By Vincent Marsala.
Many people think that applying business principles and making educators compete via stack ranking and merit pay will make education better. Even former National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said it might work, “The first thing you have to decide on is what you differentiate the pay on? Is it skills and knowledge? Is it responsibility? And as soon as you decide that answer, you have to say: How will I measure it?”
But Margaret Raymond, the founding director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, has a different opinion, “I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work.”
Raymond is correct. Merit pay and stack ranking teachers as Accomplished, Skilled, Developing, or Ineffective will fail, and Microsoft has already proven it. In Kurt Eichenwald’s August 2012 Vanity Fair article titled, “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” he said each Microsoft unit had to rank its employees on a bell curve with top, good, average, below average, and poor performers. The rankings led to in-fighting for promotions, bonuses, and/or survival because as a former software developer said, “You walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review.” As toxic as it was at Microsoft, stack ranking may be worse within schools.
First, teachers will be forced to compete against each other based on student test scores. Eventually, teachers may resent having a special needs/low performing child in class because a student’s inability to do well on tests will reflect poorly on a teacher. Adding the idea of merit pay based on test scores/evaluations, and teachers may resent these students even more. Next, when teachers work together, kids win, but teachers, just like the workers at Microsoft, are human, too. Teachers competing for the highest test score and biggest bonus will in-fight, not collaborate, and instead of freely sharing ideas, teachers, will hide them from each other and ultimately students.
All of these misguided reforms are now hurting students and things will soon get worse. Students are about to be tested more than ever, just so we can get the data needed to stack rank teachers and schools. PARCC’s newly released testing guidance to schools calls for 9¾ hours testing time for third grade, 10 hours for grades 4-5 , 10¾ hours for grades 6-8 and 11 to 11¼ hours for grades 9-12. Of course, this testing schedule does not even account for teacher created tests.
Dealing with this obvious over-testing has brought on a nonsensical answer from Ohio State Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Richard A. Ross. In order to reduce testing time, schools may do something that his own department does not recommend. His solution is shared attribution for teachers of art, music, foreign languages and some years of science and social studies. In simple terms, up to 50 percent of these teachers’ ratings, plus pay and hiring and firing decisions may be based on student tests in other subject areas, on students these teachers may have never even seen. Meanwhile, some of these subjects may no longer be taught by certified teachers if the Ohio State Board of Education has its way. The Board wants to eliminate the 5 of 8 rule that demands that school districts hire five full-time teachers in eight areas, including music, art, physical education, library science, nursing and social work, for every 1,000 students. With the dysfunction occurring at the state level because of these types of misguided reforms, is it any wonder why young people are bailing on the profession? According to the U.S. Department of Education’s estimates, teacher-preparation programs enrollments have shrunk by about 10 percent from 2004 to 2012, with California losing approximately 22,000 teacher-prep enrollments, or 53 percent, between 2008-09 and 2012-13.
Teaching is not a simple task that can be easily assessed. While on paper, stack ranking and merit pay sound fine and easy to devise, it will be a debacle. American schools are not in crisis, and collaborating, student-focused teachers are already working hard and producing great results for children every day.
Vincent E. Marsala, a National Board Certified Teacher, has taught English since 1997 in Northeast Ohio. He believes that a successful educational environment is a team effort between the community, parents, students, and school personnel.
Featured image by Austin Kirk, used with Creative Commons license.
Sources:
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/28/how-much-time-will-new-common-core-tests-take-kids-to-finish-quite-a-lot/
- http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/22/09enroll.h34.html
- http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
- http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/12/ohios_charter_school_performan.html
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/12/12/major-charter-researcher-causes-stir-with-comments-about-market-based-school-reform/
- https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/news/2013/10/25/77986/the-nations-largest-teachers-union-calls-for-revamp-of-teacher-pay-system/
- http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/01/state_superintendent_says_20_h.html
- http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/11/the_ohio_board_of_education_mu.html
Christine Langhoff
In the Feb 23 edition of The New Yorker, there’s an interview with Jonathan Ive, vice-president of design at Apple. Here’s an excerpt:
“At one of our meetings, Ive reminded me of a short article that Bono wrote about him in Time. It said, “To watch him with his workmates in the holy of holies, Apple’s design lab, or on a night out is to observe a very rare esprit de corps. They love their boss, and he loves them. What the competitors don’t seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money.” Ive, Bono’s friend, described these comments as “shockingly perceptive”—which is an unusual response to praise, even shared praise. But the strength, and the professional advantage, of the team’s solidarity is one of Ive’s recurring themes.”
What the merit campaign doesn’t get is “you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money”.
In the first place the reformsters don’t think teachers are smart, at all. In the second place, we’re talking pennies when it comes to bonus money. (See Mercedes Schneider’s $435 reward recounted in the NYT!)
So Apple didn’t choose to rank and stack its employees, creating divisiveness and mistrust. Microsoft has had a terrible run and Apple has a stock-market valuation of close to three quarters of a trillion dollars.
Maybe we could take a lesson from this business?
howardat58
And regarding test scores and validity I have just read “Making the Grades”, by Todd Farley. Should be compulsory reading for politicians, those that can read, at least.
Ray Brown
Dennis Van Roekel thinks that merit pay might be a good idea? What kind of evaluation percentage should teachers get, based on their scores, 20%, 30%, 40%? This article shows the misery this merit pay caused at Microsoft. What is he thinking? I’m not surprised! My dad worked for a real union, the ILWU, or for those not familiar with a real union, like so many of us teachers, it is the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. My dad worked for a great union that had his back. How many of us teachers feel that our union has our back? We could have done a hell of a job of trying to prevent NCLB and now, Common Core, which is NCLB on steroids, if we had union presidents who thought like the presidents of great unions. I feel now, many of us teachers feel isolated and how much more with this anti union garbage of merit pay? This will weaken our already weakened union. Im totally disgusted! !
Erik Mears
http://provocationsblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/bad-reformer-ideas-merit-pay-grows-on.html