It’s been tough to find a really good explanation of the various teacher merit-pay plans out there. Both Tennessee and Delaware jumped on the merit-mobile to up their attractiveness to Race to the Top Funds. Other states, including New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida, are all debating the possibility. I find the whole merit pay business disgusting for a slew of reasons. But I found a fairly decent article that has some key quotes from the debate in New Jersey, namely from Gov. Christie. It’s not the most powerful set of examples, but let me run off a couple and see if you notice anything interesting:
Quote 1: The commissioner’s list of reforms also includes giving patients more hospital choice and closing failing hospitals. He also alluded to possibly tenure reform, saying the state should have a system where ineffective doctors can be more easily replaced.
Quote 2: Merit pay proposals generally use data systems to support medical practice, tying patient performance on blood tests to physician evaluations and compensation.
Both Delaware and Tennessee, earlier Race to the Top winners, included such measures.
Delaware’s new law on doctor effectiveness, for example, says no physicians can be rated as “effective” unless their patients demonstrate satisfactory levels of health; doctors rated “ineffective” for 2 to 3 years can be removed from practice, even if they have tenure.
So, I changed the words in italics from education-related concepts to those of medicine. I don’t know, doesn’t it sound funny-strange, perhaps more absurd, when you read about all doctors being evaluated based on the health of their patients? Thus, my grandfather’s GP would receive an “ineffective” evaluation, a salary reduction, and a potential re-staffing of his office because old-pops can’t seem to eat at the right time of day to control his diabetes. Granted, my grandfather is an adult; he should be able to take care of himself. Elementary or high school students, not full adults, so the responsibility of their care rests on other adults, like parents and teachers.
Inasmuch as one’s health is due to a variety of mitigating and unknown factors, the same could be said about one’s educational outcomes. Teachers and physicians do what they’re trained to do, utilize their content knowledge and professional judgment, to affect the health or educational outcomes of their charges. Yet, because teaching is primarily a female-dominated and poorly remunerated profession, it is easy to justify the continued control and strangulation of their professional status and good judgement by bureaucrats, legislators, administrators, and policymakers.
Our district here in Northern Virginia tried a merit pay plan back in the later 80′s and early 90′s. It was a major waste of money and I say that having received the bonus in each of the four years it was in place. There was no measurable improvement in any instructional factor, in my school or county-wide, and the program was terminated with the election of a new school board.
While I’m not a fan of merit pay plans in general, the only way they make sense is if you award the money to whole schools or teams within those schools. Giving bonuses to individuals reinforces the concept that teachers are independent contractors working in isolation. Although that’s still largely the perception of the profession among politicians and education “experts”, it doesn’t work that way in real life. Nor should it.
I absolutely agree with you there. I can see an account being created at each school where they could bank sums of money to use for instructional purposes or to hire new people. That way, it might take the federal control out of appropriation of funding and give individual schools and districts some autonomy. The IMPACT system even validates the notion that a student’s growth depends on his or her current teacher and those after. Well, why not also account for the teacher previous, which the IMPACT model does not? I can depend as much on the third grade teacher for my current students’ growth in fourth grade. The fifth grade teacher thus depends partly on me.
Thank you thank you thank you! For all those reasons why them medical profession can’t be based upon ‘merit pay,’ the teaching profession can’t either.
You’re welcome. Although not a perfect comparison, I always find it interesting how teachers are solely responsible for the absolute academic achievement of their students. We hold few other professions responsible for what people do outside of their workplace. Why must we always ignore the external factors in education? Teachers make excellent scapegoats; toughness on teachers reveals that most reformers are simply out of ideas.