Will Merit Pay Make Teachers More Effective?
Teachers often say they don’t do their jobs for the money, but
surely financial incentives are a factor in just about any career
decision. Would you work harder at your job if there was a cash
bonus on the line? More importantly, would the extra money alone
somehow make you a more effective employee?
Under a new law being implemented over the next several years in
Indiana, student test scores will now be used as a factor in
whether a teacher receives a pay increase. The
Indianapolis Star, in partnership with The Hechinger
Report, is closely monitoring the state’s reform measures
aimed at boosting teacher effectiveness.
The state’s teachers are questioning whether the law can be
fairly applied, and whether merit raises will ultimately result
in students learning more,
according to the recent entry in the newspaper’s series.
There are also fears among educators that the unpredictability of
the pay scale will discourage people from considering teaching as
a career.
“The level of concern from our teachers is through the roof,”
Wayne Township Superintendent Jeff Butts told the Star.
“It’s higher than I’ve ever seen it.”
Schools districts across the country continue to tinker with
merit pay, despite a dearth of evidence showing it’s an effective
tool for reform. Boston Public Schools is exploring whether
offering cash bonuses to faculty helps boost student achievement,
handing out more than $400,000 in the first round of cash
incentives to teachers and staff at schools that made gains
on standardized tests.
Armed with sizable federal grants intended to spur reform and
improve student learning, dozens of states are experimenting with
incentive pay using a wide range of formulas. In some schools,
individual teachers earn bonuses based on the progress of their
students. Other districts, like Boston, reward the entire staff
for overall achievement.
The Boston teachers union president, Richard Stutman, says his
organization supports the all-for-one, one-for-all approach to
incentives. “Individual rewards set up an unnatural
competitiveness in schools and leads to a potential divisiveness
and a potential lack of sharing of best ideas among teachers,”
Stutman told the Boston Globe. “Teachers work hard
regardless of a reward.”
The District of Columbia Public Schools rewards teachers,
sometimes with as much as $25,000, for successive years of
achievement. As Jason Kamras, DCPS’ chief of human capital,
recently
told the New York Times, “We want to make great
teachers rich.”
What’s not yet clear is whether such bonuses will improve student
learning. The National Center on Performance Incentives at
Vanderbilt University looked
at three years of data from Nashville’s public schools and
concluded that a merit pay pilot program had little or no effect
on instruction or student achievement.
The Nashville pilot program, where teachers could earn up to
$15,000 for improved student test scores, “was focused on the
notion that a significant problem in American education is the
absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the
incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an
effective intervention that improved student outcomes,” according
to the report’s executive summary. However, “results did not
confirm this hypothesis,” according to the researchers.
The notion that teachers might work more effectively if they know
there’s a cash reward at the finish line is an interesting one.
(Stutman, the Boston teachers union chief, told the Globe
he doubted it was a motivating factor.) But how many other
professions use merit pay to push performance, and does it
work?
A 2009 report on teacher performance pay and accountability
from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.,
found that “relatively few private-sector workers have pay that
varies in a direct, formulaic way with their productivity, and
that the share of such workers is probably declining.” Merit pay
systems in the private sector have been found to hurt job
performance, rather than improve it, the report concluded. The
researchers also make the case that student test scores are not a
reliable measure of how well teachers do their jobs.
If that’s the case, then why are so many policymakers willing to
bet that extra money will improve teacher — and as a result,
student — performance?
Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Contact Emily Richmond. Follow her on Twitter @EWAEmily.
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