Three years after the Newark Teachers Union agreed to a merit pay plan funded by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, the union is now resisting renewal of the plan. The new president of the union says it didn’t work. This should not be a surprise. Merit pay has been tried and failed consistently for nearly 100 years. (See the chapter on merit pay in my 2013 book, Reign of Error.) Merit pay failed in Nashville in 2010; it failed in New York City, in Chicago, in Texas, and elsewhere in the past five years. Corporate reformers never admit failure, so they can’t stop trying to revive merit pay, despite the fact that there is neither research nor evidence to support it.
It was hailed as a breakthrough when the bargain was struck: Top-performing teachers in Newark could get bigger paychecks.
The provision in a 2012 contract struck between the state-run school district and the Newark Teachers Union was the first of its kind in New Jersey, and it was made possible because of a massive donation intended to improve education in the city.
But three years later, the contract has expired, and the new president of the local union says that it hasn’t worked and that it’s not a sure thing the teachers union will agree to keep the provision in its current form. Several Newark teachers said that they had real problems with the contract and that the merit pay hasn’t worked, though none were willing to speak on the record for fear of reprisals.
Talks for a deal to replace it haven’t started, and the contract with the merit pay remains in place.
The deal was made possible because of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to education causes in Newark, announced five years ago. His foundation agreed to pay not only for the cost of the merit bonuses, but also for retroactive raises for educators who had worked two years on a previous contract, going without raises for that duration. The total cost to Zuckerberg for the deal was more than $48 million, or nearly half his contribution. While $30 million of the money contributed by Zuckerberg and matching donors is left, it’s not clear whether it will help pay for a new contract.
For advocates for education reform, it was a big deal. Gov. Chris Christie helped hash out the contract.
Those reformers say that teachers should be paid like many people in other industries are, with paychecks reflecting their results rather than just their experience.
Count on corporate reformers to ignore evidence and to keep doing the same thing over and over again, no matter how many times it fails.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Failed” to do what? If you’re talking about the alleged intention behind “merit pay” – to attract the “best and brightest” and “reward” them for “success” – of course it failed. But the evidence on “merit pay” has been available for a hundred years – I can’t believe the rephormers are unaware of it, so I have to conclude that their stated objective is not quite their real one. But if the intention of “merit pay” was to demoralize teachers and turn teaching into a single-minded pursuit of test scores in competition with other teachers needing to up their test scores to keep their jobs (which is what “merit pay” has done everywhere it’s been tried), I’d say it succeeded fabulously.
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Exactly
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Merit pay is one of a number of rheephorm shibboleths that drive mediocrity and failure.
In the bidness-lingo so beloved of the self-styled “education reform” movement: it incentivizes the wrong behaviors and disincentivizes the right behaviors.
Then they act feign shock and surprise when—as in so many places like Texas and Atlanta—they get the predictably perverse results they have worked so hard to achieve.
And it’s why they can’t stand even the mention of Campbell’s Law. Or it’s succinct predecessor by Charles Goodhart:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Why is it that business practices are foisted / forced upon education after they have already been implemented and tried in business, deemed ineffective or outright failures, and then terminated because they didn’t work there either? Sort of like recycling useless, unwanted, outdated, unworkable, unproven – feel free to add to this list – practices.
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I find merit pay somewhat insulting. It assumes that lazy teachers have been holding back on their best work and coast. If we throw some money at them, they’ll get off their lazy butts and work harder. I taught for thirty-six years and never coasted, and I am not noble or unique. I was surrounded by hard working, caring colleagues.
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Yes, that’s a good point. That should go as “fifth” in my response to TC below.
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If one is teaching at a school where the poverty level is low, parents are involved in the education of their child, exposure to books, music, art and travel, then perhaps merit pay may work.
If one teaches in a high poverty area, many students live in crowded conditions, and do not have the experiences as stated above, then it is not going to work.
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It doesn’t matter. The “merit pay” is highly subjective to the whims of a principal and destroys workplace cooperation, which is necessary in education.
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Of course they don’t work. School districts are even more heavily political than private businesses and principals cannot be trusted with handing out merit pay. Too much temptation for favoritism. School workplaces need to be cooperative, not competitive.
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Also known as “Suck Up Pay” (SUP) or the “Survival of the Brownest Noses” …
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Jon Awbrey:
TARGO!
😎
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We foolishly agreed to merit pay when we unionized my charter school, but we got rid of it when we negotiated our third contract this summer. Holy cow, what a relief. Stress is way down, morale is way up, and I feel I can pretty safely disregard a lot of the bullshit and just focus on doing my job. In the next couple weeks, merit pay will exist in no unionized charter school in Chicago.
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Brian Harris:
Thank you for your perspective and info.
😎
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In my opinion corporate leaders involved in education merit pay plans know full well that merit pay doesn’t work. What they do know is that it is a way to limit/eliminate pay increases or even reduce costs by firing “ineffective” teachers and replacing them with lower cost teachers, which brings me to the other part of this issue: The elimination of tenure.
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The only type of “merit pay” I would support is a bonus for teachers who agree to work at a school in need. Perhaps this would encourage teachers to work in schools such as this, or maybe it can be used to at least equalize pay rates between districts in need and the wealthier ones.
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My plan:
Any teacher working in a Title 1 school who receives tenure (after at least three years), then gets to work tax free. No federal or state taxes. If they leave their district, they lose their tax free, de-facto raise. And it doesn’t cost the district one penny. Lost revenue is shifted from the already bloated defense budget.
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Clever idea…
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Now that corporations are people too, many essentially work tax free. Why not teachers working n high needs schools?
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It’s not so much Reinventing the Wheel as Reinventing the Blowout.
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Yup, they just keep on trying to do the wrong thing righter, and not realizing the righter they do the wrong thing, the wronger they become. They demonstrate that Russell Ackoff’s f-Law 57 needs revision.
Ackoff’s f-Law 57: Managers cannot learn from doing things right, only from doing them wrong.
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“but also for retroactive raises for educators who had worked two years on a previous contract, going without raises for that duration.”
How many millions were spent on that? That sounds like a well intended gift on the part of Zuckerberg.
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Of course the number is important. Be it a masters degree, national board certification, 10 years of experience, a high SAT score, high test scores from students. Set the premium too high, and it will distort the system and destroy morale. It’s like an out of tune piano. Pay systems have to be dialed in for fairness. Merit pay for excellence in high scores might not be a bad thing in itself. Going from 0 to a $500 bonus is one thing, going from 0 to $7,000 based on one test might produce problems.
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“Merit pay for excellence in high scores might not be a bad thing in itself.”
Yes, it is. First because it makes test scores the only metric that gets focused on, thereby sacrificing a well-rounded education. Second because it encourages cheating. Third because it creates competition among employees for artificially scarce resources (bonuses). Fourth because it is almost always in lieu of rather than in addition to annual raises (especially in the public sector where there is a fixed pot of money for teacher pay). There’s probably a fifth, sixth, seventh, etc., but that’s what I can think of off-hand.
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Merit pay is really a bribe. The billionaire education reformers are sp addicted to bribing people with money labeled as grants or contributions that they think they can buy anything even great teachers.
Any fool can be elected to office and now the oligarch are proving that any fool can become a billionaire who will have foolish butt kissing idiots who are not wealthy that will become their cheer leaders just because they are wealthy and powerful.
After all, greed is good and the greediest idiots are elevated to gods by the faithful who worship at the alter of the neo-liberal Milton Friedman shrine.
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Weingarten helped negotiate merit pay in Newark.
Weingarten supports Hillary.
Eli Broad suppors Hillary.
Connect these three wart-like dots.
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You hit the nail on the head Robert!
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I’d like to hit – figuratively speaking – Hillary, Eli, and Randi on their respective heads, but it will never happen because I have social skills and really live by them.
Besides, if I were to use a hammer to do it, the hammer would break in half and any or all three of them would walk away unblemished because they are such “teste dure.”
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My social skills come from a completely different experience growling up and culminated when I went into the Marines and fought in Vietnam. I can tell you that the hammer to the head approach is not the best option. You don’t want to get that close to your enemy.
It’s better to strike from a distance and stay invisible.
“The British routed the minutemen at Lexington, but the relentless colonists unleashed brutal sniper fire on the British returning to Boston from Concord.”
http://www.ushistory.org/us/11.asp
If we are going to win this war, I think we should learn from our own history.
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Cx:
supports . . .
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Now that NEA is endorsing Hilary, where does she stand on Merit pay, vouchers, charter schools for profit, more testing and Common Core? Please do not tell me that we do not know the answers to these types of questions or it depends on x, y and z.
California high schools using the NEW INTERIM ASSESSMENTS will now be giving 6 INTERIM ASSESSMENTS BEFORE GIVING THE SBAC AND EACH TAKES 5 OR MORE HOURS! Why are parents sitting by and allowing this abuse?
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Mark Zuckerburg is a graduate of Exeter Academy, where he earned a classics degree.
He was not prepared for college or career, he was prepared to be a thoughtful person.
If he would bottle his money to destroy the test, and develop classical education in schools, he might a real hero.
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