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There’s another city that spent the summer locked in high-stakes negotiations over teacher compensation: Denver.
Three years ago, voters there passed a levy to fund something called the Professional Compensation System for Teachers, or ProComp, designed to increase teacher pay and to reward the best teachers doing the hardest jobs. So far, ProComp has pumped $50 million into the city’s education system.
In May, Denver’s ambitious and reform-minded young school superintendent, Michael Bennet (the subject of an excellent piece by Katherine Boo in The New Yorker in 2007), proposed changes to ProComp that, he said, would make it more attractive to teachers, especially to the young teachers whom he wanted to bring into the system.
The leaders of the local teachers union didn’t like the changes. The basic dispute boiled down to this: The union wanted to take the extra ProComp money and distribute it more or less evenly throughout the system, so that every teacher would get a generous raise. Bennet wanted to use it to increase bonuses for teachers who taught in a high-poverty school, took a hard-to-fill job teaching math or science, or boosted their students’ test scores significantly. Under the old contract, teachers could receive $1,000 bonuses for each of those categories; Bennet wanted to increase each bonus to $3,000.
So if you were a successful math teacher at a high-poverty school, under Bennet’s proposal you could make an extra $9,000 a year. The problem, as the union saw it, was one of fairness: If you were, say, an English teacher at an affluent school, you would have no shot at two of the bonuses.
Which, Bennet replied, was the whole idea: to convince those teachers that they should come teach where they are really needed.
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A reader who spent the last five years teaching in Los Angeles and Chicago writes,
You’re right that the next fight in education is all about the teachers. We need to pay them better. But there are so many ineffectual teachers out there that it is difficult if not impossible to weed them out.
What you have yet to mention is the difficulty in weeding out those teachers. You have talked about rewarding teachers who are “successful,” but on what grounds will that success be measured? Testing can only measure so much, and some subjects (the phys ed teacher for one) aren’t tested in any meaningful way anyway. If testing cannot or does not measure the success of a teacher, then that puts power into the hands of the principals, which can be incredibly dangerous.
I agree, it’s a difficult question. But some useful answers are emerging. The best research I’ve read about teacher quality is a paper from 2006 by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger.
They make five points:
1) We don’t know yet exactly how best to measure teachers, and the federal government should give R&D money to the states to test out some different methods.
2) That said, it seems that some measure that combines growth in test scores—how much a teacher raises his students’ scores over their scores the previous year—with more subjective measures like principal evaluations will actually give us a pretty accurate picture.
3) How can we tell it’s accurate? Because teachers who do well in one year by these measures tend to do well the next year, too. In other words, in any given school, there are teachers who consistently do well and teachers who consistently do poorly, and it’s not all that hard to figure out who’s who. (Though it is hard to predict ahead of time, at hiring.)
4) We should offer bonuses to teachers who perform well by those measures—in the top quartile, say—though only if they’re willing to teach in schools with a lot of low-income students, where they’re needed most.
5) Even though bonuses are nice, the more effective way to use the evaluations is to fire the bottom quarter of teachers. This is less politically palatable. But these teachers are the ones, Gordon and his co-authors say, who do real damage to the students they teach, and they tend to do that consistently.
The authors have a neat firing idea—they make it the default. So a principal simply couldn’t continue to employ a second-year teacher who performs in the bottom quartile without sending a note home to parents explaining why this low-performing teacher deserves to keep his job.
It’s not a solution we’re likely to hear on the campaign trail any time soon. Pro-layoff politicians don’t last long. But, politics aside, what these authors are proposing is a valuable and natural flipside to a bonus system. What good is paying the high performers more if the low performers are still hanging around, mishandling another classroom of kids every year?
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It’s one thing to talk hypothetically about merit pay for teachers. It’s another to actually put a merit-pay system into practice.
Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida became one of the first states to experiment with merit pay. In 2006, after years of negotiation, the state created a new compensation system to reward successful teachers. Each district was offered additional state funding if they opted into the plan. Districts were given some flexibility in how to measure student success, but standardized-test scores had to make up at least 60 percent of the formula. In February, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times found that in one urban district that had opted to take the deal—Hillsborough, which includes Tampa and its suburbs—“merit” checks were going in overwhelming numbers to teachers at affluent schools.
[O]nly three percent of the educators deemed worthy of the $2,100 bonuses worked in the low-income schools that struggle most, where at least nine in 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. And almost two-thirds taught in A-rated schools, where they arguably were least needed.
That wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
Indeed.
But just because merit pay didn’t work in Florida doesn’t mean it can’t work, period. A more effective merit-pay program wouldn’t reward every successful teacher, it would reward teachers who succeed with those students that are hardest to teach. And it also might define “success” in a more creative way than Florida does. One thing most teachers seem to agree on: they hate being judged on their students’ test scores alone. If you ask current teachers about a deal like the one in Hillsborough, most of them say no thanks. In the teacher-compensation study I mentioned yesterday, researchers surveyed teachers in Washington state and found that 83 percent of them opposed merit pay, including almost 60 percent who “strongly” opposed the idea. But the survey defined merit pay very narrowly, as a system that gave bonuses only for standardized-test gains. If we could come up with a more flexible system, the number of teachers opposing change might start to fall.
I got an e-mail yesterday from a reader, a former New York City teacher, making the case against judging teachers by standardized tests alone. (She asked to remain anonymous, “in case my old principal actually learned how to use the Internet.”)
In the school where I used to work, I would be alternately canonized and demonized each year, as we compared not how each student had progressed each year, but how one eighth grade compared to the grade in front of or behind it. The year our eighth grade went from 400 motivated kids to over 500 “challenging” students, test scores fell, and I was told not to be creative in my classroom, “at least until after the test.”
The next year, the eighth grade shrank to 250 students, and a good group of them, at that. When test scores for that class were higher than the previous eighth grade, I was praised to the heavens as if I had actually had anything to do with the increase. If my performance review and job security were tied to that kind of a measure, I’d be terrified, and would demand a salary equal to two or three years what I actually deserved just to build in security for my inevitable firing.
Accountability nuts get nervous when teachers say they want to be judged by more flexible standards than test scores alone. And for good reason—without some kind of objective measure, it would be way too easy to design an accountability system that could be gamed, where teachers were rewarded based on “parental satisfaction” or some equally vague measure, or where sub-par teachers received bonuses along with high-quality teachers, out of a sense of “fairness.”
Still, the Florida system—bonuses based only on test scores, and no extra compensation for working in high-needs schools—clearly isn’t working.