Read the fine print
The administration chose Wisconsin as the site for the president’s Race to the Top speech yesterday, we’re told, because that state’s legislature is about to get rid of its data firewall.
But did anyone read the bill in question? According to a local newspaper, while the legislation would allow student test data to be tied to teachers, that information can’t be used to remove teachers from the classroom. Of course, that isn’t the only reason to link teachers to student performance data, but in the most serious cases where that data reveal that student learning is being imperiled, a principal should be empowered to act.*
I’ve been warning that there’s a big difference between changes in law and changes in practices and therefore we need to drastically scale back our excitement about all of the RTT-generated changes in state laws. For example, hostile districts may erase a charter cap lift’s ability to generate new schools. Similarly, local union contracts may render a state merit pay program meaningless. And just because a state gets rid of its data firewall doesn’t mean that the state will actually link teachers to students or, if it does, make use of the data that’s generated. In fact, in the case of Wisconsin, a principal may actually be barred from acting on data swiftly and forcefully.
I hope the Department is wise to these important distinctions. States are bound to make the most electrifying promises in their RTT applications. It’ll take some hard-nosed peer reviewers and senior Department officials to cut to the quick and figure out whether great sounding proposals will actually lead to reform.
* Thanks to Robert Pondiscio for pointing out that I was insufficiently clear on this point earlier. I appreciate his alerting me to my poor wording which came across as an intemperate tone. I’ll do better next time.
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November 5th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Nicely noted. My fear is that these legal reforms will just be a redrawing of lines on the map while doing nothing to change the terrain. On paper things may be different, but on the ground it is all the same. Perhaps with vigilance like this, that result can be avoided.
November 5th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
<<< while the legislation would allow student test data to be tied to teachers, that information can’t be used to discipline or fire teachers. So principals and districts will have more useful information than ever before, they just won’t be able to make use of it.
Whoa.
Surely there are other uses of the data such as helping teachers improve their practice? When you suggest that the data is pointless unless you can use it to fire teachers, it leaves the impression that your interest is in, well, firing teachers. This is exactly the kind of thing that leads teachers to believe that “reformers” are only interested in blaming and firing teachers–and to distrust reform efforts.
You go to school with the teachers you have, not the teachers you wish you had. Let’s be a little more judicious before we run around screaming “off with their heads.”
November 5th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Texas just spent 300 million on merit pay and apparently has nothing to show for it in terms of test scores. Merit pay has intuitive appeal but it also has a long history of failure and collateral damage, as in our most recent economic meltdown. Florida tried it twice and failed twice–once in the 80s and once recently. Intrinsic motivation and internalized self-regulation simply work better in the long run than extrinsic motivation does.
Attempts to reward excellence in complex professions generally backfire because excellence cannot be reduced to a short list of behaviors, and attempts to do so often cause people to stop doing the other things that are a part of overall excellence. Carrot-and-stick motivation inherently creates counterproductive incentives.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Karl–then why do nearly all other “complex professions” compensate people based on merit?
November 5th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Hi Andy,
Interesting question.
First, there are tons of people in complex professions on straight salaries. In probably any profession you can think of, there are some people on straight salary, and some eligible for merit pay. No one at our church is eligible for merit pay, but they all work very hard and well. I don’t think Obama gets an extra $50K if he passes health care, and I doubt Eisenhower got a bonus if D-Day went well. Also, there are other countries in which it’s much less common. Back when we were more directly focused on Japan and Germany, an article in The Economist asked why American businesses thought they needed merit pay when these countries were so successful without such rewards.
Second, people fall back on merit pay for roughly the same reason I skip my workout too often (and if you saw me, you’d say that skipping the workout probably isn’t so wise!). We are fixated on short-term results, and often choose strategies that seem effective in the short run but are counterproductive in the long run. It’s easy to see how carrots and sticks get somebody to jump to attention and do some target behavior in the short run, and harder to see and keep track of how it backfires in the long run. Deming said something about how these systems of appraising and rewarding performance are “the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world.” When it does backfire, we blame the employees, not the overall strategy, because faith in carrots and sticks seems almost an article of religious faith among some in the business community.
In Texas, as has been true most places merit pay systems have failed over the decades, they’ll inevitably say they implemented it wrong. That’s what folks always say, but any structure creates perverse incentives. Reward for test scores and we toss creativity and deep understanding out of the curriculum and stop having gym class and recess (even if that just means health care costs sink our economy faster). Reward for passage rates and they focus on bubble kids and ignore above average kids, and ignore kids unlikely to pass no matter what you do. Reward for average test scores, and you have the above problems plus teachers will focus on kids where dramatic test score gains are most likely, and perhaps ignore the gifted kids. And never mind the problem that tests don’t contain much of what matters most to CEOs and politicians, or that extrinsic rewards backfire in systemic ways (e.g., it’s hard to have a “learning organization” when you create a powerful incentive for not sharing teaching strategies). David Cohen and some co-author, I think Murnane, did an analysis of some these problems in a 1980s article–and they aren’t even motivation researchers, so they left out some of the key problems.
Since I’ve researched teachers’ beliefs about their efficacy (i.e., teacher efficacy beliefs), I’ve thought a lot about how people perceive effectiveness, and what informs them or misinforms them about the actual effectiveness of things they do.
Third, most folks just don’t know the research on this, big studies in the 70s and 80s showing no effect, past failures of teacher merit pay–or they’re fooled by low-level short-term effects, or ignore collateral damage. What’s interesting in Texas is there were investigations into cheating, and STILL no big effects!
What people used to say about rewards is closer to the truth–that you often get the behavior you reward (but sometimes not even that). However, efforts to reward excellence generally don’t create more excellence because what we really reward is a narrow set of behaviors we can specify, and excellence in complex professions can’t be reduced to a short checklist of behaviors or targets.
November 5th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
[...] get too excited, write Andy Smarick, Wisconsin’s law bans firing teachers because of student [...]