Matt Yglesias has touched off social media discussion of one of the great zombie ideas of education-- the idea we should pay more for the best teachers. So let me explain, again, why this is not a great idea.
I will admit up front that I did not read t
he full post because A) it is behind a paywall and B) Matt Yglesias is kind of a tool.
Problem #1: "Best"
Modern ed reform has been obsessed with the idea of identifying high-quality teachers and low-quality teachers with hopes of getting more of one and firing all of the others. So folks have been working on the problem for twenty-some years-- and they haven't come up with anything remotely useful.
There was the
travesty that was VAM/VAAS sauce, a system that promised to translate the low-quality data from the Big Standardized Tests into data about which teachers were awesome (or not). The idea was that magical maths would allow us to figure out what a student would have scored in some teacher-neutral parallel universe, and then whatever difference there was between the imaginary parallel universe student score and the actual this world score-- that difference was either to the credit or blame of the teacher. It was always a bizarre idea, and that was even before we got to the question of how to use that score--based on math and reading test results-- to evaluate teachers who didn't teach math or reading (or, in some cases, even that student).
Anyway, that was one of our brightest ideas about how to find the "best" teachers, and it was (and, unfortunately in some states today, is) a terrible idea.
We can all agree there are good teachers and not-so-great ones. We just can't agree on who they are. Pick out the teacher at your school who you think is most obviously awesome; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was awful. Pick out a teacher you think is obviously awful; somewhere out there are students who think that teacher was one of the best they ever had.
Maybe we can agree that there can be broad agreement on the very best and the very worst doing the work. That still leaves the vast middle. When I was in the classroom, I would say I was pretty ok, but I don't imagine I was "best." How do the pretty ok teachers do in world where teachers are paid according to their best-ness, and how would we parse out the various gradations of pretty ok-ness?
Nor should we discuss a teacher's quality as if it's an immutable quality. A teacher's work varies over time, influenced by a variety of factors. Personal stuff. The students in the classroom. The acquired skills over time. The material given to teach. Did I teach every month of every year at the same level of pretty ok-ness? Absolutely not. Really, it's not as accurate to say I was a pretty ok teacher as it is to say I usually did pretty ok work.
In short, figuring out which teachers are "best" is a huge challenge. It makes far more sense to talk about doing the best work, but even then, we're talking about measuring the almost-immeasurable (particularly since some of the outcomes we're talking about don't become visible for years after the work is done.
Does this mean we shouldn't talk about how to do the best work? Absolutely not. But trying to tie large stakes to it will not help.
Problem #2: Schools are not businesses
"We should reward the good people and fire the bad ones-- just like in the business world," say fans of this model whose brains have conveniently failed to retain examples like Enron and Donald Trump and every mediocre business guy who kept falling upwards while hardworking high-quality working stiffs lost their jobs.
But even if we accept the meritocratcic business world fairy tale, there's another important way in which public schools are not businesses.
Public schools do not make money.
Consider how merit pay works in the business world. "We collected an extra pile of money this year," says CEO Gotbux, "So to show our gratitude to those of you helped us make that extra money, we are going to share some of the extra money with you."
But public school districts don't make money. There is no extra profit to share with the folks doing the actual work.
So merit bonuses can't work. And for the same reason, merit pay is a problem.
One of the reasons many school boards like the current pay system is that it makes the payroll costs for the coming year very predictable. That's helpful, because the revenues are also pretty predictable; school districts don't expect sudden windfalls of revenue. School districts are dealing with a finite pie, so it's helpful to know ahead of time exactly how many slices they have to cut that pie into.
Try to imagine a school board going to the taxpayers and saying, "Evaluations are done, and we have so many teachers with top-quality ratings this year that we will have to raise taxes to meet our payroll obligations." Yeah, that's not happening.
What's much easier to imagine is a district saying, "Here's the budget. We can afford five Best Teachers this year." Which actually is a lot like business. And if the Best Teacher ratings are set by factors that the school can't control, like test scores? Then expect the district to say, "Congratulations to all 157 teachers rated Best this year. Your merit pay bump will be $2.98."
With a finite pie, the end result must be competition among teachers for a slice. That means the very thing a school would hope for will not happen.
Principal: Mrs. Teachwell, you have been very successful teaching students about binomial fricatives, so I'd like you to share your techniques with the rest of the department.
Mrs. Teachwell: Not on your life. My kid is going to need braces next year.
Maybe the board or the state will kick in extra money to sweeten the Best Teacher pot. But there is one other popular way to get the money for merit bumps-- take it from the base salary of everybody else.
Look, Robert Pondiscio has a point when he observes that with 4 million teachers, most are going to be regular folks and not superstars, and trying to get 4 million superstars is not the path to better schools. Figure out how to help every teacher to do better and best work (pro tip: a system that punishes them for being less than superstars is not the way). Extra pay for the Best does not further that goal. It just turns schools into teacher Thunderdomes.
Problem #3: The Premise
Merit-related proposals too often assume that teachers already know the secret of how to be Best-- they're just waiting for someone to either threaten or bribe them. This is both insulting and nonsensical.
And if the premise is that this approach will retain teachers, ask yourself how likely it is that teachers will be enticed by a system that rewards them for random "data" or for factors beyond their control (like which students they get to teach).
Some supporters on the dead bird app follow another old pattern-- they don't so much want to reward Best teachers as they want to punish bad ones. The parity can rankle, and believe me, you can find teachers in any school building in the country who say, either quietly or not-so-quietly some angry version of "I can't believe that person gets paid the same as I do." A teacher who isn't getting the work done is supremely irritating to the teacher who has to clean up after them.
But whenever someone talks about getting rid of all the Bad Teachers, I am reminded of an observation from W. Edwards Deming, to the effect that if there is dead wood in your organization, there are only two possible explanations-- either it was dead when you hired it or you killed it. Either way, you are looking at a management problem.
I get it.
There is something hugely enticing about the idea of a pay system that rewards excellent teachers (and doesn't reward less-than-excellent teachers). It is a great concept, but the devil is in the details-- and any such system is all details. And the critical details remain unsolved puzzles.
