Though everyone's sure to be blogging about this one, I couldn't help but jump on the bandwagon to mention something so worthy of enthusiasm. The Center for Teacher Quality has just come out with a report on teacher pay, which among other things advocates a salary range from $30K - $130K for teachers, incentives to work in high-poverty schools, performance pay for individual teachers and small groups of teachers who work collaboratively, and creating a career ladder with novice, professional, and expert designations for teachers----with corresponding levels of pay, responsibility, and authority. The study was led by an diverse group of 18 effective teachers, giving its conclusions that much more legitimacy.
What's great about this study is not just that it advocates things like performance pay and challenge pay--which are easy to advocate, but harder to implement--but that it puts enough nuance into its formulation of these ideas to offer some usable solutions. For example, one of the most frequent criticisms of performance pay is that it sets teachers in competition with each other and undermines the collaboration and teamwork necessary to good teaching. Though this argument can be overblown, some common, but ill-conceived formulations of performance pay, such as Florida's recent attempts, do produce irrational results. Florida offered performance bonuses to the top 25% of teachers in every school. Certainly this does de-incentivize the sharing of instructional know-how that would help fellow teachers advance to top performance, because if you help others rise they might surpass you and jeopardize your bonus. Likewise the Florida plan simultaneously rewards tons of bad teachers--even if every teacher is terrible in a school someone is definitionally going to be in the top 25%--and neglects very good teachers who teach in schools full of very good and some truly outstanding teachers.
And regardless of whether these problems turn out to be big or small, the perception among teachers that performance pay is against, not for, them is as much of problem as are the purported consequences of such programs on teacher collaboration and the inaccurracy of the program in recognizing success. The point of performance bonuses is to motivate teachers to perform better, recognize teachers who do, and retain quality teachers in the school system. In other words we want happy, hard-working teachers. If even great teachers distrust performance pay because of the way its designed, the program will be fail to motivate or retain. And if the average teacher, who is neither amazing nor incompetent, is pissed off about it you are not helping motivation or retention among the vast majority of teachers.
A typical approach some have proposed to these problems is school-wide bonuses for student achievement. But this idea just sets up a typical prisoner's dilemma system of incentives. If I work hard and no one else does I get no bonus. If everyone else works hard and I don't I still get a reward. So what incentive (other than the intrinsic ones, which existed prior to the peformanc pay program) would motivate me to work any harder? Collective accountability rarely produces incentives for individuals. Also, schoolwide bonuses often include all staff, administrators, secretaries, janitors etc. While I have any objection to paying the lunch lady well, but no amount you put in her pocket is going to raise student achievement.
But the CTQ recommendation heads objections off at the pass. By allowing all teachers to be eligible to receive bonuses based on absolute not relative performance it undercuts the harmful competition argument. And by offering bonuses for collaborative teams of teachers based on the performance of the students they teach together, it actually incentivizes the sharing of best practices and mutual support that opponents say peformance pay undermines. And pay for small teams minimizes if not eliminates the collective action problems associated with school-wide programs. As astute students of collective action know small groups create a regularized flow of communication about participation in group activities and relationship-based accountability for group success. Lastly, small-groups provide opportunities for leadership among a much broader range of school staff, and most importantly among staff who are still anchored in the classroom unlike most school administrators.
A combination of universal eligibility-bonuses for individuals and small, collaborative groups is simple elegant solution to one element of the problem of building teacher buy-in for performance pay. Read the full report for a treasure trove of such ideas. Kudos.
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A NEW WAY TO SUPPORT & REWARD TEACHING 07/07/07
By: Gerald Dudley Ph D, partner in Career Resource Center; co-author of: www.careerfit-test.com.
Category: Education
Technology use to improve education is in an infancy stage, compared to the business community. Here are some concrete ways to better utilize technology to improve student learning and teaching efficiency.
MERIT PAY FOR IMPROVED ACADEMICS?
One enduring argument against rewarding teachers with merit pay is that it will encourage these professionals to “teach to the test”. The “test” that is the object of this constraint is the “standardized achievement test,” and it has been evolving from research results for nearly 65 years. These student-test outcomes constitute the basis for judging school performance, and even comparing public school students with their International counterparts. America is a competitive society and, no matter how much money we provide education, the competition seems to always be winning.
DO MERIT REWARDS WORK IN BUSINESS?
What about the private, entrepreneurial segments of America? Do they use rewards to recognize exemplary performance, as well as to motivate quality? One prominent performance measure in manufacturing is worker productivity. The more output a worker produces over a given time period, the higher the productivity quotient, with opportunity to increase earnings. In retail trade, customer satisfaction is a crucial measure of management focus. The healthcare sector uses trial studies to achieve success through improving patients’ quality of life and lengthening life span. As diverse as these three enterprises are, they each remain worldly competitive by reducing errors. Through research and measurement, they isolate those areas of operation where most errors occur, and initiate practices to reduce those errors, with merit rewards as the prime incentive.
Although somewhat simplistic, it might be useful to identify the proven techniques that aid these employment segments with error reduction.
Goal Setting: With a continuing process in place for isolating error prone activities, goals that are observable and specific are stated in written form and communicated to all those involved in error reduction. Vague goals are easy to reach, but useless.
Computer-aided Technology Use: Creating software and/or hardware designed for alleviating tasks of a repetitive nature usually helps in reducing errors. Precision results are more likely to occur with technology use, than when humans perform the same tasks.
Decision Making: The responsibility for problem solving is usually best vested in persons closest to the problem. If you see it, fix it. Don’t just call a specialist.
Merit Rewards: For that person who causes success above the level of expectation, their repeated performance at that level will more likely occur with merit recognition.
Entrepreneurial Competitive Support: American ingenuity remains the reason for surges in the unprecedented growth in start-up small business employment. This American service sector continues to grow, and create solutions wherever challenges exist.
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COULD MERIT REWARDS WORK IN EDUCATION?
Now, let’s examine how well these techniques are, or could, benefit public education. If the private sector finds competitive success by implementing proven approaches for error reduction, could the public sector do the same? Perhaps attention to the elements that have made our American private sector the envy of the world would do the same for education.
Let’s examine them one-by-one:
Goal Setting: This is one of the important sections of the Federal Policy “No Child Left
Behind” law. Each State is empowered with the task of writing, communicating and implementing specific, measurable student learning outcomes. This state-by-state process is moving slowly and many of the already published learning goals are not measurable, therefore no one can precisely agree if these stated student-goals have even been reached.
A practical solution to this dilemma would be an insistence that all goal statements contain action verbs that define observable human behaviors. One simple, but useful list of these verbs, arranged from simplest to most complex would be to: identify; distinguish; name; place in order; describe; contrast; state a rule; apply a rule; demonstrate; and interpret.
Not only would statements containing these verbs be observable, but they would also lead to measurability, a necessity for tracking learning progress with standardized testing.
Entrepreneurial Competitive Support: With the availability of goals containing observable academic behaviors, the task of preparing test questions focused on these outcomes becomes a precision task. Research by qualified test making companies can match questions to goals very precisely. At the present time these companies provide standardized achievement tests and scored test results.
But these results are of little use to teachers who need immediate feedback to diagnose areas for remediation. The thing that would be most useful to educators would be an Internet system that could electronically supply teachers with short classroom quizzes and instant scoring.
Unique tests of any length could be downloaded, based on the teacher’s subject choice of item characteristics, available from the test company’s large test-item database.
Other support organizations might offer a way to provide the quiz according to teacher-chosen curriculum characteristics, but with each student in the class receiving only a few questions. And each student’s questions would differ from questions of all the others in class.
When electronically graded and returned, the scoring would then cover all the questions, and a wider range of ideas, thus providing the teacher immediate feedback on reaching specific academic objectives for the whole classroom. This process has been well researched and documented for about 35 years by the independent, National Assessment Of Educational Progress.
Should the teacher find these diagnostic quiz results unsatisfactory and desire a fresh approach to teaching the concept, a database of research-proven approaches, in lesson plan format should be available by electronic means. Over the years, educational research into successful teaching approaches has been supported by government grants and contracts, but remains hidden in some government file or on some professors’ bio sheet. An entrepreneurial opportunity exists to validate and communicate these ideas; greatly assisting teachers through Internet downloads.
These are just a few ideas that should be available to help teachers reduce the errors in instructing America’s uneducated youth. The service sector is always willing, capable and ready to fill this void, and to accomplish it competitively.
Computer-Aided Technology Use: With the familiarity of Internet use by today’s educators, transition to this classroom measurement processes could occur with little training. In fact, the proliferation of software and hardware service could even assure test-item security for test manufacturers.
The service sector has a proven ability to meet this need quickly. Teachers would need log-in codes for program entry, classroom printers to download and print unique quizzes for students to answer, built in machine scoring capability to produce a classroom score and then destroy the paper tests, and database development to capture quiz and longer test results over a semester or year for teacher look-back and self-analysis.
This is just a sample of the aids a creative society could provide as assistance for our Nation’s teachers, and result in improved student academic performance.
Decision Making: It goes without saying that individual leaders manage teachers’ classrooms. Their success in fostering student academic achievements rests on their ability, training and support. Having immediate, professional feedback is much better than waiting a long time for “standardized test” results that come too late to practice remediation.
Merit Rewards: The basis for granting merit pay for exceptional performance is imbedded in the record electronically produced with each use of technology outlined in this article. It can . The private sector has shown the way!be done
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