Arizona want to pay teachers what they are worth
December 2, 2001 7:04 AM   Subscribe

Arizona want to pay teachers what they are worth A new basis for pay puts aside tradtional contractual salaries in favor of pay according to worth. Second state in nation to try this system. How is worth decided and by whom?
posted by Postroad (17 comments total)
 
I used to think that performance pay was a good idea until a friend of mine asked me this question: "How do you tell how good a teacher is?" At first, it seemed like a simple enough question, but for every strategy I could devise he came up with a way it could be unfair and end up punishing teachers that I knew intuitively were 'better.' Since then, I've come to the conclusion that teacher quality is, indeed, qualitative rather than quantitative and so any attempt to quantify it, as you'd need to if you wanted to pay people based on it, is doomed to fail.
posted by jacobm at 7:52 AM on December 2, 2001


This plan didn't go down very well with teachers in the UK either. The main argument being that there are many other external factors linked to test grades. I can imagine this would also deter good teachers from working at poorly performing schools, causing a downward spiral.
posted by viama at 7:52 AM on December 2, 2001


As a former teacher, I always faced the paradox: every child can learn, but no two children come to school at the same place. I could help improve a child's reading skills, for example, but if they are in 4th grade, and could only read at a 1st grade level at the beginning of the year, and by the end could read at a 3rd grade level, did I fail? The child learned, but isn't up to "state standards".

I would love to see teachers be paid for what they are worth. They prepair our future. I think that the American public's perception of education needs to change, and its role needs to be valued and honored.
posted by jazon at 8:26 AM on December 2, 2001


Well, if I inherit a software project that is essentially thousands of lines 'o garbage-non-working-spaghetti-code and I have, say, 8 weeks to get it re-engineered and I have it 75% done at the end of that time, then I failed. How is it any different just because these are kids? Teachers are worth much more than they are paid, with that I agree. However, I tire of the "but these are children" and "there are external factors" arguments. I feel that the first is used to mystify the profession in order to thwart attempts to quantify an educator's performance, and the second, well, there are external factors with EVERY career.
posted by internook at 9:13 AM on December 2, 2001


Prepair? No wonder you're not teaching kids to read anymore. :)
posted by gleemax at 9:35 AM on December 2, 2001


Edison Project takes pay for performance further, not the teacher but the whole school is paid on perfomance (becomes a profit center). They claim to be having notable results. Who knows.
posted by Voyageman at 9:44 AM on December 2, 2001


Well, if I inherit a software project that is essentially thousands of lines 'o garbage-non-working-spaghetti-code and I have, say, 8 weeks to get it re-engineered and I have it 75% done at the end of that time, then I failed. How is it any different just because these are kids?

I was unaware that "garbage-non-working-spaghetti-code" was a) likely to have discipline problems, b) come to school unfed, c) be lazy, d) have undiagnosed learning disabilities, e) come from homes where learning wasn't encouraged, or f) willing to work but simply unable to master a task. One could add to the list. These things are not equivalent.

Unfortunately, to accurately evaluate a teacher requires a lot of time--like several years. At the college level, for example, you aren't going to learn anything accurate about an instructor from a single course evaluation; however, several years' worth of course evaluations will yield a fairly accurate assessment. The situation isn't much different at any other instructional level.
posted by thomas j wise at 10:10 AM on December 2, 2001


If executed right, this would be great. But I have a feeling that it won't be based on qualitative in-room evaluation by experienced administrators with time to spend evaluating teachers, but rather on standardized tests and other metrics that are easy to measure, but don't actually have any bearing on how well students learn. here's something I wrote in May about the problems with standardized testing as policy.... (and a response about the problems that it's led to in Japan.)

But yes, pay techer's what they're worth, already!
posted by andrewraff at 11:14 AM on December 2, 2001


I swear to gosh I am not trolling here. I have a gal friend who is close to getting her degree in education and we debate this constantly.

thomas. a) if the kid has discipline problems can we not discipline him and/or move him to a special class? b) do schools not offer free lunch programs? c) it is the teachers job to teach, to used methods that motivate and educate, is it not? d) I came from such a family and the better teachers I had encouraged me, I went on to college against the odds. f) I don't understand this. I mean, if the kid is slow or dyslexic then he needs special help. Otherwise it is the educators job to teach the material in a way that the kids can pick it up and to make allowances for different learning styles/abilities. That is what teaching is, in my book.


These are the "mystifying the art of teaching" arguments that I am talking about that just sound like one excuse after another to me. Is teaching an art or a science?


I would take this a step further. Pay all teachers what they are worth (and it is more than 40K). The one's who can't measure up get a pink slip. This will draw better talent and weed out the people who are just putting in time.
posted by internook at 11:17 AM on December 2, 2001


According to the article, teacher success would be based upon "student progress, achievement, parent satisfaction and professional development" which means that a fourth grader who goes from not reading to reading at a third grade level would qualify the teacher under acheivement and if that kid's mom and dad were happy with this success, the teacher then would have parent satisfaction points. There are ways to make this work. Anything is better than continuing to keep people in the classrooms and giving them regular pay increases when they are doing the bare minimum required of them and leaving kids with barely sufficient educations and absolutely no motivation or enthusiasm for learning.
posted by Dreama at 12:00 PM on December 2, 2001


"How do you tell how good a teacher is?"

Why is it so hard to work around this problem for teachers, yet so easy for most other professions with equally hard to quantify results? Consider programming, which I'm most intimately familiar with. I've never been compensated based on lines of code written, functional units, or anything else that's possible to quantify. Here's approximately what does happen:

* Management committee determines budget for increased compensation at beginning of salary review cycle.
* Managers collect feedback from peers on performance (and they've been keeping tabs on projects throughout the year, if they aren't idiots they have a very good idea of who is writing quality code and who isn't)
* Managers determine raises (constrained by budget, can be vetoed by their manager), we talk about my past performance, what I can do to improve, and the direction I want to head in the future

The only people this doesn't hold for are consultants paid for by the hour and upper level managers who also have quantified measurements of department performance built into their compensation.

An analogous system for teachers would have teacher's compensation determined by principals, while the principal's compensation might be partially determined by test score changes for the entire school, and district administrators for the entire district.

What's so hard about that?
posted by mlinksva at 12:08 PM on December 2, 2001


I will learn how to spell prepare properly... I will learn how to spell prepare properly... I will learn how to spell prepare properly... I will learn how to spell prepare properly...

One of the reasons I taught 1st grade was because their spelling tests are easier. 8-)

I always am wary of Education arguments because they are so polarized - on one side are people saying "Teaching IS hard, and each kid is a unique challenge, and it's unfair to apply a global standard to all of them" while others say "How hard is it really? Just teach the little nippers, already? What kind of teacher are you anyway?"

Teaching is hard, and while it all sounds good on paper - put the special needs kids in class by themselves, get kids the help they need, motivate them and they'll learn - in reality all that goes out the window.

My wife is volunteering at a school, helping with a reading program. One kid she works with has no intention of learning to read. He doesn't see the value. His parents don't read, his brothers and sisters don't read (that is, they aren't illiterate, they just don't read). He can, however, tell the plot of every Disney video he owns, and can describe, in detail, a number of video games he owns. Going back to the programming example internook used above - how successful a programmer will you be when the code is determined to undermine your work?

I now return to my writing... I will learn how to spell prepare properly...
posted by jazon at 1:07 PM on December 2, 2001


thomas. a) if the kid has discipline problems can we not discipline him and/or move him to a special class?

Speaking as the child of a school administrator, I'm afraid that it isn't that simple: the kid has to have done something of significant magnitude to warrant the move (unless, of course, s/he's in a zero-tolerance zone, in which case...); there may be no funding for a special class, or there may be a waiting list for it; the child may have to be transferred to another school--which requires that the other school be willing to take him/her--and so forth. In short: there are lots of bureaucratic hurdles here, as well as some financial ones.

b) do schools not offer free lunch programs?

That depends on funding, which is not necessarily available.

c) it is the teachers job to teach, to used methods that motivate and educate, is it not?

Yes. But some students don't care. Teaching requires the students to cooperate. Thinking about my own elementary- and secondary-school education, I can recall several brilliant teachers stuck with students who couldn't be bothered.

d) I came from such a family and the better teachers I had encouraged me, I went on to college against the odds.

Great!

f) I don't understand this. I mean, if the kid is slow or dyslexic then he needs special help. Otherwise it is the educators job to teach the material in a way that the kids can pick it up and to make allowances for different learning styles/abilities.

Again, there are problems. You can't just move the kid; you need the parents to cooperate (a surprising number of them won't). Special-ed programs in many districts are notoriously underfunded--there may be no-one particularly qualified to deal with the student, if the problem gets caught in the first place, and if there is someone qualified, there may well be a waiting list. To make matters worse, state-mandated testing and assessment programs often come unequipped with state-provided money, meaning that there may not be enough school psychologists around to examine students with possible learning disabilities. And don't forget that special education has always been unpopular with certain political groups on both the right and the left--which can worsen the situation in some areas.

In re: adjusting instruction to different levels of skill. Nobody has yet figured out a way to do this without losing a good chunk of the class to either boredom or frustration. At some levels, it's possible if there is an instructional aide, or time for the teacher to do one-on-one instruction, or the opportunity for some advanced children to spend part of the day in other classrooms. However, if you're in a "teach-to-the-test" school district, don't bet on any of these options being remotely possible.
posted by thomas j wise at 1:22 PM on December 2, 2001


The main reason individual merit pay fails in the teaching setting is that teaching is a collborative effort, and a profession that requires individuals to work together to achieve their goal, educating children. Individual merit pay systems have, in practice, created only incentives to grade inflation, lack of collegiality, cheating, and test fixing. The grades look better, but the kids don't learn.

The teaching process is not like that of writing a computer program, where the programmer has a very large degree of control over the variables of the job. Teachers have a set of state mandated standards to which they must educate their children. In most instances, they are not provided with the tools to do so. It's like trying to write a program without a computer. You can only get so far.

School based merit pay programs have historically worked better because they reward the collaborative process that needs to go on in schools. Teachers and administrators are rewarded for working together and achieving real results that are measured by external, state mandated standards.
posted by faith at 2:33 PM on December 2, 2001


Most professional programmers do not have a large degree of control over their job. Requirements and specifications are constantly in flux. The narrow act of programming is usually solitary, but a programmer's job is very team-oriented, and the delivery of a software product requires the cooperation of many individuals on many different teams.

If you narrowly define "merit pay" as compensation based on a (deceptively) easy to quantify metric, then sure it does work. Not for teaching, not for most jobs.

School based merit pay is a good idea, but it's a fairly weak incentive, much like profit sharing in a for-profit business. Managers should be compensated based on how well their department is doing (principals and district administrators in the case of schools), individual contributors (teachers in the case of schools) based on manegerial evaluation. This keeps incentives nearest to where they'll make a difference. Works for all businesses of any size. There's no reason it can't work for schools as well.
posted by mlinksva at 6:43 PM on December 2, 2001


pay teachers what they're worth?
Most of the civil service fossils who attemted to educate me would've wound up eating out of garbage cans.
posted by jonmc at 6:59 PM on December 2, 2001


mlinksva:

Why is it so hard to work around this problem for teachers, yet so easy for most other professions with equally hard to quantify results?"

Well, I don't think I would go so far as to say it's easy to work around the problem in other fields, but the fundamental reason why education performance is harder to measure than programming is that in any business environment, there's a bottom line -- how much money ends up in the corporation's bank account -- that's easy to measure. Most of the time, there are also more immediate more-or-less easy-to-evaluate objectives: does the program work? Was it over budget? How well did it sell? Did a programmer go over time or deliver a bad (slow/buggy/ugly/hard to use) functional unit? These things are easy to tell.

In teaching, though, there's no agreement as to what successful teaching looks like. What's the baseline? Somebody just sitting down and talking to all the graduating seniors and seeing if they're smart or not? Giving a big standardized test? Asking them to self-report? Hell, why don't we get all capitalist and just ask how much money they make in their first 5 years after a terminal degree?

Those are all flawed measures, though, and I can't see how it would be possible to create one that wasn't. So if we can't even tell how well the children were educated by the time they graduate (or any other time, really), and that's the entire goal of the system, then how can we evaluate the performance of any individuals in it, even heuristically? Any judgement we make, someone can just turn around and say, "related to what?"

I know that up until this point I've sounded like a real anti-performance-based zealot, but I should point out that this is a conclusion I would be happy to be wrong about. I actually would really love for there to be some way for us to use some great criterion that would order all teachers by effectiveness -- if we could, I would be all for paying each and every one in exact proportion to that number. I certainly don't object to putting a fire under people's butts. In fact, I'm also pro-standardized testing (with a big caveat that it should absolutely never be directly tied to any kind of funding) and pro-standardized curricula, and I think that most education research done in the past few decades is bad for education and the product of bad thinkers. I'm kind of an education curmudgeon, when it comes down to it. It's just that I can't see any way for this one particular thing, measuring teacher performance, to work. I wish I could.
posted by jacobm at 12:03 AM on December 3, 2001


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