A bill linking teacher pay to student performance passed the Indiana legislature today, just one of many such measures wending their way through Republican controlled statehouses nationwide. “Merit pay” is a perennial proposal here in Washington state too, and a longtime favorite of conservative “reformers” everywhere.

But will merit pay measurably improve student performance? I don’t think so, and to understand why, we need merely examine the Seattle Public Schools, starting with the following two assumptions regarding student outcomes:

  1. The better the teacher, the better the performance; and…
  2. There is substantial disparity between Seattle public schools.

These assumptions seem pretty self-evident, and thus all else being equal, it should follow that the better schools must have the better teachers. But of course, all else isn’t equal.

Educational performance within the Seattle school district largely tracks along socio-economic (and thus racial) lines, with the best performing schools generally found in the whiter, more affluent northern neighborhoods, and the worst performing schools clustered in the poorer, more diverse Southend. So if the Northend schools owe a substantial amount of their advantage to teacher merit, there must be some mechanism by which they are attracting and retaining better teachers.

But there isn’t. HR often assigns teachers to schools with little input from principals, and whatever say teachers have in their own assignment is based on seniority. And even if the district wanted to use assignment to favor one school over another, the metrics for evaluating teacher performance are iffy at best. Thus lacking a mechanism, market or otherwise, to account for an unequal distribution of good, bad, and average teachers along the north/south divide, we can only assume that there isn’t any.

I’m not saying that teacher performance isn’t a factor in student outcomes. I stand by assumption number one. Merit matters. But it just doesn’t seem to matter enough to even begin to explain the outcome disparities between Seattle schools.

Thus even if merit pay could work to incrementally increase teacher performance (a big “if” considering the lack of credible supporting data, and the simplistic/deterministic assumptions it makes about what motivates teachers), incrementally increasing performance across a district or across a state would have much less impact on overall student outcomes than closing the yawning performance gap between schools and between districts. For the bigger problem facing educators isn’t that our good schools aren’t good enough, but that there aren’t enough of them, a disparity that merit pay simply cannot solve.

68 replies on “The Merit Myth”

  1. Something I haven’t seen discussed is providing more resources to the lower-performing schools in the south-end. Schools with non-disadvantaged students can get by with larger class sizes, while schools in poorer areas need to have smaller classes. There should also be a pay incentive to teach in schools with more disadvantaged children – it could bring up the teacher seniority level in those classrooms.

    The district would have to lower the average per-student expenditure district-wide, then use the freed-up cash to provide extra $$ per disadvantaged student to the schools that have them. I think this would improve overall performance more than a merit pay system, and would provide the fairest outcome to the children.

  2. Also, any plan to fix education that doesn’t address class size is categorically not serious. Anyone who tells you that we can cut our way to excellence is selling magic beans.

    My SO is a teacher in a high-needs grade school, and the kids with the biggest problems are also the kids with the worst attendance, the worst record of completed assignments and the parents who take the least action when she informs them of their child’s poor performance. Even if every teacher you put in front of a student is Jaime Escalante, a child who doesn’t do the homework is going to have problems.

    No teacher can make you appreciate the opportunity afforded by education. No teacher can make you come to school ready to learn or make you complete the assignments on time. Those are things that have to be learned and rigorously encouraged in the home if they are to take root at all. The idea that a teacher can somehow be so good that they can override that bad habits of the student and the indifference of the parents is silly on its face. It’s at least as silly as the idea that there is a quantifiable link between teacher output and the performance of a particular student that is somehow independent of all that child’s other variables. Even when it’s measuring change from year to year, that solution ignores the fact that poorer students are also more transient, making it difficult to have comparable samples year on year.

    My SO teaches in high-needs school because she wants put in work where it’s most needed. She works hard to make contact with every single student’s family, and to give ample warning when a child is beginning to struggle. Punishing her because several of her kids are homeless, many of them are ESL, and the district can’t afford the staff to work with some of the educationally and behaviorally challenged students seems perverse.

    Politicians can’t get elected saying it, so they pretend it isn’t true, but the real issue is that some parents take no responsibility at all for the success or failure of their children. You don’t have to worry about the kids whose parents are involved – the won’t be derailed by the occasional mediocre teacher. For students whose parents aren’t involved (and it doesn’t matter why – too busy isn’t a valid excuse) even a Dream Team of teachers might not be enough.

  4. OK, I agree, merit pay is an oversimplified sound byte but what do you suggest as an alternative?

    If merit pay isn’t going to help, what will? Parental involvement is one of the best predictors of student success but how do we as a society get them more involved? How do we get the parents involved? We know that if a kid isn’t getting fed regularly at home they’re less likely to do well in school. Do we need to go to their house to cook for them? We know if a kid has to work at their job all night to help the family pay the bills instead of doing homework or sleeping they won’t do as well in school. Do we need to pay their rent?

    Seriously, I think educating our children is pretty much the most important thing our government can do. I would take 50% of our defense funding to put it towards good schools if I could but what do we do when most of what impacts student performance happens between when they leave the school to when they come back (hopefully) in the morning?

  5. Even if the underlying idea of this were somehow valid, there’s no way implementation won’t be a disaster.

    The only way to base pay on performance of students is to use some sort of standardized testing.

    Basing pay on standardized test results guarantees a focus on only what will be on those tests, an a reduced (if not eliminated) focus on absolutely anything else. So even teachers who don’t want to skew the curriculum will be forced to go along or lose their jobs.

    And any time there’s some kind of standardized testing, there will inevitably be a gray or black market in cheating on those tests, whether by teachers, parents or students.

    Bad idea.

  7. Goldy, you are so naive. The push for merit pay has nothing to do with improving outcomes – it has to do with defunding public education for poor people so that we can have a permanent underclass that will be willing to work for slave wages.

  11. @57 Yes. A school is only good as the parents of the students that attend said school. Case fucking closed. All the money in the world won’t fix a bad school; all the AP classes, national board certified teachers, what ever….doesn’t make a difference. As long as parents don’t give a shit and treat their child’s education as a 13 year publicly subsidized babysitter school performance will suffer. Teachers have never, and will never be able to compete with the world outside the classroom. All we can do is to push majority in the right direction and maybe save a kid or two each year.

  12. Dear Erin Daisy,

    I hope you are more willing to engage in constructive argument with future students who hold opinions you dislike than you are with me.

    Regards,
    David Wright

  14. @64 Before I moved to the private system I spent many years working in a school with a high needs poulation and low parent involvement. However, I wouldn’t say that parents treated the school like a free babysitter for their kids; many families are new to this country and do not speak English- or even Spanish which is widely translated. These families have a completely different cultural orientation towards school. Many other families have not experienced education as a pathway to success, but rather an oppressive institution where they failed repeatedly. In the years that I taught in the public system I can honestly say I never met a parent who did not want the best for their child. Holding families accountable for their child’s readiness for school is important but we also need to give the families in disenfranchised communities the tools to participate.

  15. Ken dear (@ 33) I don’t mean to be cruel, but honestly – after listening to that poor thing gas on about the supposed choice between seniority and “excellence”, for the last few centuries, I have to say it: It’s time to give up the dream, dearie. AM radio spots are the last stop on the train to obscurity. Better you should try to hire out as the automated receptionist for government call centers.

  16. Is merit pay a good idea? Definitely not in its current form. Last summer I analyzed a large amount of data put out by the Los Angeles USD (where I’m a teacher) that covered 573 elementary schools. Statistically, here’s what I found for third graders for the year 2004 (typical grade level, typical year):

    The average LAUSD third grader’s raw English Language Arts score was approximately 37.8, with a standard deviation of about 6.5. This means that the typical student correctly answered 37.8 out of 65 questions, and that more than two thirds of the district’s third graders received raw scores between 31.3 and 44.3. Teachers at an underperforming school, with students who averaged 35.1 out of 65 on their third grade ELA exam, would be classified as “most effective” if their students’ average scores went up to 36.3 (that is, if the teachers’ students managed to correctly answer 1.2 more questions than the average school peer). An unfortunate colleague next door would be labeled as “least effective” if her students answered 33.8 out of 65 questions correctly (1.3 questions fewer than the school’s average third grader).
    In a high performing elementary school, where third grade students averaged 43.3 out of 65 on their ELA exams, a teacher would be labeled as “most effective” if her students scored 45.1 (answering nearly two questions more than their average peer). On the other hand, a teacher down the hall would be deemed “least effective” if his students answered an average of 41.8 questions correctly (1.5 questions fewer than his school’s average third grader).
    These “most effective” and “least effective” labels are absurd. They are absurd because teachers place varying degrees of importance on the annual California Standards Test. Some educators compensate for their mediocre or poor instruction throughout the year by dedicating the entire month of April to CST review and drill. On the other hand, many quality teachers feel comfortable with what they have imparted to their students throughout the year and would rather present new lessons than spend precious hours reviewing for what they consider a meaningless test.
    Can anyone honestly claim that a teacher with students who score 1.2 or 1.8 points higher on a single 65 point exam is much more effective than his/her peers? Or that a teacher with students who average 1.3 to 1.5 questions fewer as being much less effective? In its current form, that’s exactly what merit pay initiatives do. As others have stated here, there are many things that need to be considered in assessing teacher effectiveness, not just a (in many cases, irrelevant) single exam.

  17. Just a quick note to those who think that teachers will just ‘put in some time’ at lower-performing schools, and then bolt for higher-performing schools as soon as they can; this is not what I’ve observed in six years working at a low-performing high school in Portland. My school has a strong, dedicated staff of teachers. They are committed to the success of their students–even if it means completing high school somewhere else. They work long hours and constantly strive to improve their own practices. Yes, there are a few who aren’t as effective, and have a hard time reaching kids. But all of ’em at least CARE.

    We’ve had students win the Gates Millennium Scholarship. We’ve had a teacher win the Milken Award for outstanding teaching. We are not a backwater where crappy teachers go to while away the years until retirement. I bet we’re not the only low SES school with great teachers, either.

  18. Merit pay for teachers is not an inherently bad idea, but no merit pay scheme that I have ever seen proposed was any damn good at all. All of the schemes that I have seen are, at some point, based on student test scores. That’s the problem. Student test scores – either the absolute score or the change from some previous score – are a poor choice as a basis for measuring teacher effectiveness because they do not reflect the teachers’ work very much (if at all).

    Consider two middle schools here in Seattle, Eckstein and Aki Kurose. The scores at Eckstein, in the northeast part of the city, are excellent while the scores at Aki Kurose, the middle school for southeast Seattle, have been poor. Aki Kurose is the only middle school in Seattle rated at the lowest level, Level 1, on the District School Segmentation Performance Framework. That means that Aki Kurose not only had low pass rates on the state achievement tests, but also had poor growth on those tests. Eckstein, on the other hand, had the highest pass rates on the tests and was among the top performers for growth as well.

    Who – if anyone – believes that this difference is due to a difference in quality of instruction between these two schools? Who – if anyone – believes that if these schools swapped teaching staffs that they would also swap test scores? Anyone? Anyone? Of course not. The very notion is absurd. No one in their right mind would even suggest such a thing. The root causes of the underperformance of Aki Kurose students cannot be found in the teachers. No amount of re-arranging teaching staffs is going to have a significant impact on the overwhelming influences of poverty, violence, despair, substance abuse, instability, and culture.

    Merit pay is a sideshow. It is a distraction. It is an effort to villify teachers while distracting people’s attention from what would really improve student academic achievement – identifying and addressing the root causes of each individual student’s underperformance.

    There are, of course, good teachers, great teachers, and, yes, bad teachers. The great teachers should be allowed to continue what they have been doing. The good teachers should be supported in their efforts to improve and be allowed to do the things that will bring that improvement. The bad teachers should either be put on a path to improvement or be fired. No one disagrees with that. The solution to bad teachers, however, lies in their evaluation by principals who are expert and honest.

    Let’s think about that for a moment. If there’s an ineffective teacher in a school, isn’t that evidence that the teacher’s principal – who allows that ineffective teacher to continue teaching – is also ineffective? I think it does. For all of the claims that it is SO difficult to fire a teacher for poor performance, good principals are able to do whenever they have to. What else does that principal have to do that is more important?

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