By Tom
I spent about an hour this morning slogging through an article by Dan Hanushek about the imperative of having good teachers. It's an intriguing read, in which he makes the case that having an excellent teacher will increase the expected lifetime earning by up to $400,000 per student. A lousy teacher, on the other hand, would have the opposite impact. While he allows that "The majority of teachers are hardworking and effective," he argues for renewed efforts to eliminate the least effective 5 to 10 percent. That, and merit pay.
Like I said, I spent about an hour with this thing. Then I taught a full day in a real classroom, where I tried to be excellent. I'm not sure the extent to which I increased the future earnings of my students, but I'd like to think I did some good.
After school got out I went to a meeting. There were seven of us in attendance. In addition to the other third grade teacher and myself, we had the principal, the psychologist, the math specialist, the reading specialist and the ELL specialist. We talked about our students. Our students. Not my students, not the other teacher's students, but our students. We looked at lots of data and talked about the faces behind the numbers. We talked about which of those kids will need more support next year and what that support will look like.
It seems extremely ambitious for Hanushek to place a dollar figure on something like a teacher's impact on a student's future earnings. I have a lot of respect for data and I appreciate the fact that advanced metrics have allowed us to isolate the role teachers play in student achievement. But I don't see how it's possible to tease out the impact one teacher has on any given student.
What Mr. Hanushek and others don't seem to grasp is that teachers in this day and age don't "own" their students and the data they generate. We work collaboratively. Remember, there were seven of us in that room, talking about two classes of students. And everyone there played a role in their education and holds a stake in their success.
Furthermore, the students with the highest needs, the ones that need the most support, are the students on whom the most people collaborate. And they're the same students that tend to "drag down" classroom data as it's assigned to a given teacher.
Collaboration is a great thing, and it's here to stay. It's high time the research community accepted it.
i absolutely liked reading everything that is posted on your blog keep the posts coming. I enjoyed it
Collaboration is key, not only within grade levels or content areas, but as a staff and even as an elementary/middle/high school feeder pattern.
In my district there’s not much communication between elementary, middle and high schools, something I plan to work to improve.
And you’re right, none of us does this work alone.
Tom – The collaboration example you give is such a wonderful one.
As I have worked with a group from my district to plan some staff development we have come to a disturbing conclusion – while collaboration is talked about all the time, teachers really don’t know how to collaborate effectively.
Our team agrees that collaboration is important and we ended the school year by introducing what effective collaboration looks like. We have plans to continue next year by doing some training in how effective collaboration is carried out.
Thank you for sharing.
Dave, it sounds like you actually do have a problem with unions.
As you know, unions are supposed to represent their members when those members face disciplinary actions. They have no choice in the matter. That’s why their members pay dues. The judgement on the quality of the teacher in question is rendered by the disciplinary process itself, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say that the unions “shield the genuinely incompetent.”
One of the biggest dampers on accountability is how vehement so many unions are about shielding the genuinely incompetent teachers. I have nothing against unions, but in education I’ve so often seen their leadership abuse the organization more frequently than using it for everyone’s benefit.
Erik Hanushek? Or Dan Goldhaber? Either of them could have written the article, but it sounds like Hanushek. And the merit pay piece was written by Roland Fryer.
Sorry for being an officious twit. (Really.) This is what graduate school does to a person. Makes you an expert at ferreting out common sense and stomping on it, in favor of trivial details.
What do all three Famous Ed Researchers have in common? They’re economists. Education policy is no longer being made by educators. “Business” gets a bad rap these days–“can’t run a school like a business”–but what’s really killing us is the facile assumption that economic principles apply and trump education philosophy.
I still say I’d rather have merit time. If they want to reward me, give me more planning time during my paid school day… I teach high school, so I’d take two periods of planning instead of one. If the goal is to reward good teaching in a way which promotes even better teaching, money won’t do it for me, time will.
I’m honestly not sure if I could work any harder, but if I was offered an extra $5000 to improve my students’ test scores I would probably work differently. Trouble is, I don’t think it would be better.
The data on New York School’s merit pay system is interesting, and I think the idea of collaboration has a lot to do with it. I’m know there are differences in quality among the teachers in every school – just like in any field – but as far as most of us are concerned, that’s beside the point.
Citing a research study on New York’s merit pay experiment from Ronald Freyer on GothemSchools.org (3/8/11):
“In his study, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Fryer writes that researchers were surprised to see that schools that won bonuses overwhelmingly decided to distribute the cash fairly evenly among teachers. More than 80 percent of schools that won bonuses gave the same dollar amount to almost all of the eligible educators.”
I think your post may speak to why schools choose not to distribute the bonuses to individual teachers.
I wonder if merit pay has any merit. For an extra $5,000 would you work any harder? What would you do differently? Would you accept this challenge: you earn a bonus for a 10% improvement on an applicable measure* and lose a similar amount if students decline 10%? Would you accept this as an individual teacher, as a grade level team, or as a school?
I don’t know.