Robin Alexander, who headed the Cambridge Primary Review in England, has been reading the posts on this blog. He was especially interested in our faux reformers’ love affair with paying teachers and schools to get higher test scores. He thought we might want to learn about the UK experience with “payment-by-results”:
Payment by Results
– or ‘prizes for success in teaching the rudiments’
Reading Diane’s blog is instructive and depressing both for what it chronicles about the wanton political and commercial abuse of a national educational system in the name of standards and accountability and for its many resonances with what has been happening in the UK (especially England) during the past decade or so – and indeed in other countries infected by GERM.
But there are historical resonances too, and perhaps these should be more frequently exposed in order to demonstrate that these glitzy new policies are usually not new at all, and when they were tried before they frequently failed or caused such damage they had to be abandoned. But then since history begins the year that politicians are elected it has nothing to teach them.
So try this. The drive to link teacher pay to high stakes tests as advocated by Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush and their ilk and castigated in so many of Diane’s blogs resembles nothing so closely as the system introduced in England in 1862 – yes, 1862 – for making the level of grants to elementary schools conditional on children’s performance in literacy and numeracy tests.
What was this eerily familiar system called? Payment by Results, or ‘prizes for success in teaching the rudiments’. What were its consequences? The great Matthew Arnold – poet, essayist, defender of culture against the philistine hordes, and as it happens also a school inspector – showed how Payment by Results narrowed the curriculum, forced teachers to teach to the test, bored children, intimidated teachers and in many other respects did exactly what high stakes tests always do. He warned, and he was proved correct for a few years later the scheme was abandoned, that Payment by Results ‘will not do what it proposes to do, and even if it were to do what it proposes, the means by which it proposes to do this would still be objectionable.’
A slightly convoluted and very Victorian riposte to throw at Bush, Rhee and today’s other self-appointed US educational heroes, but an apposite one. Try it sometime. They may not understand it, but it will be fun.
If you want to hear more about the more recent impact of a variant on this regime on our side of the Atlantic, read the evidence assembled by the massive and wholly independent Cambridge Primary Review http://www.primaryreview.org.uk or since the Review’s final report is very long, try this summary of England’s 1997-2010 ‘standards drive’ – http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/downloads/Alexander_Miegunyah_lecture_FINAL.pdf . Or with your Presidential election now imminent, register the 11 policy priorities which we extracted from the Cambridge Primary Review and presented to our own political leaders before the UK elections in 2010: http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/downloads/revised_2011-02/POLICY_PRIORITIES_BRIEFING_REVISED_2_11.pdf .
One of them was this:
Stop treating testing and assessment as synonymous. Stop making Year 6 [grade 6] tests bear the triple burden of assessing pupils, evaluating schools and monitoring national performance. Abandon the naive belief that testing of itself drives up standards. It doesn’t: good teaching does. Initiate wholesale assessment reform drawing on the wealth of alternative models now available, so that we can at last have systems of formative and summative assessment – in which tests certainly have a place – which do their jobs validly, reliably and without causing collateral damage. Adopt our definition of standards as excellence in all domains of the curriculum to which children are statutorily entitled, not just the 3Rs. And understand that those who argue for reform are every bit as committed to rigorous assessment and accountability as those who pin everything on the current tests. The issue is not whether children should be assessed or schools should be accountable – they should – but how and in relation to what.
Alongside Payment by Results, perhaps this and some of the Review’s other policy priorities will strike a chord in the US.
Robin Alexander
University of Cambridge, UK
Wow! This shows that the idea of merit pay as a way to improve the schools is truly a “zombie idea,” which has been killed but refuses to die. Dead, but a living zombie 150 years old!
I should have written financial rewards for student tests will improve schools, as this is not about individual teacher pay. But still, a zombie idea if there ever was one.
Having worked many years in manufacturing before career-changing to education, I often see similarities that range from somewhat amusing to profoundly disturbing. The “payment-by-results” mentality is all too much like Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives, which was misunderstood and misused by business leaders, resulting in a mindset of using any means necessary, including lying and cheating, to meet numerical goals or quotas. In my experience, it is much better instead to follow W. Edwards Deming’s principles for long-term systemic improvements based on honesty, trust, education, and leadership – focus on quality and the numbers will come.
Complete agreement. Modern research in psychology verifies it as well (Daniel Pink’s book). The summarized Cambridge document is fantastic.
Thanks for sharing this, Diane!
Deming presented to AASA about 1991; NEA’s version of Deming was “new unionism.” With NCLB, NEA abandoned good corporate citizenship to focus on orchestrating a backlash.
In retrospect, the NEA is stuck with Rhee as a consequence of abandoning Deming.
Their business ideas are just as regressive as their education ideas.
Back in the 1990s, when everyone was thinking a lot about what the education of the future would be like in the new millennium, there was a revival of thinking about critical thinking, inquiry-based learning, reflective practice, the scholarship of integration, and there was a movement to get businesses and corporations and even universities behaving like intelligent organisms under the heading of “organizational learning”. Dealing with complexity was a big part of the science and systems thinking that went into those endeavors.
Then came the Great Regression, the great recession in the intelligence of the national conversation, that always comes with a certain brand of administration, to the point where most folks today don’t even recall the questions and the visions of that bygone age.
But maybe it’s time for another revival …
It could happen …
… organizational learning … systems thinking …
As I recall, ed week predicted that NEA staffers (not the teachers who pay the dues but the staffers paid with dues money) would quietly sabotage “new unionism” despite lip service paid to the concept by union leadership. Perhaps union self-sabotage explains bipartisan support for privatization.
Our attempt to build a more perfect union is ever susceptible to union self-sabotage, and every society that would learn is at risk for learning deficiencies. The latest attack of Democracy’s Auto-Immune Disease (DAID), where democracy fails to recognize itself, was caused by the Reagan Retrovirus.
Let us hope we find a cure before it’s too late …
This is not the only history that is repeating itself. We are also making the same mistake as the one that led to the factory-model school: The idea that commerce provides the right model for education. In the factory-model school, the metaphor was industrial production. Now, it’s industrial standards. In both cases, students are deemed to play the role of inanimate products, in the first case to be produced and in the second to be assessed as meeting standards. The whole idea of outcomes assessment is based on this little metaphorical deception. So isn’t it logical that they want to pay more to the most efficient and reliable producers of outcomes?
As Mark Twain said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”[
Wish Randi Weingarten read this before joining Christie and endorsed Newark contract based on bonuses..
assessments should have only 1 clear purpose.. multi-tasking assessments yields garbage. Garbage in results in garbage out.
Thanks for sharing this. The history of education is important, and people should pay attention to it before they reinvent the wheel.
wow!! Those who do not learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them! So true in today’s reform movement.
Sadly, though, UK leaders don’t seem to be listening either: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/9237293/Teachers-face-payment-by-results.html
Even worse, the survey results attached to this article- roughly evenly split on the questions.