Some American public school districts are now offering salary incentives or “merit pay” to encourage and reward exemplary teachers. In Houston, Texas, the merit pay system started in 2005 provides teachers with $40 million (up to $11,000 extra per year) for measurable improvements in student performance. President Barak Obama surprised many by saying “It’s time to start rewarding good teachers and to stop making excuses for bad ones.” Should Canadian provinces be looking at teacher quality initiatives like merit pay? And if so, what kind of systems might work best?
The Americans seem attracted to merit pay systems because they fit more comfortably into the current “Race to the Top” reform agenda. The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is now often cited as the exemplary model and it is driven by principles and models of effective teaching. Over the past week, Melinda Gates has weighed in with an influential commentary in The Washington Post (February 19, 2010). ” An effective teacher,” she claimed, ” has more impact on student performance than any other school-based factor.” Recent research in Australia by Dr. Richard Dinham and ACER tends to support that contention. Although 50% of student performance is linked to “student motivation,” about 30% is directly affected by “teacher quality.” In the United States, the Gates Foundation has also announced a Measures of Effective Teaching project, in 7 school districts, working with 3,000 teachers. It will develop measures to promote effectiveness, including videotaping classes, analyzing test scores, surveying teachers, students, and parents.
While the Gates Foundation has found modest support among teacher union ranks, the Teacher Effectiveness movement also faces formidable foes. With the passing of Albert Shanker the American National Teachers Union has found itself beseiged and has tended to rely heavily upon public voices such as the late Gerald W. Bracey and Alfie Kohn to do its thinking. Since 2005, Alfie Kohn has been the fiercest opponent of Merit Pay for teachers. From the beginning, he has claimed that “It Doesn’t Work” and long before it was even implemented in a planned or systematic fashion.
We should be considering other options perhaps better suited to the Canadian educational milieu. When we do, the Australian “Smarter Schools” model will have clear advantages. First proposed in April 2008, the Austraian project for improving Teacher Quality (TQ) is funded by $550 million over 5 years and includes both “facilitation” reforms and “reward” incentives. Business support has been critical and the Australian Business Council has invested heavily in “teacher quality” programs. (See the Stephen Dinham and http://www.acer.edu.au websites) It is a far more comprehensive system of teacher development than the U.S. free enterprise experiments.
The Australian plan is based on an ingeneous new teacher salary scale system tied directly to levels of teaching competence. It replaces the traditional Canadian “seniority, credentials system” with a “Standards-Based Career Structure.” Instead of being rewarded for seniority/long service and “positions of responsiblity,” teachers are expected to progress through four new stages of competence: probationary, registered, accomplished, and school leader. Salaries do not plateau at mid-career, but can rise to 1.46 X the starting salary. Simply put, the most competent, accomplished teachers also rise to the top on the new scales.
Having identified Teacher Quality as a critical factor in improving student performance, we should be looking for systems that work, not just recycling predictable Alfie Kohn commentaries. Now, it’s your turn.
Paul, what you seem to say is that the Alfie Kohn comments and demonstration that Merit Pay Doesn’t work although devastating to the merit pay argument is not allowed because you heard it before. LOL.
The American have a much more severe problem than we do. They have never invested in their inner city schools. As they have allowed the situation to deteriorate even further under Bush, high quality teachers have abandoned the inner city. Young teachers don’t last, they quit. Teach for America kids don’t re-enlist. The system is full of uncertified teachers.
No wonder they need to do something but in most cases it is the wrong thing. It will simply mean fewer teachers and chronic shortages.
“it will mean fewer teachers and chronic shortages.”
Now that’s a throw back to 1990.
Rewarding teacher quality and competence and NOT seniority
would be very welcome among not just school communities
by individual teachers who are less than impressed by the
all-for-one union group think. I think pay based on merit
would be the first step in setting teachers free instead of
binding them to an antiquated union shop.
Canada needs to begin serious discussion among those
who it would effect most, those individual teachers.
Individual teachers including those who received merit pay under Jeb Bush’s plan in Florida came forward to say it is not worth it. Teacher competence is rewarded on the teacher’s grid by certification, education and experience, the factors that make better teachers.
In American inner cities you have incredible numbers of totally uncertified teachers, inexperienced teachers and teachers who just scrape by in these catagories.
Houston will soon learn that the use of test scores to evaluate teachers is seen as an attack on all teachers including those who are very competent. There were huge domonstrations by Houston teachers against the new plan. Do you think these were only the weak one? Don’t make me laugh.
There is NO desire for merit pay among Canadian teachers as there is no desire for it among American teachers. Michelle Rhee tried to impose it in Washington DC. The teachers are almost unanimous in rejecting it. She has become so unpopular she will soon be fired or take the Mayor down with her in the next election.
Set your watch. Houston will soon have a teacher’s shortage of extreme proportions, especially after NEA and AFT leaflet the teacher training colleges with the “Don’t work in Houston” brochures.
Major cities already have chronic teacher shortages of qualified people willing to work in them. I have interviewed the principal. They despair.
This scheme looks a lot better than what we have now, but I worry that status quo educators, who have proved to be very resourceful when it comes to resisting change, will find a way to subvert this reform as well. As long as we have a grid and rules and formal measures of effectiveness, some people and groups will discover ways to game the system. At heart, I think the problem may be the remoteness and central planning and bureaucracy that is firmly entrenched in most jurisdictions today. My inclination is to entertain the concept of autonomous schools, with principals able to hire and fire their teachers and determine how much each is to be paid. I fear I can’t take credit for the slogan “Small is Beautiful”, but I can at least echo it.
Nice dream for you Malkin. I don’t think the Las Vegas odds makers would give it much of a chance.
I don’t think “reformers” (conservatives to me because of their backwards looking nostalgia) agree among themselves on very much. There is a public school crowd that wants testing and drill and kills workbooks. They seem to hate inquiry, discovery, project learning and authentic assessment. The also seem to deplore cooperative learning, balanced literacy and equity oriented policies.
There are the home schooler anarchist crowd, the voucher crowd, the charter crowd, the faith-based crowd and the private school crowd that all just seem to want public money with no strings attached but this is naive in the extreme. Has anybody in this crowd ever heard of “the one who pays the piper calls the tune?” This is so true it is like a law of physics. You can say “we all just want choice” but if the wrong choice model is chosen somebody will be very disappointed.
Of course teachers, both organized teachers and individual teachers are able to strangle every reform in the closet if they don’t believe in it. Gerald Caplan, when he was working on the Love of Learning Report told a public meeting I attended, “research shows with every reform, that if you don’t get substantial teacher buy in then the reform is doomed.”
Merit pay is not going anywhere. Testing has a limited future. Anybody remember “Departmentals”. Eventually the population turned on them when they felt they were just keeping deserving students out of university an extra year for no purpose.
I am surprised that conservative educators don’t look more closely at Singapore or other jurisdictions that are moving forward at an incredible clip in very conservative societies. The problem may be that they are essentially public systems.
Further to my original comment, I agree that the current teacher pay system is inefficient. For example, a junior kindergarten teacher can earn the same amount as a physics teacher even though there is a shortage of physics teachers. A terrible teacher is paid the same as an excellent teacher if they have the same qualifications and experience.
But, as currently conceived, the introduction of a more sophisticated pay structure will not overcome these fundamental problems; in fact, it will invite additional problems. Figuring out who deserves to be promoted to the next level will be very tricky and, no matter who is rewarded, strike and jealousy will often ensue. The identification of meritorious teachers will fall to principals, who may play favourites or make mistakes. The process is likely to be acrimonious and contested, nurturing grievances. The teachers’ unions will vigorously oppose the new system, making life difficult for everyone, and they will do their best to bias the new policy in the direction of non-selectivity – resulting in a tendency towards the rapid rise of most teachers to the top categories.
How to avoid these problems? Well, we might look to the business world, where employees come and go all the time. If, for example, Joe gets a better offer from another company, he might either take it or invite his current employer to match it. If Joe’s work is valued enough, his current employer will give him a promotion. In this way, good employees work their way up the ladder without any need for formal systems.
Of course, for the business model to work in schools, individual principals would have to be free to spend their personnel budgets in whatever way best suits their particular school. If, for example, Joe’s principal doesn’t want to lose Joe (because he is such an excellent teacher), then Joe’s principal needs to be able to offer Joe a higher salary. In this way, excellent teachers would soon achieve higher salaries and, if some other teachers at the school believe they are worth more than they are currently earning, then they are free to look for another school that will pay them more. And if they can’t find one, they can stay at the school at the salary that reflects their worth to that school.
In short, in Dr. Dinham’s model, the principal would determine who gets paid more. In the business model, the market would make this determination.
Having served as a principal, I tend to look at teacher compensation quite differently. Abandoning salary scales and going with merit-based systems looks attractive, until you begin to consider the formidable implementation challenges in an educational culture. The current system has only one real advantage — it is crystal clear and practically removes the potential for teacher-management conflict. In fact, that is the only real purpose it really serves. Unfortunately, it can also perpetuate mediocrity.
Addressing teacher quality through a merit-based compensation system is sure to raise fears, but it holds out the best hope for rewarding the best and entrenching a “professional growth” ethic in teaching faculties. The Australian model strikes a reasonable balance, basing compensation levels upon demonstrated and proven teaching competencies. Teacher salaries plateau too early now and that needs to be addressed. On the other hand, far too many long-service teachers have not been evaluated since their third year of teaching and are simply putting in time.
Dr. Dinham is well aware of the potential pitfalls. He wants to see a teacher competency continuum, regularized performance-based teacher assessments, and more consistency between teacher effectiveness and salary levels. Right now, it is next-to-impossible to remove an incompetent teacher. Any system that would introduce regular evaluations tied to salary and insist on accountability for student performance would have untold benefits for the entire system. We can, I think, introduce more accountability without relying too much upon market forces. Today’s principals would have a stake in making it work if they were expected to demonstrate that “every school can improve.”
The best system to blend the two is a career ladder system but we almost have it. The teachers that management would like to reward to “keep them sweet” are given assistant headships, headships (now renamed as curriculum leaders) Consultants, coordinaters VPs and principals.
Frankly I is one of the least managed workforces on Earth and that idiot Mike Harris cut the budgets for these PORs which killed the incentive and flattened the pyramid for many teachers.
In actual fact, it played right into the federation’s hands by giving the teachers the feeling that you cannot move yourself through the system on your merits, only the union can improve your standard of living so that is where you owe your loyality.
Frankly, I would pay teachers for extra curricular activities (see Rochester contract) I would pay for tutoring after say 4:30, I would even pay for on-call coverage. A lot of problems would disappear. Some teachers want the overtime, some want the time.
and that other idiot Dalton McGuinty has had how many years to correct what big, bad Mike did Doug?
If this discussion is going to be intelligent can you please knock off the political pap?
In Rochester football coaches are paid more than principals and likely held to a higher esteem by their community IF they win. IF they have too many losing seasons, out they go.
How would that fly in Canada do you think.
Manitoba also paid teachers extra for extra work. We could have had that option here too, but the discussion on extra-curriculars never moved beyond past anything substantial.
Rochester teachers get $5000 last time I looked. That hardly puts them over a principal.
The idea that you can separate education issues from partisan politics is just so profoundly naive it boggles the mind.It is the usual defence of education conservatives who understand that the education positions of the PCs are indefencible. BTW the other two are often not that hot either.
Malkin above tries to defend a bit of market oriented teacher pay but realizes that it is a mug’s game
The Brits did some experimentation with performance pay. The headmasters pleaded with the government to end the program because they could not gt any other work done.
Everybody denied the pay appealed. The staffs overwhelmingly opposed it. The small group who got it were shunned by the others, nobody worked cooperatively any more. The principal were accused of playing favourites. Those denied the pay withdrew from extra duties. The whole thing was one big mess but suit yourselves. I’m out of it thank God.
Paul,
1.46 X the starting salary is not much. Say the starting salary was $50 000, 1.46 X this is only $73 000. This is peanuts.
The discussions are intriguing but I can’t help but ask what the overall goal is. My assumption is we are looking to realize greater student learning.
Am I to assume that paying teachers more equates to better learning and that those less well paid will disappear from the system, not likely.
Perhaps a better solution is to better prepare teachers going into the system. It certainly isn’t a quick fix but it is one very good place to begin. This places substantial responsibility on those working to prepare teachers for the classroom. Can the universities do that, would the universities do that, are they able to do that?
Let’s take a look at the teaching that is occurring currently in the classroom and assume a posture that demands quality of instruction. This really requires a will to insist on teaching and learning excellence. A will that I am not convince truly exists.
Moving in a different direction, I applaud Australia, Singapore and any other country that is striving to improve their education system. It is healthy to be a global community working towards improving the learning of our students. However, let’s not stand in awe and lose sight of what we do that is good. When I am visiting systems in the Pacific Rim they are wanting to do more like we do, go figure. I have spent a good measure of time in Australian schools and progress is being made, yet I can’t help but be perplexed when the numbers indicate that 500 000 school age students are not attending school and what is even more bewildering about this is when the legal age to leave school is 16. How strange is this for a country of approximately 22M has 500K of its citizens ages 4 – 16 not in school. Good teaching and learning opportunities will draw students to be in school
In actual fact, you can relate higher wages for teachers to better outcomes. In Ontario the gap from top to bottom is so small there is not much to see but in the USA there is a clear corelation between high wages and high achievement. As some of my friends like to tell me, a corelation is not a cause.
It seems that in high teacher wage districts we also see a high standard of living and a high cost of living so it would seem in order to keep teachers in that area, the wages must be high enough to keep the teachers happy with the standard of living. Massacheusetts = high wage, Mississippi = low wage.
Concentration on initial teacher preparation is the coming thing. Countries that concentrate on teacher preparation, education and certification are doing well educationally and moving ahead rapidly.
I am always ammused at certain people who believe that in order to get quality you must pay CEOs, doctors, lawyers, architects etc high wages or you will not get quality. On the other hand it seems with teachers there is no relationship. You can’t have it both ways.
Value Added Measurement involves testing students twice say once in September and once in May and looking at the growth over the period, not just the starting point of the students. Many who advocate teacher testing believe they have finally found the way to “fairly” measure teachers that has eluded them in each of the many waves of teacher testing that have risen up only to fizzle over time.
Linda Darling-Hammond says’ Technical and educational challenges make it more difficult to draw strong inferences about individual teacher effectiveness from value-added measures by themselves, especially for high-stakes purposes such as personel decision. Teachers ratings of effectiveness are not highly stable across different tests, classes, and years, and are influenced by the characteristics of their students as well as the school context in which they teach. Summarizing the research of many studies, including recent research reviews by the RAND Corporation, Henry Braun of the Education Testing Service concluded :
VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis for making consequential decisions about teachers. There are many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness on the basis of the data available from typical school districts. We still lack sufficient understanding of how seriously the different technical problems threaten the validity of such interpretations.”
Teacher quality vs. quantity?
Is there research to compare the effects of teacher quality vs. quantity?
For example: Does (statistically) a top-tier teacher making say $80,000 with a class of 30 students facilitate greater student success than say two junior teachers making $40,000 each teaching the same class?
And what factors would influence the outcome? E.g. does grade level/subject have an impact?
This is a matter to be negotiated between the community, as represented by the trustees, and the teachers. It is nobody else’s business.
Is an old doctor better than a young one? Is an old lawyer better than a young one? They tend to make more.
The Los Angeles Times feature story( August 14, 2010) highlights a pilot project in California using the “value-added” system assessing teacher effectiveness in the classroom. The pilot project involved more than 6,000 Grade 3 to Grade 5 teachers and rated the teachers on the basis of their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year.
See the full story at http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/14/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815
The value-added system might have some merit as part of the overall ongoing evaluation of teachers. I noted that the “experts” recommend that it count for no more than one half of the total evaluation.
After evaluating teachers for 20 years with the conventional model ( both clinical supervision and faculty growth systems), I would strongly favour adding another, more objective component. Ongoing coaching and support need to be included to assess for collegiality, teamwork, and rapport with students. Ironically, tough teachers generally score lower in process model evaluations.
We should be striving for a balanced, fair and judicious assessment… with real consequences. School systems have many ways of rewarding and demoting teachers. Giving out wholesale pink slips is a gross overreaction to chronically low student performance results. There is a better way, but it will take time to develop a fair and effective new system.