THERE ARE some discouraging statistics that indicate the United States may be falling behind in the quality of its K-12 schools, and with the emerging global economy, the state of our education system may be more important now than ever. Whether fueled by altruism or xenophobia, people have long been calling for reform in this area, and paying teachers according to performance is commonly discussed as a possible solution. Although the idea has not caught on in the past, the development of more sophisticated means of measuring teacher performance justifies more aggressive experimentation with the issue.
Many industries employ at least some form of merit-based compensation, so why do so many — namely teachers’ unions — oppose paying teachers for performance? The main argument against the idea is that the success of a particular teacher cannot be effectively evaluated. In “Merit Pay and the Evaluation Problem: Why Most Merit Pay Plans Fail and a Few Survive,” Richard Murnane and David Cohen argue that “the problem [with paying for performance] lies in the nature of the teaching activity itself” and point to “the lack of a blueprint for effective teaching.” The article, published in 1986, also claims that the secondary effects of the idea are socially problematic because they create inequality and unreasonable expectations.
These arguments are noteworthy but cannot be directly applied to the modern state of education. Michael Podgursky and Matthew Springer in “Teacher Performance Pay: A Review” argue that the “relevance [of Murnane and Cohen’s arguments] may be waning given the major advances in data systems being put in place in states and districts.” Podgursky and Springer note that “states and districts are rapidly developing massive longitudinal student-level databases that permit more precise estimation of value-added contributions at the building, grade, and, in a growing number of states, teacher level.” In contrast to traditional methods, these newer systems are more complex and encompass a variety of factors.
One example is the Professional Compensation for Teachers Program adopted by Denver Public Schools. According to Podgursky and Springer, this program consists of “four components that enable teachers to build earnings through ten elements, or learning opportunities, including knowledge and skills, professional evaluation, market incentives, and student growth.” Similar programs are catching on elsewhere; Albemarle Public Schools have recently established a task force to research possible performance pay systems. James Wyckoff, an economist and professor in the Curry School of Education, views the idea of using newer, more detailed systems of evaluation as “not yet ready for primetime but a promising way of thinking.”
Arguments against paying teachers for performance also underestimate the competence of teachers and school administrators. Performance pay could encourage teachers to prepare students for a test rather than provide a comprehensive background or compete for limited resources within schools. However, the vast majority of teachers want the best for their students and would feel guilty about taking advantage of the system just as any other professional would. It is impossible to completely eliminate corruption, but many public school systems are highly bureaucratic and, even without a system of performance pay in place, already contain loopholes that can be exploited.
One possible policy is rewarding entire schools or districts for improvements rather than individual teachers. This could eliminate competition within schools and would in fact encourage cooperation. Although it would be more financially burdensome to local governments, this practice could be a more economic alternative to simply raising teachers’ salaries across the board. Wyckoff notes that in many systems where a combination of an administrator’s judgment and a value-added approach (which compares students’ scores before and after they were taught by someone) is used to determine teacher performance, there is a high degree of correlation between the two factors for the top and bottom two deciles of teachers, but the middle percentile is harder to evaluate. Paying only the top twenty percent of teachers for better performance would be easier to justify and might encourage school employees to view the salary increases as a bonus rather than a reflection of their performance.
A number of questions still surround the issue; therefore, experiments by local school boards, rather than national programs, should dominate public education policy. School districts in our nation are incredibly diverse, and just as different students thrive in different college environments, each district will operate best under its own set of optimal conditions. Those conditions could include varying levels of paying for performance, and it is highly likely that a successful model employed by one school district will be copied by others. At the very least, experimentation is more productive than dwelling on all those frightening statistics.
Mitch Ross’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at m.ross@cavalierdaily.com.
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