Is YOUR pay based on measurable outcomes?
While I’m not in the business of advocating policy positions, I’m on record as supporting some form of merit pay for teachers. But I would never, ever promote it using one justification you hear often from proponents of primarily test-score-based performance pay: that in the real world, workers are paid based on measurable outcomes. Really? Sure, salesmen get commissions. But lawyers, doctors, accountants, consultants, journalists, politicians, policy makers? Bosses judge how valuable their skilled employees are using subjective judgments about effectiveness and pay accordingly.
Quantifiable measures rarely form the basis of that calculus, unless you blog at Gawker (and even they seem to have abandoned the model). So can we put a halt to that rhetorical fallacy? And why not revisit the blanket opposition to subjectivity playing a role in rewarding great teachers, the way it does in so many other professions? “My principal might have it out for me” does not convince me.
Quantifiable measures rarely form the basis of that calculus, unless you blog at Gawker (and even they seem to have abandoned the model). So can we put a halt to that rhetorical fallacy? And why not revisit the blanket opposition to subjectivity playing a role in rewarding great teachers, the way it does in so many other professions? “My principal might have it out for me” does not convince me.
posted by Linda Perlstein at
10:14 AM
9 Comments:
Every journalist who endorses tying teacher pay to test scores (we're pretty much talking about editorial writers and columnists, not education writers) has a moral obligation to call for tying journalists' pay to circulation and profits -- in the same paragraph.
I think you're right, Linda. For most salaried people, specific measurable outcomes isn't tied to pay, but to continued employment. :) I don't know anyone whose paycheck is based on lines of code written or scripts deployed, f'rinstance.
Teachers are not necessarily opposed to merit pay. I am a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, and a few years back a number of our members put together a proposal for merit pay that if you don't know you ought to explore; and you can read about it here
On Caroline's point, you can see an interesting debate with journalist Jonathan Alter here: http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/performance-pay-pundits.
I wonder how many of the people who advance the argument that everyone but teachers is paid according to objective measures is paid according to objective measures.
This is not to knock performance pay. But you're right to demand some honesty.
I've taken on Jonathan Alter before over his teacher-bashing ways, and also for a significant lapse in accuracy and understanding.
An Alter column in 2008 gave misinformation that benefited KIPP, the widely praised charter school chain. I corrected Alter's misinformation in a blog post, pasted below. The original post used highlighting to differentiate quotes from my own observations; readers here will have to look closely at the quotation marks:
June 13, 2008
www.sfschools.org
KIPP alumni in college: the number, please?
http://www.sfschools.org/2008/07/kipp-alumni-in-college-number-please.html
In the current Newsweek, columnist Jonathan Alter earnestly claims that 12,800 alumni of KIPP schools have gone on to college. Here's what Alter wrote:
"At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids."
The actual number, according to KIPP itself, is 447.
It's ironic that Alter made that rather significant error in a column mostly devoted to blasting and blaming teachers for troubled schools and calling for getting rid of problem teachers, along with eliminating tenure and increasing "accountability" for teachers. I wonder how he feels about more accountability for journalists.
Here's a memo from KIPP explaining the actual number. It went from a KIPP staffer named Debbie Fine to KIPP press spokesman Steve Mancini to Washington Post/Newsweek education writer Jay Mathews to me.
"We have been tracking KIPP middle school alumni (i.e. KIPP students that
completed the 8th grade at KIPP) since the fifth grade class that entered
KIPP in 1995. Since that time, 546 students have completed the eighth
grade at KIPP, and 447 of those students have matriculated to college for
an average college matriculation rate over five years of roughly 81
percent.
"This number only includes students who attended the original two KIPP
schools in Houston and New York since those are the only KIPP schools that
have been in operation long enough to have kids progress from eighth grade
to college freshmen. Kids from the next generation of KIPP schools that
opened this decade will not matriculate to college until 2009."
Also, it's not truly fair or accurate to claim that KIPP students are "randomly selected," though they are presumably randomly selected from among those who pursue the application process all the way through. The KIPP application process, as has been extensively discussed here and elsewhere, aggressively self-selects for motivated, high-functioning and compliant students from motivated, high-functioning and compliant families. So the implication that KIPP students are a random sampling of low-income students is wildly off the mark.
I'm not opposed to creating schools for motivated, high-functioning, compliant low-income students from motivated, high-functioning, compliant families. KIPP's target is a low-income, high-need, at-risk demographic, and it does seem to be working well with that subset of kids.
I just think the public discussion needs to be clear and honest about the fact that this is not a random cross-section of low-income, high-need, at-risk kids. KIPP misleads, and insufficiently questioning journalists with an overly shallow understanding of education issues eagerly accept and spread the misinformation.
##
In the comments section following my blog post, which (not surprisingly) attracted heated dispute from KIPP enthusiasts, my co-blogger KC Jones made this point, which is germane too: "Furthermore, we know KIPP attrition rates are alarmingly high, so if Alter wants to talk about the "randomly selected" KIPP students, wouldn't it make sense to examine the graduation rate [actually, KC should probably said "college matriculation rate"] of the applicants and not the graduates? That would certainly drive the graduation rates way down."
And sorry, I should clarify that those figures are as of June 2008.
So this incident raises the question of whether journalists' pay should be tied not only to circulation and the employer's profitability, but also to the accuracy of their copy.
I don't care for merit pay, but that's not the issue. The older generations of teachers who've seen how it has failed in the past are being replaced by a new generation that apparently wants it. So, its the job of Baby Boomers to protect educational values as we enter into new experiments in Market-oriented compensation.
Any Value Added Model for evaluation purposes is a loaded gun when placed in the hands of management. But if we move towards peer review and collaboration, then we'll always be using imperfect information to make policy decisions.
I suspect we'll get a much much larger bang for the buck by using evidence-driven evalutions through peer review to remove the lowest performing teachers, while programs like TAP seem to be the best performance pay system. In TAP, I bet its the investments in collaboration that produce the gains.
Frankly, I wish we didn't have to go down this risky path, but Baby Boomers like me who were so good at telling our parents' generation what they did wrong, won't be able run schools for the next generation.
How can anyone be opposed to "Merit pay?" Only a person who believes children should be left behind, those who believe we should be racing to the bottom, and those who believe teachers should be unqualified.
The only groups who endorse these silly deforms are teachers unions--or so everyone is led to believe. It's very effective propaganda, but hardly effective leadership.
Posing the issue as "for or against" doesn't promote consideration of "how." And mandating that student test score on standardized tests "not be excluded" doesn't promote consideration of what should be included. When this mandate is coupled with "national standards" masked as "common core" and more charter schools, the agenda is much larger than teacher merit pay."
The National Academy of Sciences has warned of the dangers involved in each of the "pillars" of the "Race to the Top":
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12780
Who are you going to listen to?
The Economic Policy Institute book "Teachers, Performance Pay and Accountability: What Education Should Learn from Other Sectors," published in May, 2009 does an excellent job dissect the claims of "merit pay" proponents. The bottom line is that "performance pay" is not at all common in most professions; where it has been tried, it has often been counter-productive.
Journalists should not allow ideologically or politically motivated claims about program effectiveness to trump hard data.
Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
http://www.fairtest.org
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