Room at the Top for Test Scores?
The Obama administration's "Race to the Top" on education has a lot of hurdles ahead of it, and one may be the fact that the administration is embracing one of the ideas that teachers have seemed most skeptical about: judging teachers by test scores.
To be precise, states can't get funding under the $4.3 billion initiative if they have laws that bar the use of test scores to evaluate teacher performance. That includes some big states like New York and California. The administration argues that using test data to evaluate schools is essential for reform. "You cannot ignore facts," President Obama said. "That is why any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways."
Perhaps so. But it's worth noting that Public Agenda research has consistently found that out of all the players in education, teachers are the most skeptical about testing. In 2006, we found 71 percent of teachers said students were required to take "too many" standardized tests, compared to 59 percent of superintendents. Teachers are also less likely than other groups to see standardized testing as valuable, with 62 percent of teachers calling them a "necessary evil," compared to 37 percent of parents.
No surprise, then, that teachers are also consistently doubtful about using test scores to gauge their performance. It isn't that they're completely opposed to merit pay or other options for paying teachers based on their performance. As far back as 2003, in our Stand by Me survey, we found solid majorities of teachers favored extra pay for those who worked in tough neighborhoods (70 percent), who put in more time and effort (67 percent) or who teach hard-to-reach students (63 percent). But only 38 percent favored higher pay for teachers "whose kids routinely score higher than similar students on standardized tests."
When we examined the views of new teachers in high-needs schools as part of 2008's Lessons Learned study, we found something very similar. Very few teachers considered "tying teacher rewards and sanctions to their students' performance" as a very effective strategy to improve teacher quality. And the results were similar for both traditionally trained teachers (12 percent) and alternative-route teachers (19 percent). Even superintendents and principals consider other strategies more important in improving teaching, such as improved professional development and mentoring.
It would be easy to be cynical about these results, and argue that teachers just don't want to be held accountable at all. But while that's probably true for some teachers, most of the teachers we survey have a great passion for what they do. Eight in 10 say it's work they love to do. But that doesn't keep them from feeling beleaguered at the same time. Three-quarters say they feel like scapegoats for the problems facing students. Seven in 10 feel "out of the loop" in decision-making. Four in 10 say they spend more time trying to keep order than they do teaching.
Yet these are the people who have to be enlisted if education reform is to have any chance. Nothing happens in a classroom unless the teacher makes it happen. The great challenge is holding teachers accountable and keeping them enthusiastic -- at the same time. Reluctant runners win few races - to the top, or anywhere else.
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I am a teacher and have been for about the last 10 years. I became curious about the subject of performance incentives outside of education about a year ago with the implosion of the financial industry which has moved towards a largely incentive/bonus based compensation system over the past two decades. Since I used to work in banking, and worked on two incentive compensation reporting systems as pay was shifting from salary-based to more bonus based, I was interested in this. Banking, finance, and other businesses assume that bonuses work because they can "see" what they are getting from employees for that incentive (look, he brought us a $300k loan, that will earn us a net of 2% a year). Education, on the other hand, is hostile to incentives. I think part of the scientific basis may come from books on student behavior, like Punished by Rewards. Educators approach this from a behavioral science POV, whereas business people look at it from a pure economics POV.
I think the new school of behavioral economics may shed some light here. Work by Leavitt in Freaknomics pointed to how incentives could cause people to act in ways that are logical, but undesired, with the story of teachers in Chicago cheating on student tests. Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) took a stab at this subject by doing on a study on a pure incentive bonus for discrete task performance. His conclusion was that incentives at outsize levels worsened performance compared to no and low or mid based incentives.
My conclusion, I don't think we've proved that incentive based pay works ANYWHERE. In fact, it looks like due to its controversy, studies on incentive pay for educators may be some of the first work done on the subject in a really comprehensive way. This is not even addressing the third rail issue of what "metric" to base the incentive on (more straightforward in a sales based system).
Alice Mercer
twitter: alicemercer
I was a principal of an elementary school for about 17 years. While good teachers should be rewarded (and are not because of Unions that foster mediocrity, this is not a good idea.
As a principal I had certain children who needed great teachers -- they were very needy children who needed the best teachers to succeed. These best teachers would have a disproportionate number of difficult students. Although, my experience has been that these teachers still managed to achieve the best test scores. However, these teachers would naturally be concerned that they are being punished for being good for struggling children.
Not to mention that the whole emphasis on test scores hurts all children, but especially the children who are most school ready. We are losing the good students and the schools of the socio-economically communities are complacent.
Future Visions Youth Development, Inc. has a program called the Maine Model in Learning Vision we are running in Maine schools this year. The focus of the program is to address issues in vision currently not recognized. Within those children with the low reading score in State tests, with a learning vision screen,we will be able to identify the youth whose vision is not coordinated between two eyes, who does not have binocular agility and who may have an issue in accommodative distance. We have been blaming our wonderful teachers for too long for issue in reading that with a standardized approach (this FVYD program) we will be able to resolved these vision issues and return our struggling youth and Special Ed misdiagnosed youth back to mainstream learning and forward to fluency. Watch for our program the website is FutureVisionsInc.com. Teachers can teach when children have been returned to active learners. This issue begins in third grade and never is resolved until we take action to bring it into the schools and correct it. Our FVYD program does just that....F's to A's in 16 weeks is possible.
when we bring the program into the schools. Think of the financial impact at approximately 5,000 per youth per year, when the children may no longer need special services. Watch for the program data that should be available soon!
Deborah Miller, Pres. FVYD
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