Could local public schools adopt Pay-for-Performance?
Many are doing it, like the Washington, D.C. district—and have observed teacher quality, retention of better teachers, and students' standardized test scores go up. Perhaps SJUSD could use a shake-up. The brilliant Larry Sand reports on American Greatness.
[W]e must change the way we pay teachers. Whereas private sector employees are paid via merit, K-12 educators rarely are, courtesy of the teachers’ unions. Instead, teachers are part of an industrial-style “step and column” salary regimen, getting salary increases for the number of years they work and for taking (frequently meaningless) professional development classes. Great teachers are worth more—a lot more—and should receive higher pay than their less capable colleagues. Of course, any suggestion to augment any form of merit pay, turning teachers into independent professionals, is a red flag for the teachers’ unions, which view educators as identical dues-paying automatons.
One significant loss for the teachers’ union occurred in Wisconsin when Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 became law in 2011. The measure all but eliminated collective bargaining for teachers and created a marketplace where school districts could compete for better educators by paying valued teachers more.
Focusing on Act 10, Barbara Biasi, an assistant Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management, found that there was a “34% increase in the quality of teachers moving from salary-schedule to individual-salary districts and a 17% decrease in the quality of teachers exiting individual-salary districts.” In fact, about half of Wisconsin’s school districts abandoned their lock-step salary schedules to the teachers’ unions’ great chagrin and began to pay teachers for performance, for having advanced math and science skills, taking difficult assignments, etc.
(Act 10 was overturned by a county judge in December. The ruling, however, has been appealed in state court by Republicans, who run the legislature.)
Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and long-time proponent of performance pay, simply states that we should provide monetary incentives to our better teachers to take on more students. This move would result in less proficient teachers educating fewer students.
Hanushek et al. looked at several large urban districts that implemented linked performance-based evaluations with new merit-based pay schedules. “In Washington, D.C., for example, the IMPACT system rated teachers based on a variety of outcomes, including student test scores and professional observations, and triggered boosts in pay, targeted supports, or dismissal notices for educators at the ends of the spectrum. A long-running study by Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff found substantial improvement in teacher quality after IMPACT began in 2009, with greater retention of high performers and quick exits or improvements among teachers with lower performance rankings.”
Also, Hanushek reports that starting in 2013, the Dallas Independent School District replaced its traditional pay scales for principals and teachers with an evaluation and compensation system based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student achievement and student survey responses. “The district also established new, robust definitions of educator excellence, performance-based reviews for school principals, and cash incentives to encourage highly rated teachers to move to low-performing schools.”
Four years after Dallas adopted its new pay regimen, “student performance on standardized tests improved by 16% of a standard deviation in math and 6% in reading, while scores for a comparison group of similar Texas schools remained flat. Teacher turnover in the wake of these reforms was concentrated among lower-rated teachers.”
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
We prize letters from our thoughtful readers. Typed on a Smith Corona. Written in longhand on fine stationery. Scribbled on a napkin. Hey, even composed on email. Feel free to send your comments to us at opportunitynowsv@gmail.com or (snail mail) 1590 Calaveras Ave., SJ, CA 95126. Remember to be thoughtful and polite. We will post letters on an irregular basis on the main Opp Now site.