This post reviews a study by Roland Fryer, Jr., in the peer-reviewed Journal of Labor Economics. Fryer analyzed the results of New York City’s merit pay program and found that it made no difference on several levels.
“A randomized experiment, a gold standard in applied work of this kind, was implemented in more than 200 hundred NYC public schools. The schools decided on the specific incentive scheme, either team or individual. The stakes were relatively high – on average, a high performing school (i.e. a school that meets the target by 100%), received a transfer of $180,000, and a school that met the target by 75%, received $90,000. Not bad by all accounts!
“The target was set based on a school performance in terms of students’ achievement, improvement, and the learning environment. Yes, a fraction of schools met the target and received the transfers, but it did not improve the achievement of students, to say the least. If anything, such incentive in fact worsened the performance of students….Not only that, but the incentive program had no effect on teachers’ absenteeism, retention in school or district, nor did it affect the teachers’ perception of the learning environment in a school. Literally, the estimated 75 million dollars invested and spent brought zero return!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve worked for merit pay. Got several nice checks. Didn’t change a thing I did, didn’t work any more or less (60+ hours a week).
Districts around the country have received large grants from the Gates Foundation to roll out schemes whereby teachers get immediate pay increases in exchange for submitting to VAM and giving up tenure.
The deformers are always saying, “But where’s your alternative plan?” That’s because they think that we need a centralized, totalitarian plan–a monoculture–instead of the actions of independent, free educators making their own professional judgments.
We’ll, here’s part of that plan: Give teaching back to teachers. Give them autonomy at the building level. Let them choose from among alternative voluntary curricula, curricular frameworks, learning progressions, pedagogical techniques, etc.
Imagine that you hire someone to do landscaping around your house and cut the grass. But whenever that person is there, you stand over him or her and say, “No, you are tilting the gas can too far. You missed a spot there. Here, I made up a list of 1,000 outcomes of your lawn mowing that I am going to measure. See domain three: edging.”
How long do you think the competent landscaper would work for you? What sort of person would work under such conditions?
thumbs up!
“But where’s your alternative plan?”
I always compare this to a situation in which someone is hitting you over the head with a hammer and you’re having trouble concentrating. All the “experts” come rushing out of the woodwork to offer you all kinds of helpful products to improve your concentration. When you reject their offers they turn around and demand, so what’s your solution.
The obvious solution, of course, is to STOP HITTING ME OVER THE HEAD WITH A HAMMER, DAMMIT!
The obvious solution, of course, is to STOP HITTING ME OVER THE HEAD WITH A HAMMER, DAMMIT!
LOVE IT,
Thank you.
It is amazing how the business mindset cannot wrap its head around the idea that teachers, unlike consumers, do not need “special, year-end incentives” to motivate them. Treat them like professionals, allow them to take charge of their own teaching, and compensate them fairly by way of fashioning an agreement in which they have had considerable input. Of course, these practices would make them (and by extension, the public school coffers) harder to control/monopolize. Who is obsessed with controlling people and money? Any reformers’ names come up in that answer?
But teachers do need to be paid a reasonable wage or they will leave teaching. Teachers need to be paid a reasonable wage or potential new teachers will never consider teaching to begin with. Better paying suburban districts get their pick of teachers. Teachers need more pay if they are to get graduate degrees. Teachers need to be paid more every additional year that they teach. Teachers will stop collaborating with each other to teach children if their pay differs by anything but seniority.
Statements like these have all been made at one time or another on this blog. Clearly salary can motivate teachers as it motivates many who work. What I think folks who look to bonuses to impact effort failed to think about is that the people who choose teaching do so in part because they were looking for a non-competitive environment. Those that wanted to work in an environment where individual effort could create monetary awards looked to other professions.
“Teachers will stop collaborating with each other to teach children if their pay differs by anything but seniority.”
Excellent point. Collaboration is the currency of a good school. No individual has it all. Teachers need to learn from each other on a continuing basis because the children change, the community changes, and the curriculum should be able to change over time too. If teachers are in competition with each other for a living wage, they’ll close off.
Given the influence of Bill Gates and others in our educational system today, I don’t understand why they don’t see schools as at least cybernetic systems. The top-down/central authority style is more like what was attempted by Hitler and Mussolini. This isn’t a simplistic comparison…as in “look this is what the bad, bad Nazis did.” They, too, wanted to keep their nation competitive and pursued a centralized and standardized approach to education in which teachers had to tow the party line or lose their jobs. But a democratic nation cannot go down that path. It needs to come up with different organizational and managerial forms. Engineers and economists are not the most suited to come up with the kind of innovative socio-cultural forms we need today.
There is, of course, collaboration in higher education where salaries can be very different across departments and in departments. I have colleagues who are paid more than triple my salary and yet we can work together.
” I have colleagues who are paid more than triple my salary and yet we can work together.” Is anyone compensated for your collaborative work?
I am not sure what you mean by being compensated for our collaborative work. My colleagues and I are salaried employees and generally do not get extra pay for doing additional things associated with our jobs.
Would you characterize “things associated with our jobs” and “working together” as actual collaborative work or simply working within the same institution?
I would describe it as collaborative work. Much of it informal daily discussions about curriculum and approaches to teaching, some or it more formal organizations at various levels that seek to share teaching ideas in and out of the institution. It is just part of the job.
Would you say that these collaborations are across departmental areas or within them?
LG – I can answer this that one – both. An exemplary school has grade level meetings, subject level meetings, and school wide meetings for the exchange of ideas and cross curricular planning as well as a correlation within a given grade/subject. Some schools even go so far as to have a yearly or quarterly theme as a jump start.
Education which goes beyond the box.
I think LG was inquiring about the university in which I work and perhaps by extension higher education in general, but I would give essentially the same answer. Informal collaboration is obviously influenced by physical proximity, so it is most common within departments. Collaboration within and across schools is typically more formal. This last semester, for example, a group of faculty and post docs from across the university got together every other week for a couple of hours to discuss ways to increase student engagement in large classes.
Ellen, I wasn’t asking what collaboration should be. I am fully aware as a seasoned public school teacher what is meant by collaboration within the public school teaching profession.
I was asking if TE is referring to collaborative work within his own department or across departments. He is a college professor who is not a public school teacher. My brother is a full professor with a doctorate and he tells me that profs in the computer department are on a higher salary scale than those in his department. I know that they do not collaborate so I’m curious how it works in TE’s school. Many college departments have more autonomy than those in public K-12, especially in regard to departmental budgets. It’s often still a case of the haves and have nots, even at the post-secondary level.
Sorry for the misconception. Sometimes I get carried away.
At the college level, sometimes one of the professors will collaborate with the librarians to assist students in developing valid research skills. The results are an eye opener to all involved and teach the young adults skills they can use throughout their lives. I highly recommend this model of instruction, taking advantage of the expert (university librarian) in the field.
LG,
See my reply above.
There is certainly more autonomy in post secondary education. Departments are free to design any curriculum they deem appropriate. That is why St. John’s, a great books school, can have such a different curriculum from Olin, an engineering college, can coexist. This is the autonomy that student choices allow.
Budgetary autonomy is less clear. Deans typically authorize big ticket items like faculty positions. Departments are given a budget for lesser expenses and make choices appropriate to the discipline.
One small correction, I am not a professor. My title is a little odd, but it would be more like a lecturer than a professor.
And, TE, by shrinking a department’s budget to practically nothing the administration can force a collaboration between groups or, in essence, squeeze a department into non existence. For example, a graduate program in Library Science at UB in now joined with the Communications Department.
The tenure system, combined with the end of mandatory retirement, means that there is little room for institutions to change priorities other than by trying to free resources by consolidating staff.
Interesting, TE. Does this collaboration put any particular professor at an advantage in regard to salary increases?
LG,
In general, probably not. The base for faculty salary is the possibility of outside employment. Faculty in the medical school get paid far more than an English professor (as do economists). At my institution, there are some raises as a tenure stream faculty goes through the ranks (assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, distinguished professor) and even smaller increases at times within rank, depending on merit. The big increases happen when another institution offers a faculty member a job and the home institution wants to keep that faculty member.
I was friends with Dr Hauptmann’s wife – we were both long term subs in a local elementary school. (My husband, at the time, was a visiting professor at UB in the statistics department.) She was complaining that her husband had a loose association with SUNY at Buffalo (UB), but they weren’t paying him much. Lo and behold, shortly after that conversation, he won the Nobel Prize for science/medical research he had done years earlier. Suddenly he was a hot commodity and his value shot way up. UB quickly and quietly upgraded him to a full professor and a building/institute was named in his honor. He recently passed away at the ripe old age of 90+, but I continue to be amazed at what that “little” award can mean in money and prestige.
Here is where incentives might work: pay the tuition and living expenses of teaching and medical students, as they do in, say, Finland, with a guarantee of a long-term, permanent, unionized job with benefits and decent working conditions on graduation.
Do the advocates of merit pay think teachers are in the classroom HOLDING BACK because they don’t have the carrot of a bonus to motivate them?
If a teacher is doing less than the best job they are capable of, they will be “motivated” to do better by the bored and misbehaving kids in their class until they improve their game.
Mike, the advocates of merit pay think you are hiding your really good stuff, until they offer you a carrot. That carrot will make the kids work harder. I know it makes no sense, but that’s their logic. Or illogic.
It’s about creating a climate of competition for “scarce” resources. The belief that competition improves performance simply won’t die, despite having been killed innumerable times.
The advocates of the carrot policy probably think that way because more money motivates THEM to do more. They assume teachers view their job the same way, but teaching is a career, and teachers do what they need to do to get the job done. These advocates will NEVER understand.
I am reminded of this evertime I hear merit pay
the most relevant point is at 11:20
Wonderful! TY.
Mike Dixon: let me add a little historical perspective to this discussion from THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION by Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn (2013, p. 60):
“One of the longest lasting merit pay systems involved extra pay for better test scores in England … and it lasted from 1862 to the mid-1890s.”
Horn and Wilburn then quote from a 1999 piece by W. Wilms and R. Chapleau:
“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’ curricula 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)”
So it is not just that merit pay/incentive pay schemes don’t encourage BEST teaching practices and learning outcomes. It is more insidious than that. They incentivize WORST teaching practices and learning outcomes.
And not surprisingly, merit pay/incentive pay goes together quite nicely with stack ranking/rank and yank/forced ranking/burn and churn.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
I think merit pay advocates are trying to create a giant smokescreen. They don’t really believe that the merit system will increase teacher or student work. They require teachers to give up their tenure rights and hope that teacher idealism will prevail in the minefield they call “ed reform curriculum” attached to high stakes poorly designed tests. And when these teachers fail.. BOOM.. they are out and in comes new teachers (preferably TFA teachers) and the quest for privatization begins! It sadly makes sense in the warped world of “corporate ed reform” strategy.
This.
However, even the potential TFA recruits will catch on. Or at least they should what with their undergraduate seminars in Foucault and all. 🙂 These reformers severely underestimate how goodwill towards TFA could turn on a dime.
Undergrad seminars in Foucault?? They must be very, very special!
Damn, I didn’t get to Foucault until my graduate work but then again it was a second tier state university in one of those flyover cornpone states** for my grad work.
They may have had those seminars but something tells me that if they truly understood Foucault they wouldn’t be TFAers.
**But then again that state is known for it’s corn cob pipes. Wore out many of those over the years.
Remember, TFAers only plan to stay 3 years. It takes at least this long (at least at present) for base line and ” improvement” scores to evaluate a teacher.
No worries for TFA.
Community service badge in hand, Harvard application typed.
It’s all good .
Ang, TFA recruits plan to stay only two years. Some stay longer.
LOL, Duane. I think I may have encountered him in a women & gender studies course. I would suspect that potential TFA recruits will have done some kind of coursework in inequality. They probably want to “give back” (hate that phrase). Of course, we don’t really know, do we?
A few dour words from their respected professors + bad peer word-of-mouth could change everything for students who have had coursework concerning structural inequality or the history of american labor. Also, the children of career teachers might have some ideas too. TFA’s public persona could change quite quickly amongst fickle college students.
BTW: can a student even major in education at the most prestigious universities in this country? Perhaps that is one of the problems.
We have a problem, D.C. The problem is D.C. Guess the pundits are challenged in the numbers dept. They don’t understand this.
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” -Albert Einstein
Yup, NUTS! TY.
Teachers in high poverty schools should work tax free; no federal or state taxes. Doesnt cost the district any money.
What so they could be labeled as even bigger leaches on society???
or is that leeches?
bloodsuckers would do. nothing like riding the gravy train of inner city teaching
Tax free teaching just might attract leechier leeches. we better be careful
Great comments…like Robert’s analogy to the landscaper.
However, VAM and merit pay proposed by the Rheeformers should not be the issue. It is a meaningless band-aide. If America’s university students who are in the top quadrant of the academy were to see an economic future in teaching, many would love to enter the profession.
In Finland teachers are in the same pay bracket as doctors and lawyers, and are looked at with respect. They are also all in the UNION. Unlike our unions, theirs really represents teachers, not politicians and billionaires.
A far cry from how America views teachers. Today, we get TFA kids from good universities who will only commit until they get into grad school, or get a job on Wall Street. And too many who manage to graduate from lesser colleges with a credential see teaching as a safe, but minimal, economic future…but better than voc ed. They are easy fodder for both criticism and for Broadies to menace them as their CEOs.
The older and wiser teachers of yesteryear are now being fired by districts (like LAUSD) on false charges to implant cheaply paid TFA students and cut the bottom line of the budget, and kill the unions. Many of these teachers taught in inner cities because they have the skills and the desire to educate all students. Looking at how many successful public school grads of-color there are in our State House and other political and business leadership, these teachers must be doing something right.
Unfortunately, also, some of these teachers are burned out and drifting and should be out of the system. It is hard to voice truth about it all without being clobbered by those who have not been part of this continuum of ‘successful to ineffectual’ educators for a long time.
The answer, I think, in part, is a major shift in teacher prep by Graduate Schools of Education, and also in the way teachers are viewed by our society which is too often shallow and based on greed. A teacher should be well versed in subject matter and have the ability to offer this knowledge in a clear way to students, and for this training and skill, a teacher should be able to buy a home, have a safe economic future, and have community respect.
I cannot live long enough to see this paradigm shift…sadly. It is the American culture that is the enemy of education.
Ellen Lubic
“Today, we get TFA kids from good universities. . . ”
If I may correct that thought “Today, we get TFA kids from FANCY, OVERPRICED, POSH, SWANK* universities. . . ”
*Or is that skank?
I agree that there needs to be a change in schools of education. The physics department at my institution makes it very clear that the courses taught for graduate certification to teach physics in high school are too elementary to count words an undergraduate major in physics.
I wonder if a student can even do an education major at a top 25 university? Certainly not at the top liberal arts colleges. When you think about it, that is a lot of bright students who would need to pursue an alternative path into teaching. It is also very remarkable in a different way. By the time these folks become parents they are all about education. They’re practically obsessed with it. Seriously, small talk with middle class/upper middle class people in their 30s is either about real estate, schools or real estate + schools.
Some future teachers have to get a graduate degree in education after pursuing a different undergraduate major. I was in the last class of the elementary education undergraduate program at SUNY at Buffalo and that was in 1976.
Which suggests to me that good policy might be to offer more scholarships for highly qualified students to pursue a MA degree in education rather than this TFA nonsense. Students can work off the value of their MA by agreeing to teach for a certain amount of years. Ellen, do you know if these kinds of scholarships are available?
I know that they needed Math teachers in Buffalo about ten years ago. One of my daughters was 21 and was one of the few Math majors who had graduated from UB in May. (They had over 2 pages of Psych majors, but only 9 individuals in Math). I signed her up to teach summer school and she continued on teaching Math at one of the High Schools. It was initiation by fire – but they did have regular in-services with lesson plans. It wasn’t long before she ditched the script and started creating her own. She lasted the year, left education, and did not look back.
The main point is that the district would have paid for her to get her certification. She just chose not to follow through and pursue other options (she’s now a nutritionist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute). I’m sure that the Buffalo Public Schools will offer the same deal to the to-be-hired TFAs next year.
My daughter also advised me that if those in TFA could last until December, they might have a chance to come up for air.
That raises an interesting question, Ellen. How do we get our best and brightest to investigate teaching under the best conditions to see if it is something they’d like to pursue further? As we know, new teacher turnover is high even for people who come in through the more traditional route.
There are alternative routes. Catholic Schools are one. Charter Schools are another. Young teachers cut their eye teeth, and the good ones move on to better schools (pay and work conditions) and the ones who are misplaced can move on into other careers.
And the TFA might be another model. I can’t be a hypocrite and totally reject the system since I essentially created my own TFA program with my daughter (her only experience was two parents who were teachers – and we did provide mentoring – plus), I suppose some good teachers might come out of this new paradigm. However, the situation might also scare off some potentially talented individuals.
Perhaps a bigger question is this: Are we born with a natural ability to be a teacher or can the skill be taught? Or do we need both? I always knew I wanted to be a teacher/librarian. What about you?
Ellen, I would say people discover what kind of a teacher they are. Its not preparation or innate ability – its both. For that reason, a new teacher’s experiences need to be strongly supported when they are on the steepest part of the learning curve. Otherwise, I suspect we lose some of the people who might have been able to stick with it over the long haul.
We all were first year teachers at some point. I can admit I was a much better teacher librarian at the end of my career than I was in the beginning. Yet, I did some pretty amazing things those first few years of which I’m proud. Others, not so much. You are right – a strong support system with veteran teachers leading the way – is a must.
TFA students are not ‘elite’–unless one looks at flawed U.S. News and World Report rankings. I would say the average TFA entrant is on par with the average pharmacy or optometry school matriculant. More B.S. for the P.R. machine.
The minimum gpa is like 2.5 or something too. (Sorry, too lazy to look it up).
Yes, TFA wants the brightest and the best – so they need a 2.5 average. My daughter graduated last year and her average exceeds the minimum. We are thinking of signing her up.
Another question is : “do you want your children or grandchildren taught by someone in the TFA program?”
Putting four kids through public schools and now with one grand daughter in the system, I can honestly tell you I didn’t want anyone teaching my children who didn’t have at least five years experience. Even individuals who I could tell would eventually be master teachers, didn’t know enough to be effective in those beginning years.
I think the an inexperienced teacher might bring some things to the table that can make up for inexperience, depending on the specific situation. My middle son’s calculus instructor was inexperienced and, by public school standards, unqualified to teach. But because he was the first teacher my son could actually talk to about mathematics, my son thought him by far the best mathematics instructor he had taken a class from up to that point.
That is a valid point. Sometimes the teachers of higher level courses in math or science do not know their stuff. My high school geometry teacher was amazing, but the kids couldn’t understand him, so he was fired mid year. I did the work and followed along just fine – to the point that I got an almost perfect score on the Regents.
So it’s not just the educational background, it’s the knowledge base of the teacher. I could tell in five minutes whether the new English teacher was a “keeper”. You don’t want them teaching “The Crucible” when they’ve never read the book or even heard of Miller.
As long as principals have absolute control over teachers’ careers, there is no way “merit pay” could ever work. There is too much corruption and filthy office politics for it ever to work. There isn’t any such thing as “merit” anyway. These privatizers want to turn education into a job that is like sales and pays commission only.
It is interesting that Microsoft, in the face of market threats, is moving from the stacked-ranked, competitive model to a cooperative organizational structure while teachers are being forced from cooperative environments to competitive, zero summed, survivalistic arenas. Wonder if the Gates Foundation noticed?
The “solution” in education is simple – if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it and if it is broke, fix it right.
The obsession with testing and measurement is a top-down, micromanaged, one-size fits all approach built on guesses and assumptions. No mathematician would accept a conclusion without proof. No musician would compose without a theme. No doctor diagnose without observation. Yet schools are forced to teach to unproven standards and measure progress by secret, unchallenged methods.
On various occasions when the teachers in my district wanted better pay, the union had us follow the contract exactly as written. That meant you arrived and left at the prescribed times. NO EXTRAS. You would have thought we were ogres. How dare we not go above and beyond expectations.
The public doesn’t realize the true dedication of their teachers. They take what we do for granted. We ALL deserve bonuses.
This happened to me in high school. I was impacted in countless ways. All of the students were happy when the “work to rule” strike was over. Looking back it gave me incredible insight into labor relations at a very young age.
The old “You don’t appreciate what you had until it was gone”.
This juried study further documents merit pay as a failed initiative in improving teacher performance or student learning. However skillfully designed and administered incentives which encourage teachers to change behaviors and work together as teams for the benefit of all the students have earned promise.