The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has released a national report that cautions about moving forward with pay for performance plans for teachers. It includes Richard Rothstein’s work, and that of two economists, on whether and how private sector firms actually use quantitative measures to implement pay for performance, or not, in their own compensation of employees, and the associated pitfalls.
Pay for performance (PFP) for teachers, in whatever version (ProComp-like, or Michele Rhee radical huge bonuses proposal, or Minnesota Q comp) is clearly a reform poised to sweep the country – the huge increase in federal TIF money, alone, will incentivize districts and states. It is true that little strong evidence yet exists to demonstrate that PFP works – so we could hardly call it “evidence based.” But there is a common sense link that people can readily see, and a notion that some version of PFP has to happen if teacher recruitment, evaluation, and quality are to be improved (and there seems to be no reform more popular right now than improving human capital systems).
It is fascinating to see the assaults on PFP from both sides. From the left, the teachers unions still oppose most of the PFP elements, except “combat pay” – more money for teachers in schools with overwhelming numbers of at-risk kids. The EPI/Rothstein work also comes from the left, but with more of a thoughtful argument that PFP doesn’t clearly work in the private sector, where it is easy to implement, and therefore why impose it in a more complicated, public sector arena like education, where student outcomes are very hard to associate with teachers, and where evidence is pretty strong that cheating and narrow “teaching to the test” will occur around the rewarded quantitative outcomes.
From the right, the typical attack on actual PFP plans is that they become entitlements for too many teachers, they don’t award enough big, one-time bonuses tied directly to measurable student outcomes, they don’t have enough financial sanctions for teachers who can’t demonstrate student achievement, and unions will inevitable use their power to soften the programs at the implementation stages.
Fair enough. Still, we do have solid evidence that most current teacher pay systems reward nothing associated with student outcomes, and they do reward things shown not to be associated with student outcomes (longevity and masters degrees). PFP plans, even if they aren’t perfect, will accelerate changes in the teaching workforce and attitudes about the work, and the rewards. Rothstein is right that implementation needs to be thoughtful, but wrong that the very real problems he identifies should stop us from experimenting.
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Good points. You’re right the “strong evidence” for performance pay currently is “little”, but it’s growing. One excellent resource to check out (although it’s probably slightly outdated by now):
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/Winters_et_al_PEPG08-15.pdf
I worry that the discussion and debates about teacher pay are getting framed in such a way that we may end up the worst of new and old systems using stimulus funds. There needs to be much more thoughtful discussion about the benefits and costs of different systems and how they would play out in real schools. It is clear the current system is ridiculously unfair to teachers but it is not yet clear to me how the new more effective systems might operate. We need many more experiments and research on different kinds of systems.
I like the way this report contains a thoughtful assessment of the realities of performance pay in the private sector. Too often in education I think we have an overly simplistic view that private sector= performance pay. As the report notes, the vast majority of private sector workers are not receiving performance pay. And even in the private sector it can be difficult to figure out how to reward employees without causing unintended consequences, especially when you get beyond relatively clear-cut situations like a salesperson who works on commission. I am sure any of us who have ever worked in the private sector can think of many examples of cases in which monetary rewards did and did not motivate people in ways that benefitted the employer. I’m with Van in wishing we could have more thoughtful studies and trials with different types of performance pay in schools. As with many issues in education, this one has become not only partisan but a rather awkward litmus test people use to determine someone’s ideological stance. Oh, you support performance pay? You’re rightwing or neoliberal. You oppose it? You must be a knee-jerk liberal unionista. Rather than focusing on pro/con, I wish we could ask a different question which is..if we were to have effective, widespread performance pay in schools, what forms would it take and in which situations might it be beneficial or harmful? This would mean that if it turned out that rewarding teachers for increasing test scores worked, then we would do it, even if it contradicted some people’s ideological preconceptions. And if it did not work, we would drop it, even if it matched other people’s ideological preconceptions. Ah, if only the world really worked like that!
“Pay for Performance” bonuses were initiated for non-educating DPS workers several years before the teachers got the idea, specifically for administrators in a group called “Pro Tech” for “professional and technical” workers. So far as I know, it didn’t result in any benefit to the taxpayers or children.