MovieChat Forums > Waiting for 'Superman' (2010) Discussion > Merit-based Pay

Merit-based Pay

posted 12 years ago by AJWilliams3
18 replies | jump to latest

Can someone explain to me how merit-based pay is supposed to be implemented?

I teach social studies. It's currently not tested, so am I eligible for the merit-based system?

I teach in a county where students, even the ones who fail, are "socially promoted." I just want to be clear about this. Teachers fail students because students don't do or can't do the work, but the administration or school board passes them. So, student X could have failed multiple subjects for multiple years and still end up in my class. How should my pay be linked to this student?

Even in those cases where teachers know months ahead of time about leave long-term subs are often selected at the last minute without consultation with the subject supervisor or the teacher. Sometimes, teachers are forbidden to work with long-term subs in the buildings for legal reasons. Long-term subs do not have to be certified and are usually not provided structured support at their schools. This situation is even worse in the case that a teacher wouldn't know he needed to take leave. If I am forced to miss weeks of teaching time how should the achievement of my students be linked to my performance?

By the time students are in 7th grade they know that these tests won't affect them, what's to stop them from not trying?

If I teach special education or kids with emotional issues, why would I want to continue if my economic well-being is attached to struggling students? This would mean that newer teachers would be attached to more difficult students.

I agree there are bad teachers, but I don't see how merit-based pay will help.

[–] SelmerVI 12 years ago

That's one of the problems with merit pay (and with corporate reform in general) is that the details of the "answer" haven't been ironed out, and yet the bureaucracies are rushing to implement them all the same. (You can thank the "Look voters, I'm actually doing something!" principle for that) No one seems to know where the funding is going to come from - or even the funding for the testing that is going to be the basis for the teacher evaluations.

Like you, I teach a subject that is not tested, nor is it likely to be (secondary music). If they did start applying some kind of measure to what my students can do, I would be at a disadvantage given that I have no elementary programs feeding into me. I gather that the assessment would only determine that my students do not perform at a secondary level - it would not take into account as to why. On paper, it would appear that I'm not doing my job.

I also have to ask: if they introduced some form of merit pay - would I be excluded (on the premise that my subject isn't tested) from any financial benefits, regardless of how well I do my job? Would my pay be linked to simple student/parent surveys? How does that work?

As it stands, I seem to enjoy job security simply because I manage to pound out watered-down arrangements of 60s and 70s pop songs for the football games that entertain the crowd well enough. I aspire to much more than that, because I take pride in my work as a music educator. But having the public judge me on the quality of my work is meaningless, because I inadvertently get judged by people who do not know the world of music, except as casual listeners (and yes, that includes my administrators).

[–] cribera-1 12 years ago

>If I teach special education or kids with emotional issues, why would I want to >continue if my economic well-being is attached to struggling students?

Stats comparing similar groups in former years, taking IQ into account (it's not the same failing with a lowIQ group than with a group of intelligent kids).

Unions could work with administration to ellaborate criterias with the most comprehensive set of attributes taking into account (alsoe teacher knowing the subjects they teach).

If in the same school, same grade, a teacher A consistently performs above average, and another perform under the statistical average, wouldn't that be a good indicator?

If private companies manage to evaluate and promote their workers, why couldn't something similar be done with teachers?

[–] 12 years ago

[deleted]

[–] There_Is_No_Sayid 12 years ago

Merit pay doesn't work. Studies have been done which show no difference in performance between teachers who are eligible for merit pay and those who aren't. It's another dumb fix promoted by right wing free market ideologues who think that everything can be solved by promoting competition.

"Unless Alpert's covered in bacon grease, I don't think Hugo can track anything."

[–] nypoet22 12 years ago

"Merit" pay doesn't work because it is never based on actual merit. No matter what formula you devise as a measurement, people will game the formula rather than actually engaging in better pedagogy. The easiest way to game the formula is to attract gifted students and attentive parents. No matter whether you are measuring by test scores or by observation, those students will be very likely to exceed the "expected" result, regardless of the quality of instruction.

However, in those cases, sometimes the students will so outpace the grade-level standards, their test answers will be marked incorrect due to the students operating at a different level of complexity. Then teachers will be pressured to teach those students far below their zone of proximal development, because the test answers matter more than how well the student is learning.

TEACHER: Who can tell me how many of these numbers are divisible by two?
FRED: All of them
~little man tate

I've read articles by adherents to the "value-added" formula, and the variables it supposedly accounts for. Even most of the statisticians who devised VAM acknowledge that it is not appropriate for any part of a summative evaluation. at the very most, it might be used as a screening tool, to narrow down who might (or might not) warrant additional attention. It's certainly not accurate enough to be reasonably tied to pay or employment decisions.

"Because you're an idiot. No, no, don't look like that, practically everyone is."
~Sherlock

[–] frogge-3 12 years ago

Attach a right wing label to it and everyone will be against it? Is that your aim?

Why can't it be about what is right for our children. I think if done correctly, merit based pay can work. If you base it on test scores along, yes, it's a bad idea. But how about other factors? Are teachers getting extra training from local colleges or online? What are the parent's opinions of the teacher? Student's opinions? How often do they meet with parents? Did they go above and beyond to help one student that really needed it? All these factors together should go toward the merit of a teacher and thus this is what their pay should be based off of.

Just as in any other career field, you should be paid based on the good things you do in addition to you time with an employer.

[–] yldr45 12 years ago

Yeah, I always find it incredibly bizarre that so many opponents of the types of reforms that are currently being most advocated for try to characterize them as "right wing" or "conservative". If anything, they are ideologically liberal and the arguments made against them are conservative. The teachers' unions biggest argument is that they cannot work because they are too much of a top down approach that don't take the individual differences of teachers and schools into account. They say it's better for decisions to be made by the people who most come into contact with students. And they complain that the state and national governments, they say, are micromanaging the way schools operate (and also that large school districts and city governments are micromanaging the way schools and teachers operate). And they argue for more of a status-quo approach than those that want reform. All these things indicate that the reform opponents are the ones that are coming at this from the more conservative perspective. That doesn't make it good or bad. But it's strange that quite a few people seem to look at it the opposite way. I guess it's mainly because teachers' unions (and unions in general) are thought to be liberal and generally support Democrats.

I also agree with you completely about merit pay. It, of course, refers simply to pay that is tied to what is thought to be the teachers worth in the classroom. I agree that there is the potential for problems if standardized tests become too much of a factor. But teachers' unions, by and large, haven't just opposed this but also any effort to tie teachers pay to anything other than seniority (and maybe level of advanced degrees). They oppose allowing principals to give bonuses to the teachers he or she feels are especially good and most worthwhile to students if they are encouraged to stay. They oppose efforts to give higher pay for more difficult teaching assignments within a district, such as an inner-school or more core subjects. These are common sense things. So when unions oppose them, it makes me more skeptical when they make more reasonable arguments against the possibility of having too rigid of a system of using standardized tests for evaluation. It seems to me that there isn't much harm in at least testing things out. If they work as bad as the unions claim they will then everyone will see it and it will be stopped.

[–] nypoet22 12 years ago

good point about the weird inversion of ideology that seems to be occurring in education. at least in theory, the conservative point of view would be not to make any big top-down changes, and instead let the schools and individuals decide how to go about reforming, from the bottom up. that's why at least a few folks at heritage.com have come out against the common core and other prescriptive reforms from the federal government. my suspicion is that the ideology on either side stems from economics - specifically, campaign money from wall street. submitted for your consideration:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-faux/education-wall-street_b_191972 7.html

regardless of which ideology it is, "merit" pay has not shown any evidence of working in education. perhaps, as you say, this is simply because nobody has ever managed a good operational definition of merit. taking on more difficult assignments probably does deserve higher pay. dividing up raises/bonuses based on judgments by principals, parents, students and teaching peers also probably does make sense, but would have to be verified against one another, not plugged into some arbitrary statistical formula with invalid standardized test results. it might conceivably work at some point. but before we start implementing such things on a large scale, wouldn't it behoove us to work out the kinks beforehand?

"Because you're an idiot. No, no, don't look like that, practically everyone is."
~Sherlock

[–] yldr45 12 years ago

submitted for your consideration:

Do you know what? I got as far as the second paragraph of that article and just stopped reading. That paragraph summarizes the arguments of school reform advocates in a completely factually incorrect manner. I don't have patience for that type of thing. Whenever someone does this with the opposing point of view it indicates that they either are not interested in a true and honest debate or they are not capable of understanding what the other side is saying and selectively misunderstand certain things when it is convenient. I've never heard anyone advocating for school reform say that a charter school will automatically be better than a public school. Nor have I heard anyone pretend that low quality teaching is the only major problem that needs to be addressed. The biggest advocates for change, such as Michelle Rhee, have always emphasized that not all charter schools are good. And they all point out that it is the culture that is the problem and not simply the quality of teaching. So I didn't read what the rest of the article said.

I have seen many other complaints about the fact that some rich individuals support the types of education reform proposals that are often discussed. I don't really get the criticism about this. It seems to me that it is good that more and more influential wealthy individuals realize the importance of improving the country's educational system and are attempting to use their resources to advocate for this. And if "Wall Street" as well as corporations in general have also been stepping up to the plate to get these things done I also think that's positive. It certainly makes sense. Corporations need a highly educated workforce in order to thrive at their full potential. The U.S. has been losing ground to places like China and India recently. So it obviously is in the interests of corporations to attempt to change the fact that a huge portion of our population is written off and not given the opportunity to achieve their full potential. And it's in their interests to make sure that the U.S. population is trained well for the workforce. The economy depends on an educated workforce and corporations depend on a strong economy. So it's good they have been thinking about their long term interests and have gotten somewhat more involved in the attempt to improve education.

regardless of which ideology it is, 'merit' pay has not shown any evidence of working in education.

That's because it hasn't been tried much given the fact that unions have prevented it. There have been a few studies here and there that mostly looked at whether certain merit pay programs (some of which were horribly designed, perhaps sometimes intentionally) would motivate teachers to teach better. But that is not the major reason merit pay is likely beneficial. It's not so much for the purpose of improving the performance of existing teachers. The stronger benefit is to allow the better teachers to be retained through incentives. That's not something that would be picked up by the studies that have been conducted so far. And there have been some studies that indicate that some merit pay programs can work at improving performance of existing teachers, such as here: http://www.suntimes.com/14687664-761/cash-upfront-the-way-to-get-teach ers-to-rack-up-better-student-test-scores-study.html Or these oversees studies: http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.99.5.1979 , http://www.nber.org/papers/w15323.pdf

[–] nypoet22 12 years ago

Do you know what? I got as far as the second paragraph of that article and just stopped reading.

isn't that the same as the person on this board who criticized WFS without having finished watching it? in fact, the first fifteen or so paragraphs don't have much of anything to do with the main point of the article. yes, the author takes some positions that do not acknowledge the complexities and the positive developments in the charter movement.

but just because someone has a point of view you disagree with doesn't mean they don't have a worthwhile point to make. i acknowledged the same about your argument in this thread. if you had overcome your distaste for the author's point of view, you would have discovered a sound factual basis for his opinion on wall street's involvement in education.

start here:

"As usual, when looking for what motivates capitalists in a market system, the answer is likely to have something to do with making money."

not that there's anything wrong with making money per se, but in my view these folks are meddling in an ecosystem that they don't understand. some may be doing so out of real philanthropy, a belief that their desired changes will improve the nation's schools. but when people whose job revolves around manipulating large quantities of money invest in proposals that will change the way children will be educated, i don't see anything wrong with questioning their motives.

as you've acknowledged, most "merit-pay" systems in education have been very poorly designed. that being the case, why the rush to implement them on a large scale before first firmly establishing that a certain set of conditions will actually work? on surveys of attrition among teachers, lack of economic opportunity is only third on the list of factors in non-retention. one and two are a hostile work environment and too much standardized testing, in that order. i see no rush among reformers to try to retain good teachers by finding ways to improve those problems.

money does make a difference, but for the most part that's not why teachers teach, and therefore not the best way to motivate retention.

"Because you're an idiot. No, no, don't look like that, practically everyone is."
~Sherlock

[–] yldr45 12 years ago

but just because someone has a point of view you disagree with doesn't mean they don't have a worthwhile point to make. i acknowledged the same about your argument in this thread. if you had overcome your distaste for the author's point of view,

Again, it wasn't the author's point of view that caused me to stop reading. I absolutely agree that it is destructive to avoid reading certain points of views because you disagree with them. The reason I stopped reading was because he wasn't being honest. He was claiming the other side was stating things that it wasn't. With that being done and considering it was a long article and that it was late at night I didn't think it was worth much of my time to read the whole thing. Maybe I will do so at some point.

I agree with you that merit pay based on standardized tests should first be tested out on a small scale before it is implemented widely. Teachers' unions, unfortunately, have largely been against even small tests of these things.

[–] nypoet22 12 years ago

what exactly do you find dishonest about the first few paragraphs? re-reading them, there's nothing there that isn't factually accurate.

davis guggenheim in WFS explicitly does argue that the central problem with American K-12 education is low-quality teachers, and puts people on camera saying that problem could be solved by removing union protections (neither of these assertions have any credible evidentiary support). waiting for superman does cast unions as villains, standing in the way of the progress represented by charters. whether one is for or against charters, it's not as if anyone in the media has been actively promoting all the high-performing traditional public schools. those are not part of the discussion.

most of the funding for the movement does come from people who make their living manipulating large amounts of money for profit. some of said individuals have indeed made support for their agenda a prerequisite for receipt of campaign funding. it would take a giant leap of logic to somehow suggest that any of those were factually not the case.

"Because you're an idiot. No, no, don't look like that, practically everyone is."
~Sherlock

[–] yldr45 12 years ago

The second paragraph of that article states:

The familiar media narrative tells us that this is a fight over how to improve our schools. On the one side are the self-styled reformers, who argue that the central problem with American K-12 education is low-quality teachers protected by their unions. Their solution is privatization, with its most common form being the privately run but publicly financed charter school. Because charter schools are mostly unregulated, nonunion and compete for students, their promoters claim they will, ipso facto, perform better than public schools.

It is just totally false that charter school promoters, by and large, claim that charter schools will automatically perform better than regular public schools. Every time I have seen someone who strongly supports charter schools speak about the issue they always make clear that a charter school will not necessarily be better simply because it is a charter school. They concede that many have failed. But they point out that others have achieved extraordinary results with students who many people would have written off. Some charter school graduating classes have roughly all of their members go on to four year colleges. These are inner-city students in very disadvantaged communities. Charter schools don't have the same restrictions as regular public schools so it allows for a level of experimentation that could allow for the right formula for success. Not every charter school achieves success. All of the strong proponents of charter schools that I have seen, such as Michelle Rhee, have made this clear and said that charter schools alone cannot solve the educational problem. They say there also needs to be reform within the regular public school system. And they say one way is for regular public schools to learn from what the successful charter schools have done. Guggenheim mentions in the film that most charter schools don't achieve great results. The article is just not correct that advocates for charter schools have said that all charter schools will automatically be better. If somebody provides some sort of quote from someone of note who gives that impression I would certainly be interested to see it.

And the article minimizes what the reform advocates are saying when it states that they "argue that the central problem with American K-12 education is low-quality teachers protected by their unions". Their argument is much more than that. It is the inflexibility of teacher contracts that don't just protect the low quality teachers but also don't allow the best teachers to do their best work. And there's the fact that administrators cannot make efforts to retain the best teachers (or even those that teach more difficult students and/or subjects) by paying them a higher salary than other teachers. The article is misleadingly simplifying the argument that the other side is making in order to give readers a worse impression of it. And do you have any specific examples of the people you say Guggenheim puts on camera that state that removing union protections would completely solve the problems of education in the inner-city? Do they actually say that? Or do they just say that removing or loosening these protections would go a long way to improving the situation? It's been a while since I've seen the movie but my recollection is that nobody said that the only problem with inner-city education is union protections and that changing that will solve everything.

[–] nypoet22 12 years ago

Charter schools don't have the same restrictions as regular public schools so it allows for a level of experimentation that could allow for the right formula for success.

that is an unsupported statement of ideology regarding the possibility for students at a charter to succeed. there are many factors that have been evidenced to contribute to a student's success, and any successful school will have them, regardless of whether or not it has "the same restrictions as regular public schools." some public school restrictions are productive, such as the ones saying all teachers need to be state certified, or statutory protections against excessive class size.

this is exactly what the author meant when he said that supporters of charters assume that a school will be better because it is a charter. you (as well as michelle rhee, arne duncan and president obama) hedge by saying that it "could" be better, but most readers and listeners take such statements to mean that it probably will. any data suggesting otherwise just means we haven't yet appropriated enough time/money/power to make the "formula" work more consistently for every child. in those cases where there actually is a formula, it is usually a formula for selection bias toward students who have the family support systems that make them the most likely among their socioeconomic peers to succeed. this certainly cuts down on the problems that come from attending public school with the most severely dysfunctional of those peers. should all public schools be allowed to require parents to fill out a long application and do volunteering as a condition of attendance? or should they at least be able to expel a disruptive child without worrying about lawsuits? i don't mean this facetiously, it's a serious question.

"leaders" in the charter movement may not suggest outright that charters are necessarily better, and some will even admit that they generally aren't. however, that is not the impression that is marketed and repeated by regular citizens who listen to them. here's just one example:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/12626969-418/testing-firm-pulls -charter-school-question-after-complaints-of-brainwashing.html

It is the inflexibility of teacher contracts that don't just protect the low quality teachers but also don't allow the best teachers to do their best work.

it is also poor administration, top-down focus on testing, overcrowded classes, and the flight of the best students to charter schools, many of whom return six months later without having learned anything beyond the fact that the school they went to wasn't as good as the school they left. certainly a substantial minority of charters really are wonderful, but there is zero causal evidence to suggest that being charters is a contributing factor in what makes those schools so wonderful.

"Because you're an idiot. No, no, don't look like that, practically everyone is."
~Sherlock

[–] SelmerVI 12 years ago

"The biggest advocates for change, such as Michelle Rhee, have always emphasized that not all charter schools are good. And they all point out that it is the culture that is the problem and not simply the quality of teaching."

People like Rhee *say* a lot of things - She *says* she's not anti-union, she *says* that poverty is a problem that needs to be addressed... But what do her actions say? Students First does not push for systemic change in the way that schools engage parents and students - it *exclusively* pushes for legislation that allows schools to be closed, and charter schools to be set up in their stead, as well as procedures for determining which teachers should be retained and which ones should be fired. To be sure - Rhee has *never* made a plea to parents to be involved in their child's education by working with schools - she only wants them to rise up against the existing system. If Rhee truly believed that teachers weren't the only problem, she would be investing in solutions that weren't solely teacher based.

[–] joedogboy68 10 years ago

For merit pay to actually work, you would have to test students when they entered your class, and again when they exited, and your "merit pay" would be based ont he level of improvement.

What is a far more likely scenario is that teachers would get merit pay based solely on testing completed towards the end of the school year. This would mean that teachers with enough seniority to score the AP and Honors classes would walk away with all the merit pay money, while those stuck with the "bad students" and special ed kids would get left out.

I've got no problem with merit pay, as long as the measurement used is fair and accurate, and as long as it measures the achievement level of each of my students from the point when I gain them to the point when they leave my class.

With modern, computer based testing, it should be dead simple to track and report the progress of each individual student, as well as to return standardized assessment scores rapidly enough that they can be used to help find areas where remediation is needed (followed, of course, by retesting).

[–] nypoet22 10 years ago

Fair and accurate measurement is neither easy nor cheap, no matter how powerful the computer. Perhaps some branches of mathematics or science might be linear enough to make such statistics marginally valid, but the process of standardization tends to make achievement tests in most subjects notoriously poor measures of overall near-term progress. It is simply too easy to obtain an outcome for which there could be any number of reasons outside of how well you taught. You'd probably get a fairer and more accurate measure of merit just by anonymous peer-rating surveys.

"Because you're an idiot. No, no, don't look like that, practically everyone is."
~Sherlock

[–] generationofswine 9 years ago

I look at it as "suburban teachers get more merit." I taught for 3 years in one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago & thanks to the privatization of public schools we went from an average of 30 kids per class, 28 desks, 15 text books, to over 60 kids per class & the same resources.

They had closed down 2 public schools & opened up 2 charter schools that only took a 1/3 of the student population.

We went from 1 gang to 4 gangs.

Our test scores fell after the first year of severe over-crowding & our budget was sliced.

But the charter schools scores rose.

Our scores fell again the following year, after the charter schools refused to take on any more students & as a result they closed us down.

We were all labeled as failing teachers in a failing school. That label sticks.

60 kids per class, 28 desks, 15 text books. Over 7 periods at that high school I taught about 420 students in a single day. That's an entire graduating class in most suburban high schools.

Over half the class was on the floor or standing.

It's impossible to meet any form of "merit" in that situation. We were set up to fail.

Merit-based Pay is just another way of saying they are going to pay inner city teachers minimum wage.