Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Dateline – Nashville:

Rewarding teachers with bonus pay, in the absence of any other support programs, does not raise student test scores, according to a new study issued today by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development in partnership with the RAND Corporation.

With that simple paragraph, the whole world of performance pay is thrown on its ear.

I can’t, like Rick Hess, say the experiment tells us nothing. Nor can I say, like Eduwonk, that the results were unsurprising. A lot of people are running for cover and it’s discouraging to see. If we want to evaluate teachers on their performance, we should be prepared for performance pay programs to be evaluated on their performance.

In this experiment, fifth- to eighth-grade math teachers were given bonuses of up to $15,000 annually for the specific purpose of raising student test scores. Unlike most education research studies, this one was conducted scientifically, with random assignment and control groups. It had every opportunity to succeed and it didn’t.

Were conditions perfect? Of course not. The teacher attrition rate over the three years was atrocious – 50%. There were unexplained significant gains by fifth-graders that disappeared in the higher grades. But there are no indications that these factors had an effect on the overall result. There’s no getting away from the conclusion reached by Matthew Springer, executive director of the National Center on Performance Incentives:

“If teachers know they will be rewarded for an increase in their students’ test scores, will test scores go up? We found that the answer to that question is no.”

Naturally, the unions are all over this. The AFT response was measured:

This study, the most robust to date, concludes that individual performance pay based on test scores doesn’t work. It isn’t the motivational carrot its advocates believed. Education reform that actually improves teaching and learning requires a much more comprehensive approach, not just the implementation of one reform. It’s time to end our love affair with simplistic strategies that don’t get us where we need to be, in order to provide a great education for all children. There is a role for performance pay as part of a larger education reform plan that should also include providing teachers with the necessary tools, resources and conditions to do their job and using a robust curriculum. As this and several other studies show, performance pay doesn’t work by itself to boost test scores.

NEA portrays the report as the latest in an unbroken series of poor results for performance pay in a story headlined “New Study: Merit Pay Does Not Boost Student Achievement“:

The study — being billed as the first scientific study in the U.S. of teacher performance pay — is only the latest blow to merit pay, which the Obama administration continues to advocate as part of its education reform strategy. The $4.5 billion “Race to the Top” competitive school funding grant program encourages states to offer merit pay as an incentive.

It’s funny to see NEA suddenly equating “student achievement” with the results of a “single standardized test” (page 13) – in this case, the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) math test.

The Tennessee results aren’t all rosy for the teachers’ unions, however. For one thing, the burden of proof is always on the performance pay side. The control group didn’t outperform the bonus group, so the report isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the traditional salary schedule. Second, if your goal is to raise student math scores, and a $15,000 bonus to math teachers didn’t do it, why would giving all teachers more money have any effect?

What happens next is just as much a political question as an education one. In the meantime, those of us who believe in the performance pay concept should avoid the temptation to rationalize the outcomes. We should take our lumps and learn from them, as a way to improve our own performance.

U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski lost the Republican primary in Alaska for her seat and is now mounting a write-in campaign. NEA Alaska, which endorsed her in the primary, is sticking with her in the general election. And she’ll need every teacher, because one of the pitfalls of a write-in campaign is that it requires voters to write your name.

In an ad designed to help voters with this task, the final image directed voters to “Visit LisaMurkwski.com.”

No wonder she says, “Let’s Make History!” Maybe it’s her stronger subject.

Click here to read:

1) Waiting for Lois Lane

2) Unions Line Up to Oppose NEA in Oklahoma

3) Van Roekel Wants Edujobs Money Used to Rehire Teachers Who Were Never Laid Off

4) Working Mothers

5) More District Spending Tables Posted

6) Last Week’s Intercepts

7) Quotes of the Week

“Birds fly, fish swim, unions support tax hike.”

From this morning’s Charleston Daily Mail:

West Virginia teachers unions are searching for ways to use a $55 million, one-time infusion of federal money.

Both the state chapter of the American Federation of Teachers and the West Virginia Education Association want to use the money first to rehire any teachers who have lost their jobs because of the economy and then to help struggling students.

But members of both groups also are searching for ways to give teachers some additional compensation.

One option, floated by members of WVEA, could allow teachers in some counties to take home more of their salary by asking counties to pay 100 percent of health insurance premiums for teachers. Because the money is one-time funding from the Obama administration, the benefit would end after a year.

…West Virginia’s $55 million comes from the Obama administration’s $26 billion jobs bill that was signed into law last month. The law is meant to help states across the country rehire thousands of teachers who have been laid off.

But since West Virginia hasn’t been forced to lay off many teachers – and it has to spend the federal money in the next two years – it can use the windfall to pay for a year of tutoring and teacher training and to expand after-school, summer school and preschool programs.

Comcast agreed to resume airing a revamped California Teachers Association political ad it had pulled after a complaint from the campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. The CTA ad accused her of advocating $7 billion in education cuts and 100,000 teacher layoffs. The union agreed to add some new language to address the objections. Now, instead of the narrator intoning “Whitman says…,” he now states “Whitman’s plan could…” A caption also adds the disclaimer “Assumes proportional budget cuts.”

Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle has the interesting backstory to the teapot tempest. It appears what ultimately prompted Comcast to drop the ad in the first place was an admission by Karen Getman, the attorney representing CTA in the matter.

In a letter to Comcast, Getman wrote:

“Of course Ms. Whitman does not explicitly state in her campaign materials that her plan for California will involve further cuts to our already-struggling schools. What politician would admit that $15 billion in cuts to state spending, if done on the same proportional basis as has been done throughout this budget crisis, will indeed result in at least another $7 billion cut to our schools?”

It’s hard to argue with Getman’s reasoning, except the CTA ad said Whitman had done just that.

Commenting on CTA’s new language, the Chronicle‘s Garofoli writes, “Pass the parse-ly.”

The California Teachers Association has been running the following ad against Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman:

Attorneys for the Whitman campaign threatened to sue, claiming the ads are false and defamatory. After review, Comcast pulled the ad from its cable system, and several broadcast stations across the state have followed suit.

The ad claims “Whitman says” she wants $7 billion cut from schools, 100,000 teacher layoffs and 33% larger class size. While you can make arguments about the effects of any politician’s proposals, Whitman never said any of those things, and they don’t appear in her campaign documents.

CTA told the Los Angeles Times it “extrapolated” the figures from Whitman’s education plan.