March in my bedroom (next my preferred posters of Scott Baio and the PYT-era Michael Jackson), I've always believed in unions. They existed to protect workers and the working class. To give voice to the less powerful. To help bridge the inevitable tensions between democracy and capitalism.

I still believe this. And as I see it, teacher's unions need to exist, and they need to be strong. Steve Jobs' suggestion that unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is "off the charts crazy" is just the type of divisive remark that fuels the firestorm. But in fairness, something's definitely not right with today's teacher's unions. They need to get beyond the myopic stance of protecting salaries and tenure above all else. No, they shouldn't back down on giving teachers respect and voice and control over their working conditions– teachers are the ones who work everyday with our kids and, by and large, they really do care and try and work hard, and they do deserve protections. But the unions also need to get a grip on the language and provisions in some of these teacher contracts- does anyone really believe that involuntary transfers are, in practice, a good idea? And they need to recognize that facilitating changes that protect students and the larger school community will in the end be better for the whole of the teacher workforce. The message then is yes, you matter, you're important. But no, it's not all about you.

So I'm hopeful when I see evidence that local unions and districts are making some headway in working together. Certainly the warring us versus them mentality is not constructive. Nor, by the way, are the back and forth claims of Cesar Chavez or the UFW as an ally. Give me a break. Letting the grapes die on the vines is completely different from letting your most vulnerable students languish in bad schools.

Barone Speaks

Charlie Barone is offering up a wealth of informed commentary on NCLB reauthorization and other matters over at Swift & Change Able. Plus, they have cartoons. I'm jealous!

Schools as Scapegoats?

Larry Mishel and Richard Rothstein have written a long piece for The American Prospect titled "Schools as Scapegoats," which is a good summary of the labor-centered critique of education reform. They make some good points, but I think their larger takes on the political and the policy implications are deeply misguided.

First, the good points. A Nation at Risk was released 24 years ago on a wave of scare-mongering about public education--if we don't reform the schools, people said, the economic consequences will be so dire that we'll all be speaking Russian and/or Japanese in a matter of decades or less. Literally within minutes of the report's release, we embarked on the greatest economic expansion in history, leaving the Japanese in our dust, the Berlin Wall in ruins, and American workers as the most productive in the world, despite the fact that many of the critiques embedded in A Nation at Risk are as true today as they were then.

Now, that doesn't mean the critiques were wrong, or that the education system was responsible for the expansion. It might have happened in spite of the schools, since things like the Fed licking inflation or real estate bubbles and liquidity traps in Japan or the ideological and economic bankruptcy of Communism or the Internet have little do with education policy one way or another. But either way, Mishel and Rothstein are right to call foul on the idea that economic prosperity--particularly for the middle and lower classes--begins and ends with education. For years people have been saying "Adopt my education agenda or we're going to become a third-world country," and they've always been wrong.

Rothstein and Mishel are also right to say that education can't be the only answer to rising income inequality. For example:

Another too glib canard is that our education system used to be acceptable because students could graduate from high school (or even drop out) and still support families with good manufacturing jobs. Today, those jobs are vanishing, and with them the chance of middle-class incomes for those without good educations.

It's true that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. But replacements have mostly been equally unskilled or semiskilled jobs in service and retail sectors. There was never anything more inherently valuable in working in a factory assembly line than in changing bed linens in a hotel. What made semiskilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages. That today's working class doesn't get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education. Rather, it has everything to do with policy decisions stemming from the value we place on equality. Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits), typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor's degrees.

That said, in addition to getting some of their facts wrong,* I think Mishel and Rothstein misread the extent to which this is politically vital, as well as the implications for education policy. As a result, they're making things worse for families they ostensibly want to help.

I understand that it's frustrating when influential politicians justify some kind of horribly stupid and inequitable economic policy by saying "It's all good; we just need to reform public education, preferably with vouchers." But it's silly to say, or even imply, that the horribly stupid policies depend on the education justification. Does anyone seriously think that Newt Gingrich would have raised the minimum wage in the 1990s but for some talking points about school choice? Or that George Bush couldn't have implemented his phenomenally irresponsible and deeply unfair tax cuts for the rich without the rhetorical cover provided by No Child Left Behind?

Please. Redistributing money and power to the rich and powerful was the foundation of the conservative agenda, as Jon Chait recently described brilliantly in The Big Con. Chait is a connoisseur of bogus arguments and devious strategies, and nowhere in that book is there a chapter describing the crucial--or for that matter, even nominal--role of the argument from education reform in advancing the inequality agenda. If they hadn't said "we just need to reform the schools," they would have said something else, or just stuck to the various crackpot theories and outright lies that were much more important to making their case. It all would have happened anyway.

The second--and more substantive--problem with Mishel and Rothstein, both here and in their larger bodies of work, is that they seem to believe it's not enough to simply argue that education reform is a bogus palliative for inequitable economic policy. They believe we must attack education reform itself, that the only way to ensure that corporate tax cuts are never again falsely justified by a school reform agenda is to convince people that school reform is not needed and/or will never work.

This comes in two forms, the "everything is fine" argument and the "it can't be done" argument. Mishel tends to stick to the former, like when he insisted that high school graduation rates aren't so bad after all. Rothstein focuses more on the latter, arguing that schools "can't do much better" by poor kids than they do today, or trying to debunk KIPP, or peddling the (incorrect) notion that NCLB requires schools to erase all achivement difference between poor- and non-poor students.

I'm not saying issues like graduation rates or the efficacy of KIPP schools shouldn't be debated. But it's strange to see two smart "progressives" devoting all of their education-related energy toward tearing down any and all non-funding-related efforts to help low-income and minority students--until you realize that they're really not talking about education at all.

And so Mishel and Rothstein conclude their article by correctly denouncing the "suppresion of unions and the abandonment of the norm of equality," but then immediately follow with "These are not problems that can be solved by charter schools, teacher accountabilty, or any other school intervention." Sure--but that's not an argument against charter schools, teacher accountability, or any other school intervention. Or do Mishel and Rothstein actually want people trying to create better schools for poor children to abandon their efforts, just so we can force plutocrats to invent some new lies (which they undoubtedly will) while we throw the problems of the poor into even starker relief?


* Rothstein and Mishel state that:

"The American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess and former Clinton White House domestic policy staffer Andrew Rotherham jointly write in an AEI article that "study after study shows an America unprepared to compete in an increasingly global marketplace." They worry that the urgent "competitiveness agenda" could be derailed if we are distracted by a focus on equity-improving outcomes for disadvantaged students."

Hess and Rotherham explain why the "competiveness" agenda can be in conflict with the equity agenda--exploring this tension is the point of the article--but to imply that the article is an argument against equity is simply wrong.

Clearly, Our Work Here is Done

When we started Education Sector two years ago, we had big dreams--a new kind of organization, combining the best that think tanks and high-quality journalism have to offer, a place that would have a deep and lasting impact on the American educational experience.

And now that our work has been cited on the Colbert Report (click on the "Paul Glastris" clip), there's obviously nothing more we could hope to accomplish.