Merit Without Merit

In her Dec. 6 “Edwatch” commentary in the Providence Journal, columnist Julia Steiny says, “No evidence anywhere shows that merit-pay systems aimed at individual teachers improves education. Incentives to groups of teachers are effective, but not individuals.”

She is to be commended for making this both striking and strikingly obvious observation. She cites Jeffrey Pfeffer, who in a 1998 Harvard Business Review essay, exposed the fallacy “that individual incentive pay drives creativity and productivity.” It has instead, he notes, “been shown to undermine teamwork, encourage employees to focus on the short term, and lead people to link compensation to political skills and ingratiating personalities rather than to performance.”

Steiny identifies several “boondoggles” that she associates with individual merit pay. One of them is the definition of “meritorious or even good.” She observes that “if your definition of ‘merit’ mainly involves test scores, the performance of the ‘bad’ kids will get worse.”

By “bad” she no doubt means kids who are inconvenient to the system. Such kids, challenged by some mental or physical disability or dysfunction, are often the source of the greatest professional and personal satisfaction to teachers who with passion and ingenuity find ways to recalibrate these kids’ potential.

But if test scores are the be-all and end-all as determinants of eligibility for merit pay (or even tenure, if Mayor Bloomberg gets his impossible way!), then, according to Steiny, teachers will “use political pull to get classes populated with ‘easy’ kids who are set to make gains anyway. Teachers will play hot potato with the autistic, oppositional, low-functioning, boy-crazy, or disengaged kids, who are far less likely to get scores that will boost a paycheck.”

Citing a Portugese study that revealed an apparent link between incentives for merit pay and the incidence of grade inflation, Steiny concludes that “merit pay encourages all manner of gaming the system.” She boldly revives what should never have been anything but a “no-brainer”: that the ultimate goal is to improve teaching. To that end she deems merit pay to groups such as teams to be sound and prudent.

She thinks that organizations, presumably school boards and principals, should “incentivize teachers with fun,” favoring Pfeffer’s insight that problems of “attention, retention, and motivation” cannot be solved strictly and solely by compensation systems, but also require “time and effort…on the work environment — on defining its jobs, on creating its culture and on making the work fun and meaningful.”

Why does such solid wisdom generally elude folks in high places?

Tagged: merit pay