With Barack Obama winning an historic race for the presidency this week (and the nation exhaling in wonder and relief at his victory), Jim Guthrie and Patrick Schuermann at Vanderbilt's Peabody College offer a timely reality check in Education Week on performance pay for teachers, a reform that has cycled back onto the education agenda after two decades of dormancy and that the President-elect has endorsed.
Guthrie and Schuermann write that some 10 percent of the nation's school systems employing at least 20 percent of the nation's teachers are now paying teachers on the basis of their performance "in some form or fashion." But in a helpful taxonomy of "what we do no yet know" about performance pay, they point out that there's no compelling research evidence on "the power of financial awards in promoting more-effective teaching and elevating student performance" and that there's no evidence on "the long-term effect of performance awards on the supply of effective teachers." In other words, the rationale for teacher performance pay hasn't been proven. Nor, they point out, is there clear evidence suggesting the "effects of group awards relative to individual performance" or the "preferable mix of financial and nonpecuniary awards"--important second-order questions.
There is, of course, a strong logic to rewarding good teaching and good teachers and Gutherie and Schuermann are sympathetic to the potential of performance pay to strengthen the public school teaching profession. On its face, public education's wide use of a "single salary schedule" to pay teachers strictly on the basis of experience and credentials is more than a little irrational. Guthrie and Schuermann advocate carefully constructed experiments to help answer key questions about performance pay's effectiveness, and they are right to do so. But their study of the performance-pay research makes clear that policymakers' rush to introduce performance pay for teachers isn't necessarily going to make the teaching profession any stronger, and that the Obama administration would be wise to help answer the big questions about performance pay, rather than assume the answers already exist.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I don't know that performance pay would lead to more effective teaching. I think it would lead to more effective teachers entering the profession. People tend to be motivated by more than money in the education field. I think the power of performance pay or pay based on talent would come from pushing the profession of teaching as a realistic career path for top talent. That isn't to say that current teachers aren't talented. Only that for too many cream of the crop college graduates teaching lacks the monetary updside of other jobs. It isn't just about money it is about status that comes with that money. If teachers were paid more like the professionals they are, in the same way as other professionals (if you are good you get raises if you aren't you lose your job), then perhaps teaching would become just another job option that people look into like advertising or consulting or accounting.
I think the power of performance pay lies in shifting the pipeline that feeds people into a teaching career. This shift would take years to occur and would likely not show an immediate impact on student achievement. So the question will be who can stick with something new and innovative for five years to see if it works? And what do we do to help kids stuck in bad schools right now?
Our current pay schedule is irrational. And a key would be whether we could keep up a performance pay system for five years, or more. But that has been the single biggest drawback. Our funding system is even more irrational, and historically the pay portion of performance pay hasn't survived.
I personally don't see performance pay as important, but I still support it. We need to go into it with our eyes open the way Toch and Guthrie and Shuerman are.
Performance pay, to me, is like the proposal to Grow What Works. Some innovative ideas will work, and others won't, but we need to gamble on the creativity of American democracy.
Just like charters were partially an immunization against vouchers, performance pay done well can be our answer to merit pay, especailly merit pay dominated by not-ready-for-prime time test results models. Were we to have defeated Denver's plan, that would have made it more likely we would get a disaster like Rhee's plan. Conversely, if Obama who apparently influenced the Denver breakthrough could get inolved in D.C., that could become a win-win situation.
As you guys know, the devil is in the details. Its like George Soros' explanation of the financial crisis. If you have twenty bottles of water, and only one is poisoned, then they are still all useless. If a plan linking pay and tenure to performance only unfairly destroys the career of one teacher in a school, soon the whole system comes crashing down. But if an equally imperfect model meant that only one teacher in a school was denied fair raises, that's not the same risk. And merit pay has a double danger. Systems that we have today would mean that if you taught in a high poverty neighborhood secondary school, or if you had a bad principal, or if the central office came down with one of those ridiculous policies that basically kill the chances of raising student performance, then you would never get a pay increase, and your career might be in danger. And your staff would be stressed out all of the time worrying about the arbitrary system.
But that brings me full circle. I support performance pay because the younger generation and others support it, and we need a spirit of compromise. It would be better, however, to empower educators, have a real debate using evidence, and evaluate educational policies before we implement them. For instance, if neighborhood schools could adopt some of the wisdom of KIPP and take the time to teach students to be students, then we could see results in five years. That's just one policy that is consistent with performance pay, but inconsistent with merit pay.
Post a Comment