A further conversation on merit pay

A friend from highschool who's currently working in the ed policy field in DC wrote me yesterday about my post on merit pay:

My objection to the notion is an ethical one. How do you say to a parent, "sorry but your kid's teacher this year has lower merit than his peers' teacher." If that were my kid, I would be pissed. And building that structure into the system is asking for seas of letters from angry parents, and probably lawyers too. You would have to have a totally random placement system, which would take the flexibility away from administrators to match kids with teachers, and even a random system would probably still get push back from overbaring parents.

If we are supposed to be holding all teachers to the same standard of excellence and expecting them to do the same job, it seems unethical to pay one more than the other. Year end bonuses would be different, because it rewards performance in the short term but doesn't effect the underlying salary structure, but that doesn't seem to be the proposal, at least here in DC.

Ultimately, I think the solution is to create more and better professional pathways for teachers. If a teacher is great, they ought to take on more responsibility (providing training, support and professional development for new or struggling teachers). This would create the incentive to stay in the profession and help reform bad teachers, before Pres. Obama kicks them to the curb. And if they don't get better, the curb is where they belong. I'm sure you sucked as a teacher your first day/week/month as a teacher... I know I did! But, as a part of Teach for America, you had way more support right out of the blocks than most new teachers ever get. The problem now is that teachers are allowed to suck for their whole careers without support to get better or consequences for not getting any better. And these teachers are more common in low performing schools than high-performing ones.

I think the subtext of merit pay (and high-stakes testing) is that if teachers (students) have more incentive to work hard, they'll get better. This is, at best, an incomplete representation of the issue. It's an old Oswego County expression, "you don't fatten a hog by weighing it." If you want to change the outcomes, you have to change the inputs, not just change the way you measure outcomes. If you want teachers to get better, start by changing the way they are trained and supported.

I agree that officially labelling one teacher as "excellent" and another as "not excellent" would have serious public relations, and perhaps legal problems. It would not, however, change the underlying situation- that some kids randomly get good teachers and some get terrible teachers. I think he's right that shifting merit pay into a bonus system would work better from this standpoint- teachers aren't permanently "good" or "bad", but "did well last year."

He's also right that this isn't the entire solution. One of the reasons I'm no longer in teaching is that the idea of teaching the same prep 5 times a day for 30 years held no interest for me, and there wasn't a natural pathway for development to take on new responsibilities. I think my Dad would have been more interested in sticking around and teaching 5th grade longer if he had been spending most of his time in a mentoring role instead of doing essentially the same job he had when he started teaching in the 70s.

I don't necessarily agree that additional support and training is enough. It gets you part of the way there, by helping teachers who start off being terrible (which I most definitely was) get better. The problem is that there are too many people in the profession who, even with a lot of support, are not going to ever be very good teachers because they don't care about the subject matter, they don't read or learn new things themselves, or just aren't smart or hard-working enough. On top of that, a lot of smart, committed, well-read, hard-working people leave teaching because there's no professional advancement and the pay is significantly less than what they can get in other fields. I think merit pay is to some degree a pathway to ultimately professionalizing teaching to create a self-reinforcing system where most/all teachers are highly paid because most or all of them deserve to be highly paid. One of the big problems with raising pay for teachers now is that too many taxpayers know, have had, or have kids who have had a lousy teacher, and they can't stand the idea of that lousy teacher getting more money.

His response:

I think we are in agreement that the ultimate goal is not just to reward good teachers but to improve the quality of teaching overall. My wife is a medical resident and having her go through the process is usually infuriating, due to the amount of time she spends working, but seeing the amount of support she gets seems exactly appropriate. Practicing medicine is high-stakes... and so is teaching. There is recent research that says that if a kid gets two bad teachers in a row, they rarely recover academically. I'm not sure what you do about the bad teachers we have now (other that try to help them get better or fire them), but I think the public policy goal should be to make sure that new teachers entering the profession are substantially better prepared on day 1 and substantially better supported throughout their careers. We should view new teachers as apprentices, not as masters. And excellent veteran teachers should be sharing their expertise. The role as a master teacher would be earned and rewarded with better pay. This system would be well-defined, meritocratic and, most importantly, fair to children.