The New York Times published an editorial calling for “carrots and sticks” for teachers and principals.
What the editorial means is that professionals should get bonuses for higher test scores, and this would recognize high performance and get educators to work harder and produce more high performance (higher test scores).
As I said in my speech in Detroit to the AFT convention, carrots and sticks are for donkeys, not professionals.
The schools in New York City have been subject to budget cuts for the past few years. The Times’ editorial doesn’t suggest where the money will come from to award bonuses. Should some teachers be laid off so others can get a bonus? Should the schools eliminate the arts so that some teachers can get bonuses?
The Times makes no mention of the long and consistent history of failure of merit pay plans. See here and here and here and here and here.
After ten years of carrots and sticks in New York City, the Times concludes that what is needed is more carrots and sticks.
Teachers are doing the best they can, with or without bonus pay. I posted several times yesterday about why merit pay doesn’t work. I wish the Times’ editorial writer were reading those posts, and more important, reading the comments by teachers, such as this one:
I work in a challenging inner city school in NYC-DOE. Just about every teacher there works hard. Our administration is ok but not great. Our teachers collaborate and cooperate. I love working in my school. This past June during our final staff meeting on the last day of school our principal who was thanking everyone for their hard work let slip that thanks to our hard work, she and her assistant principals all received substantial bonuses from the DOE. There was complete silence in the room. It was a very sad way to end the school year. No one listened much to anything the “suits” said after that. She did say it was part of her union contract and we should pressure our union. Many teachers were very discouraged. Teachers are between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t work hard and make the administration look great (which is not likely because in the end it would hurt our students) our school will most likely close. If we work hard, the administration will be rewarded for our efforts. This is not going to do much for morale come September. If states made it more difficult to enter the teaching profession and provided adequate resources, none of this bonus stuff would be necessary. |
I left a shorter version of this as a response (I had to cut it down..too long) but it is not posted yet. How many more ways can they find to degrade our profession:
Your headline is a joke, right? This is another parody about the failing school system and how to motivate the lazy good-for-nothing unionized slobs, right?
Have you or anyone on your staff worked in a public school teaching children for an extended period of time? Not the 2-3 year teach for a while experiment but stayed for 10, 20, 30 years?
You see when you have dedicated your life to teaching and learning, you know it is team work. Everybody working together for the students. For example, the teacher overhears the student telling a friend a story about her step father and something about being in her bedroom at night (during a lesson by the way while you are teaching). You quickly get word to the guidance counselor (email, quickie phone call) while teaching. You continue your lesson and try to give a little more attention to the troubled student while keeping all on task, focused and performing. You hold the student back at the bell to tell her you are concerned (by the way you are now on hall duty while 25-30 more kids are marching in) and if she wants to you can meet her at lunch or guidance will meet with her. Later you coordinate with guidance, the school psychologist and your principal. Someone calls DCF, you may hold her off the bus, etc.
The point is this is teamwork and we don’t compete against each other for a PRIZE or a CARROT or the wack of a STICK.
This editorial further degrades the profession. The only way to get and keep teachers is to BRIBE us with prizes or threaten us with a wack of a STICK.
As stated by Diane Ravitch at the AFT convention in July: “Carrots and sticks are for donkeys.”
They are not for professionals! Treat us like professionals. Let us tell you how to reform schools…not Bill Gates, not Michelle Rhee, not Emperor Bloomberg!
You don’t even know what you don’t know! Good grief NYT…go back to school.
Every teacher and principal should leave a response to this editorial on the Times website.
They already shut down comments. One day?
If I’m in competition with my peers in the school, I can win in two ways. I can get better results. OR, I can work to make sure my colleagues get worse results. Merit pay doesn’t distinguish. It also doesn’t help the merit pay cause that there’s not a direct statistical relationship between how hard we work and ultimate test results. There should be but there isn’t.
Perhaps they’ve never heard of Deming.
I love this reply, Ed Lettis! I so wish the pols and admins would model the managerial concepts of Deming, or more recently, of Peter Senge, in order to motivate and develop teacher talent.
I posted about this earlier, comparing the Times “Carrot and Stick” editorial to a Guardian editorial from four years ago that said education is about more than can be measured by metrics. The Guardian writers said the following:
“Instead of using Sats as a snapshot assessment of how pupils are doing, schools end up teaching to the test because of the confused double purpose of the exams. As well as checking on the progress of individual children, the results end up defining the standing of the school – once they are collated into league tables. What gives the tables their power with parents is the seeming precision of the numerical rankings. But that precision is entirely spurious. Academic analysis suggests that year-by-year chance fluctuations in pupils’ ability overpower any real differences in performance for the majority of schools. And much of the real variation that can be discerned is down to the social mix of the pupils, as opposed to the quality of teaching. There have been worthy attempts to recognise good teaching in tough areas by creating new tables which adjust the figures to take into account, among other things, the number of children entitled to free school meals. But such approaches are inescapably arbitrary, not to mention hard to understand.
Earlier this year ministers floated plans for a new battery of metrics, covering everything from bullying to drugs. They would do better to reflect that there should be more to education than arithmetic alone.”
How refreshing to see editorial writers who understand there is more to education than what can be measured.
The Timesmen and women do not seem to understand that.
If metrics alone were to be used to judge the Times, the paper, which “narrowed” its quarterly loss to just $88 million dollars, would be shut down and all the writers fired. It bothers me that the Timesmen and women are happy to hold schools accountable to metrics alone, but refuse to hold themselves accountable to similar standards.
You boys and girls at the Times want carrots and sticks for teachers and principals?
Why not carrots and sticks for yourselves too?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/16/sats.schools?INTCMP=SRCH
I agree with your assessment that the editorial shouldn’t be pushing for “carrots and sticks.” I think one of the issue here is that the media and certain portions of the public are using the TNTP report as an opportunity to drum up certain political and personal agendas, rather than what’s best for students, teachers, and principals.
I read the TNTP report used as support for the editorial argument. While I cringe at the lack of data offered in the report’s recommendation and while they did in fact recommend increasing pay, the report touched on various other improvements (such as work life and environment, principal flexibility to hire the best teachers, creating effective careers pathways, etc.) that the media doesn’t seem to be focusing on. Instead, all I see are another call for “carrots and sticks.” Disappointing, indeed.
VIOLATES FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT OF 1938: If a child is given work or assessments to do in the classroom that will eventually determine the income of a teaching professional, that student is providing the catalyst for the pay. In Texas, administrators and teachers are paid “bonuses” or additional stipends through “strategic compensation” programs that are dependent upon the school-wide TAKS (standardized tests) growth or other student performance goals. This breaches the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, which states that sixteen is the basic minimum age for employment. It also says that when young people work, the work cannot jeopardize their health, well-being, or educational opportunities
This is EXCELLENT information, TexasParents!
People, pay attention to this, and USE it!
Carrots and sticks have nothing to do with what education needs-it’s about honesty-and oh yeah, a good pair of hedge clippers. Policymakers, in collusion with the “reform” industry had been searching for an opening for their attack on public education, and the financial crisis gave that to them.They tried the approach of “we are being outperformed by other nations” since the time of Sputnik and most notably in “A Nation At Risk”. The textbook/workbook/testing and standards industry began to boom, and despite the fact that this nation was built into the greatest nation on the planet without those things-schools became our biggest threat. Over the decades since, standards and testing have been reworked repeatedly,and the results/grading criteria were usually arrived at in a process kept secret from students, teachers and schools. I remember a year when a brand new state writing test was administered to 5th graders. The students did very well! So then they made it a test for 4th graders. After working in a system like this, as mandates and expectations increase and funding is taken away-dangled somewhere or shifted to “regional councils” or training centers to help schools do more with less….Well, it starts to appear as if failure is imposed so the stick can be swung. The testing industry proves how much we need them when kids do poorly on the tests.
Teachers could show how well students can do, the successes we can help them realize, in measures that don’t necessarily involve bubbles/boxes/or a computer monitor (but might, depending on the student) we might help kids get the carrot. Or the apple, or the broccoli-whatever! If this new wave of “reform” was HONESTLY about children, experts that truly understand children and how they develop would be involved and explain much better than I can here: people are not standard, neither are their skills/aptitudes and destinies, parents in conjunction with educators are best able to maximize student potential. Which brings me to the hedge clippers. I sometimes feel like that psycho-dad played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining-chasing that kid foolishly around a hedge-maze someone else created. <<>>He dies from exposure and the kid gets away. Okay, the kid shouldn’t have run into the maze. Jack, if he really wanted to catch the kid, shouldn’t have run in after him.
This is the problem with private interests being allowed to insinuate themselves more and more into the education of children-controlling education and the debate. They will never admit that, for them, it’s about money first. Valid data gathering shows that students with resources allowed to learn in more nurturing supportive settings (NOT TESTED ENDLESSLY) do well.The most powerful know little if anything about kids NOT born into privilege and security, yet they have been allowed to create the hedge maze I have to chase students through-hoping we make it to a predetermined end. They couldn’t guide a roomful of hungry, tired, challenging kids to a place that would be success. I know some people who could. All they need is to be turned loose with their hedge clippers and get protection from the fools with sticks.
Brilliant analogy! Yes, bottom line,it’s ALL about the MONEY.
Several points to be made:
1. The phony crisis invented by the Billionaire Boys and Girls–public
schools failing (failing what? Oh, yes, failing those tests which
are–in and of themselves–faulty, poorly designed and poorly
graded {see “Pineapple Question,” Julie Woestehoff “Charter
School Question,” faulty math questions, Todd Farley’s book,
Making the Grades, about who/how scores/scored, cheating–
rendering these tests to be NOT standardized, NOT valid, NOT
reliable}). BUT–as the saying goes–“never let a good crisis go to
waste.” (And we thought Wag the Dog was only a movie–silly us!)
2. It is as if the powers that be are heroin addicts: there’s a big hole
(Pearson)that has to be filled, and–by golly!–only all of our tax $$
can fill it! The analogy goes: all of the heroin addict’s money is
the hole in his arm, all of our education money (taxpayers’) is
going into that hole that is…Pearson! (Or–here is a monster that
must be fed!)
3. Bleed our schools (public) to feed our charters.Ka-ching!
How do we shrink the tumor? We don’t; we operate: we cut it out, we excise it, we get rid of it once and for all. STOP the testing. There will be no more VAMs, teachers being fired, schools being turned around. There will be teaching, instead.
What if metrics could be established apart from testing? Does anyone have ideas as to how metrics could be gleaned apart from testing? Seems to me the state (and its funding) want to frame teacher improvement within their own understandings of measurement.
If you could somehow assess another teaching aspect on a consistent basis, do you think that would help remove the otherwise normally applied incentive to good, hard work (salary or bonus compensation)?
I don’t mean to be rude, just curious as to your perspectives.
“What if metrics could be established apart from testing?”
Not logically possible as metrics implies measurement of a process, teaching and learning, which is in the logical category of quality. It is logically impossible to quantify a quality. So again the answer is not possible.
Hi Duane, I meant scholastic when I referred to “testing.”
To sum up every other possible empirical means as a “quality” sells short the possibility of an actual answer.
There is an answer.
What is something else that might be measurable apart from scholastic testing?
I think there are absolutely other options, but tests should continue as a facet of assessment (especially in basic skills) to inform instruction and the student’s path forward. Not every student will need calc, physics or additional years of foreign language-but they should be there for those who are ready and want them. Other countries guide students through a combination of experience and aptitude into programs and fields. Some of these countries are described as outperforming American students. Experienced teachers, parents, professionals and the students can work together to decide the path. They don’t need industry shaping the path to be most profitable. That approach is destructive to true education.
I left a response last night, and never saw it posted. The NYTimes used to send me an email when it was posted and a link. But since they changed policy, it’s hard to find. I did however see that most readers are not buying into any of this.
The scary part this editorial in the Times is that the author chose to hide behind the name of the paper rather than giving us a byline so we could assess who is in cahoots with Rhee and Gates. A short (10 sec) search brought up a Wikipedia article that tells us that Michelle Rhee is the founder of the New Teacher Project which conducted the study that the Times based their op ed on. Also we find out that the principle funder (surprise) is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Another interesting fact is that this organization is a revenue generating non-profit (can such a thing exist?). I searched in vain for a direct link to this study that the op ed was based on but could not locate it. I wanted to assess their methodology and find out over how many years the study was conducted. It was obviously not published in a peer-reviewed journal, which raises the question, why not? What did they have to hide? However, just knowing that Rhee and Gates were behind the study is enough to know that it very likely biased. It is a shame that the Times published the op ed with such an uncritical look at this questionable study and did not give its readers the proper context to judge the merit (or demerits) of the study.
cshore1844, here is the direct link: http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_Irreplaceables_2012.pdf
It is right on TNTP’s website as they have been tweeting, facebooking, and marketing it all day. TNTP’s methodologies are rarely truly academic or scientific. It’s usually based on marketing and business methodologies used for quick decision making rather than doing expensive, well thought out, and year-over-year academic studies. And while I do agree with you that Michelle Rhee does push her agenda a lot and while this particular study’s results directly correlates with their “non-profit” business model, I think they do a good job of at least trying to push an important agenda (how do we get good teachers to stay and bad teachers to go). However, my issue here is that there are certain media outlets that tend to do more pushing of TNTP’s agenda than TNTP does itself, and I think they do it more so to push their own political agendas.
Regardless, I think it’s time we ALL grow up (on every side) and stop pushing personal and political agendas and realize that we are all failing at our responsibilities to many children in this country. Let’s stop telling each other what we think is right and start working together towards a common end goal.
Hi Eric,
Good posts. But, sorry, I don’t agree that this is all just “both sides being too immature” to work together.
Work together towards exactly what?
For all their imperfections, I believe strongly in the principle and the function of our public schools.
I’m a parent—not a teacher—and I want to save our schools and make them better. Rhee, and her band of funders and privatizers want to turn them into private, for-profit businesses, suck all of the value out of them—kind of like Mitt Romney’s “best practices” at Bain—and then cast them aside for the “losers” in this “Race To The Top” (the “top” of what?)
It’s not an emotional or tactical disagreement here between two well-meaning groups; it’s a fight for the dignity of our communities, our families, our children and the (almost always) good people that teach them.
I am part of a group that sees our schools as representing The Best of our community spirit. We work together. We help each other. It’s not about “MY kid”; it’s about ALL our children.
And for the billionaires funding ersatz “reform” groups, it’s pretty clear; it’s all about looking for “ROI” as they salivate over the $600 billion spent on our K-12 schools and try a variety of tactics to get control of it.
Forget the bonuses and pay raises. I would settle for bulletin board paper, pencils, and working internet access in my school.