Merit-Based Pay

BY LESLIE McCRACKEN

Merit Based Pay- Trying to Make Sense out of Bureaucratic Dollars

“Teachers should be treated ‘like the professionals they are while also [being held] more accountable. Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools….’ It’s time to start rewarding good teachers, [and] stop making excuses for bad ones.” -President Barack Obama, March 2009

We can all reflect back to a time in college when we were wrangled into some group project, and irrespective of the varying degrees of effort contributed by each individual, all involved received the same score–good–bad–or unfair.   If you were considered the group ‘slacker’, then chances are you benefited a bit more than the group members who stayed up all night making sure things got done.  But if you are the group dynamo, then you may feel a bit slighted.  This depiction of receiving the same compensation as it were, for varying degrees of effort is the building block of a debate that has been circulating the globe for years.  This debate is about Merit Pay, which, it could be argued, is just a standard case of collective effort, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts–even if those parts contributed differently to the whole? Or it could be a case of unequal distribution of merit to those who don’t deserve it.

Recently, this concept of being incentivized or paid for performance (known as Merit Pay) has been stirring around the issue of education reform.  As one can imagine, this debate is riddled with opinions and sides that would take longer than we have to address.  But the root of the issue is essentially is this type of performance incentivizing fair?

Merit pay programs, which base compensation for teachers on their classroom performance rather than their seniority and academic degrees, found some support in the 1980s among policy makers and school administrators, who saw it as a way to encourage good teachers to work harder and to weed out those deemed ‘unsatisfactory’. Proponents of Merit pay believe that this model will prove successful in terms of increasing student achievement and rewarding teachers for their academic competency.  While opponents argue that merit pay increases teacher competition and think that the measuring criterion, which is predominately based on the students’ standardized test scores, do not accurately assess teacher performance or student aptitude.   Some even suggest that this approach is a thinly veneered gimmick used to reward teachers based on favoritism.

At the intersection of both sides of the argument stands the fundamental desire for academic accountability.  Most would agree that imbedding methods for evaluating teaching effectiveness, and increasing salaries or providing bonuses based on strong academic performance does indeed provide teachers great incentive to execute at a higher level.  However, the ways in which one measures student and teacher successes are a great source of discussion–and in some cases contention.  While this issue has long been dormant within the creases of policy formation in American education, the resurgence of educational reform by President Obama has propelled this issue back to the pinnacle of the discussion pile.  And what an attention-grabbing pile it is.

Since taking office, President Obama has indicated a strong desire to improve teacher quality in the public schools, mostly through reforming teacher compensation.  This has reinvigorated the merit pay debate, with various groups taking a side. The National Education Association, for example, has opposed merit pay, while the United Federation of Teachers supports the idea. There are many questions and sub-debates spawning from this discussion, which continue churning out multiple concerns. Does merit-based pay improve education? Does it improve the quality of teaching by incentivizing hard work? Does it help attract and retain quality teachers and weed out bad teachers? Does merit pay take the fun and passion out of teaching and over-focus it on measures? Does it create undesirable competition between teachers and undercut cooperation? Can teacher merit be successfully measured? Or does varying student performance get in the way? Does it fall prey to principal cronyism? Does it encourage teachers to cheat to enhance student standardized test scores? If teachers should be paid more in general, is merit pay the best way to do it? Is merit pay for teachers good education policy?  While these questions seem as deep as Alice’s rabbit hole, the question becomes, will there ever be a way for all teachers and policy makers to find a happy medium?

Traditionally, School districts have paid teachers according to the “single salary” schedule which is a fixed pay schedule based primarily on education and years of experience. Among education reformers, they suggest a new conventional wisdom has emerged that suggests that this system is obsolete.

School reform efforts in the United States have increasingly come to focus on the identification, recruitment, motivation, and retention of highly effective teachers. This renewed emphasis on teaching and the teaching profession came to national awareness when, in 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced it was phasing out its large investment in small high schools, and instead turning its attention toward teacher quality. Furthermore, President Obama has announced his intention to significantly expand performance-based pay through the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which would, under his proposal, increase in size from $97 to $483 million dollars.

One key challenge of merit pay is finding a way to measure performance. We all know some amazing teachers who make a dramatic impact on their students’ lives. But can one with relative accuracy rate teaching successes (or failures) based on standardized test scores?  Teachers cannot make students perform well on standardized tests. Sure, they can teach the material and attempt to motivate the class, but there are countless other factors affecting students’ test scores.  While many believe that teachers must retain a level of liability in terms of teaching, others argue that the measures in place to determine such successes are erroneous.

Shannan Wynn (English) and Carlton Davenport (Math) have both taught in middle schools in lower income public schools in the greater Los Angeles school district.  They state, “We’ve dealt with students who’ve come to school hungry, cold, or even dirty– some hadn’t slept because of family and home life issues.  Shannan further states, “I’ve had children come to school begging for lunch money and asking if they can take a nap in my car during their lunch break, some of these children have real problems at home.” Carlton notes “Some of these kids are just trying to figure out how to survive through the day, and many find it extremely hard to focus in classroom environments.  Some of these young students, troubled by economic and basic survival issues are expected to perform unilaterally on standardized tests.” And while many students don’t have the extreme home life issues described above, there are varying degrees of peer and social pressures that can contribute to lack of focus for all students.  And as Carlton Davenport put it, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”  In this case, would Merit pay potentially coerce dedicated teachers to leave these types of schools and commit to those who offer merit pay or incentivize?

According to proponents of  Merit pay  they suggest that, in an effort to retain “quality” teachers, they must be paid more money and further argue that Merit pay helps attract and keep quality teachers, improves teaching and student learning and gives teachers an incentive to work harder.  According to a survey by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Sandra Feldman said, “Teachers need more money, and salaries must at least become competitive to attract and keep quality teachers.”  Reformers also argue that traditional systems fail to attract our best college graduates into teaching and provide practicing teachers no incentives to produce results. As we can see, this issue is saturated with pros and cons.

Another key point of contention within this debate is the fact that teachers can be incentivized, yet students cannot.  It’s been argued by the education portal that teachers only have so much control over how much and how fast a child can learn. Even if they are willing to go the extra mile, state law may not allow them to do so. For example, in California, teachers cannot require students to stay after class or school to get help. The main factor then becomes the students’ willingness to learn. Teachers can do everything in their power to engage their students and make learning fun, but some students are simply not interested. Another variable beyond a teacher’s control is each student’s intellectual ability.

It has been stated that student performance does not demonstrate teacher performance. and that there are several problems with basing teacher salaries on student performance. There are too many other variables besides teacher effort that determine an individual’s and a class’ performance.

The final synopsis of all these could come down to this: Is Teacher merit too hard to measure for merit-pay to be fair.  One of the problem with merit-based pay is that there’s no consistent way to measure performance.  Teaching is more art than a science and  each student is different, with a unique perspective, background, learning style, and, more importantly, pace of development. To penalize a teacher for having a group of students who develop slower than others is not fair; and no matter how good the teacher is, there’s no way to force a child to develop faster than they’re intellectually capable.

These arguments support the notion that that education reform is at the precipice of change, and that the traditional systems in place are in need of major adjustments.  Clearly, rewarding teachers for their efforts is at the forefront of this change, but should tenure, accolades and accomplishments overshadow a teachers’ ability to teach effectively? And furthermore, will merit pay programs promote the development of a non-competitive environment among teachers, one that fosters student development rather than a race for personal and financial gain?

For years, the unionized teaching profession opposed few ideas more vehemently than merit pay, but those objections appear to be eroding as school districts in dozens of states experiment with plans that compensate teachers partly based on classroom performance.

The positions of the two national teachers’ unions diverge on merit pay. The National Education Association, the larger of the two, has adopted a resolution that labels merit pay, or any other pay system based on an evaluation of teachers’ performance, as “inappropriate.”  While it encourages efforts to raise teaching quality and endorse arrangements that reward teams of teachers whose students show outstanding achievement growth.  On the other end of the spectrum, the American Federation of Teachers says it opposes plans that allow administrators exclusively to decide which teachers get extra money or that pay individual teachers based solely on how students perform on standardized test scores, which they consider unreliable.

A study compiled by Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives researchers found that students in classrooms where teachers received bonuses saw the same gains as the classes where educators got no incentive.  While the U.S. Department of Education called Vanderbilt’s study too narrowly focused. “It only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder,” said Sandra Abrevaya, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education. “What we are trying to do is change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better while rewarding and incentivizing the best to teach in high need schools, hard to staff subjects.” While the traditional District pay scale is measured by seniority, academic accomplishments, and years of service, this system is motivationally based–unfortunately, the motivation does not rest exclusively on the shoulders of teachers.

The discussion of whether or not merit based pay is fair or not could be around as long as education itself.  But inevitably the answer lies somewhere at the intersection between the pay-for-performance structures and traditional single-salary schedules, where accountability is carefully comingled with pay based on student outcomes.

Above all, students and teachers working together to rise to the challenge of mutual accountability and the assurance that the students get the education they deserve and teachers, are motivated and compensated for their efforts.