By Kristin
An editorial in the Seattle Times gives a vote for charter schools and merit pay. "Students are graded according to their abilities," the piece says. "Imagine paying teachers according to theirs." Let's take a moment to imagine that.
Merit pay would be great. I work hard and I care. I think I'm effective. I should be paid a little more than the teacher who alternates between movies and packets. But merit pay is problematic. When we "grade students according to their abilities," it's based on spending an hour a day with them for nine months. If someone wants to come give me that kind of attention I'd be so excited I would hardly know what to do. Just thinking about it gives me shivers, because it would be the end of the mindless societal whining about what's wrong with education, and it would be the beginning of people realizing we cannot continue to impoverish our schools and expect educational miracles.
Merit pay cannot be dependent only upon teachers jumping through hoops like professional development or peer observations. No one is better at jumping through hoops than teachers because we have to jump through so many of them just to be allowed to do our job. Merit pay based on hoops rewards the ability to jump through a hoop, not the ability to teach.
Merit pay needs to be based on how the academic skills of my students have improved from September to June. That makes sense and I'm up for that measurement. The problem is that a child's academic growth is easy to measure, but the cause of it is not. A child might spend winter break in France, and her language skills improve regardless of her teacher. A child might go home every night to a dad who coaches him in math, or who discusses literature with him. I've had students like that, and I can't take credit for the tremendous gains they made between September and June.
Then, there are children who live in chaos. I have those children too. What happens to the score of the boy whose older brother killed himself in October? He learned a lot that year, much of it from his teacher, but it didn't involve analyzing literature.
What do we do with the score of the 14-year old girl who got pregnant and spent every waking second debating the abortion that finally happened in the sixteenth week? The boy who spent tenth grade in three different foster homes? The girl who spent November through March in Juvenile Hall? The girl getting beat up by her boyfriend? The boy trying to pull away from his gang against their wishes? The boy who lived under a bridge for two months because his mom and dad were sent back to Colombia? The friends of the boy who died in a holding cell because he suffered a brain injury when his stolen car crashed? Is this list getting a little overwhelming? I could go on. Every one of these stories is true. These were my students, and the list isn't even complete. I'm not the only teacher who does more than teach my students academic skills. Sometimes I'm teaching them how to stay alive, physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
How do you measure that?
Here's a suggestion: come watch me teach. You want to measure a teacher's skill and pay her for those skills? Stop paying some phony educational expert to develop an assessment that will never succeed at measuring what teachers do. Stop trying to grade teachers from far away, with a paper trail of evidence.
If you can figure out a way to get someone with credibility to spend time in classrooms and decide which teachers deserve merit pay, I'd be completely behind the idea. It would involve getting to know the students, too, and how their home lives affect their schooling. While teachers understand that we need to teach the children who arrive in September regardless of their prior instruction, the designers of merit pay need to understand that teachers aren't the only impact on a child's academic skills between September and June.
Well, I had a ‘professional’ come in and observe my class, and she thought I sucked. And I don’t. So, even the idea that someone could come in and see what I do and establish that I work hard and care and adjust my instruction based on student success and failure might mess up. I do work hard and care and do everything in my power to make my class one that students will enjoy and engage with and learn something from. But, based on the standards and current ‘best practices’ I have been relegated to the dustbin of slacker teachers that don’t give a rip and suck money from the state because they can. It isn’t true. It isn’t valid. I agree that my students should learn and improve over the course of the 9 months they spend with me. I just think that trying to establish ANY one system to determine that success is next to impossible. I definitely don’t want it to be based on one person’s ideas of me. I might rub someone the wrong way. I already have. Tests are problematic at best. What then?
Hmmm, merit pay. Nothing wrong with admitting you’re doing a good job and deserve to be compensated for it. However, it is very difficult to make a judgement on an individual’s proficiency and effectiveness on a single (or even a few) classroom visits. I agree with those who support PGPs (professional growth plans) as a means to have teachers self-direct the areas of their professional practice they feel need attention. Hopefully these plans are actually reviewed by administrators and adequate support is made available to help in a teacher’s growth.
Although the Professional Growth Plan is certainly one means for reviewing and helping to develop better educators, determining their efficacy and effectiveness in terms of student success is quite different. Would one need to look at student report card grades, standardized test scores, parent/student survey responses, teacher involvement in professional growth workshops/initiatives, administrative evaluation reports? All of these things have the potential to show incomplete or inaccurate data regarding a teacher’s performance and effectiveness.
I do agree with merit pay. I see great inequities in the educational experience of students based on my observations of my fellow colleagues in the school system. Better teachers should be acknowledged for their contributions. But how?
How do you pay special education, elective, and PE teachers merit pay?
Kristin, I have an idea. Tenure should be something we renew, not a lifetime guarantee. I think the evaluation process should be based on Professional Growth Plans. Everyone is on one, every year. The evaluators would be a cadre of master teachers, and the whole purpose would be to improve teaching. If a teacher successfully meets their goals each year they would continue on the same path. If they didn’t, the master teacher would recommend probation, which would be overseen by a district administrator. The emphasis would be on improvement, but the consequence of not meeting standard would be non-renewal.
I agree with Tom: merit pay is not the way to increase teacher performance. The idea is insulting to hard working teachers.
Good post. I think many of us know and accept the points you make.
Here’re a couple of nits I think teachers can do based on your opening:
1. Student performance, not abilities are evaluated. A teacher should so advise the Seattle Times editorial writer.
2. Teachers have this blog as a good place to describe good things you do in classrooms to increase learning. That will go a long way to convince readers of the worth/value that teachers add to student lives.
3. Arne Duncan talks about improving teaching from a different set of assumptions than many teachers seem to use. He assumes, based on empirical research and his experiences, that increased student acsdemic performance is possible. He also expects that educators will change what we do in order for students to demonstrate those increases.
Yes?
Of course merit pay should be done well. I like Mark’s very realistic comment about how so many things in education get done the easy way. Think about it, would there even be enough competent administrators in education right now to equitably and meaningfully evaluate all the teachers in some future merit pay system?
As for who would teach the remedial or “low” classes, that would depend on how the as-yet-unknown merit pay system uses test scores. But, you might be surprised to find lots of teachers, me included, fighting over those classes. I teach high school ELL right now and these students generally show more overall growth than non-ELL students. That’s probably because they start “lower” and have more “room to grow”, but you get what I mean. I can promise you that if a teacher is administering a student assessment, WASL, HSPE, ITBS, whatever, upon which a potential raise might be based, many of those student scores will go up. Did they learn more? Did the teacher work harder? Maybe.
Tom, I agree that merit pay is silly. As Michael pointed out, teachers who earn their National Board Certification already get a bonus (unless it’s cut from the budget). The best thing about the NBCT experience was that my challenge was directly related to the subject I teach and the grades I teach. As well, the whole thing was developed by teachers. Finally, I had to submit videos of me teaching that were watched multiple times before I was assessed. It was an authentic way to show my merit as a teacher.
Mark and BikeNounVerb, I am with you. In fact, I read Mark’s comment and thought, “Yes yes yes yes yes.” If merit pay happens, I think it should be done well. I’m okay with it, but I think it’s unecessary not only because I agree with Tom and Michael that we already have a system in place to reward exceptional teachers, but because I think the money should be spent elsewhere.
Personally, I’d much rather see 15-student classes in grades K-3, and I’d like to see a pre-K class attached to every Kindergarten class so that every child has access to free pre-K education if the family wants it. If we have money to throw around researching, designing and implementing merit pay (and you KNOW the bulk of that money is not going to meritorious teachers), then we have the money to do some good things where education is really strained.
Here’s my main problem with MP: Most teachers are not primarily motivated by money. We need and desire a living wage, but we don’t really have any dreams or expectations about someday owning our own island. No, we’re motivated by teaching itself. That being the case, most of us would gladly do something to improve the way we teach whether we would earn more or not. It angers me to think that Arne Duncan and all the other merit pay enthusiasts assume that I’m “holding out” for more money. That I’m not yet working to my full capacity because I’m not yet fully motivated. Because when Duncan says, “We want to reward those teachers who are doing an excellent job,” that’s exactly what he really means. Think about it; why would you pay someone more to do what they’re already doing? You wouldn’t. He wants to use merit pay the way I sometimes use praise in my classroom. When I say, “Thank you Keiyarah, for sitting up straight and giving me your full attention while I’m talking,” what I’m really doing is telling Nathan, the kid sitting next to Keiyarah, that he should probably stop digging around in his desk and start looking at me.
I have an idea that might work. Let’s develop a system in which we articulate exactly what good teachers should do. We’ll write it out in the form of a set of standards. And we’ll make sure there’s a separate set for each teaching area. Then we’ll develop an assessment process in which teachers show that they’ve met those standards. If they have, we’ll give them a bonus. And we’ll let educational researchers do their jobs; they can check to see that the students who are taught by the teachers who have met those standards are actually learning more. Oh wait! We already have that system! National board Certification!
I, like Mark, believe that merit pay would benefit me and if a state were to vote and pass such a bill, then so be it. However, I cannot imagine a more complicated system, especially one that will likely follow previous educational systems. One that will likely involve cleverly named forms and involve a constantly changing nomenclature only to be stable the moment before being tossed away for the next “new” thing to change education.
I am okay with Merit Pay.
My concern with merit pay is that, like everything else in education, the policies and practices chosen to determine “merit” will be those which are easiest to administer: looking at a schedule of PD classes taken is much easier to administer than spending an hour a day, a week, or even a year in my classroom assessing my merit as a teacher. The former is easier to administer, but I don’t think anyone would disagree that the latter is the better way to assess a teacher’s actual merit.
Add to that the complicated and ugly issue of using test scores to determine merit… what about the brilliant art teacher or the amazing German teacher, then? Why would anyone in their right mind choose to teach low or remedial classes if test scores determine our merit as a teacher? Back to the ease of administration idea… it’s much easier to use a single snapshot test in March or April than to use a preassessment and postassessment to actually track real growth.
Though I arrogantly feel that merit pay would benefit me, because I do think I am competent enough to be considered a teacher “of merit,” I don’t foresee a fair and reliable way to assess teacher merit until people are willing to throw money at the assessment of teachers…and since a common opinion about teachers is that we do nothing but whine about our “low pay,” I don’t foresee that being an easy sell either. And it’s pretty clear that our country would rather complain about the poor state of education in America than actually take a tax hit and pay to elevate the system out of the poor state it is currently in.
Thank you Kristin, you are worth a million. Too often decision makers are outside the classroom and do not have a clear lens as to what goes on in the lives of our students. It would be so amazing to have people in decision making roles come to my classroom. Not an a scheduled, media type day, just an ordinary day, to see teaching, learning and living within the classroom. I think then they could see the complexity of merit pay proposals.
Thanks for your comments Michael. I do consider the NBCT bonus as merit pay, and I’m grateful for the financial recognition of my efforts to be the best teacher I can be.
But you know what? I’m not pushing for merit pay. I think teachers get paid really well. To me, merit pay is an indirect way to improving schools. I think that money could be better spent, and perhaps that money should be spent in whatever way each school needs it – an art teacher, maybe, or a truancy officer who helps kids get to class.
The other, more direct way to improve schools would be to make the move from seniority to quality as the primary standard by which teachers keep their jobs. Good teachers outnumber bad teachers, but bad teachers do a lot of damage and no one can get rid of them. Design the assessment that would be used for merit pay, but instead of using it for financial bonuses, use it as the mark teachers need to hit to stay in the classroom.
I agree with most of your points, especially about the long-term and ongoing commitment necessary to make merit pay at least seem equitable to teachers.
As an NBCT, do you consider yourself someone who already receives merit pay? I do.
I often think it’s teachers like us, NBCTs who do work hard and care, who should be advocating for merit pay?