Widespread benefit from incentives

Education Week offers this thought-provoking article on cash incentives for AP test scores. While this is a little bit smaller than the scope of most incentive or merit-pay programs, it is an interesting case study that may offer some lessons as we look at what works, what it fair, and what we cam employ to bring education and teaching standards up across the board. A study by Cornell Professor Kirabo Jackson shows that AP test participation rose when a $500 incentive was offered, which is not groundbreaking in and of itself. Common sense would tell us that.

Yet Mr. Jackson said the main spur for the score jumps at the schools in Texas’ Advanced Placement Incentive Program, or APIP, didn’t seem to be cash.

“I can’t say conclusively if it was or it wasn’t, but what I heard from guidance counselors was … that it changed the culture of the school,” he said.

Suddenly, for example, AP classes were no longer seen as cripplingly uncool, he said, but a way to buy a new iPod.

A 4 or 5 on AP tests can usually be used as a college credit, but saving intangible amount of money on college as a reward for studying and taking an hours-long test does not necessarily compute for many high school students. And if they don’t get a 4 or 5, they come out behind in the money game if not the experience game.

A cash incentive will certainly increase participation. But is it worth it? According to Education Week’s article, possibly so! SAT and ACT scores also increased by a similar percentage as the participation, as well as increased college enrollment.

Hopefully as Missouri looks at merit pay and incentives to raise test scores, a broad look at was is working across the country will help narrow the concept and produce some excellent results.

Other States are Trying out Merit Pay

Taken from a news outlet,KTUL, in Oklahoma:

State Republicans are laying out their plan for next month's legislative session. Among their top goals is getting merit pay approved for state teachers. It's already paying off for some teachers. Merit pay rewards teachers whose students do well. And, because of their students' success, they're getting a three-thousand dollar check. At Union's Cedar Ridge Elementary, Sarah Worley wanted good test scores for her students. She had no idea her school would win a state award.

"I was just shocked," she says. "When she told us about the money, I was in further shock."

There are concerns with merit pay, but the benefits outweigh those potential downfalls. Merit pay could increase the number of excellent teachers in the field, improve the current ones, weed out the not great teachers; which will all serve to help the children learn better. It should come as no surprise that Missouri schools are not the best and there is room for improvement. According to January 10th article on the Columbia Tribune:

The 12th annual Quality Counts study gave Missouri a C-minus for its public school system this year. Only 10 other states and the District of Columbia scored as low or lower than Missouri; and Nebraska is the only bordering state to earn a lower grade.

Missouri earned a C-plus - its best grade and also the national average - for a child’s chances for success, including early education opportunities and family background.

But the state earned its worst grade, a D, in the area of K-12 education, primarily because test scores and academic gains remain below the national averages.

This is a tragedy! Our children are suffering. Why can't the citizens of Missouri realize we need to do something drastic to improve our schools.

Missouri teachers OK with merit pay

Oklahoma is stepping up to the merit pay idea. Good for them! Missouri should follow this example. In today's Tulsa World:

Certified personnel at three Union elementary schools will receive financial rewards for their students' test scores, the district announces.

Teachers at three Union elementary schools are to receive a financial award for their students' test scores.

Calling this the beginning of merit pay for teachers in Oklahoma, Union Superintendent Cathy Burden announced at the school board's regular meeting Monday that three of the district's elementary schools qualified for financial awards from the state.

Burden said she was informed by the Oklahoma State Department of Education that Cedar Ridge, Roy Clark and Moore elementary schools were among 63 Oklahoma schools whose certified personnel will receive financial awards.

"I'm pretty flabbergasted, actually, at this information," Burden said.

"I wanted you to know how proud we are of these schools."

The additional income for teachers at the three schools will total $144,500, with those at Cedar Ridge receiving $3,000 each and certified staff members at Roy Clark and Moore receiving $500 awards.

Cedar Ridge is being rewarded for having the highest Academic Performance Index Score in the "all" category, with a score of 1,469, Burden said.

API scores measure performance and progress in schools and school districts and are a central part of the accountability system Oklahoma created to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The audience gasped Monday night when Burden announced that the financial award for certified staff members at Cedar Ridge will be $3,000 each.

Roy Clark is being rewarded for improving its API score by 300 points -- the fourth-largest gain by a school in the state, said Burden.

Moore will receive an award for having the fourth-highest test scores for schools with enrollments of more than 500, Burden said.

Missouri could use some encouragement for merit pay. Our schools could use something to encourage change and improvement!

I'll Be Back!

California Governor Arnie flexes his muscles on education reform and at the top of his list, he calls for merit pay for teachers. Why? Because that's what makes sense after the results of a landmark study by Stanford University., He calls for other changes too. Like many in Missouri, he would like to see greater empowerment of schools to control where they are spending their money:

"Meanwhile, giving local school districts more control over finances is a popular idea strongly endorsed by the Stanford researchers in their analysis of the school system last spring."

Hurray! If California does it, then maybe we can finally see some change in Missouri too~afterall, we cannot possible make ANY changes until we see that everyone else on the coasts have done it too... Clearly, given that Missouri lags so drematically behind the rest of the country in offering educational options, and since we don't seem to want to be the LEADERS WE COULD BE...well, good luck Arnie! I'll be back to see the results!

Merit pay for Missouri: focusing on the details

Merit pay for teachers is, for obvious reasons, a controversial idea. When you get into the gritty details, many concerns bubble to the surface, like test scores. As a state we test for math and English, history and communications, science and reading. But what about Spanish, art and higher level maths and sciences? What about the arbitrary nature of test scores?

It looks as if this legislation (detailed in the last post), as well as other legislation that has been proposed in other states in recent years are taking those concerns into account. As we look at measures that reward positive teaching, we have the luxury to control a lot of those variables. If a good teacher, for instance, has students that need more attention or tutoring, perhaps a merit pay system will make the administration even more responsive to those situations.

What is sure is that simply having a teacher pay schedule, as Missouri has now, does little to promote good teaching. It rewards teachers for longevity, and while I believe a commitment to teaching as a career is laudable and should be rewarding, it seems like there should be a complimentary system that promotes what works. Even the Missouri School Board Association says this is an idea worth pursuing. It will take into account student improvement, and while, as Columbia BOE President Karla DeSpain notes, all children are different, it is he responsibility of the school administration to ensure a teacher has the capacity and resources to help his or her students make those improvements. I especially like the idea of looking at student improvement, because that seems to suggest that students are learning how to learn, not simply acquiring new facts.

Jan Mees, a Columbia school board member quoted in the article, breaks one of the cardinal rules of debate by using a slippery slope argument. Her statement doesn’t make too much sense. If a teacher is rewarded for the improvement of all the students she teaches, then it seems her financial benefit would be greatest by spending whatever time was appropriate to keep all her students improving—and that having one child exceed especially well (since we are talking about improvement and not test scores per say) wouldn’t matter so much if the rest of her class was not making progress. It seems that dedicated teachers already spend more time with those kids who need an additional explanation and that this would reward a teacher for that extra two or three minutes after class.

But as this conversation continues, I think we need to be inclusive of those kinds of concerns in order to come up with a merit pay system that cuts out inconsistencies and rewards teachers for teaching students no matter how long they’ve been in the classroom. If the devil is in the details, let’s run him out of town.

Lastly, the New York Times has an article that looks at some truly creative merit pay systems across the country. Very interesting!

Missouri Legislator looking at Merit Pay

Thanks to the Columbia Daily Tribune and Janese Heavin for this goodie:

Lawmaker works on merit pay for teachers

By JANESE HEAVIN of the Tribune’s staff

Published Saturday, January 12, 2008

Rep. Ed Robb, R-Columbia, is hashing out details of legislation that would allow school districts to pay teachers based on merit.

A final draft of the bill has not yet been filed, but Robb expects the proposal to allow differential pay based on performance as well as expertise in shortage areas such as science, math and special education.

"We need to attract science and math teachers and teachers in other specialized areas," Robb said. "We’re going to have to have some differential pay just for that, let alone pay based on quality teaching. It makes sense this year we make it happen. You can’t ignore it forever."

Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, who is chairwoman of the House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee, said passing a merit pay law is one of her priorities this year.

"How do we get good teachers into the classroom?" she said. "We have to reward teachers like they’re professionals. We’ve got to attract the best, and we’ve got to recognize their performance financially."

The Missouri School Boards’ Association - a group that’s been at odds with Robb about other education proposals - supports the idea.

"To allow school boards to develop some sort of differential pay schedule for teachers is an idea worth considering," Brent Ghan, spokesman of the school boards’ association, said. "There ought to be ways to come up with a process of evaluating teachers and rewarding those who are outstanding performers or offer differential pay in shortage areas."

Missouri law now requires districts to operate teacher salary schedules, a mandate that essentially prohibits merit pay. Missouri courts have ruled that schools cannot pay teachers higher wages based on subject area or withhold salary increases based on low performance. The Ladue School District in St. Louis County, however, has been paying teachers for performance for more than 50 years without legal challenge.

Robb said teacher performance would be measured on student improvement, not a one-time test score.

Merit pay based on student improvement alleviates some concerns about measuring teacher performance, but it doesn’t change the fact that students have unique needs, Columbia Board of Education President Karla DeSpain said.

"The problem becomes that every child is different, which means that every class is different," she said. "… If a teacher has a number of kids that require different strategies and more attention, there may be a limit to the teacher’s ability to challenge each of the other students in the classroom."

Regardless of individual student needs, quality teaching is easy to recognize, said Trent Amond, director of Columbia Independent School. CIS bases pay increases on routine observations of teachers in action.

"In general, there’s a pretty consistent impression across multiple observers of what a good teacher is," Amond said. "It’s not dependent on" teaching "style, it’s how that style is used to relate to students and help students learn and grow. In general, having a performance component to an evaluation system is a good way to recognize those employees who really excel at their profession."

Although DeSpain said she has "mixed feelings" about merit pay, she supports the state giving districts more flexibility when it comes to compensating teachers. But she warned that merit systems aren’t necessarily cheaper for taxpayers. "The two criteria I have read about are that the base pay must be competitive to begin with, and merit increases must be enough money to be motivating and meaningful to the teacher," she said.

Columbia school board member Jan Mees, a former media specialist, remains opposed to the idea of merit pay, fearing that it could have unintended consequences.

"It could put pressure on a teacher to maybe work harder with one child than another," she said. "I realize that teachers 99 percent of the time work hard to bring everybody up, but when there’s a dollar amount equated to that, I think it can be a slippery slope."

Invest in the Best

Janese Heavin, education reporter for the Columbia Daily Tribune, has started a lively debate on teacher pay with an article on school spending in Columbia Public schools. You can find the discussion both on her Class Notes blog and at the Tribune’s message board on the subject. Her original topic was that while Columbia public schools have some of the highest per pupil spending, their graduation rates were lower than other similar districts spending less, and dropout rates higher.

The conversation detoured to teacher compensation: should it be less? More? More than a tenth of the superintendent’s salary?

Some are saying that teaching is easy, and that they should have to earn pay increases, not automatically get them. Others argue that they have knowledge of teachers who endure unspeakable hardships yet find the will to keep on teaching because they love it and feel called to it. I think the opinions expressed probably have something to do with the teachers each person has in mind. I have in mind a teacher who single-handedly taught me how to research and what civic responsibility means. Half of the kids in that class with me are either in government-related jobs or are pursuing as Master’s in history or political science or law. It took more than 40 minutes a day on his part to give us that kind of experience, and it took commitment on our part. Oh, and did I mention he was retired and didn’t get paid to spend time before and after school coaching us in government competitions?

I think it’s apparent that good teachers make a difference. They did for me, and I was already a bookworm, love-to-learn type. So I wanted to see what was so bad about rewarding those teachers. I had performance-based pay raises for mopping floors, so why not in a more critical field like education?

The first argument I ran into was that socio-economic factors are more influential in a child’s life than teachers. I’m afraid I don’t like that line of reasoning—because it makes capability subjective. I’m sorry child, but your home life isn’t too good, so I can’t be expected to impart to you the same information that the other kids get. Child, you’ll be distracted in class and you won’t get your homework done. There are plenty of counteracting influences as well—after school programs, tutoring and the inspiration that talented teachers foster.

Cincinnati’s public schools were the first to test-drive merit pay in 1997 with a peer evaluation (peer evaluators held no stake in the outcomes and used factors like class preparedness). Teachers liked the process and believed it was fair and useful. The system they used doesn’t even use test scores, so that assuages the “teach to the test” fear that many express: a merit pay system doesn’t have to be based on tests and tests alone.

Benefits, on the other hand, are the ability to retain new teachers, many of which leave in the first 5 years or become discouraged because they get no compensation for going beyond the bare minimum. Falling many places along the spectrum of merit pay, Iowa, Denver and Cincinnati’s models show us that merit pay doesn’t mean making teachers compete for money. I just means not rewarding all teachers to the fullest extent because some teachers deserve that. It’s a way to retain young, passionate teachers, a way to help ineffective teachers understand that this is not their calling. It’s a way for teachers to hold themselves accountable rather than having restrictions imposed on an administrative or government level.

I have a friend who is substitute-teaching and being told to not do so much extra work because it makes the other teachers look bad. She didn’t get a job in the classroom she subbed in for 6 months because another teacher with seniority wanted the position. Does that sound like a system that retains and promotes the best and most capable teachers?

School Choice Will Promote Accountability

A Kansas paper, The Hays Daily News, discusses why Kansas should have choice and how it would increase accountability. As a taxpayer, wouldn't it be nice to know that your money is being used well. Some opponents are convinced that school choice would decrease the school's accountability, but since when are the schools accountable without choice? Even in public non-school choice areas, fraud, mismanagement, and ineffective teaching persists. When a parent makes the decision of where their child attends school, they are holding a school accountable for inadequate education if they decide to leave. A parent, in most situations, will know best about their child and where they would succeed. Why should one's location determine if they are given a great education, an adequate education, or a horrible education?

When they have no choice, that school is not held accountable because they will continue to get the money for retaining that child. When the schools become affected by these, they will have no choice but to improve.

Consumer sovereignty, individual freedom, and dispersal of power are values that Americans take seriously. We experience them in many other aspects of our lives, but not in education. Education is so important; as the stepping ladder to the rest of one's life.

Quality Professional Educators

Recently, a Springfield TV station reported that the Missouri State Teachers Association is asking for a higher base pay for teachers. In the report, one teacher is quoted, "If we want quality professional educators, and we want to be competitive with other states even, we need to raise that base pay, but we need to look at [the] entire [salary] schedule to keep quality teachers as well," second year Pleasant Hope teacher Cara Clark said.

I agree, teachers should be paid more. But I think the teacher quoted above made several interesting points. First, she used the phrase "quality professional educators." Second, she referenced the "salary schedule" -- implying that the base pay is not the only salary level that needs to be raised or at least evaluated.

To ensure that our educators are quality professionals I think they should be treated as such. Why not implement some of the performance measures that other professionals use? Key quality indicators, performance evaluations, accountability, etc., etc. Doesn't it make more sense to reward excellence rather than making across the board pay increases? I'm not suggesting teaching on commission, but I am suggesting paying teachers who have met certain benchmarks more than teachers who do not meet them. It's really very simple and there are a lot of models out there for replication.

As for the entire "salary schedule" this too needs to be addressed. Excellence should continue to be rewarded throughout a teacher's career more than the number of years a teacher has been in the classroom. Quality over quantity. Besides, if we continue to raise the base pay with no consideration for performance we will have some small school districts that have to let teachers go in order to meet the new pay requirements. This is echoed by the Pleasant Hope superintendent also quoted in the report. My fear is that if that happens, it won't be the highest quality teachers that keep their jobs, but those who have been there the longest.