In an impressive
analysis, Jersey Jazzman pulls apart the numbers
associated with the Newark merit pay plan. He is no fan of merit
pay. Neither am I. Merit pay has been tried again and again for
nearly 100 years, and it has never made a significant difference,
nor have merit pay plans lasted. The Newark merit pay plan is
funded by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, and we may safely
assume that he will not make Newark’s teachers his lifetime
beneficiaries. He reports that only 20% of teachers with advanced
degrees opted into the merit pay plan. And here is the takeaway,
according to JJ’s analysis of the available data:
Remember: according to the Memorandum
of Agreement between the NTU and the state-run
district, only teachers who were more senior and had earned
advanced degrees were eligible to opt out of the merit pay
system; teachers without
masters/doctorates and who were new to the district had to opt
in. But one group was clearly more likely to earn a
rating of HE than the other.
have advanced degrees, and who opted not to
compete for merit pay were more likely to get a rating of “Highly
Effective” than newer teachers without advanced degrees who were
competing for a merit pay bonus.
Unfortunately, not all the data are available. JJ ends with an
urgent plea to Chris Christie, Chris Cerf, and Cami Anderson:
Release all the data.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Like VAM and CCSS, merit pay is an agreeable fantasy… http://waynegersen.com/2011/04/26/merit-pay-an-agreeable-fantasy/
And you’re right: Zuckerberg’s millions won’t go very far and are unlikely to be replaced with taxpayers money.
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A gigantic joke. The money would be more effectively used for other things. I can’t wait to hear from teachers about the absurdity of the merit pay system.
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NC has requested a waiver that even though we are now on the new evaluation system (which, interestingly, is continuously being reworked (Home Base) because Pearson is still getting kinks out—-possibly another one of those airplanes being built in the air)—anyway, the waiver would allow that even though the online evaluator system (which I assume factors in test scores) is up and running (sort of) that it not be used to make personnel decisions until 2016-2017.
It seems to be the era of mandates that are impossible, and then a series of waivers to get out of them. It seems like a parent making ridiculous parameters for children, but then constantly giving passes to work around them.
Most want to still blame everything on W. I cannot accept that. What is going on right now has nothing to do with W, directly speaking. There was an opportunity, I am assuming, to move away from NCLB and instead we are even deeper into that type of mandating and waivering (wavering).
Platitudes never seem viable. To me they just indicate posturing on the part of decision-makers.
While it may be wiser to vote for Democrats in NC in you are pro-public school, I am still waiting for Democrats to take ownership in some of the troubles we are seeing.
Add to that—while teachers can always improve, I will say that as an institution public school is far more sophisticated than any reformer would ever want to admit. I read over the stack of IEPs yesterday provided to me by the special ed teachers (because I am on the team of teachers who teach the children and therefore need to know about accommodations, modifications, behavior patterns etc) and I was thinking to myself that no matter what kind of undergraduate education a young graduate has had, a building full of inexperienced educators (such as a charter could be—not sure that they ever have been), could not possibly offer the services to special education students that a well-established public school can. The problem is right now there are ideas that want to treat everyone the same. And we are risking throwing out the baby with the bathwater in a big way. A big, expensive way. We gotta figure this out. And we can’t just blame it on W.
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Yes you can blame it on W, he is the one that got the whole thing started.
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I just came across this gem in Jim Horn and Denis Wilburn, THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013), p. 60. The citation starts with the last sentence in a paragraph by the co-authors:
“One of the longest lasting merit pay systems involved extra pay for better test scores in England (Wilms & Chaplean, 1999), and it lasted from 1862 to the mid-1890s:”
followed by the following excerpt from Wilms & Chaplean, 1999:
As historical accounts show, English teachers and administrators became obsessed with the system’s financial rewards and punishments. It was dubbed the “cult of the [cash] register.” Schools’ curriculum were narrowed to include just the easily measured basics. Drawing, science, singing, and even school gardening simply disappeared. Teaching became increasingly mechanical, as teachers found that drill and rote repetition produced the “best” results. One schools inspector wrote an account of children reading flawlessly for him while holding their books upside down. (para. 4)
Perhaps the new slogan for the reforms of the education establishment should be “Forward into the Twenty First Century With Nineteenth Century Thinking!”
Think this combination of poor thinking and bad management is too ridiculous to be, or ever have been, true? Turns out one of those old dead Greek guys can still teach us a thing or two:
“Foolishness is indeed the sister of wickedness.” [Sophocles]
🙂
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Jersey Jazzman I really like the simplicity of the way you run and display your numbers. It is KISS. When you do that many understand. These differences are too drastic. Something is really wrong, as you point out, with what they are doing and that is why they are hiding the underlying information. The bomb will blow up in their face if they do. Just because Zuckerburg is rich does not mean he is slick. That and those behind this plan just showed how unslick they really are.
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