Opponents of merit pay often argue that performance-based compensation punishes good teachers for factors beyond their control. A new article from The Atlantic suggests that administrators and teachers are getting markedly better at measuring performance in the classroom. [Read more →]

Will backtracked last week from this post, which included a chart detailing federal spending increases in education and the rather flat results over the past few decades.  And I wish he hadn’t, despite the many good points brought up about education spending, possible causes for increases in federal education spending, and so forth.

Here’s the thing – during those same years that the federal government has increased its role in education funding, state and local governments have become increasingly dependent on the federal government to shore up budgets, step in during a crisis, and keep them solvent.  Look no further than the recent stimulus money and the bailout of the states.  Many states could barely sustain their commitments to education budgets without federal padding.  Is there any reason to think this will change next year?  Next recession?

It’s not so much that this is a serious problem right now, either.  As Will notes, the federal government is responsible for only about 8.3 percent of all education spending in the country.  The problem lies in the future, as state and local governments continue down the path of dependency, relying more and more on the federal government to catch them when they fall, and doing whatever it takes to make sure they qualify for the handouts.  [Read more →]

Conor’s latest posts (here and here) sparked off a pretty decent debate in the comments over at The American Scene, and led to a good follow-up here at the League via Brother Will.   Over at TAS you essentially have Conor et al arguing against teachers unions and in favor of performance pay; and you’ve got Freddie and others in the comments arguing that the performance pay better be pretty damned good to give up the job security that tenure and the unions provide.

So we have a few problems to address.  First is the notion of quantifying performance.  There are obviously cases where you’ve got an exceptional teacher.  Everyone knows they’re great.  The students love them.  The parents love them.  Other teachers love them.  And then there are cases where teachers are obviously bad.  They’re disliked, have terrible results, etc.  But I’d say most of the time the situation is much, much more difficult – most teachers are hard to quantify.  It’s hard for many reasons, including who their students are, where their school is, how the funding is at that school, how the teachers at the school work together, who the principal is, and so on and so forth.  So the government wants to quantify the performance (for whatever reason, not currently teacher pay, though) and the only way to do that is to use standardized tests, graduation rates, and future success of students.

Of course, standardized testing is a terrible metric (and the others aren’t much better) for student or teacher success.  Standards require uniformity, and across the country uniformity simply doesn’t exist.  A lot of the new data on learning indicates that even across one school, or one classroom, countless differences exist in how students learn.  Some students are visual learners, others very physical, still others social, and so on and so forth.  Some students do very well when they are lectured to and assigned long papers; others do better when put in group projects.  Some are good test-takers, others are not.  By forcing teachers to teach to tests we leave a lot of these kids behind.  By paying teachers based on abstract and arbitrary national (or even local) standards, we are going to sabotage teacher performance because we’re going to ignore how kids learn, and inevitably how teachers ought to teach.  Any professors out there want to start teaching to national standardized tests?

I didn’t think so. [Read more →]

This depressing Los Angeles Times story inspired a pretty interesting debate on teacher unions over at the American Scene. In comments, Freddie mounts a persuasive defense of union-backed tenure for professional educators, arguing that job security is a major incentive behind recruitment and retention. This certainly makes sense to me, though it’s worth noting that a few proposed reforms replace tenure with a different incentive structure. Here, for example, is a good summary of DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s new program:

Rhee has proposed a two-track, green and red, system for D.C. teachers. Teachers who volunteer for the green track would give up all tenure rights and, in return, would get larger pay hikes and become eligible for performance bonuses that could put their annual income well above $100,000. Red track teachers would not give up tenure; they would receive a smaller pay increase; and would not be eligible for performance bonuses.

Rhee’s reforms have become something of a cause célèbre, garnering praise from Nicholas Kristof and a high-profile Time cover story. Her abrasive personality and take-no-prisoners approach hasn’t endeared her to the local teacher union, however, which is generally wary of performance-based reforms.

From what I understand (I have a few friends with the DC Teach for America program) the divide over Rhee’s reforms is mostly generational, with new teachers favorably disposed towards performance-based pay while older teachers are more concerned with job security. This may also reflect different career priorities, as a lot of DC’s Teach for America volunteers are not planning on staying with the DC school system.

To be perfectly honest, this is not an issue I pay close attention to, although I did get the chance to see Rhee speak last summer and was suitably impressed. The (younger) teachers I know in the DC system are almost uniformly enthusiastic about the proposed changes, and I think that replacing tenure with performance-based pay has the potential to incentivize better teaching. Having said all that, the environmental barriers to improving student achievement in DC are pretty overwhelming, and I’m sympathetic to teachers who feel that they’re being unfairly scapegoated for structural defects.

Good teaching does seem to be quantifiable, and DC’s public school system definitely needs a major overhaul, so I’d tentatively place myself in the reformist camp. What do you all think?

…is laying off all the school psychologists, school counselors, art teachers, music teachers, theatre teachers, P.E. teachers, and many of its new teachers not out of the “probationary” period yet – a total cut of 30% of school district teaching staff.  This is how we will face the coming century – by bailing out our bankers and abandoning out children.  Good lord.