The EDifierApril 8, 2010 Yesterday, the Washington Post announced that, after two years of negotiation, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the Washington Teachers’ Union had reached tentative agreement on a new contract.
In that contract was an agreement for “a voluntary pay-for-performance program that will allow teachers to earn annual bonuses for student growth on standardized tests and other measures of academic success.”
I’m sure the program has yet to be developed, but two things are encouraging about that sentence. For one, it talks about student growth, not simply student test scores. Second, since it’s a voluntary program, it’s obvious that the program looks for teacher buy-in.
Pay-for-performance plans are a hot topic right now. The two features I mentioned above are two of the few things we know about what makes them successful. But how much more do we know about whether they really work? Read our full report, “Promise or peril? Teacher pay for performance.” –Rebecca St. Andrie
March 18, 2010 The time has finally come. Earlier this week President Obama sent his “blueprint” to revise the No Child Left Behind Act up to Capital Hill. The major shift in accountability is the proposal to move from expecting students to be “proficient” by 2014 to the expectation students will be “college- and career-ready” by 2020.
Furthermore, the blueprint proposes schools be evaluated beyond the percent of students passing a test in a single year by allowing schools to be judged on the amount of growth their students have made over time as well as how many students earned a high school diploma. However, it isn’t clear if schools would receive credit for those students who take more than four years to graduate high school.
The blueprint also focused on teachers by significantly reworking NCLB’s teacher quality provisions. Instead of evaluating teachers based on qualifications, the blueprint would require states to develop an evaluation system to identify effective teachers. There is also a provision to provide incentives for states and districts to pay teachers based on their performance.
The blueprint is quite general, so it is far too early to determine if the proposed new federal accountability system will better, worse, or just different from NCLB. However, during these months as Congress and administration start putting the details together, check out the research behind many of their ideas so you can be an informed advocate for an accountability system that will help ensure more students are prepared for the 21st Century. Just click on the links above to get a quick summary of what the research says about these important educational areas. –Jim Hull
November 11, 2009 On Monday I attended the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Education and Workforce Summit, where they released the second installment of their Leaders and Laggards report. The Chamber released the first installment two years ago which graded states on their education achievement. This installment, however, graded each state on their educational innovation in eight categories using 47 indicators.
The categories include:
- School management
- Finance
- Staffing: Hiring and evaluation
- Staffing: Removing ineffective teachers
- Data
- Technology
- Pipeline to postsecondary
- State reform environment
For each of these categories states were given a grade (A – F), mainly on the basis of whether a state had implemented a policy or not. In most of the cases, it didn’t matter if the policy was effective, it just mattered if there was one in place.
For example, part of a state’s Finance grade was based on whether states allow teachers to be paid based on their performance. However, the Center’s Teacher pay for performance report shows that such pay for performance plans have shown only modest gains in student achievement and that there is little evidence yet on what type of rewards are most effective.
Furthermore, the Center’s Wanted: Good teachers report also points out that the impact of alternative certification programs are quite mixed. Yet, part of each state’s Staffing: Hiring and Evaluation grade is based on the percent of teachers who entered the profession through an alternative certification program regardless of its quality. So the grades in these areas do not necessarily represent how effective state policies are at improving student learning.
Yes, our schools do need to be innovative. But just implementing policies with no track record of improving student learning isn’t exactly innovative. As a matter of fact, it is something that has been done for far too long in education.
What would be truly innovative is if states were graded on how successful they were at scaling up successful programs and eliminating those programs that aren’t effective. Another truly innovative approach to grading states and our schools would be to grade them on how much they improved their student’s learning. The Chamber didn’t give grades for either of these measures in either installment of their report. –Jim Hull
August 28, 2009 “Salary commensurate with education and experience.” We’re all used to reading that phrase, right? Therefore, it seems logical — or at least the way the world works — that teachers with a master’s degree should earn more than those without.
A new brief from the Center for American Progress, “Separation of Degrees: State-by-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees,” by Marguerite Rosa and Raegan Miller, urges states to stop this practice. Since master’s degrees in education (which are the majority of master’s earned by teachers) have no effect on student performance, they argue, this “makes little sense from a strategic point of view.”
Though there’s much variation, Rosa and Miller calculate that the master’s salary bump costs the average school district $174 per pupil. In the current economy, that may look like too much to some school districts.
Divorcing teachers’ salaries from education level, even a little bit, would be huge. But it’s just another indication that we may need to examine pay-for-performance plans, because it sure seems the concept keeps coming up. –Rebecca St. Andrie
July 30, 2009 At long last, the guidelines for the Race to the Top funds were announced by President and Secretary Duncan this past Friday. The funds, billed as the “largest-ever federal investment in education reform” by Secretary Duncan, are meant to urge states to :
- ease restrictions on charter schools,
- link teacher pay to student achievement, and
- adopt common national standards.
The EDifier wrote earlier this week about the common standards CCSSO and NGA have been putting together. Today we take on linking teacher pay to student achievement, a.k.a. performance pay—also formerly known as merit pay.
Teachers should get paid for their performance. Who can argue with that? Ah, but of course this is education. What sounds like common sense in theory is much more complicated in practice. It’s not that it is impossible; some districts, like Denver, have been successful at implementing a pay for performance program. But in many other district and states, pay for performance plans have fallen flat. Paying teachers for performance is easier said than done.
But it can be done. Keep in mind, however, that one size certainly does not fit all. Much will depend on the achievement level of your students, the makeup of your teaching staff, the goal of the pay for performance plan, the culture of your school district and the data available about teacher performance.
One piece of data that some districts are collecting now to make pay for performance fairer is teacher value-added data. This is data that uses gains in student test scores to isolate the impact an individual teacher has on student achievement over the school year. This is much fairer than previous plans, which based their evaluation of teacher performance on student test scores at a single point in time. This led to teachers who had the highest-performing students entering their class being recognized as high performing, eliminating teachers who may have had lower-achieving students entering their class and making dramatic gains.
Is value-added data the answer? It’s not a silver bullet, but it is a significant piece of the puzzle when trying to identify the best teachers for performance rewards. But it is just that, one piece of the puzzle. No one piece of data, no matter how sophisticated, can accurately measure teacher effectiveness. So other measures, like principal evaluations and peer reviews, should be included in a pay-for-performance plan. Including multiple measures of teacher effectiveness will more accurately identify those teachers for performance rewards.
For more information on pay for performance plans, check out the Center’s report Promise or peril? And to learn more about the strength and weaknesses of value-added and other growth models (in non-technical terms!) check out the Center’s Guide to growth models.
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