The Daily News turned its guest editorial space over to former Giuliani speech writer and policy staffer Josh Greenman on Sunday. Greenman started off well enough–pointing out how crappy teacher salaries are and noting that in New York State, though our average salaries are above the national average, in fact we’re more than 5% lower than we were 10 years ago in real terms.
But his solutions are vintage Giuliani–pit teachers against each other for merit pay bonuses.
Even conservative education publications have moved beyond that tired bromide. In Education Gadfly’s guest editorial of July 28, “Merit Pay: Not So Fast, Governors!” Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, gives a sharp-eyed view of the problems with merit pay, among them that it is very hard to evaluate teachers effectively, and that too often the merit money is stingy. “The thorny problem of how best to determine a teacher’s effectiveness—the only fair basis for deciding who gets merit pay—has by no means been worked out to the degree required for wide scale adoption,” she writes.
12 Comments:
1 eddie185
· Aug 22, 2005 at 3:10 pm
Merit pay based on test scores is a terrible idea! A teacher whose kids start out with high scores can’t achieve the necessary gains, while a teacher whose kids start out with low scores might show great gains but still have a class full of (relatively) low achievers. Look how many principals of SURR schools – even of schools that were closed! – got performance bonuses, while principals of high-performing schools didn’t qualify. As my late father-in-law always said, “Figures lie and liars figure.”
2 msd2005
· Aug 22, 2005 at 3:22 pm
Kate Walsh’s quote “The thorny problem of how best to determine a teacher’s effectiveness—the only fair basis for deciding who gets merit pay—has by no means been worked out to the degree required for wide scale adoption.” begs the question why no one can agree on how to evaluate teachers. Every other profession seems to have worked this out for themselves, but teachers have a fit every time their supervisor tries to evaluate them. Principals should be viewed as professionals whose job it is to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers. In every other field that is the rationale role of one’s boss. Just as we are supposedly holding students to standards, why can’t we hold teachers to standards as well. Test scores can certainly be part of the equation if we learn to use gain scores rather than fixed scores, and I’d also through into the mix an individual’s content knowledge, pedagogical skills, professional collaboration, and contributions to the school outside the classroom,
3 jgreenman
· Aug 22, 2005 at 3:37 pm
I wrote the Daily News piece, and let me second the argument made by msd2005. Kate Walsh is right that there is no perfect way as yet to determine a teacher’s effectiveness. But the same can be said of journalists, professors, you name it–and in all of those professions, we do find ways to make distinctions. I would never want teacher merit pay “based on test scores,” as eddie185 suggests. I’d want some portion of pay increases to reflect student learning gains when that’s an appropriate measure (it’s not appropriate for art teachers, physical education teachers, etc.), with many other factors considered as well. Look at the Denver plan (denverprocomp.org) and you’ll see a sophisticated grid. The Teacher Advancement Program (http://www.mff.org/newsroom/news.taf?page=tapfaqs) is intelligently, designed, too. Neither is perfect but both make much more sense than the single salary schedule. And it should be clear to everyone reading this that no performance pay plan being contemplated would “pit teacher against teacher”; that’s a myth. The key here is finding new ways to make sensible quality distinctions–and give excellent teachers a genuine career ladder to climb.
4 jgreenman
· Aug 22, 2005 at 3:39 pm
Please excuse the stray comma (“intelligently, designed”) and any other typos I failed to catch in the post above. Also: thanks for posting a conversation on the op-ed. I honestly appreciate the feedback.
5 Maisie
· Aug 22, 2005 at 4:08 pm
I have to agree with Josh Greenman that the TAP program has a lot of good aspects. And his conclusion that teachers need a “genuine career ladder to climb” is something the UFT has advocated for years. So has the AFT. I don’t believe any TAP site links an individual teacher’s pay to student performance alone. Instead, teachers are evaluated by peers, principals and value-added analysis of test scores. It offers pay for mentoring or expert (“lead”) teachers. What bothered me about Greenman was the idea that teacher pay reform was a matter of not paying those thousands of slacker teachers as much as the good ones. It’s more a matter of professionalization. Sandy Feldman wrote a couple of years ago that “the best thinking about teacher compensation recognizes that we can’t look at this question in isolation. We have to see equitable pay for teachers as a part of an effort to support quality teaching and raise student achievement.”
6 curious2
· Aug 22, 2005 at 6:54 pm
I agree strongly with msd2005. Teachers merit pay should be based on the judgments of principals. In almost all sectors of our economy, managers are responsible for making judgments about exceptional performance. That is the way it should work in schools as well. I don’t understand why the unions think that public schools need to function differently to be successful.
7 jgreenman
· Aug 22, 2005 at 7:36 pm
I didn’t use the term “slacker teachers,” but let me answer the point Maisie made. There are some absolutely superb teachers. There are some absolutely terrible ones. There are many good ones. I simply think that we’ve got to make a good-faith effort to tell the difference and have the very best make more than the very worst, as happens in almost every other career (public sector included). It’s funny to me that this is seen as an offensive proposition.
8 Maisie
· Aug 22, 2005 at 10:14 pm
But Josh, how do you decide? Who decides? The reason I liked the Kate Walsh piece (on Gadfly–the newly Democratic web site!) is because of what she writes about actual experience with differentiated pay. In practice, it’s very hard to fairly evaluate teachers. (And principals alone are not a good way to do this–Denver and Cincinnati both dropped that idea long ago). Even if you can get agreement on a methodology then you have to actually come up with real money. Some places have run out of $$, incurring lots of ill will from teachers. I don’t think the UFT leadership is opposed to all kinds of “merit” pay, but they want to see a fair system first. And it would be a terrifically hard sell to the membership. Having said all this, I think I wind up in agreement with your point that some kind of pay for performance is an essential piece of education reform.
9 redhog
· Aug 23, 2005 at 5:22 am
“Merit pay” is one of those euphemisms like “body count” and “relocation to the East” that are intended not to sound like what they are intended to mean. Principals deciding merit? Did they get their job on merit? There is no viable C-30 process anymore. A LIS plops a person into a school and announces that that person is the new principal. Go read “The Principal Prize” by ron isaac, at http://www.educationnews.org Principals often have very little teaching or administrative experience and are, by miracle of cronyism, given school and system leadership roles almost before their first menses. They schedule the highest-skilled classes to those teachers who are most amenable to ignoring breaches of their contractual protections and serving as union-busting informants. Based on academic outcomes, these lackeys will get “merit pay.” If you are a dermatologist, the mortality rate of your patient load ill be much less than if you specialize in pancreatic cancer. Should the Health Dept. give “merit pay” to the skin guys?
10 jgreenman
· Aug 23, 2005 at 9:43 am
Maisie: How you decide is by using multiple indicators. Who decides is up to the individual district. Teacher evaluations are one way, principal evaluations are another, goal-setting by teachers in combination with their principals is another, and all this can and should be supplemented by some relatively objective measure like value-added achievement gains when possible (and market incentives, too–physics teachers in high demand should not make the same as teachers in relatively low demand). National Board Certification is another answer to “the how do you decide/who decides question”–it’s not my favorite way of distinguishing between the best teachers and the worst, but it’s definitely a way, and better than the status quo. You’re right that real money is often hard to come by, and that’s been a big problem. Pay plans need to be sustainable, and too few districts and states are prepared to dig deeper into their pockets to make that a possibility.
Redhog: Should the Health Department give merit pay to the skin guys? Yes, I think so–but not using mortality rates. That wouldn’t make sense. At the very least their supervisors should have the chance to weigh in on the quality of the job they’re doing. But likely there are some other measures you could use in assessing their work. Again: we make all kinds of distinctions with university professors. Why not with teachers?
11 curious2
· Aug 23, 2005 at 10:45 am
Hi Redhog,
I think you are using a “two wrongs make a right” argument against principal judgments on merit pay. If the principals aren’t good, we should solve that problem too. Like all organizations, if the managers aren’t good the organization will suffer. The solution is to get better managers. This is the responsibility of the person or group responsible for picking the managers. If they don’t do a good job, they should be changed too. This is how close to 100% of our country operates. At Google or Apple, for example, managers have great influence if not control over how people that report to them get compensated. They might use metrics and/or they might use judgment. I don’t understand why the public schools should be any different. Google and Apple seem to do a great job of providing a valuable service in an impressive manner.
12 Maisie
· Aug 23, 2005 at 5:49 pm
This is funny, considering how this whole blog thread started out, but I agree almost entirely with Josh Greenman about the multiple forms of teacher evaluation he has listed. Uh-oh, is there a political “center” beginning to emerge in this blue-state city??? What’s getting to me now is that so many good ideas like Josh’s are on the cutting room floor. If we had a contract, and the promise of at least a portion of the CFE money, and if the climate wasn’t so badly polarized around everything to do with the schools, this city could be doing some fabulous, innovative and effective things for its students. The time is ripe so in many ways. Joel? Mike? George?