Harvard study on NYC ed merit pay: "If anything student achievement declined."

[erodriguez]

Lots of politicians are on the reform wagon just for the sake of doing something.
This is despite studies that show many of the current en vogue reforms are not efficacious.


NYC spent $75 million on a teacher pay initiative. The result, according to a Harvard study?

New York City’s heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — deemed “transcendent” when it was announced in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes.

“If anything,” Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, “student achievement declined.” Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

http://gothamschools.org/2011/03/07/study-75m-teacher-pay-initiative-did-not-improve-achievement/

[Fire1]

1. If Eli Broad wants it, that's the way it's gonna be! n/t

[erodriguez]

2. That's pretty much it.

[xchrom]

3. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Both political parties are neck deep in this shit.

[msanthrope]

4. So Bloomberg and the NYC teacher's union were wrong. Good thing he stopped the program last year.nt

[erodriguez]

5. As should the Obama administration drop its pursuit of merit pay.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106437883

[msanthrope]

9. No, because if you read the study, the problem in NYC was that

the merit pay was awarded in a manner that few teachers understood.
I think merit pay is still on the table, but should be studied. What doesn't work in NYC doesn't mean it won't work elsewhere.


"What explains the discrepancy between programs in the U.S. and elsewhere? Fryer rejects several explanations. He argues that the $3,000 bonus (just 4 percent of the average annual teacher salary in the program) was not too small to make a difference, citing examples of effective programs in India and Kenya that gave out bonuses that were an even smaller proportion of teachers’ salaries. He also rejects the possibility that schools’ decisions to use group, rather than individual, incentives was the problem, citing a 2002 study of a program in Israel that used group incentives.

Instead, he says the challenge is that American plans aren’t clear about what teachers can do to receive the reward. In New York City, the bonuses didn’t come simply if students’ test scores rose; the test scores had to rise in comparison to a group of similar schools. So did other measures considered by the city report card, including the surveys that ask students, teachers, and parents for subjective opinions about schools.

Fryer argues that the complexity made it “difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to know how much effort they should exert or how that effort influences student achievement.”"

[FiveGoodMen]

6. They're trying to destroy public education, not fix it.

So there you go.

No mystery.

Just treachery.

[erodriguez]

7. Agreed, however there are lots of people who "feel" merit pay is a good thing. Gotta share the facts

[kwassa]

8. Rich and powerful people with no expertise have decided what is wrong with education

and they usually exclude anyone with expertise from their deliberations, lest the purity of their false vision get sullied.

It really reminds me of an evangelical cult, a group of people infected by an idea that has no validity, no proof, no basis, yet they all agree with it.