Andy Goldstein, a superstar teacher in Palm Beach County, Florida, recently addressed the school board and urged them not to impose a merit pay plan mandated by the legislature. The Florida legislature is dedicated to the belief that schools should be run like a business and should focus on competition, incentives, and punishments. It never passes up a chance to pass laws that foster bad practices and that promote privatization.

In the most careful study of merit pay, researchers at Vanderbilt University recorded the results of a three-year experiment in which one group of fifth-grade teachers was offered a bonus of $15,000 to raise test scores while the other group was offered nothing. The bonus had no effect. (See here and here.)

Here is Andy Goldstein’s statement to the  PBC board:

From Palm Beach County, FL:

The Failure of Merit Pay – why it will fail our students most in need – a school board talk by Andy Goldstein. April 20, 2016.

Transcript:

Good evening. My name is Andy Goldstein. I’m a teacher at Omni Middle School and the proud parent of an 8-year-old daughter who attends second grade at one of our public elementary schools.

I wish to talk about the proposed salary agreement for teachers.

This proposed salary agreement, if approved by our teachers, will be the first year that so-called merit pay will be put into effect in Palm Beach County as mandated by Senate Bill 736.

It divides those teachers who will earn a raise into categories of “effective” and “highly effective.” The highly effective category pays teachers 25 percent more.

I’m looking at this merit pay plan through the lense of our District’s 5-Year Strategic Plan, which our School Board approved.

Our District’s Mission Statement states that:

The School District of Palm Beach County is committed to providing a world-class education with excellence and equity to empower each student to reach his or her highest potential with the most effective staff to foster the knowledge, skills, and ethics required for responsible citizenship and productive careers.

Beautiful!

This proposed pay plan actively works against this mission, and vital elements of our Strategic Plan in the following ways.

• Instead of promoting a high performance culture in which teachers are respected and allowed to collaborate to help our students, it promotes divisiveness, bitterness and competition between teachers. Merit pay historically has not been supported by teachers because the pay has been based on subjective and arbitrary systems of evaluation, and teachers know there is no fair way for it to be done.

• If merit pay is a good idea, then why is it a highly kept secret in each school which teachers are found to be highly effective? Don’t we want to share best practices?

• It promotes those teachers who have a certain set of students that respond to a certain growth pattern needed for a narrow set of test scores – called VAM—the Value Added Model of teacher evaluation.

• In our District’s 90-Day Entry Plan findings, you ask the big questions: Is it good for children? Is it research based?

• Merit pay is not good for children. It punishes those teachers working with the most challenging populations, the very populations you state you most want to lift up.

• Merit pay based on test scores is not research based. In fact, research shows the opposite. It shows no affect in student outcomes because basically, the teachers studied were doing the best they knew how, no matter what population of students they were teaching. The American Statistical Association cautions that VAM scores, while they may be useful in noting large trends in big systems, are not effective when they are used in high-stakes decision making related to individuals.

• Our District’s strategic plan cites the need for a high performance culture. Yet merit pay goes against this. It’s an extrinsic form of reward, making use of carrots and sticks, as if our teachers were pet monkeys. W. Edwards Deming, the management consultant who turned Japanese auto makers into world class manufacturers, said that the intrinsic motivation –the love of the work itself—is what motivates people to do a good job. He said it’s important to pay people well, develop their capacities for excellence and let them do their job.

• Merit pay works against this. It will make the District actively work against having all teachers be highly effective, since our School District is not going to want to pay the top salary for all its employees. We already see this at work in Florida’s Lake County School District.

As education historian Diane Ravitch states: Merit pay has over 100 years of research and has never been found to be effective.

As teachers, we have been branded with a Scarlet Letter, called VAM, a projection of the collective sins of our society for our grotesque inequity.

I will not, as a teacher, vote to approve merit pay, which will widen this inequity for our most underserved students most in need, and I ask the District to fix this botched idea and work at having it reversed by our state legislature.

Thank you.