US Study: Merit Pay for Teachers Does Nothing

[Camikaze]

Don't know what it's like over there in North America, but in NSW at least, accreditation (and of course a DipEd) is probably going to be a better indicator of the quality of teachers than student grades are.

 

[downtown]

Don't know what it's like over there in North America, but in NSW at least, accreditation (and of course a DipEd) is probably going to be a better indicator of the quality of teachers than student grades are.

Yeah, that isn't really the case here, although I remember reading that getting National Board Certification (which is a fairly involved process above and beyond a Masters) does have some correlation. A masters degree, education major, Praxis Scores, even prestige of undergrad institute, do not seem to correlate with teacher performance.

Here is what we do know:

1) The teaching applicant pool does not consist of our strongest college students. People who enter Ed majors have some of the lowest GPAs, ACT/SAT scores, and other indications of accomplishment.
2) Education Departments have not done a great job training people to become teachers.

 

[Camikaze]

I would've thought that, given the almost infinite variables impacting on student grades, of which teacher quality is only one (although an important one), as opposed to the more straight forward relationship between accrediation and at least some aspects of teaching, it wouldn't be possible for it to be a worse metric.

Out of curiosity, when you say 'teacher performance' at the end of the first paragraph, what exactly are you referring to? Because I still don't really see how it's possible to judge such a thing at all accurately.

And on the last point; even assuming low standards, I would've thought there'd been some basic correlation between qualifications and actual performance (whatever that's determined by). I mean, there's going to be at least a small minority of teachers who have quite good qualifications, and presumably they'd be better than those with just the norm.

 

[Cutlass]

I heard a portion of something on the radio today, and I didn't hear it all clearly, so I'm not certain I have what they said right. But what I got out of it was that 5 years or so ago the idea was that the problems with schools was uninvolved families, unmotivated students, and that sort of thing, while now the focus is entirely on poor teachers.

What's the reality behind that?

 

[downtown]

I heard a portion of something on the radio today, and I didn't hear it all clearly, so I'm not certain I have what they said right. But what I got out of it was that 5 years or so ago the idea was that the problems with schools was uninvolved families, unmotivated students, and that sort of thing, while now the focus is entirely on poor teachers.

What's the reality behind that?

I think there are a couple of different reasons there. There has been research that suggests that teacher quality actually has more of an impact than poverty, class sizes, etc (a poor kid in a bad school with an outstanding teacher is probably in better shape for that year than a kid in a rich school with a bad teacher).

The other reasons are political, with the prominence of TFA, The New Teacher Project (Alt certification programs that bring Ivy-League types into the classroom), and people like Joe Klienn (NYC Schools chief) and Michelle Rhee (About to be former DC schools chief), who became famous for raising teacher pay, but also firing a lot of teachers and closing schools.

Democrats think that if they co-opt the teacher accountability thunder, they steal a possible issue from Republicans. The Obama DOE and the Bush DOE are WAY more similar than they are different.

 

[.Shane.]

I heard a portion of something on the radio today, and I didn't hear it all clearly, so I'm not certain I have what they said right. But what I got out of it was that 5 years or so ago the idea was that the problems with schools was uninvolved families, unmotivated students, and that sort of thing, while now the focus is entirely on poor teachers.

It seems to change every couple years.

I live in a very high performing school district and they continue to vacillate between OMG GIVE THE KIDS TONS OF HOMEWORK KIDS ARE NOT BEING PUSHED ENOUGH THAT'S WAY THEY SUCK and OMG WE'RE RUINING THESE KIDS BY WORKING THEM SO HARD BAN HOMEWORK

Its like they can't figure out a model that works and they keep reacting to whatever the latest trend is.

 

[downtown]

*bump*

Another Merit Pay study came out yesterday in NYC, and the results are similar to this one...no statistical evidence was produced that Merit Pay impacts student achievement.

New York City’s heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — deemed “transcendent” when it was announced in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes.

“If anything,” Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, “student achievement declined.” Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

Schools could distribute the bonus money based on individual teachers' results, but most did not. Most teachers received the average bonus of $3,000.

The program, which was first funded by private foundations and then by taxpayer dollars, also had no impact on teacher behaviors that researchers measured. These included whether teachers stayed at their schools or in the city school district and how teachers described their job satisfaction and school quality in a survey.

The program had only a “negligible” effect on a list of other measures that includes student attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and high school graduation rates, the study found.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The Bloomberg administration quietly discontinued it last year, turning back on the mayor’s early vow to expand the program quickly.

The program handed out bonuses based on the schools’ results on the city’s progress report cards. The report cards grade schools based primarily on how much progress they make in improving students’ state test scores. A so-called “compensation team” at each school decided how to distribute the money — a maximum of $3,000 per teachers union member, if the school completely met its target, and $1,500 per union member if the school improved its report card score by 75%.

The deal was seen as a landmark in 2007 when Mayor Bloomberg announced it with then-United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten by his side. “I am a capitalist, and I am in favor of incentives for individual people,” Bloomberg said then, while Weingarten emphasized that schools could decide to distribute bonuses evenly among educators. She called the program “transcendent.”

In his study, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Fryer writes that researchers were surprised to see that schools that won bonuses overwhelmingly decided to distribute the cash fairly evenly among teachers. More than 80 percent of schools that won bonuses gave the same dollar amount to almost all of the eligible educators.

Researchers were also surprised to find that middle school students actually seemed to be worse off. After three years attending schools involved in the project, middle school students’ math and English test scores declined by a statistically significant amount compared to students attending similar schools that were not part of the project.

The study adds to a research literature on teacher incentive pay that is decidedly more lukewarm than much of the popular conversation about teacher pay. Fryer, himself a strong early advocate of experimenting with financial incentives to improve student achievement, calls the literature “ambivalent.” While programs in developing countries such as India and Kenya have had positive effects, few teacher incentive pay efforts in the United States have been deemed effective.

Almost all schools gave nearly all of their teachers the same sized bonus.

Nevertheless, a person’s position on teacher merit pay has become a litmus test for her reform credentials in many education circles. During his campaign, President Obama used his support for merit pay — traditionally scorned by teachers unions — as evidence that he was willing to challenge traditional Democratic Party thinking. Now, the Obama administration has boosted support for the Teacher Incentive Fund, a program that funds local experiments in incentive pay.

What explains the discrepancy between programs in the U.S. and elsewhere? Fryer rejects several explanations. He argues that the $3,000 bonus (just 4 percent of the average annual teacher salary in the program) was not too small to make a difference, citing examples of effective programs in India and Kenya that gave out bonuses that were an even smaller proportion of teachers’ salaries. He also rejects the possibility that schools’ decisions to use group, rather than individual, incentives was the problem, citing a 2002 study of a program in Israel that used group incentives.

Instead, he says the challenge is that American plans aren’t clear about what teachers can do to receive the reward. In New York City, the bonuses didn’t come simply if students’ test scores rose; the test scores had to rise in comparison to a group of similar schools. So did other measures considered by the city report card, including the surveys that ask students, teachers, and parents for subjective opinions about schools.

Fryer argues that the complexity made it “difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to know how much effort they should exert or how that effort influences student achievement.”

http://gothamschools.org/2011/03/07/study-75m-teacher-pay-initiative-did-not-improve-achievement/

I believe that makes three studies now in major US cities that have failed to produce results (even though these programs have apparently worked in India, Israel and Kenya). Is it time to stop advocating this position? How would you tweak it?

 

[Cutlass]

It seems like they are taking a much to simplistic approach to the problem. Thinking that all of the problem is lazy teachers, and not paying attention to all of the other factors that impact how well students do. And in doing that, they really are not providing incentives to teachers, because they are holding the teachers responsible for things that they have no control over.

 

[Tani Coyote]

Perhaps we should start randomly examining homes failing students come from to see if there is any parental laziness. If so, let's start repo'ing some kids!

Sounds rather statist but in an ideal world this could be done easily.

 

[Archbob]

How long was this study done for? Merit pay versus senority pay has to be compared over several years for the system to take any effect. Just doing one year isn't going to start weeding out the underperforming teachers.

Having it be opt-in makes it totally meaningless.

 

[Quintillus]

“I personally believe that the biggest role of incentives has to do with selection of who enters and who stays in teaching—how incentives change the teaching corps through entrance and exits,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “The study has nothing to say about this.”

I think this is important. At least in the U.S., teaching is a relatively low-paying profession (below the university level), so by committing yourself to being a teaching you are accepting a relatively low salary. Those who would make good teachers might well also be able to make a good living in a higher-paying industry, so a potential very good teacher might choose another career for the more sound financial future. You could say this is good in that it means only those who are really dedicated become teachers, but I suspect you lose a lot of good teachers who simply want more financial security as well - and you replace those, in part, with people who couldn't get those better-paying jobs in industry.

Hanushek is right that the study doesn't have to do with teachers entering and exiting the trade - three years won't be enough to impact that. If the pay system were nearly all merit-based rather than seniority-based as it is now, it would allow the good teachers to get good salaries pretty quickly and make teaching a financially sound industry for the best potential teachers, while discouraging poor teachers from staying around. And that's half the problem now - you get bad teachers who stick around and get very high salaries simply because they've been there a long time, and because of the unions it's nigh-impossible to fire them.

In his study, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Fryer writes that researchers were surprised to see that schools that won bonuses overwhelmingly decided to distribute the cash fairly evenly among teachers. More than 80 percent of schools that won bonuses gave the same dollar amount to almost all of the eligible educators.

That the 'incentive pay' was distributed nearly uniformly seems like an issue to me. The whole point of incentive pay, other than increasing student learning, is to reward the good teachers and not reward the bad ones, so it shouldn't be distributed nearly evenly.

 

[Earthling]

Just doing one year isn't going to start weeding out the underperforming teachers.

This wasn't even a form of merit pay that "weeds out" teachers anyway. Wasn't implemented to any effect in hiring/firing really, just yearly bonuses.

I agree completely though, kind of a waste of time to consider this a real evaluation of the "merit pay" concept again.

 

[downtown]

How long was this study done for? Merit pay versus senority pay has to be compared over several years for the system to take any effect. Just doing one year isn't going to start weeding out the underperforming teachers.

Having it be opt-in makes it totally meaningless.

The study was over 3 school years, after which, Mayor Bloomburg decided it wasn't doing anything and ended it.

I think this is important. At least in the U.S., teaching is a relatively low-paying profession (below the university level), so by committing yourself to being a teaching you are accepting a relatively low salary. Those who would make good teachers might well also be able to make a good living in a higher-paying industry, so a potential very good teacher might choose another career for the more sound financial future. You could say this is good in that it means only those who are really dedicated become teachers, but I suspect you lose a lot of good teachers who simply want more financial security as well - and you replace those, in part, with people who couldn't get those better-paying jobs in industry.

Hanushek is right that the study doesn't have to do with teachers entering and exiting the trade - three years won't be enough to impact that. If the pay system were nearly all merit-based rather than seniority-based as it is now, it would allow the good teachers to get good salaries pretty quickly and make teaching a financially sound industry for the best potential teachers, while discouraging poor teachers from staying around. And that's half the problem now - you get bad teachers who stick around and get very high salaries simply because they've been there a long time, and because of the unions it's nigh-impossible to fire them.

Its true, neither of these studies really address the issue of people entering the profession as a result of Merit Pay. Let's be honest though...the NYC bonuses were 3,000, and I think the max Nashville bonus was 5,000. Nobody is entering the profession because of that, if $ is their primary concern. I took more than a 3,000 pay cut to leave teaching.

Nobody is really talking about doing a PURE merit system though. The only people who are really compensated that way are people who work completely on commission. I'm a corporate recruiter now, and I see a lot of qualified people avoid those jobs because they're not comfortable with that compensation package. Teachers can impact a lot of the factors with test scores, but obviously, we all know a ton of stuff goes into those numbers that teachers have nothing to do with.

The merit pay programs that are currently in effect (and there are several), or the ones that are proposed are basically variations of this same program, although some have hiring and firing tied in with it. I don't think its going to bring financially minded people in without dramatically changing compensation.

Of course, teacher compensation is now being cut pretty much all over the country, so that's prob going to help.

That the 'incentive pay' was distributed nearly uniformly seems like an issue to me. The whole point of incentive pay, other than increasing student learning, is to reward the good teachers and not reward the bad ones, so it shouldn't be distributed nearly evenly.

It didn't HAVE to be though, it was at the administrator's discretion. Most simply chose to do it that way.

 

[Silurian]

Does this lead too teaching to test

 

[Aegis]

These findings confirm my belief that overall student performance has more to do with the social atmosphere than it does teacher motivation. You cannot force kids to learn if they do not want to.

 

[Cutlass]

I'm not sure in many cases if it is "do not want to" so much as "do not see the value of it".