Jersey Jazzman describes here the Newark teachers contract, which was just ratified.
The central feature of the contract is merit pay. This particular gimmick is a fixation of billionaire Eli Broad, who calls the shots in the Garden State through Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf and Newark’s Superintendent Cami Anderson, both of whom were “trained” to think the Broad Way in the uncertified Broad Superintendents Academy.
Cerf has probably forgotten the New York City bonus plan that failed when he was Deputy Chancellor; the city blew away $50 million on it before the RAND corporation declared it a failure.
Anderson believes in bonuses. In addition to her salary of $247,500, she stands to get a bonus of another $50,000 if the district meets certain performance targets.
As the nation faces a so-called fiscal cliff, how can Newark afford bonuses? The plan is being financed by Mark Zuckerberg’s gift of $100 million.
Why not try merit pay one more time? Who cares that it has been tried repeatedly for decades and never worked? Just in recent years, it failed in Nashville, it failed in New York City, it failed in Chicago. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Ditto for the 100th time.
“Success” would be a kind of failure, too, though I know of no examples of success. Success would mean more teaching to the test, more narrowing of the curriculum to what is tested, more focus on tests as the goal of schooling rather than as a diagnostic measure.
So Newark will do education the Broad Way, which has seen no success anywhere it’s been tried.
The Broad Way means a fervent belief in carrots and sticks as tools of control by management. It means management by numbers and targets and return in investment. It is the ethos of billionaires and management consultants.
It is totally inappropriate for professionals. Professionals always do their best. If they don’t, they should not be hired or they should be fired.
I’m on an airplane about to take off. Should I offer the pilot a bonus to get me to Chicago safely? That’s his job.
What happens when the Zuckerberg money is exhausted? Will Eli Broad promise to keep it going?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Cristy and Weingarten were having a love fest on MSNBC this morning, I heard. Did anyone see it? I was told that Weingarten was promoting merit pay and Cristy was praising Obama.
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Yikes! I misspelled Christie’s name .
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Glad I didn’t see it (don’t have TV at home) as I prefer to keep down my special Friday breakfast-donuts!
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I didn’t see it this morning. But I have seen other episodes where it is a Cristy, Weingarten,Obama love fest. I’ve seen pictures of Obama and Cristy on airport runways practically walking hand in hand way before hurricane Sandy. The love affair has been going on for some time.
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Yes, there was a lovefest between Christie and Weingarten. I must say that AFT couldn’t have picked a less charismatic leader than Weingarten. She seems to absolutely suck the life out of any interview she does — I can’t imagine her as a teacher, yikes! Unfortunately, there wasn’t any discussion on Morning Joe this morning with Christie and Weingarten about the history of merit pay experiements in U.S. education, just an implicit statement of fact that merit pay always works. Apparently the funds for the merit pay are coming from the $100M Mark Zuckerberg donated to Newark public schools. Anyway, it was a lovefest, with not much counterpoints offered.
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Doesn’t surprise me. Weingarten, it should be clear by now, is a mole who was sent to destroy the AFT from within. Too bad teachers have been slow on the uptake.
Weingarten is a “graduate” of the Broad Academy, so that should be all one needs to know where her interests truly are.
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Didn’t realize weingarten got broaded. I was walking out the door when they came on msnbc, but it was obvious a lovefest was about to take place with cheering from the hosts. Weingarten is a traitor. My middle schooler is already bored with tedious curriculum and tired of mounds of homework after a long day (he is in a high SES, thus high-performing public school). If the homework is already bad, WHAT DO YOU THINK TEACHERS WILL FEEL DRIVEN TO ASSIGN ONCE THE TEST SCORES ARE TIED TO PAY? My child is more than capable. He is creative, smart, and sweet. Test scores always top notch. All perentiles on last year’s ITBS above ninety. Most were high nineties. Yet he will be crazy with the burden of the workload rather than rewarded by learning….before,he ever reaches high school. We do feel Ike we are in the “race to nowhere.” Is it Vicky Abeles who made that documentary?
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Thanks…yep…sustainability????? I’ve printed out & am going to begin reading parts of the NTU CBA! Yes, I officially have only this life!!
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If we want teachers with degrees in math and the natural sciences to be teaching in our high schools, we will need to pay them more. According to an NCES study done in 2007-8, as reported by USN&RP, about 25% of math teachers have a degree in mathematics. This is not a problem in other areas. The same study shows that 82% of English teachers, 90% of art teachers and 95% of music teachers have undergraduate degrees in their fields.
The USN&RP article is here: http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2011/06/08/many-stem-teachers-dont-hold-certifications
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That doesn’t surprise me. No mathematician in his right mind is going to go into a profession where how he gets paid depends on something as volatile as student test scores.
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The data is from 2007-8. I do not know how widespread that pay model was at that time.
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Don’t forget the Career Ladder experiment in Texas in the 90’s. It was a roaring success, not. The outcome was a massive reduction in collaboration and trust.
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Pilot is the good example. The Broad way, too!
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina and commented:
Add your thoughts here… (optional)
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Cerf is doing for public eduction in New Jersey what he did for NYC schools and what he did for the stockholders of Edison Schools: he is bringing it down from within. The record is clear in all cases.
Papa BROAD though is very proud of his spawn.
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Diane…
The privatization of merit pay is a late wrinkle in the merit pay scam. Here in Chicago, as I reported two weeks ago, Rahm Emanuel instituted a form of merit pay for principals using what he said were “private philanthropy” sources so the plan never went into the Chicago Board of Education budget. At the press conference where he announced the principals’ merit pay, which featured Broad training alumna Barbars Byrd Bennett, now in Chicago (as CEO) after her pillage of Cleveland and Detroit, Emanuel refused to identify the sources of the funding or the case by case bases for the selection of the roughly 80 principals who were lined up, as a theatrical backdrop (typical of Rahm) to receive their checks.
It’s too bad Newark (where I went to high school while I was growing up in Linden…) accepted this latest humiliation, but such are the problems facing teachers today. What should be fun will be following how many tricky ploys are utilized to once again demonstrate what we already know: that merit pay doesn’t work.
By the way, as I also reported when Rahm pulled out Chicago’s merit play plan and claimed that it was a Chicago “first” (he’s compulsively inventing every wheel), Chicago had merit pay, foisted on the city during the Daley administration and funded with a grant from the Bush administration’s U.S. Department of Education. That failed, but in Chicago the old Chicago Teachers Union regime had to hide the thing under a bunch of obfuscations from the union’s membership. It really didn’t come into focus for most of us until the July 2008 American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention, when it was one of the featured national “reforms” put up during the medley that opened the convention. (They even took a busload of conventioneers to one of the “merit pay” sites in Chicago).
But Chicago’s union leadership had to hide the actual merit pay from the union’s membership under a couple of ploys, and the whole thing collapsed — in some cases, in laughter — by the time Marilyn Stewart and her “United Progressive Caucus” were ousted by Karen Lewis and CORE in June 2010, less than two years after that AFT media event.
Merit pay can be challenged and defeated at the local level, as Karen and CORE showed this year in the contract fight. Part of that defeat requires decent research, which as you know was one of the first priorities of CTU (just as it had been a CORE priority) after Karen became union president here on July 1, 2010. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a member of CORE since the founding…).
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