I don’t know if reformers want to hear from an experienced teacher, but in case they do, here is a sound proposal:
| After 39 years in education and living through many policy changes I can tell you from personal experience that children’s standard of living influences their success with school curriculum more than ANYTHING else. In my opinion we need to focus on reducing the number of children in poverty and invest in parent education and early childhood education. |
I just got this post on Twitter by a student who wants no part of the DFER-like “Students for Education Reform,” created at Princeton to advance the corporate reform agenda. This student is amazing! Impressive research, real understanding about how words can be used to deceive, and a grasp of the issues.
There is a bottom-line question that no one ever answers: If DFER and SFER and SFC and TFA and StudentsFirst and other corporate reformers already know how to close the achievement gap, as they repeatedly claim, why are there no examples of it anywhere? It hasn’t happened in New York City, after ten long years of corporate-style reform; it hasn’t happened in New Orleans since Katrina even though 80% of the children are in charter schools; it didn’t happen in D.C., under Michelle Rhee (which still has the biggest gaps in the nation). Why do they keep saying they know how to do it when they haven’t done it? At some point, the dance ends. And the bill comes due for all those promises and claims.
Remember Howard Dean? He ran for President in 2004. He is a leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
His son was TFA and now runs charter schools.
Who on the national scene supports public education?
A faithful reader sent the following quotation from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations:
Merchants and master manufacturers are, in this order, the two classes of people who commonly employ the largest capitals, and who by their wealth draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness of understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occasion) is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects than with regard to the latter. Their superiority over the country gentleman is not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
The New York Times’ editorial is so unbelievably ignorant!
There is by now a huge accumulation of knowledge and experience about the uselessness of merit pay or pay for performance.
Daniel Pink (Drive), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Edward Deci (Why We Do What We Do) have explained why intrinsic motivation matters more than bonuses, and why bonuses may actually impair performance by demoralizing people.
Here are leading scholars in Zurich who explain yet again that merit pay does not work and will never work.
The idea that people are solely self-interested and materially orientated has been thrown overboard by leading scholars. Empirical research, in particular experimental research, has shown that under suitable conditions human beings care for the wellbeing of other persons. Above all, they are not solely interested in material gains (see eg Frey and Osterloh 2002). Recognition by co-workers is greatly important. Many workers are intrinsically motivated, ie they perform work for its own sake because it is found challenging and worth undertaking. This applies not only to qualified employees but also to persons fulfilling simple tasks. They often are proud of their work and performance.
What part of does not work, has not worked, and will incentivize negative behaviors does the Times not understand?
A number of eons ago, I had a Twitter debate with Justin Hamilton, who is Arne Duncan’s press secretary. I forget how it started, but the tenor of the exchange went something like this.
I question whether education would be reformed by educators or entrepreneurs, and Justin, unbidden, sprang to the defense of entrepreneurs. Or maybe he said that teachers and entrepreneurs would both transform education. I narrowed my target and said I was complaining specifically about for-profit entrepreneurs, not people with an entrepreneurial spirit. Justin’s response as something along the lines of, well, you are an entrepreneur, you sell books and make speeches.
Happily, essayist Rachel Levy has saved me the trouble of explaining how shallow Justin’s response was. Her thoughts about intellectual work and business and entrepreneurialism bear reading. I recommend her essay to you, along with the thoughtful comments that follow.
I can’t be angry at Justin. He did write to ask me for a copy of my book, which I sent him gratis and autographed.
I just wish he had found it in his heart or head to say something negative about the unfortunate rise of for-profit schooling and privatization. He didn’t and he couldn’t. That says something about our government’s policies.
This parent activist in Chicago says that parents have good ideas about how to improve the schools but Mayor Rahm Emanuel won’t meet with them.
Parents in New York City say the same about Mayor Bloomberg.
Why won’t the mayor listen to the most informed and most committed stakeholders of all? Not the business community, not the entrepreneurs, but the parents of the children?
| It would cost more than the city has which is a nearly 1 billion dollar deficit! Parent groups have proposed plans that would increase art and gym, support after school programs and allow more opportunity for hands-on learning, but CPS and the mayor emphatically refuse to discuss the future of our children’s education with parents. Rahm’s only solution is to impose a longer school day with no additional funding and essentially let schools try to figure out how to make it work, while secretly hoping schools fail so he can close them and create more charters. |
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. |
This reader writes about the teachers who changed his life:
I had four CPS public school teachers to thank for recognizing and nurturing my strengths in English, writing and creativity, in 7th through 10th grades: Miss Fox, Mrs. Langdon, Miss Schwartz and Mrs. Gordon.
Until middle school, I did not think I had any academic strengths. In part, this was because, in 4th grade, when my mom remarried, I gained a step-father who frequently referred to me as “dumb”. He often said that, in his estimation, I was just too stupid to be able to excel at school. He turned out to be an example of how wrong non-educators can be about students and learning.
Thanks to these great CPS teachers, I developed confidence in my abilities, was inspired to broaden my interests, and I graduated with straight A’s from high school and summa cum laude from college. I will be forever indebted to them for rekindling my love of learning, because in spite of my achievements, my step-father never did change his views about my capabilities and always found a way to downplay my academic success. Thank goodness I learned at an opportune time in my development that his opinion didn’t matter as much as the professional judgments of those who are skilled in learning and teaching.
Andrea Gabor has followed our discussion of merit pay and sent the following post.
Gabor is the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York. She has extensive experience as a journalist who has written about business.
I learned about her work when I stumbled upon one of her books The Man Who Discovered Quality: How W. Edwards Deming Brought the Quality Revolution to America. Chapter 9 of the book explains why Deming, a guru of business and corporate culture, was adamantly opposed to merit pay. Gabor explains there how merit pay discourages teamwork and collaboration and promotes short-term, me-first thinking. If you can find the book on amazon, buy it.
Deming was speaking about business, not education, but his words are applicable equally to education.
This is what Gabor sent me:
The question of scarce resources being used for merit pay, which one of your readers commented on, raises another important problem. Merit-pay skeptics among senior managers—and, yes, there are some—note that merit pay appears to work during flush times when there is lots of money to go around, i.e. when just about everyone gets some merit pay. The big problem occurs during down times when there is less money to go around. Suddenly, instead of “incentivizing” the majority of employees, smaller bonus pools actually serve to demoralize the majority who do not benefit from merit pay.
Of course, the real problem with merit pay is that it assumes that good organizations, including schools, are those that hire a lot of “star” performers, and that the biggest stars will work harder when chasing the carrot of merit pay. This view completely ignores the importance of the overall system in which individuals work—and which management controls–and the fact that all organizations, good ones and bad ones, have some stars and some laggards. Well run organizations are likely to have more “stars” than laggards because the hiring and training is better. But the best organizations—check out Brockton High in Massachusetts, which achieved a turnaround with pretty much all the same teachers who worked there when it was a “failing” school—find ways to use training (i.e. professional development) and teamwork to improve everyone’s performance.
As W. Edwards Deming, a leading management expert and critic of merit pay, once put: The only reason an organization has dead wood is that management either hired dead wood or it hired live wood and killed it. Merit pay, by dividing and demoralizing employees, is a good way to erode initiative and overall quality.
Diane Ravitch's blog 