Teacher Merit Pay Has No Merit, Again

[Hannah Bell]

First, the ground-splitting Vanderbilt study. And now this from New York City, a study conducted, no less, by pay for performance fan, Roland Fryer. If this doesn't finally end the fascination with this line of stupidity, what will.

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.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The Bloomberg administration quietly discontinued it last year, turning back on the mayor’s early vow to expand the program quickly. The deal was seen as a landmark in 2007 when Mayor Bloomberg announced it with then-United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten by his side. “I am a capitalist, and I am in favor of incentives for individual people,” Bloomberg said then, while Weingarten emphasized that schools could decide to distribute bonuses evenly among educators. She called the program “transcendent.”


http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/03/teacher-merit-pay-has-no-merit-again.html


Of course merit pay has no effect, even a bad effect. It destroys collegiality, the sharing of ideas, methods, materials, advice between teachers & promotes factionalism.

[JCMach1]

1. There is no distribution method currently devised that will work- this study help show what most

teachers would tell you after 5min.

Only NO ONE (especially politicians) listens to teachers!

Any merit pay system is subject to cronyism, factionalism, and 'teaching towards the bonus' rather than having real learning as a goal...

[ejpoeta]

2. they won't listen. they are hell bent for their 'merit pay'. i don't think they really care

whether teachers do better or not..... this is about money. what do kids need to know anyway besides how to push the buttons on the cash register at walmart. It's sad to see how we treat those we entrust with our kids education. Yet we want to pay them like babysitters. Here's a tip for doing such a great job suzie. Then we bemoan how awful the education system is. Gee, I wonder why! We treat teachers like shit and want to pay them shit. What do you think is going to happen!!

[Hannah Bell]

3. merit pay picks off the climbers & fools -- who will support the change because

they think they'll benefit from it.

and as those kind of people have the mentality of concentration camp capos, they probably will.

that's the mentality "success" demands in our time.

[boobooday]

4. First of all, if teachers were motivated by money, they wouldn't be teachers

Secondly, this is idiotic. All this testing, rhetoric of "failing," all of it. It all seems designed to make sure that no teachers will ever teach in a lower-income, needy school.

Thirdly, when you work with kids, you know that their growth is not measured by test scores, and that your hard work as a teacher may not yield returns for years. To treat it like widget production is shameful and criminal, and insulting to students and teachers.

[Pholus]

5. Your last sentence is REALLY effective.

The kind of line I want to have on the top of my head for when the topic comes up... :)

[HockeyMom]

6. "You cannot teach an empty desk"

that was a comment from one teacher at a high needs school. The mother took the child to another country and disappeared for 3 months. Then, one day he was back in school. What do these people propose to do in a situation like this? There were other kids who came to school, if at all, drunk/on drugs, arrested/parents arrested, etc., etc. These are things that happen all the time in these schools. Merit pay? What are teachers supposed to do about these outside of school circumstances a lot of these kids are living with?

What will happen is that no teacher is going to want to work at a school in these areas if their pay is going to be tied to standarized tests.

[Ranting_Wacko]

7. Saw the perfect analogy yesterday...

"Basing teacher pay on the percentage of students who fail is like basing dentist pay on the percentage of patients who get cavities."

Simply put, it doesn't matter how much hard work you put into your job if those efforts can be short-circuited by someone not doing what they are told, be it not doing their homework and studying or not brushing their teeth and flossing.

[aikoaiko]

8. I can accept that this type of merit pay model didn't work, but ...

...I always cringe when teachers say merit pay, in general, doesn't work. Is there not meritorious performance by teachers? Do some do more than others? Does it make sense to reward those who are more meritorious?

I would think the answers are yes, yes, and yes.

[LWolf]

9. Of course there is meritorious performance.

Those teachers are models and leaders. Merit pay is competitive. Instead of weaker teachers learning from stronger, in a merit pay system stronger teachers aren't going to be sharing and modeling for weaker, they'll be competing to prove that they merit that extra pay more than another.

Cooperating teachers benefit the whole system, and ALL students, which is what public education is all about. Competing teachers, and competition in general, sets up a system of winners and losers...NOT what public education is about.

I get "rewarded" by being assigned to, or invited into, leadership positions that help shape district policy and that make my skills available to my colleagues as a mentor. It usually doesn't come with extra pay, just extra responsibility. The incentive is in having my voice heard, and sharing my strengths with others. When it does come with extra pay, that extra pay is usually doled out at an hourly wage that is about 2/3 of what I'd get if you divided my daily salary by the contractual 8 hours I'm supposed to spend to earn it.

My district is currently working on a new system that will replace the traditional step and column system with levels of pay based on experience, on demonstration of proficiency and leadership, etc.. That system, though, will be a choice; teachers who wish can still use the step and column pay scale.

[rucky]

10. They know it doesn't work. That's why they're proposing it.

It sounds like a reasonable plan to cut teacher's pay. But if it actually improved student performance, they wouldn't be offering it up, because it wouldn't cut payroll they way they're counting on.