By Tom
Never mind the fact that we can’t afford it. And set aside for now the reality that it’s ridiculously complicated and incredibly unfair. The most important question to ask about merit pay is the one we should have asked in the first place: Does it work? Do people actually perform better when they know that the results of their efforts are directly tied to their salary?
Well, apparently not.
I just finished an outstanding book by Daniel H. Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. He makes a compelling case that most of us are absolutely not driven by the desire to make money. Especially those of us who work in fields where we’re required to make decisions and solve problems. Like teachers.
According to Pink, humans have gone through two iterations of motivation. Motivation 1.0 was when we were focused on merely surviving. Obviously, there are many people in the world for whom that is still the primary focus, but for most of western society, survival has long been conquered. When the industrial revolution came along, we moved into Motivation 2.0, and did things to get rewarded or to avoid being punished. That’s essentially how we treat horses, donkeys or oxen, or whatever animal they’re talking about when they refer to “carrots and sticks.”
According to Pink, we’ve now evolved into Motivation 3.0. Those of us who are not compelled to focus on mere survival and who make enough money to afford a halfway-decent lifestyle (and yes; that includes a teacher’s salary) are motivated by three things: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
We want autonomy. We want to be able to have some say in what we do; to use our minds and make important decision about how we complete our jobs. Obviously, there’s a balance to be struck between subordination and autonomy, but finding that balance, according to Pink, can make the difference between employees who enjoy what they do all day (and do it well) and employees who hate it (and do it poorly). People like to be in control of what they do, and they’re more motivated when they are.
People (especially teachers) are also motivated by the opportunity to master their craft. Teaching is one of those rare fields in which no one is ever a true master. Picture a horizontal asymptote, in which the line gets infinitely closer to the x-axis, but never touches it; we get better and better at teaching, but never truly master the craft. And we like it that way.
We also need to find a purpose for what we do. Well, unless you’re a Doctor without Borders, it’s hard to find much more purpose for what you do all day than a teacher.
So we’re motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. What role, then, does money play in our motivation? According to Pink’s book, it plays a surprising small role. That is, as long as we have enough money to afford the things we need and some of the things we want. He presents study after study from the worlds of behavioral sciences and economics that cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of merit pay. People simply don’t perform better when they know that their output is directly tied to differential pay. There are several reasons for this, but essentially the research shows that money causes a short-circuit in our desire for autonomy, mastery and purpose: as soon as you pay someone to do something, it stops being fun and turns into work. As it turns out, your yoga teacher was right: when you do things for intrinsic reasons you do a better job than when you do them for extrinsic reasons. When you pay someone to “garden” it suddenly becomes “yard-work,” an entirely different activity, even though it looks very similar. People do better at gardening than they do at yard-work.
And that’s why merit pay doesn’t work. Most people, including teachers, are naturally inclined to pursue mastery; to do their jobs as well as they can. Merit pay doesn’t accelerate this pursuit. It ruins it.
So why does this apparently useless practice persist? Great question. According to Pink, it persists simply because it seems to make so much sense. Most of us just can’t imagine it not working. A staple in the world of business, it’s perpetuated, I suppose, by the high-end recipients of merit pay so that that they continue to be high-end recipients. But even in the world of business (and especially in the world of sports) it just doesn’t work.
What then, is the best way to pay teachers? Fairly. People just want to be paid fairly. Teachers, as most of you know, don’t expect to get rich, but they do expect to be able to send their own kids to college. They don’t expect to drive Ferraris, but they do expect to drive Fords. They don’t need a mansion, they just want a house. That’s fair. And the fairest pay I can imagine is the good, old-fashioned, union-designed and much-maligned salary scale. There it is in black and white; your salary to the dollar for the entirety of your career. You can tell at a glance that you’ll never be rich, but you can also quickly decide whether it’s going to be enough or not. And if it doesn’t look like enough, you don’t go into education in the first place.
We all know that a salary scale pays a fifteen-year veteran twice as much as a third-year teacher, even though that veteran isn’t twice as good as his young colleague. But that’s not the point. A salary scale was never designed to differentially pay teachers what they’re actually worth. A salary scale was designed to pay teachers fairly and to encourage them to stick around and continue to take college-level classes. Period.
Yet we’ve been convinced (mostly by representatives from the business world) that pay should be used as leverage to “get more performance” from employees. People from the president down to the principals are holding out hope that merit pay is the ticket to a successful education system.
Nonsense. Merit pay is unaffordable, impossibly complicated, and unfair. But worst of all, it just doesn’t work.
I think the teachers who would be strongly motivated by merit pay are those teachers who aren’t in education for the purpose of educating. They are the ones who live up to the stereotype of teachers with summers off and short work days. And while I agree with Mark (I’m also arrogant enough to think I would be paid more)we know that merit pay would be based on test scores. Hmmm…how’s that really going to work out in the long run?
This is very interesting. My feelings about merit pay seem to swing wildly. On one hand, I’m arrogant enough to think that it would mean I’d get paid more, but I cannot comprehend a fair and effective means of assessing ‘merit.’ I think the premise that it would help principals get rid of ineffective teachers is interesting–but how is merit pay going to help them grow a backbone? There are teachers who I think should be fired (based on behavior, gross misdeeds) but we’ve all seen that it is even hard for a good principal to fire the teachers who I’d even contend are a danger to their students–let alone the ones who are just ineffective educators.
I watched an interesting documentary recently about cancer treatment and research in the U.S. The documentary (I cannot remember the title) was suggesting that the health care system and pharmaceutical companies are focusing on “disease care” rather than “health care.” Their solutions to cancer and other diseases are always reactive–chemo, radiation, etc.–whereas there is convincing research recognized by the NIH that cancer can actually be slowed, stalled, or completely reversed through diet (it was called orthosomethingorother)–and that such dietary decisions (not crazy stuff here, were talking meats, fruits, veggies, “normal” but not processed foods) have shown promise in preventing cancers.
I saw an immediate and obvious connection to education: all of our reforms are on the reactive end, not the preventative end. We’re giving the ed system radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy (which stats show actually saves fewer than 30% of real-world cancer patients…) when we ought to be looking at the causes which actually underlie our problems. Just as cancer is often the result of environmental factors which can be controlled–the focus of research is not on controlling those factors, but rather is on reacting to the result. We’re test oriented (the result) and are obsessed with the prescription (the test) and punishing the practitioners without considering how the initial situation is actually the problem (poverty, lack of home support, poor nutrition, lack of early childhood pre-k education). There are other systems which could be instituted to help with those issues–and if that were the case, I guarantee that we’d see our problems in education diminish. We’re treating the wrong phase of the disease.
Sorry for the rambling tangent…perhaps there is something worthwhile in there…
Yes Yes Yes.
On the other hand, I think another hoped-for result of merit pay is that the ineffective teachers will be flushed out. Obviously, to do that by promising a reward to the effective teachers is ridiculous, but that’s never been a dissuading factor in making top-level educational decisions.
Supposedly, all of the assessments and tracking and measuring of a teacher’s worth that would result in a bonus would also reveal who isn’t making a difference in a child’s ability to perform on a test. The big problem is that you’re right – all of the proposed ways to assess and track and measure a teacher’s skill are faulty.
The killer is that they’re so faulty they can’t effectively measure a teacher’s skill in the classroom or lack of skill in the classroom. So again, someone got elected, got the contract, or got published on the great golden balloon of Merit Pay, and it’s an idea that will never reliably get off the ground.