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I t’s generally not a good idea to start a piece of writing with a disclaimer. Or at least that’s the advice I give my freshman English students. I feel that I can’t escape doing it for this one, however. My disclaimer is this - I like President Obama. I voted for him, support his presidency and hope for its success. I agree with him on almost every issue and admire his willingness to remain pragmatic in his approach to governing. I don’t think he gets nearly enough credit and is under a microscope the likes of which has never been seen before. I can’t stand it when so-called progressives act like Ditto-Heads by taking positions they know are not tenable on things like the Afghan War or health care reform and thereby paint their own president, the most progressive president in generations, into an ideological box that causes all progress to halt.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I can go on to spew a little hypocrisy.
Lately, President Obama has been touting his plans for reforming the nation’s public schools. As a teacher and father of school aged children, I naturally have a keen interest in what the President is proposing as his plan to fix what’s broken in public education. As someone who convinced quite a few of my colleagues to vote for President Obama, I have a keen desire for him to not let us down.
During the campaign, he said many insightful and well thought out things about making American schools competitive with the rest of the world. That sounded OK to most of us teachers, but the verbiage left us a little disquieted. What did “competitive” mean? Surely, he wasn’t coding his language to favor the failed, market based approaches promoted by neo-cons and pseudo-progs.
The President-To-Be also talked a good bit about us teachers not being paid like the professionals that we are and about the “best” teachers not being paid what they deserve. Again, that sounded pretty good but still left an inkling of doubt. Did only the “best” of us deserve to be paid like professionals? He surely understood that the best way to attract and retain the best teachers is to make our salaries competitive overall with other professions.
Candidate Obama came to the National Education Association Convention in 2007 (I was there - he was like a rock star) and told us that no matter what his administration proposed they would never force us to accept their priorities, but would negotiate with us, “give us a seat at the table,” were his exact words. There were rumblings about “performance pay” and “merit pay” while he was speaking and, although we couldn’t help liking the guy, my colleagues and I were a little worried.
Merit and performance pay are based on the idea that a teacher’s worth can be determined by her students’ test scores or the evaluation that her principal gives on a yearly basis. The idea of paying teachers for so-called performance is nothing new. It’s been around since my mother was teaching in Fairfax County, Virginia in the late 1970’s.
In more or less every place where merit or performance pay has been implemented in public school systems it’s been an abject failure. See the current superintendent of Fairfax County’s take on merit pay along with Eight Reasons Not to Tie Teacher Pay to Test Scores here - http://www.edcomp.org/reports.aspx.
The problem is that to the general public and far too many politicians in both parties merit pay sounds like a good idea. Shouldn’t we pay the better teachers more? If one teacher improves test scores more than another doesn’t he deserve a bonus? It seems simple enough, right?
Wrong (again, see http://www.edcomp.org/reports.aspx) and unfortunately, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have fallen victim to this siren song of oversimplification.
The Obama Administration, spearheaded by Duncan, have already approved $4.3 billion of stimulus money in what has been labeled “Race to the Top” grants for school systems that are willing to experiment with, among other things, merit pay. They’ve both stated unambiguously their feeling that paying teachers based on the test scores of their students is somehow the lynchpin of improving public education even while admitting that the current system of standardized testing is deeply flawed. With no track record of success, $1.35 billion more are on the table for merit pay now only months after the original money was approved.
Needless to say, many of my colleagues and I are more than slightly disappointed. My own case against merit pay is simple; it just doesn’t work. Teaching children is not the same as making widgets. The variables in merit pay systems are too numerous to list, but a few of the most important are:
- Standardized tests are only one, flawed way of measuring student achievement. To base a teacher’s livelihood on one indicator from a flawed system is simply inhumane.
- There is no adequate way to account for teachers who don’t teach a tested subject. Do we leave out teachers who teach Art, Music, and Tech Ed just because their subjects aren’t tested? Or, since they’re not tested are they just not important?
- In systems where merit pay has been tried, it has created a dearth of teachers in challenging schools. Wouldn’t you want to teach in the schools where scores were higher if you knew your paycheck was tied to those scores?
- Merit pay assumes that teachers are already not working their hardest and that paying for better test scores will motivate the lazy ones. In truth, merit pay will only serve to create animosity amongst colleagues who believe that they’re working just as hard as the guy that’s being paid more, but because of the classes they’ve been assigned or the support of the administration are getting the short end of the stick.
The truth is, and I fear the President falls into this category, politicians see merit pay as a cheap way to make it look like they’re serious about education reform. Instead of investing in reforms that work, like fixing or nixing No Child Left Behind, and making sure that all teachers are paid like the professionals that we are they take a short cut and promise to hold teachers accountable by only paying those that test scores say are the best.
The reality is that the vast, overwhelming majority of teachers are working as hard as we can for our students. Many of us already put in countless hours that we’re not paid for at all. So the assumption that “paying the best” more will lead to better outcomes for students is insulting.
I had hoped that the candidate I voted for was truly a pragmatic progressive and that he truly understood and valued the work that teachers do. I know it’s hypocritical for me to accuse others of disappointment and pet issue posturing only to do the same myself. I think the difference is that tying teachers’ pay to test scores is neither pragmatically sound nor ideologically progressive.
Merit pay may be one issue where the President, my President fails on both counts.
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If not merit pay, how about eliminating tenure? If we can't reward superior teachers, we should at least be able to fire the inferior ones.
I am definitely in favor of an additional pay system, that is one that would be established above and beyond the standard scale that would reward expertise. In Portland, Maine they have a system that bumps your annual salary based on how up to date your professional development is. There is a strong correlation between quality professional development and better student outcomes. This bases the extra pay on how motivated a teacher is to improve her skills and is more objective than basing pay on factors that are often beyond the control of the teacher.
As far as tenure is concerned- it's a myth that tenure makes it impossible to fire bad teachers. Just look at DC. Michelle Rhee summarily axed about 400 tenured teachers without cause and has won every court case trying to stop it. I'm not saying I'm in favor of that, but the idea that tenure protects teachers from being fired is just not the reality.
The reality, up until recently, was that trying to find a qualified person to replace the "bad" ones was/is extremely difficult. In some places the teacher shortage is/was so bad that systems were filling vacancies with long term subs that in some cases didn't even have college degrees let alone teaching certificates.
Obviously, Allegany County doesn't have that problem- yet. And as a result, you have the most qualified teaching staff in the state. We have more nationally board certified teachers and more teachers with master's degrees per capita than any other system in Maryland. Consequently, we have students that, based on average household income, outperform other similar systems in almost every indicator.
One of the ways this system has maintained its teaching core is by boosting its average salaries fairly consistently over the past 5 years. Retention of good teachers is almost always the result of a tide that lifts all boats, not cherry picking the ones that are "the best" based on subjective measures.
I know I sound a bit like a cheerleader here, and trust me this system is far from perfect, but it is a good example of how negotiating competetive salaries for everyone can maintain the core of your teaching staff.
You are willing to accept some system of objective measurement - you say that Allegany County "outperform(s) other similar systems in almost every indicator." If those indicators can tell us which school systems are performing well, can't they tell us which individual teachers are performing well?
On tenure, the fact that DC had to fight legal battles just to fire poor teachers only shows how much of a problem tenure is. Rhee is an extraordinary case; she has a national reputation and high levels (for the moment) of political support. Most superintendents do not have the personal and political capital to fight those kinds of battles. And again, real professionals do not receive lifetime job guarantees after putting in two years of work. Besides, what is the benefit to the student and the taxpayer of teacher tenure?
I understand you want to secure the best economic outcome for workers in your industry. But I think you're going about it the wrong way. The taxpayer hears horror stories like the NYC teachers getting paid to sit in "rubber rooms", and gets the impression that teachers' unions care more about protecting their members' rice bowls than educating our children. The public would be more willing to support increased funding for teacher pay if it had confidence that the money was not being wasted on incompetents and clock-punchers.