Today the Washington Post presents an article about Barack Obama's tentative, almost under the table, discussion of applying merit pay to school teachers. As bad ideas go, this one needs to be exposed - again.
What does a politician know about what makes a good teacher different from an adequate teacher? (Bad ones can be identified, and should be generally removed from teaching quickly.) But to apply merit pay, it is necessary to understand the processes that lead to successful outcomes, measure those outcomes along with the inputs and the application of the processes, then link improved outcomes to the level of better application of the process that achieved those outcomes. This requires effective and reliable measurements of the inputs to the process, measures of how well the process is applied, and effective measures of what parts of the outcomes were successful as a result of better inputs and application of the process. Education does NOT fit this model. Such effective and reliable measures which can be applied in any given year do not exist.
How do you measure a process when you do not have good measures of where students start from and what the problems students (and their teachers) have to surmount in order for students to learn successfully? Then how do you measure all of the important outcomes of the teaching/learning process and separate those outcomes that were a result of better teaching, let alone identify which teacher or teachers actually did the better teaching? Only after these measurements are made and linked to each other can the rate of pay for individual teachers be effectively linked to teaching outcomes.
In addition, is success in teaching is an individual or a group process? If it is even substantially a group process, who belongs in the group? If successful outcomes result in more pay, how much of the increased pay is a result of group effort and how much of the efforts of individual teachers. Student outcomes are not widgets, to be measured by the quality control committee as each of thousands of identical widgets flow off the end of an assembly line. Sales and economic processes can be measured to some degree of success because the economic transaction of buying and selling goods and services creates a (roughly) measurable dollar value that be used to compare outcomes. There is no such value-measuring set of transactions that can be used to compare educational outcomes.
None of the teaching/learning processes are really understood nor at this time can they be effectively measured. Yet somehow politicians want to reward good teachers and punish failed ones by tying pay rates to these poorly understood processes and their outcomes. Teachers need to make the job of educating students their first priority. When they make increasing their paychecks their first priority, they are shortchanging the students. Teachers need to focus on teaching students, not satisfying some committee or supervisor to get a bigger check. The shift in focus from the students invariably short-changes the students. There are too many ways to game the system to increase paycheck. The teaching energies and efforts should not be misdirected into increasing paychecks over actual education efforts.
I'll buy measuring schools to determine which provide effective teaching to the students and which provide patronage jobs to the lackey's of politicians. That can and must be measured. I can even buy tying a part of the pay for top administrators to the performance of the students in their schools. But when you get down into the actual teaching/learning process in most schools, even the people who are working there rarely understand what is happening well enough to tie the amounts paid to outcomes or who is responsible for successes and who is responsible for failures. Attempts to measure these things invariably result in administrators who game the measurement process because no one really knows what to do to really change the outcomes. This has been the source of much of the failure of "No Child Left Behind." NCLB has collapsed on the issue of paying for testing students and teaching-to-the-test rather than educating them.
Not that there isn't some value in paying different rates to different teachers sometimes. More should be paid for teaching difficult subjects and for teaching in difficult circumstances, but tying paychecks to student educational outcomes is in fact a fool's errand, even for professionals. Not enough is really known about what education really is. Politicians need to butt out.
No comments:
Post a Comment