The New York Times was late in recommending carrots and sticks for teachers. Here is a school that is doing it already (satire alert!):
http://studentslast.blogspot.com/2012/08/grin-and-bear-it-teachers-paddled-in.html
Archives for category: Merit pay
This is what teachers work for: knowing they made a difference in the lives of students.
Have you thanked a teacher lately?
I have every single note that a parent has sent me over the years and every card that my students, once old enough to actually write (i teach pre-) has sent me years later. I have my entire fridge covered in notes and some of my kitchen cabinets as well, along with class pictures from every year I have been in my current school.
I have one family who send me pictures of the four of their children who have passed through my class. I have one more coming next year.
No amount of money can give me the feeling that those cards and pictures and notes give me.
When my students come back to my room and tell my current pre-k children what they did when they were in my class and how important it is to listen and pay attention, I want to cry.
The people who think that carrots and sticks are the answer don’t understand that some people have callings and others just get a job.
A reader asks a question, and I ask the teachers who follow this blog to answer him.
I suggest he read the earlier posts on the subject, but please feel free to give him your answer based on your experience:
| What if metrics could be established apart from testing? Does anyone have ideas as to how metrics could be gleaned apart from testing? Seems to me the state (and its funding) want to frame teacher improvement within their own understandings of measurement.
If you could somehow assess another teaching aspect on a consistent basis, do you think that would help remove the otherwise normally applied incentive to good, hard work (salary or bonus compensation)? I don’t mean to be rude, just curious as to your perspectives. |
Yesterday I posted a comment by a reader who said that his teachers had saved his life and changed him for the better.
He thanked four of his teachers in the Chicago public schools and he named them.
One of the teachers he thanked just responded and thanked him!
How cool is that?
That is true psychic income!
That’s better than the shekels that the teacher might have been paid for raising test scores.
She changed his life.
Hey, Roland Fryer, what about that as an incentive to teach?
She made a difference.
When I ask myself why I spend so much time on this blog, I’ll remember this.
On the topic of carrots and sticks, a reader writes:
Carrots and sticks have nothing to do with what education needs-it’s about honesty-and oh yeah, a good pair of hedge clippers. Policymakers, in collusion with the “reform” industry had been searching for an opening for their attack on public education, and the financial crisis gave that to them.They tried the approach of “we are being outperformed by other nations” since the time of Sputnik and most notably in “A Nation At Risk”. The textbook/workbook/testing and standards industry began to boom, and despite the fact that this nation was built into the greatest nation on the planet without those things-schools became our biggest threat. Over the decades since, standards and testing have been reworked repeatedly,and the results/grading criteria were usually arrived at in a process kept secret from students, teachers and schools. I remember a year when a brand new state writing test was administered to 5th graders. The students did very well! So then they made it a test for 4th graders. After working in a system like this, as mandates and expectations increase and funding is taken away-dangled somewhere or shifted to “regional councils” or training centers to help schools do more with less….Well, it starts to appear as if failure is imposed so the stick can be swung. The testing industry proves how much we need them when kids do poorly on the tests.
Teachers could show how well students can do, the successes we can help them realize, in measures that don’t necessarily involve bubbles/boxes/or a computer monitor (but might, depending on the student) we might help kids get the carrot. Or the apple, or the broccoli-whatever! If this new wave of “reform” was HONESTLY about children, experts that truly understand children and how they develop would be involved and explain much better than I can here: people are not standard, neither are their skills/aptitudes and destinies, parents in conjunction with educators are best able to maximize student potential. Which brings me to the hedge clippers. I sometimes feel like that psycho-dad played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining-chasing that kid foolishly around a hedge-maze someone else created. <<>>He dies from exposure and the kid gets away. Okay, the kid shouldn’t have run into the maze. Jack, if he really wanted to catch the kid, shouldn’t have run in after him.
This is the problem with private interests being allowed to insinuate themselves more and more into the education of children-controlling education and the debate. They will never admit that, for them, it’s about money first. Valid data gathering shows that students with resources allowed to learn in more nurturing supportive settings (NOT TESTED ENDLESSLY) do well.The most powerful know little if anything about kids NOT born into privilege and security, yet they have been allowed to create the hedge maze I have to chase students through-hoping we make it to a predetermined end. They couldn’t guide a roomful of hungry, tired, challenging kids to a place that would be success. I know some people who could. All they need is to be turned loose with their hedge clippers and get protection from the fools with sticks.
Sara Stevenson is the librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Austin, Texas.
She is an activist for public education.
She is tireless.
She scans the Internet, reads voraciously, and writes letters to the editor to set people straight about the facts.
If every teacher and principal and superintendent and parent and librarian and guidance counselor and school psychologist did what Sara Stevenson does regularly, the national conversation would change.
The American public would be better informed.
The policymakers would change their tune.
The hedge fund managers would go back to dabbling in polo ponies and yachts.
And we could all concentrate on doing what is necessary to make our schools and our society better for all students.
Watch for her letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal and other national publications.
The New York Times’ editorial is so unbelievably ignorant!
There is by now a huge accumulation of knowledge and experience about the uselessness of merit pay or pay for performance.
Daniel Pink (Drive), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Edward Deci (Why We Do What We Do) have explained why intrinsic motivation matters more than bonuses, and why bonuses may actually impair performance by demoralizing people.
Here are leading scholars in Zurich who explain yet again that merit pay does not work and will never work.
The idea that people are solely self-interested and materially orientated has been thrown overboard by leading scholars. Empirical research, in particular experimental research, has shown that under suitable conditions human beings care for the wellbeing of other persons. Above all, they are not solely interested in material gains (see eg Frey and Osterloh 2002). Recognition by co-workers is greatly important. Many workers are intrinsically motivated, ie they perform work for its own sake because it is found challenging and worth undertaking. This applies not only to qualified employees but also to persons fulfilling simple tasks. They often are proud of their work and performance.
What part of does not work, has not worked, and will incentivize negative behaviors does the Times not understand?
The New York Times published an editorial calling for “carrots and sticks” for teachers and principals.
What the editorial means is that professionals should get bonuses for higher test scores, and this would recognize high performance and get educators to work harder and produce more high performance (higher test scores).
As I said in my speech in Detroit to the AFT convention, carrots and sticks are for donkeys, not professionals.
The schools in New York City have been subject to budget cuts for the past few years. The Times’ editorial doesn’t suggest where the money will come from to award bonuses. Should some teachers be laid off so others can get a bonus? Should the schools eliminate the arts so that some teachers can get bonuses?
The Times makes no mention of the long and consistent history of failure of merit pay plans. See here and here and here and here and here.
After ten years of carrots and sticks in New York City, the Times concludes that what is needed is more carrots and sticks.
Teachers are doing the best they can, with or without bonus pay. I posted several times yesterday about why merit pay doesn’t work. I wish the Times’ editorial writer were reading those posts, and more important, reading the comments by teachers, such as this one:
| I work in a challenging inner city school in NYC-DOE. Just about every teacher there works hard. Our administration is ok but not great. Our teachers collaborate and cooperate. I love working in my school. This past June during our final staff meeting on the last day of school our principal who was thanking everyone for their hard work let slip that thanks to our hard work, she and her assistant principals all received substantial bonuses from the DOE. There was complete silence in the room. It was a very sad way to end the school year. No one listened much to anything the “suits” said after that. She did say it was part of her union contract and we should pressure our union. Many teachers were very discouraged. Teachers are between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t work hard and make the administration look great (which is not likely because in the end it would hurt our students) our school will most likely close. If we work hard, the administration will be rewarded for our efforts. This is not going to do much for morale come September. If states made it more difficult to enter the teaching profession and provided adequate resources, none of this bonus stuff would be necessary. |
Andrea Gabor has followed our discussion of merit pay and sent the following post.
Gabor is the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York. She has extensive experience as a journalist who has written about business.
I learned about her work when I stumbled upon one of her books The Man Who Discovered Quality: How W. Edwards Deming Brought the Quality Revolution to America. Chapter 9 of the book explains why Deming, a guru of business and corporate culture, was adamantly opposed to merit pay. Gabor explains there how merit pay discourages teamwork and collaboration and promotes short-term, me-first thinking. If you can find the book on amazon, buy it.
Deming was speaking about business, not education, but his words are applicable equally to education.
This is what Gabor sent me:
The question of scarce resources being used for merit pay, which one of your readers commented on, raises another important problem. Merit-pay skeptics among senior managers—and, yes, there are some—note that merit pay appears to work during flush times when there is lots of money to go around, i.e. when just about everyone gets some merit pay. The big problem occurs during down times when there is less money to go around. Suddenly, instead of “incentivizing” the majority of employees, smaller bonus pools actually serve to demoralize the majority who do not benefit from merit pay.
Of course, the real problem with merit pay is that it assumes that good organizations, including schools, are those that hire a lot of “star” performers, and that the biggest stars will work harder when chasing the carrot of merit pay. This view completely ignores the importance of the overall system in which individuals work—and which management controls–and the fact that all organizations, good ones and bad ones, have some stars and some laggards. Well run organizations are likely to have more “stars” than laggards because the hiring and training is better. But the best organizations—check out Brockton High in Massachusetts, which achieved a turnaround with pretty much all the same teachers who worked there when it was a “failing” school—find ways to use training (i.e. professional development) and teamwork to improve everyone’s performance.
As W. Edwards Deming, a leading management expert and critic of merit pay, once put: The only reason an organization has dead wood is that management either hired dead wood or it hired live wood and killed it. Merit pay, by dividing and demoralizing employees, is a good way to erode initiative and overall quality.
Bruce Baker of Rutgers has reviewed the research on effective schools and designed a “research-based” school that is guaranteed to produce higher test scores.
He calls his school the “Econometric Academy of Achievement Test Excellence.”
Every teacher will have exactly four years of experience, no more, no less, because research shows that is the point of maximum impact on test scores.
Students will be loaded with carbs on testing days.
Students will be renamed prior to entry into the school, because certain types of names are associated with low scores while others are associated with high scores.
All teacher salaries will be based entirely on loss aversion tied to test scores gains.
Really.
This is so good you have to read it yourself.
And maybe you will conclude that we need not school reform but reform of the zany ideas that now dominate the research agenda. Maybe call it the “nutty professor reform movement.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 