I’m fascinated by how performance pay for teachers has entered the mainstream of education policy thought. I won’t rehash the pros and cons; it’s just interesting to watch the theoretical debate.
Folks have been suggesting for many years that our current salary system doesn’t promote excellence in either teachers or students, and they have been mostly dismissed as ideologues or cranks. Experiments were tried. Some were successful, others were not. As time passed, more politicians and people of influence expressed guarded support for the concept. Then some Democrats. Then some Democratic presidential candidates. Then a Democratic President. Now we have legitimate work being done to put performance pay systems into place all over the country. This has prompted more detailed debate in the education policy world, and in the larger political world.
In just the last two days we’ve seen thoughtful posts on the topic by Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed, Robert Pondiscio at The Core Knowledge Blog, Megan McArdle at The Atlantic, and Matt Yglesias at his eponymous blog. All of this – the movement on the issue, the debate, the embracing of the idea by people of all political stripes – is good and is to be applauded. But while they all might acknowledge this one simple fact about performance pay, they fail to provide any practical ideas regarding what to do about it:
The teachers – and their unions – aren’t going for it.
Their position on the issue is clear and inflexible, despite the supportive tone that is sometimes served up for public consumption. And the last attempt to fundamentally change NEA’s position on the issue – nine years ago – ended with a rare delegate revolt and a strengthening of the union’s opposition.
So while a lot of energy and resources are being expended to design the perfect system, or to collaborate with the unions to determine what kind of system they might accept, no one seems to want to face the fact that they are perfectly happy with the current system and don’t want it altered.
They don’t want it. Are you going to do it anyway, or not?
Yeah, we’ll do it. That’s a forgone conclusion although not an obvious one.
The problem with performance pay in a district setting is that it’s like tail fins on a car.
They may look like the tail fin (tail assembly, empennage, etc.) of an airplane but they don’t perform the same function because there are fundamental differences between airplanes and cars and on an airplane a tail fin is a necessity and on a car it’s a fashion statement.
Similarly, performance pay is a fashion statement in a school district where performance is only important because temporarily there’s sufficient political pressure to make performance pay important but the nature of the school district means that performance pay isn’t necessary which is why it’s only and issue now.
Private schools, and charters, don’t enjoy the independence from proof of performance that districts, largely, enjoy and once they’re out from under the performance penumbra cast by school districts they’ll take to performance measurement schemes like a duck to water union resistance or not.
I’d like to know what honest to goodness classroom teachers think about performance pay aside from their unions.
If one listens closely to Obama, the great education reformer, says, its that he will create merit pay systems WITH the teachers. When Obama uses the word “teacher” it always means the NEA. So what he’s actually saying is the Union will be in on creating the proposal but that means, of course, they will design it in such a way so the union rah rahs climb the merit ladder while anti-union teachers will be past over. As with all of Obama’s education proposals, its phony. Lets get real. There no way ANYTHING will ever come of this administration without the union stamp of approval.
There was performance pay in Fairfax County, Virginia in the late 80′s. They called it “career ladder.” The teachers jumped through all the required hoops to get it, and then the Republican County Executive, Tom Davis, announced that there wasn’t enough money to do it. So, it ended.
Then NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell tried to help the FEA teachers hold on to it, but to no avail.
That’s the problem with merit pay. Politicians are big on the merit, but, in the end, not so big on the pay.
The teachers “jumped through all the required hoops to get it…”
That doesn’t sound like a merit pay system at all. It sounds more like those phony merit pay schemes that unions sometimes agree to that in reality pay teachers more for meeting requirements that have little to do with student performance.