Jersey Jazzman has posted an obituary for the Merit Pay Fairy. He says it died in Newark, when teachers negotiated a new contract, deep-sixing a Merit Payplan that they endorsed in 2012.
JJ demonstrates with facts and evidence that merit pay failed.
He begins:
The Merit Pay Fairy lives in the dreams of right-wing think tanks and labor economists, who are absolutely convinced that our current teacher pay system — based on seniority and educational attainment — is keeping teachers from achieving their fullest potential. It matters little that even the most generous readings of the research find practically small effects* of switching to pay-for-performance systems, or that merit pay in other professions is quite rare (especially when it is based on the performance of others; teacher merit pay is, in many contexts, based on student, and not teacher, performance).
Merit pay advocates also rarely acknowledge that adult developmental theory suggests that rewards later in life, such as higher pay, fulfill a need for older workers, or that messing with pay distributions has the potential to screw up the pool of potential teacher candidates, or that shifting pay from the bottom of the teacher “quality” distribution to the top — and, really, that’s what merit pay does — still leaves policymakers with the problem of deciding which students get which teachers.
Issues like these, however, are at the core of any merit pay policy. Sure, pay-for-performance sounds great; it comports nicely with key concepts in economic theory. But when it comes time to implement it in an actual, real-world situation, you’ve got to confront a whole host of realities that theory doesn’t address.
Of course, it failed! As I explained in my 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, merit pay has been tried again and again for almost a century, and it has always failed.
I would like to believe that it has died, that—as Dorothy said about the Wicked Witch, it is “really, truly dead”—but I have my doubts.
Every time it has failed, someone rediscovers it and thinks that this time it will work, unlike every other time.
I remember AFT President Albert Shanker saying at a meeting in the early 1990s that merit pay was ridiculous. The way he put it was, “Let me get this straight: if you offer to pay teachers more, students will work harder? That makes no sense.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fantastic essay. Every day that passes is yet more evidence of the failure in practice of Education Reform theories. Has Bill Gates’ ten years expired, yet?
LikeLike
Merit pay is an unfair practice when applied to education since teachers have no control over the students they teach. Like VAM it does not improve outcomes that depend on the nature of students a teacher serves from year to year.
A lot of what so-called reform tried to impose has been proven to be based on false assumptions and erroneous logic. Yet, many states continue on the same failed path. Unfortunately, the wealthy continue to impose privatization on communities despite the fact that it is a scam on the local community, and it does not improve education.
LikeLike
retired teacher,
Are you saying that teachers have no noticeable influence over student learning in their classes? This seems unlikely to me.
LikeLike
Try to establish an authentic measurement of that effect. [Hint: stdzd scores don’t make the cut]– and make sure it’s free from all out-of-classroom factors that might impinge on the measurement [so that teachers can be compared apples to apples]– & report back. Then, explain how engaging teachers in this sort of competition for limited funds enhances school collaboration toward the common goal of improving student outcomes.
LikeLike
bethree5,
Teachers here talk as if they have already use such a measurement. In this thread, for example, poster Reteach 4 America is “always trying to improve my practice” and refers to a teacher’s “best lesson plans”. If there is no way to evaluate student learning, there is no way to know if which lesson plan is best and no way to evaluate if a teacher has improved their practice.
LikeLike
TE, No one said there is no way to assess outcomes such as student growth, the effectiveness of lessons or teacher progress.
There are much more authentic</> methods for evaluating student learning than standardized tests and the same is true for assessing teachers. That’s probably one of the reasons why standardized tests are not typically used in business to determine the job success of employees. (Rank and yank is far from standardized testing.)
If standardized tests are so great, then how come professors in universities are not typically required to use them to measure student learning in their college courses? If those teachers can be trusted to assess students’ success themselves, even though most professors have only formally studied their subject matter, not teaching, learning and human development, then teachers who have studied that AND their disciplines should be recognized as competent assessors, too. This is supported by the fact that GPA, as determined by grades from high school teachers, is a stronger predictor of student performance in college than ACT and SAT scores. Also, as teachers are usually taught in their training, multiple measures are best, too, especially for making important decisions, rather than a single standardized test score from one day in the life of a student.
I’ve seen a lot of pretzel logic here before and it’s very tiring. I won’t be participating any further because my time is much too valuable to waste on anyone’s attempts at baiting, so you might as well give it up. Adios!
LikeLike
Reteach,
Math SAT scores are the best predictor of grades in introductory economics classes, better than high school math grades, better than high school GPA.
LikeLike
Meritocracy only benefits the wealthy — never teachers. The idea behind merit pay wasn’t to pay teachers more when their students had miraculously/questionably high test scores; the idea was to fire teachers when their students didn’t have miraculously/questionably high test scores. They wanted to cull the teaching workforce and raise class size to industrial warehouse levels. Eventually there would be no public schools, just massive online courses collecting and selling data. Merit pay was just Bill Gates being greedy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And Welch. Wasn’t Welch the main fat cat behind all those lawsuits against seniority and tenure? I can’t recall. So many billionaires trying to destroy public education for such a long time, I need a scorecard.
LikeLike
yes; even more specifically, they wanted to cull the “older, more self-confident and thus most resistant” workforce
LikeLike
Yes, merit pay is a pension raid.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
LikeLike
Diane, your argument that teachers are NOT typically holding back our best lesson plans and will only pull them out for merit pay makes the most sense to me.
I think the majority of us go into teaching not for the money, since it isn’t usually a very high paying job, but because we like and care about kids a lot and we want to make a difference in their lives. That motivation is intrinsically rewarding, so why on earth would we hold back on implementing our very best?
Merit pay might make sense in business, but it does not pass muster in social service fields, where most professionals, such as teachers and social workers (who are often not paid a lot of money either), are in it in order to remedy the human condition, not for external rewards such as money.
If I was offered merit pay, I would do nothing different because I’m always trying to improve my practice, in order to meet the needs of diverse students –like many others who were trained in the reflective practitioner model.
LikeLike
And, not for nothing, when you don’t do your best, you have a horrible day. At least, that’s how it is for me. The feedback I get from my students is all about whether they enjoyed & benefited from their time w/me. When they don’t, I feel it, & it feels bad– so I & go home & make notes on how to immediately improve things. It’s really quite different from business: the results have instant emotional impact, & incentivize correction w/o the intermediary of money.
LikeLike
I do remember the argument for a merit pay system in government bureaucracies. Have you ever faced a clerk that parrots directions at you in a monotone without a trace of facial expression and is incapable of or unwilling to deviate from their script? This mind numbing approach is not necessarily confined to interactions with government employees, but it does seem to be more common. I think they have classes in robotic, emotionless delivery, perhaps to deaden the chances of having someone react back in a human way. It is hard to yell at a machine. If your paycheck depends on happy customers, the theory is you behave like a human, a not unreasonable assumption. All that aside, the way the idea has been applied to teaching assumes that we are all going through the motions and will step up our game if only there is a carrot to chase. The idea is professionally insulting but might have been palatable if there was a reliable way of determining merit. Kids’ test scores just don’t make the cut for various reasons, which have been discussed here.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why continuing education along with numerous other easily observable activities were such a bad way to judge whether to keep a teacher or not. Yes, typically we got paid based on years of service, but you didn’t get the years if you didn’t do the job to the satisfaction of the system. We all know the ways that system can be subverted as well, but at least it didn’t tend to pit us against people with whom it would be of benefit to collaborate.
LikeLike
My husband [an engr/ proj mgr] has long benefited from “merit pay.” It’s optional, & significantly, the option is only available to those whose position allows them to call the shots during project implementation [i.e., project mgrs]. It’s essentially a bet that your proj leadership will result in attaining at least the profit you projected in your proposal– & that’s significant, too: these program participants designed/ approved the plan for achieving the estimated profit.
NONE of these prerequisites apply to teachers. The plan & desired results are designed by admins. The “staff”/ “raw materials” are random members of the community [students]. Only an imbecile would participate in such a shot-in-the-dark program.
LikeLike