Harnessing teachers’ greed

Last updated on: March 12, 2007 at 2:20 pm by Fred Clark

Harnessing teachers’ greed 2007-03-12T14:20:18-04:00 Fred Clark

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Article in the paper today looks at the popular notion of "performance-based pay" for teachers: "Incentive-based teacher pay unproven."

This is from a series of articles exploring the recommendations of something called "Vision 2015" — an ambitious school-reform plan that aims to turn Delaware's schools into the "best in the world" giving students the best education anywhere, ever. Plus a pony. A magical pony. Or something like that.

The plan's goals are laudable, but it seems a bit quixotic. It reminds me of that Rob Lowe-as-Sam Seaborn speech from The West Wing:

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Generally speaking, I like ambitious, quixotic plans and grand aspirations. But I also generally think that if you're proposing a multi-billion dollar plan you need to A) make sure that each of those billions of dollars is necessary, and B) have at least a general notion of where that money is coming from beyond vague exhortations about "priorities."

I'm skeptical of the Vision 2015 enterprise for other reasons as well. It's advocates don't seem to understand the meaning of comparative advantage. Thus they repeatedly insist that all children should be above average. And they point to the higher earning potential of college graduates as evidence that everyone could be earning as much if everyone went to college. That emphasis on earning potential and ensuring a well-prepared "work force" is another reason I'm suspicious of letting these folks define educational quality. (American schools, they seem to be saying, are still not Prussian enough,)

Today's article looks at the plan's idea of "performance-based pay" for teachers:

In most industries, employees who excel in their work are rewarded with raises or promotions. Those not succeeding don't advance.

Education shouldn't be any different, argue the school, business and community leaders behind the Vision 2015 plan.

As part of their plan to revamp Delaware's "mediocre" school system into a world leader by 2015, they want to see teachers paid based on their work — rewarding those who succeed while holding all accountable for student learning.

That's a change from the standard practice of linking teacher pay increases most closely to years of experience and education level, which critics say offers teachers incentive to stay another year, but not to do their jobs better.

The premise here is dubious. The annual raises that most employees receive are based more on keeping up with (or almost keeping up with) inflation, or on companywide profit, than on whether or not individuals "excel in their work."

There are practical reasons for this. Despite the appeal of the idea of linking pay to performance, most of us don't work in fields where such performance is easily measured. For salesmen, pundits and baseball players,* perhaps, it makes sense, but in most professions, the attempt to create such measurements is corrosive, resulting in financial incentives to "game the stats." This was a major theme in season four of The Wire** — which offered a relentless, gut-wrenching argument against the idea of such "performance-based pay" for teachers or police officers.

(One also wonders what is meant by the idea of rewarding teachers with "promotions." Mrs. Jones is an excellent fifth-grade teacher, so what then? She should be promoted to sixth-grade? Or to senior administrative vice president for fifth-grade?)

Advocates of performance-based pay for teachers invariably wind up measuring such "performance" by students' scores on standardized tests. Teachers are thus put on notice: Teach to the test or suffer financially. If you think that the biggest problem with American schools is that students are being insufficiently coached for standardized tests, then you might think this solves the problem. If, like me, you think that an obsession with test scores is detrimental to quality education, then you've only exacerbated the problem.

The push for "incentive-based teacher pay" is based on some other dubious assumptions as well, such as that teacher's unions are opposed to the well-being of students and that teachers are driven largely by profit motive ("I came to Casablanca for the waters …"). Those assumptions need to be explored and evaluated explicitly before school districts decide to act on them.

For today though, kudos to reporter Alison Kepner and the paper for being willing to ask whether or not there's evidence that this popular "reform" would actually improve anything.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* Even in these examples there is the difficulty of accounting for variables beyond the control of the individual worker. Runs-batted-in are a useful measurement of a hitter's effectiveness, which is why the Phillies years ago acquired 100-RBI man Tommy Herr from the Cardinals. What they failed to notice was that in St. Louis, Herr was batting behind record-setting base-stealer Vince Coleman, and that it's not that hard to drive in runs when there's a speed-demon on third every other time you're up. Expecting Herr to produce the same numbers batting behind someone who didn't steal 110 bases was foolish, but no more foolish than pretending that parents are irrelevant to students' performance.

** Just watch it. All of it. Start with Season 1, Episode 1 and go from there. Then come back and thank me.

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