Performance measurement and teaching: How is it changing the profession?
There is a current political movement toward merit pay for teachers (i.e., “pay for performance”) that would tie teacher compensation, retention, and advancement directly to student achievement, such as standardized test scores. Pay-for-performance advocates in education are found on both sides of the political spectrum, and even among educators themselves — most notably Geoffrey Canada, the Harlem educator whose life’s work is featured prominently in the recent documentary Waiting for 'Superman'. However, the majority of American teachers currently view the concept with suspicion. In any case, there seems to be a growing trend toward some form of merit-based pay for teachers in American public schools. The only questions are: How will it work? And can it work?
Unlike most of the private sector, public school teacher salaries are set largely by seniority and education level, rather than meeting and achieving certain objectives. Teachers’ unions often negotiate salary tables for their members with administrators and school boards, and teachers with higher levels of education and seniority are paid more, while entry-level teachers are paid far less than their most senior counterparts. However, teacher attrition rates are extremely high, with more than half of all new teachers leaving the profession within five years due to low pay and poor working conditions, according to the National Education Association — a figure that has remained constant for decades. With these statistics, few can make the argument that public school teachers are well paid. But few agree on potential solutions.
Danny Kofke is a special education teacher in suburban Atlanta, Ga., and a proponent of merit-based pay for teachers. “I’ve been teaching for almost 11 years, and I only make $41,000 a year,” he says. “I work very hard for my students, especially on improving their basic skills and achievement levels. But at the end of the year, unlike private-sector employees, I can’t take hard proof of those achievements in to my principal as justification for a raise. I get the same raise and pay as a teacher who did a poor job of teaching and whose students didn’t learn anything. That’s wrong.”
Kofke’s viewpoint is in the minority among teachers, however. According to Amanda LaPera, a former teacher in the Los Angeles public school system (she now teaches in the suburbs), “pay-for-performance” teacher compensation would unfairly penalize teachers who work in low-income districts. “I used to teach in South Central Los Angeles,” she says. “Good luck finding teachers to work in poor areas if you want to pay teachers based on test scores.” LaPera is also highly critical of the standardized tests themselves. ”I think it’s a bad idea to evaluate teachers on test scores, unless people only want teachers teaching to a test that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot,” she says. “I have students who score ‘advanced’ on English-Language Arts state standards tests but who can’t actually write at all.”
Sherry Robinson is a special education teacher who works one-on-one with at-risk students in the Jackson County Transitional Unit in McKee County, Ky., and she has very strong opinions about merit-based pay systems for teachers based on her experience with Kentucky’s former pay-for-performance program under the Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA). “The KERA program offered financial rewards to schools that met their educational goals and showed improvement.” she explains. “It was a disaster. Formerly successful schools were turned into battlegrounds. It didn’t take long for the state to do away with the concept of monetary rewards.”
For Robinson, having seen actual pay-for-performance programs in action, offering increased pay in exchange for higher student test scores is the wrong thing to do. “Money tends to bring out the ‘beast’ in people,” she says. “I have seen teachers who have cheated by falsifying tests and other things to raise the scores. I have seen fistfights among staff and teachers, careers ended, friendships ended.”
Scott Hatfield, a former science teacher from Ohio who has since left the profession in favor of a more lucrative career in the private sector, believes there are better ways to improve student achievement than tying it directly to teacher compensation. According to Hatfield, for teachers’ pay to hinge on factors outside their realm of control (like differences in students’ aptitudes or interests), would actually be detrimental to teaching. “Had my paycheck depended on factors that were not under my control, I guess I would have tried to get control of as many variables as I could,” he says. “I already had quite a few students’ parents angry with me because they felt my expectations were too high, but there would have been many more if I’d had to become a drill sergeant to guard my income.”
Hatfield goes on to say that compensating teachers based solely on their students’ standardized performance misses the point. “Paying for student performance is not the same thing as paying for teacher performance,” he says. “Students are not simply passive objects. At the end of the day, students are individuals who are not standardized. [If] an individual student’s achievement over time were one factor in measuring teacher performance, then it would make a little more sense.”
Danny Kofke’s opinions on how to implement a merit pay system for teachers mirrors Hatfield’s opinion somewhat. “I don’t think the standardized tests work well because they compare apples to oranges,” he says. “A poor inner-city district is never going to do as well as affluent district. But if you did a benchmarking system that tests individual students at the beginning and end of the school year, and measures improvements on an individual basis, that could really work.”
Kofke also suggests that teachers be evaluated more by their teaching peers, rather than top-down by administrators. “I think teacher observation and evaluation is best conducted by master teachers, not by administrators,” says Kofke. “Let the master teachers set the example and drive the improvement, and then pay them accordingly. Then there’d be no limit to what we could achieve.”
Whatever the solution to teacher pay increases might be, it is very clear that low teacher pay is driving good teachers out of the profession. “I’m glad I did teach, and I know I did manage to have a positive impact on some lives, but I’m also glad I’m no longer a teacher,” says Hatfield. “Being broke all the time is stressful! Now I use my chemistry degree in a lab, where I earn about 4.5 times what I did as a beginning teacher, doing one-fifth of the work.”
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