Why Your ESSA Plan Is Nonsense

At EdWeek, Andrew Ujifusa offers an explanation. In "Here's Why You Can't Understand Your State's New Plan for Education" he points the finger at jargon and offers some rather fun analytics for education argle-bargle. The top four bits of balonial verbage are, in descending order, stakeholder, engagement, professional development, and needs assessment.

Yes, this can only end well

Ujifusa breaks down the nature of the nonsense in your state's ESSA plan, but he doesn't really address the cause. But at this juncture, it's useful to remember why ESSA plans will be just as much jelly-filled fluffernuttery as oh, so, many government-drafted educational master plans before them.

It's not complicated. Master Plans for Education, both Great and Small, are almost always nonsense because they are written by bureaucrats, not educators.

Imagine military strategy and tactics being written by people who have no military training and who have never set foot on a battlefield. Imagine a plan for manufacture and assembly of widgets concocted by someone who has never used, built or worked on a widget. Imagine someone holding the highest office in the land who had no concept of how any of the policies or functions under his control actually work.

That's where we have been with education for decades. On the state and federal level we consistently find bureaucrats overseeing education who don't really know what they're talking about. Their knowledge and understanding of actual education is second, third or fourth hand. Sometimes it's no hands-- just made up out of whatever they come up with in their own little heads.

So they come up with policies that sound good, or that are birthed by the committee process (it's not right, but it's what we could all agree on), or that play well with the legislators who will have to pass them. They include lots of fine-sounding jargonny blather of the type not used by teachers (I won't lie-- we have plenty of jargon of our own) but preferred by policy wonks and thinky tanks and people who are trying to hide empty ideas behind cluttered language. And what merges eventually is policy language that makes classroom teachers roll our eyes and go back to doing our jobs as best we know. Or, if the policies hamstring us badly enough, we get beaten down a bit more.

Your state's ESSA plan is nonsense, just as your state's RttT plan was nonsense, and the NCLB plan before it, and let's not forget the super-nonsense of Common Core. It's nonsense because few-to-none actual educators had a hand in crafting it.

I'm not saying it's an easy fix. We could send teachers to the state capitols, to DC, but while we are educational experts, we are government amateurs. We know about teaching, but we don't know about working on Big Important Commissions or getting things through The Process, and we would probably create excellent policies that died in a dark closet somewhere.

Teachers are occasionally included in the process-- as long as they've been carefully vetted and determined to be agreeable enough to play well with others.

But on the whole things have probably gotten worse over the past decade, as Teach for America has helped create a whole new class of people who believe that since they have spent a year or two in a classroom, they are now legitimate Educational Thought Leaders and Policy Experts.

At any rate, it's important that those of us who do the actual work of education remember that policies like the ones about to be laid out and adopted in ESSA plans have been lovingly crafted by a bunch of educational amateurs. We read these things and invariably some teacher will exclaim, "Do these people know anything about teaching at all?" and it's meant as a half-joke, because as teachers we tend to believe in institutions and of course the People In Charge couldn't be completely ignorant, could they?

Well, yes, they could. We're about to be hit with a whole new wave of nonsense, and we should not be afraid, when we encounter amateur educational nonsense, to call it by its true name.

Well, yes, they could.

Ed Reform v 6.3 Accountability Lite

Full disclosure-- I made the number 6.3 out of the air, because frankly I've lost track of the various versions of ed reform that we've seen. But we're definitely on to something new.

The new ed reform has staked out a position against bureaucracy and paperwork. This conversation starts with a Rick Hess piece, which becomes a thing because Betsy DeVos decided to quote it in her address to charteristas. And so we arrive at a call for reformsters to stand up against reformocracy.

The call for getting rid of bureaucracy is not without disagreement. Checker Finn pushed back hard, and Mike Petrilli chimed in. But there continues to be a buzz surrounding the issue of accountability/bureaucracy. The most recent entry in the discussion is on the Fordham website, written by Max Eden of the Manhattan Insititute, defending the book project that Finn attacked.

The piece highlights some of the important features of v 6.3 reforminess. "Results: Yes. Regulation: No. How to beat back the new education establishment" is a rather mixed-up manifesto.

One of the curious features of current reforminess is the complete brain-wipe when it comes to Common Core State [sic] Standards. Reformers led the charge to inflict a set of national standards on every state and every public school district, and I'm happy that CCSS is more ghost-like these days, but it's mighty disingenuous for Core supporters to pretend that it's just awful how someone somehow created a mighty web of regulations and paperwork and bureaucratic hoop-jumping to make sure that the Core was properly implemented. This selective amnesia occurs periodically in the reform movement. Reformsters were shocked that the Big Standardized Test narrowed curriculum and warped education, after they worked hard to create a test-based accountability system. Reformsters used political tricks and tools to install their various policy ideas, and then complained that education discussions had become too political.

This has been a pattern for a long time. Slap public schools with tons of regulation and mandates, then declare that school choice is needed because public schools are too tied up in regulations and mandates.

Eden quotes the old saw that charters trade autonomy for accountability, a red flag all by itself because A) if that's the secret, then lets fight for more autonomy for public schools and B) charters have regularly and forcefully fought to avoid accountability as much as possible.

And then the flat-out falsehoods begin:

Unlike public schools, charter schools are accountable to parents (whose children they must enroll by choice), authorizers (which may choose to shut or not renew charters), and the state (which sets rules and regulations for authorizers). The debate over charter accountability is a question of emphasis among these actors.

Public schools operate transparently, run by elected boards. They are accountable to every taxpayer, including parents. The "unlike" is baloney.

But central here is Eden's definition of the issue of accountability-- balance between parents, authorizers and the state.

The “new education establishment” wants to shift the locus away from parents and authorizers, and to the state, by passing laws that prescribe and circumscribe the work of authorizers.

He identifies  National Association of Charter School Authorizers as an example of this group, with a published call for such prescriptions. Eden says that their calls for uniform authorizer standards and student achievement requirements should make sense, but don't seem to make any difference-- as always, the measure of effectiveness used here is test scores, which remains a terrible choice, like judging food quality based only on color. But he worries that the cost is greater:

As Tulane professor Doug Harris says, there hasn’t “been as much actual innovation as maybe the original charter folks hoped…when you have intense test based accountability it really restricts what you can do and to what degree you can innovate because…there are only so many ways to make test scores go up.”

First, I've got another explanation for the absence of any charter-ignited wildfire of innovation-- charter operators (who are largely education amateurs) don't know anything innovative and have leaned heavily on old non-innovative solutions of controlling the quality of the student body. But Eden does note the other obvious implication of the quote-- that depending on test scores as a measure does mall sorts of damage to the whole educational model.

This does not lead him to conclude that maybe we should ditch the whole test-centered model for all schools. Instead, it leads him to conclude that  "authorizers ought to retain autonomy to open and closer charters based on their own human judgment." Here he again glosses over some realities, including states where authorizers have a financial interest in keeping charters open, or the more common situation where it's much harder for authorizers to close a charter than -- well, than it is for public schools to fire a tenured teacher.

Eden says that then book calls not for ditching state-based accountability entirely (just mostly) but leaning on authorizers and parents. In particular, he says this:

Parents know things that authorizers don’t, and authorizers know things that parents don’t. While low test scores shouldn’t trigger a default closure, they could trigger a default conversation. If parents have a good reason to love their school despite its low test scores, they should be able to make that case directly to authorizers. Then authorizers can come to a decision informed by parents rather than have their hand forced by the state.

If these defenses all sound familiar-- don't tie our hands with bureaucratic red tape, don't enforce unfair standardization, don't judge us on Big Standardized Test results-- it's because this was what public school supporters back when charteristas were trying to clear the ground to make room for their babies. One of the large, consistent shifts in ed reform has been from "We should use these pickaxes on public schools to test their worthiness" to "It's not right to use these pickaxes on charter schools."

It should be noted that some reformsters have been pretty consistent and intellectually honest over the last decade (Rick Hess among them). And some reformsters have been pretty adamant about holding the accountability line (see above-referenced Chester Finn piece). While it's tempting to attribute the pickaxial shift to self-serving hypocrisy, it's also true that the charter industry has been largely run by educational amateurs, leading to same sort of revelations that Trump has experienced in the White House (Hey, this is harder than I thought).

If public education supporters seem a little touchy about reform's new opposition to bureaucracy and paperwork and red tape and test-centered evaluation, it's because we could have used all this outrage and resistance back when reformers were on the other side of the p0ush. It's like reformers whipped up a mob against schools, set the mob on public schools, then, after the public schools were weakened and charters were built, stood up and hollered, "Hey, you mob! You should knock it off and go home."

Eden winds up his argument by saying that accountability isn't a binary thing-- you could be all for it, all against it, or just trying to walk a line somewhere down the middle. But even Eden's "nuanced" view of accountability oversimplifies the questions of accountability. To whom? For what? With what consequences for coming up short?

Those are all important accountability question to ask (just in case you've been confused by reformster rhetoric, let me be clear that I, a union public school teachers, am absolutely in favor of accountability). But Eden doesn't really seem to be exploring the realm issues of accountability so much as he's looking at a way to make it hard to close charters without actively arguing against accountability. So we have the new reformster stance for accountability lite-- of course we want accountability for charter schools, but here's a long list of the ways in which we don't want it. Enough accountability to keep critics happy, but not so much that it actually gets in our way.

Does Zuck Want To Be The Next Gates with Personalized Learning

Here's lead from the EdWeek article:

Pediatrician Priscilla Chan and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are gearing up to invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year in a new vision of “whole-child personalized learning,” with the aim of dramatically expanding the scope and scale of efforts to provide every student with a customized education.

The power couple's Big Initiative has announced its intent to "support the development of software that might help teachers better recognize and respond to each student’s academic needs—while also supporting a holistic approach to nurturing children’s social, emotional, and physical development." So, slap the child in front of a screen, but somehow have the child turn out physically and emotionally well-rounded.

To head this up, they've hired former Deputy Sec of Ed James Shelton. Shelton knows the territory-- besides overseeing the Office of Innovation and Improvement (before John King took the job), he was an Ed Guy for the Gates Foundation, worked with New School Venture Fund, spent time with McKinsey, and worked for 2U, an organization that helped for-profit colleges take advantages of the loopholes that he wrote into laws governing such schools back when he was at USED. In other words, he has carved out a long and useful career at the intersection of Big Investor Dollars and education "innovation."

The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative presents new opportunities because A) it has more money than God and B) it's not really a philanthropy so much as a philanthropy-flavored investment business.

CZI will be able to make philanthropic donations, invest in for-profit companies, lobby for favored policies and legislation, and directly support candidates for elected office­­—all with minimal public-reporting requirements.

CZI often runs with the word "start-up," and Shelton's plans sound very businessy.

Within five years, Shelton said in the June 22 interview, CZI’s work should have helped launch a “meaningful number” of schools and learning environments “where kids are performing dramatically better, and feel more engaged, and teachers feel more engaged in the work that they’re doing.”

 The important part of that quote comes in the first half. They are looking to start some education-flavored businesses. The article includes some pointed words of caution from Rick Hess, who is rapidly becoming a prolific sub-tweeter of Betsy DeVos:

“This isn’t engineering a new ride-sharing app,” he said. “It’s how do we influence the learning of millions of children, day after day, for years to come.”

(IOW, Mrs. DeVos, charter schools are not UBER) The article does, however, give an accurate and pointed summary of the recent history of personalized learning:

Over the past several years, other philanthropists, venture capitalists, and advocates, along with the ed-tech industry, have pushed the notion hard. Many district and school leaders have responded favorably.

In other words, the PL "revolution" is about investors and corporations-- not about teachers or educators or schools. It is the new technocratic horizon, with Zuckerberg poised to become for Personalized Learning (at least this particular version of it) what Bill Gates was for the Common Core-- its patron saint, its bank, its armtwister, and all without any real input from people who work in education. Hoo-frickin-ray.


The article's author, Benjamin Herold, notes that it's hard to talk about personalized learning because the meaning is so fuzzy (and that includes when Zuckerberg is talking about it, as he has on many occasions). Part of the question is scale-- at one point Zuckerberg announced his intention to get PL to everyone-- but Shelton told EW that he wanted to focus on large improvements for small groups of students. Well.

"Large improvements for small groups of students" would make an excellent motto for the charter school industry (though they often fail to live up to it). It's not all that helpful for a public education system aimed at all students. And Shelton's exemplar shows that his aim is not true:

As an example, he cited a recent grant to the College Board, aimed at expanding access to the organization’s personalized online SAT preparation and college-planning resources, which have shown early promise.

No. What College Board has sort-of-proven is that when you give students a lot of test prep aimed at one particular test, they get better scores on that test. This is not innovation, and it's not education, either.

Herold notes that some skeptics are calling for open-sourcing. As Bill Fitzgerald notes in the article, "If you’re serious about allowing people to learn in the ways that make the most sense to them, you have to give them more choices than just using your software, under your rules.” On the other hand, if you're serious about getting good ROI on your fledgling education-flavored business, then you make sure all of your proprietary materials stay under wraps so that all customers must deal with you.

And let's remember again how Zuckerberg is specially equipped in ways that Bill Gates was not. In fact, the article notes that the special structure allows CZI to out-Gates Gates. "Levers" they can "pull." For instance, actual philanthropies have their hands tied when it comes to lobbying; CZI has no such limitations. And CZI doesn't "rule out" other sorts of political activities to push its initiatives. Yeah, I know-- the rules didn't slow Gates down a bit. But it's one more level CZI has to yank upon. And while Gates is required to employ some transparency (hence all the research folks have done tracking Gates Foundation grants), CZI will have no such requirement. They can operate in darkness as much as they like.

And CZI has clearly signaled its intent to try to shape policy debates in education and to exert different kinds of influence in complementary ways. An online job description for the position of “director of innovative schools and tools,” for example, called for someone who can “ensure our nonprofits and for-profit investments are coordinated for maximum impact.”

That not only underlines the nature of how CZI will try to impose its will, but what will they want to impose. This is a business, just barely disguised as philanthropic work, and personalized learning is emerging as the next big technocratic frontier in getting public education money tucked into private corporate pockets. And the possibility for conflicts of interest that are huge but invisible to the public-- like basically paying people to use and promote your product while keeping your sponsorship secret-- that's a big concern as well. How does Shelton plan to avoid such problems?

 We’re paying really close attention

Phew! That's a relief.

As is its wont, EW circles back around to a feels-okay finale:

Ultimately, Shelton said, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative feels as though it’s responsible primarily to the people the organization is hoping to serve.

That's probably true. The bigger question is-- who are those people, really. Of course, according to Shelton, it's all For The Children. Call me cynical, but it appears that other large interests are in play as well.

PA: Charter Transparency Fail

Last night, my district's school board voted to raise taxes.

They did it at a public meeting. I could have attended it easily (they meet just across the street from my home) as could any member of the public. I could also have commented on the budget situation, and I could have based my comments on having looked at the proposed budget, a document that has been available for at least a month. And if I attend all meetings regularly, I know the whole process that has gone into the board decisions, because it's illegal for board members to get together and do board work outside of meetings, and it's illegal for them to hold a meeting without giving public notice (PA law allows them to hold private sidebars on personnel matters).

That's transparency in the function of a public school district.

Meanwhile, in another part of Pennsylvania, one more charter is demonstrating how the opposite of transparency works.

Down Catasauqua way, Innovative Arts charter school has been a source for some concerns. Two teachers from the charter went before the Catasauqua public school board with their concerns.

Special education teacher Ann Tarafas and Spanish teacher Elizabeth Fox, herself hired as a paraprofessional and lacking an emergency permit to teach a foreign language, rehashed their non-compliance stories now accompanied with a total lack of inclusion...

Referring to inadequate special education department staffing (down from five to three), [Special Ed teacher Ann] Tarafas declared, "We're not in compliance with state standards nor are we holding up to the contracts we signed with parents of special ed students on behalf of the school. There is a blatant disregard for what those kids need and that's been exhausting," she remarked.

According to Tarafas, seven of the last eight Innovative hires were not certified teachers. Hearing the full litany of issues, the board president commented, "I don't know what to say I'm speechless."

The Innovative Arts charter was approved by the Catasauqua public school board just last February, and by April of this year, they were already restructuring in response to a drop in enrollment from 283 to 250 (after originally saying 300 students were needed to open). Their new principal is a veteran of NJ KIPP.

Innovative has adopted a budget, too. Only, they did it at an unadvertised meeting that did not allow public comment, and the budget is still not available for viewing. This is three or four shades of illegal, so it's not surprising that the Catasauqua board wants some answers from the Innovative Arts people.

The board called a special meeting for tonight to look into these questions-- and Innovative Arts has indicated they will not attend. "Acting on advice of counsel," IA leaders will not attend the meeting to discuss or explain their situation. And while you may think that it's foolhardy not to give a report to the board that is responsible for authorizing them, but as is the case in many states, Pennsylvania requires something just short of a mountain of paperwork and video proof of intense puppy abuse to rescind a charter.

The specific concerns of IA's lawyer, Daniel Fennick, is that the meeting might involve asking Innovative Arts leaders questions "that should not be addressed in public." For instance, those two whistleblowing teachers? They learned their contracts aren't going to be renewed just a few days after they spoke to the public board. So, yeah, that could be an awkward question. Or "Do you really think that members of a public school board don't know what business can be discussed in public?"-- that might be an awkward question. IA's fall-back excuse is that they've already answered all the questions (though their budget is still unreleased).

So, one more example of how charter schools cut the public out and do their best to avoid accountability. This is not how public education is supposed to work.

Supremes Breaking Down Church State Wall

The basic question was minor. The implications are huge. The bottom line is that supporters of using public tax dollars to support private religious schools got some major support from the Supreme Court today.

A church in Missouri wanted a shot at some public monies to resurface a playground. The state said no. The trip up through the levels of US courts began. Five years later, here we are.

What matters in a case like this is the reasoning. Here's the oft-quoted excerpt from the majority:

“The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution … and cannot stand,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

As Bloomberg notes, this is a big deal:

It’s the first time the court has used the free exercise clause of the Constitution to require a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church. In other words, the free exercise clause has trumped the establishment clause, which was created precisely to stop government money going to religious purposes. Somewhere, James Madison is shaking his head in disbelief.

A portion of the majority made an attempt to mitigate the effects of the decision with a small footnote (the full opinion is here).

That note may be meant to indicate that the ruling is meant to be narrow-- but not all of the seven justices who ruled against the state signed off on this footnote.

Reading through the decision leaves little mystery about where the majority are headed. The church argued that it was being disqualified from a public benefit for which it was otherwise qualified. The majority agrees:

The State has pursued its preferred policy to the point of expressly denying a qualified religious entity a public benefit solely because of its religious quality. Under our precedents, that goes too far.

And just in case that's not clear enough, here's Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Thomas, explaining why they don't agree with footnote three. They argue that there is no point in distinguishing between religious purposes and activities, and that the exercise clause does not care, either.

...the general principles here do not permit discrimination against religious exercise-- whether on the playground or anywhere else.

In other words, giving public tax dollars to a church-run private school would be just fine. In fact, it's hard to know exactly where the court would draw the line. If an organization is in the community, competing for community funds for an activity, you can't rule them out just because they are a religious organization. If a church wants money to pave a playground or run a school, you can't deny them just because they're a church.

The dissenting opinion sees this pretty clearly:

To hear the Court tell it, this is a simple case about recycling tires to resurface a playground.  The stakes are higher. This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government—that is, between church and state.  The Court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church.

That sounds about right. With this decision, the wall between church and state is pretty well shot, and there is nothing to stand in the way of, say, a federally-financed multi-billion dollar program that would funnel money to private religious schools. Trump and DeVos could not have a brighter green light for their voucher program.

I'll argue, as always, that churches will rue the day the wall is taken down. The separation of church and state doesn't just protect the state-- it protects the church, too. When you mix religion and politics, you get politics. And where federal money goes, federal strings follow. Sooner or later the right combination of misbehavior and people in federal power will result in a call for accountability for private schools that get federal money-- even religious schools. And as the requests for private religious vouchers roll in, folks will be shocked and surprised to find that Muslim and satanic and flying spaghetti monster houses of worship will line up for money, then the feds will have to come up with a mechanism for determining "legitimacy" and voila! That's how you get the federal department of church oversight. Of course, this will only happen once we're finally tired of the idea that charter and voucher schools don't have to be accountable for anything to anyone.

But that's further down the road. For right now, what we know is that the Supremes just punched a huge hole in the wall and a bunch of voucher-loving religious private schools are about to start sucking up public tax money through that breach. A bunch of public tax money is about to disappear into a black hole, and we won't know where it went or how it was used. Education, religion, law, and American society will all be a little bit worse for it.

HYH: The "i" in School

Personalized Learning continues to gather steam as a way to privatize and standardize education. And for educating yourself about the movement and what it really means, I'm here to recommend the latest edition of Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's podcast, Have You Heard. Berkshire and Schneider talk to guest Bill Fitzgerald about some of the more important aspects of this magical "algorithmically mediated learning."

Schneider, an actual education historian, puts this new tech-based movement echoes similar revolutionary predictions about television, movies and, yes, radio.

Fitzgerald addresses the problem of multiple interpretations of personalized learning, focusing on the issues of the tech-centered model currently prevalent.

Yeah, so I mean I think that there is not a single definition of personalized learning that  satisfies everybody who actually works in education technology. When we talk about  algorithmically mediated learning, we're talking about a very specific type of  interaction, which even though it's actually called personalized learning, actually cuts  people out of the project, cuts people out of the equation. So we have the semantics  of the term, which actually sound very human, but in some implementations, not all,  but in some, we actually have a process where what we call personalized learning is  actually less personal and less human. 

The conversation deals with the related issue of assessment, because as always, in bad teaching design, assessment drives everything else. And that's not the only important related issue. Here's Fitzgerald again:

So when we talk about our education system and one size fits all, I think we need to  acknowledge that there's a context within which our education system has never  worked in an equitable way. So when we talk about one size fits all, I think we need to  be very careful about how we're defining all.

Schneider on the allure of technology:

The challenge of desegregating schools is a political and moral problem, not a  technical problem and part of the allure of technology is that it suggests that whatever  is holding our schools back in terms of delivering an equally excellent education for all  children is simply a matter of a technological fix, that it's not going to require us to  make a difficult trade off, that it does not pose a dilemma that is unsolvable and that  will require us to collectively make a decision about what we value and for some of us  to give things up.

Which brings to one of Fitzgerald's most important insights:

Yeah, we have these social and ethical and moral issues and algorithms can effectively  embeds those and make them less visible and because it's an automated process, we  were trained to think that it's more objective, when the reality is its lack of objectivity  just gets done automatically every single time. So I think there's some large scale  misunderstanding of actually what algorithms do and how they can invent biases and  we have examples of this all over the place. 

It's a valuable and informative podcast. Take the time to give a listen:

Problems with Performance-Based Compensation

Bellwether Education Partners want to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of performance-based compensation (aka "merit pay" aka "fun ways to reduce total personnel costs for a school district"). But if you want writer Jen Bolson Meer's fancy definition, that's "Performance-based compensation is an approach where some or all monetary compensation is related to how employee performance is assessed relative to stated criteria."

Meer takes a moment to attack the traditional steps and lanes payment system. Advanced degrees and years of experience, she says, do not make teachers any better. And by "better" we mean "correlated to higher student scores on a narrow, invalid Big Standardized Test." That's pretty much the only way we could hope to make the absurd argument that neither additional education nor years of experience make teachers any better at our jobs.

That argument poorly made, Meer is on to her main point. Why is there no model, no "playbook" for PBC in the teaching world. Meer says that's because in all versions, there are winners and losers. She has three possible versions of PBC

1) Stick with a traditional “step and lanes” system, but teachers only move up a step if they meet a minimum specified level of performance

Nobody gets a raise unless she makes her numbers; "ineffective" teachers would stay stalled on a single step for years, just like all of the teachers in places like North Carolina. Meer says that winners would be programs that benefitted from  the "freed up" money saved  by all the people not getting raises.

There are two problems with that. One is that money would be "freed up" which h is an idea carried over from industry, where merit pay systems are based on the amount of money that the business made in that year. That is not how public school systems work-- we do not have an annual "profit" to divvy up.

Second, the system assumes, as do all PBC systems, that there is a bunch of Bad Teachers out there that we will just root out and pay less money. After years of various evaluation systems that keep saying that 98% of teachers bare just fine, reformers are wedded to the theory that the results prove that the evaluation systems are messed up, and not that most teachers are just fine.

Meer says the losers here are the high-performing teachers who wouldn't get the Big Bucks because the well-reviewed crappy teachers would be glomming up all the money. Which highlights another problem with PBC systems-- the amount of merit pay would be based not on actual quality, but on the amount of money the district budgeted for teacher pay. I've read many merit-based policy ideas and not one has ever said, "And at this point, if it turns out that the district has a plethora of great teachers, they'll just have to raise taxes to meet the merit payroll."

2. Earn one-time incentives such as bonuses

As a teacher, you basically take a cut in your base pay so that you might one year get a one-time lump sum. Meer says the winners would be teachers who actually get the bonuses, "especially teachers who find particular meaning and recognition in one-time 'gifts.'" and I do not even know what that means. Somewhere there are teachers who say, "I don't want a dependable, predictable salary. Just surprise me with a wad of cash every several years. My family will take 'surprise' vacations."

And Meer acknowledges that if districts go cheap with these bonuses, they won't actually motivate anybody to do anything like, say, stick around in a district with crappy pay.

3. Adjust base salary based on performance

Meer notes that this system is supported by people who feel they'll beat it, and opposed by people who think it will beat them. She even acknowledges that this confidence may be rooted in faith in the system, not just teacherly self-confidence. Her language acknowledges another issue with PBC-- that such a system is built to measure a teacher's built-in awesomeness, assuming that such a quality is a solid state hard-wired feature of each educator, and not a quality that ebbs and flows over decades.

Discussions about performance-based compensation are hard because there will be winners and losers with any approach, and defining high and low performance can be challenging and controversial

It's a start to admit that any PBC system must have winners and losers, but it skips over the question of why we need a system with winners and losers. There are all sorts of assumptions embedded here, from flushing out the Secret Society of Terrible Teachers noted above to the Motivate the Lazy fallacy-- the notion that teachers could be teaching students well, but just don't bother because we haven't been sufficiently bribed or threatened. This is not only hugely insulting (Yes, I could teach the children better in this profession that I've made my life's work, but I choose not to just to be a dick) but it reveals a profound lack of understanding of what a classroom is like. Teaching badly is hard-- it's exhausting and stressful and the students will punish us much more in that moment than any reformster ever dreamed of.

But even if the perfect plan is elusive,  a “works for us” compensation approach doesn’t have to be, whether it’s a variation of one of the categories above or another creative approach.

Yes, actually, it does have to be. Because the biggest weak point of all of these systems, beyond the funding of them or the insulting nature of them or the tendency to turn colleagues against each other as they fight for that money or even the dishonesty behind systems that aren't about paying more for the best as much as they're about finding ways to pay less for average teachers-- beyond all of that is the problem of measuring teacher performance.

We can't do it.

We have no reliable, valid, tested, proven method of definitively distinguishing good teachers from mediocre teachers. And we must choose the method carefully, not merely because of justice and fairness, but because of what that system will do to the work of the school.

We have ample evidence of what happens when you tie the definition of "effective" to the scores on a crappy standardized test-- education is re-organized around teaching to that test. And nobody-- nobody-- has jumped up in the last decade to say, "This is working awesome!"

A performance based compensation system is another way to tell your staff, "This-- and just this-- is what we're paying you for. This is what matters." So before you install any such system, you'd better be damned sure that you have c hosen well. Otherwise all you're doing is installing a system of perverse incentives. So no-- a "works for us" or "good enough" or "close enough for jazz" system is not easy or okay.

The obstacles to all PBC systems are many, and largely unacknowledged by the people pushing them. Meer has scratched the surface.