At its most potentially destructive, the worst possible outcome of a pay-for-performance culture in a school or even school district is that it creates the potential to pit employees against each other and lead to a mercenary and competitive environment. In the end, 59 per cent of union members voted in favour of ProComp. The net result of all this? So what is the moral of the story?
Given that it is irrefutable that better teaching produces better student results, teacher compensation, like compensation in the public sector, should be geared to attracting and keeping only the best and brightest. Join our Newsletter. Share on Facebook. Rewarding credits incentivizes teachers to invest their time and energy in coursework rather than in their teaching.
The connection between coursework and classroom practices is often negligible. We lack teacher career tracks that compete financially with the lure of becoming a school administrator. In most places now, the pathway to higher compensation eventually leads out of the classroom. Ideally, a performance pay system would address these shortcomings. And it would encourage more skilled, passionate teachers to stay in teaching, rather than leave for higher status positions away from classrooms.
The Denver system, ProComp, once seemed like a promising example of innovation in teacher pay structure. And they went on strike to change it. ProComp had created a slew of unintended consequences.
While base pay was stagnant, it offered bonuses—but those were moving targets from year to year. Lots of damage to staff cohesiveness. Teachers can earn promotions in these systems, which include significant salary bumps. But most schools implement these plans with the same funding as district schools, and have to remove a benefit or make another significant trade-off in order to fund these higher salaries. Funding limitations also mean that there might be an undisclosed cap on the number of promotions possible.
Education is considered the key to opportunity, and yet teachers are systematically undervalued. According to a recent article on teacher salaries in Time magazine , the discrepancy between teacher pay and that of comparably educated professionals is To risk stability in a climate like that is dangerous, as results so far have shown.
It dares us to compete with one another for crumbs. Instead, we need a bold move toward pay equity for teachers. This will necessitate an adjustment in school funding and tax structures. Strike wins have made this more of a reality in some states. Last year in Oklahoma, the state legislature passed the first tax increase in almost three decades to give teachers a raise; recently in Denver, the district eliminated some central office positions and cut bonuses for executives to increase teacher salaries across the board.
During the midterm elections, a few gubernatorial candidates proposed tax increases to fund teacher salaries. Though both of these candidates lost their races, they offered solutions that states could build from going forward. Until teachers are paid a base salary on par with workers in male-dominated professions, any experiments in merit pay will ultimately fail.
But if we start from a place of equity, performance pay could, one day, fulfill its promise: to encourage teachers to stay in their classrooms, build their skill sets, and become leaders in a most valuable profession. Pay for performance pressures teachers to teach to the test rather than provide students with a more holistic education.
This means not only limiting the content they teach exclusively to what will appear on standardized assessments, but also spending a lot of time teaching their students test-taking strategies, such as how to interpret and follow test directions and how to select the correct answers on multiple-choice questions. The focus and pressure on teaching to the test is compounded when teachers know their salaries will be directly impacted by their students' test scores.
For these reasons, droves of quality teachers have in good conscience walked away from districts that utilize the pay for performance model to teach elsewhere.
Do test scores truly indicate how well students learn? Furthermore, are they indicative of how well teachers teach? Because formal teacher evaluations normally still play a part in the pay for performance model, the same teachers who have no qualms about teaching to the test in order to secure higher student test scores and thereby increase their pay are often the teachers who know how to play the game to attain higher formal evaluation ratings.
Since teacher evaluation ratings are usually highly subjective, it's not difficult for these teachers to negotiate, debate, and even insist that their evaluation scores be raised to what they want. Self-reflective and conscientious teachers are more likely to accept the evaluation scores they are given rather than debate them, and as a result are less likely to receive an increase in their pay.
Should teachers be held responsible for how intrinsically motivated their students are to learn? Teachers should not be held accountable for student performance on standardized tests due to factors beyond their control, such as how many hours of sleep students get the night before a test or how intrinsically motivated students are to perform well on tests.
Student scores as measured on standardized tests are hardly an indicator of teacher effectiveness. Many argue that high standardized test scores merely indicate that students have mastered how to successfully pass standardized tests rather than demonstrate how much knowledge they have learned or will retain in years to come.
Good teachers recognize this, as well as the fact that students need to learn practical life skills that are not covered on standardized tests, such as the ability to think critically, think outside the box, and utilize their creativity in productive and meaningful ways. The teacher pay for performance model places too much emphasis on assessments that don't help students succeed in life, and then punishes teachers when students don't meet the desired outcome on these tests. School districts that utilize the merit pay model lose droves of teachers which costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly.
Although some of the teachers who leave may arguably be less effective educators, in which case the performance pay model can claim to have succeeded in accomplishing its intended goal, many of the teachers who leave are effective educators who simply won't work under this system.
Moreover, research shows that student achievement is negatively impacted by high teacher turnover, which poses yet another challenge for districts as it results in even more money being invested in resources and school programs to bridge the widened student achievement gap caused by high teacher turnover. Teacher pay for performance is a desperate attempt by school districts to raise student test scores.
While the teacher performance pay model may weed out some ineffective educators, it also drives many effective teachers away from the profession while retaining many who know how to work the system in order to earn a higher salary and who don't always have students' best interests in mind.
Thanks for your comments, Dora. Performance pay continues to be a highly controversial topic in education and one of the many big questions is: How much can educators control how well students perform on tests? Thanks for sharing these insights on Pay for Performance in Education. The points are all good.
Number 8 is worth serious consideration. Thanks for your comment, Stephanie.
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