Considering the Merits of “Merit” Pay

The other day, during one of my many rants, a colleague delicately said to me, “I think I have to disagree with you a little about merit pay.  I think it would be nice to be rewarded for doing a good job.” I had to stop for a minute…

… my colleague’s simple, honest statement sounded right.  I too wouldn’t mind being rewarded for my hard work.

Then as I thought more about it and about the teachers with whom I have worked over the years, it occurred to me that merit pay is presented as some sort of incentive for teachers to be better at what they do.  I asked my colleague (who is among the hardest working and dedicated educators I know), “Do you think that you’d work any harder, or do a better job because of the promise of  more money?” She had to admit that she would not.

Neither would I. Although I had to consider how nice it would be to be paid more in acknowledgement of how good a teacher I am, I never questioned whether money is, in fact, an incentive to work harder or better. It makes too much sense to question. It is an idea imbued with truthiness.

Then I came upon this short, provocative video lecture.  I immediately sent it to my colleague and am awaiting her response to continue this conversation.  I thought it would be a good idea to open the discussion to the broader community and, perhaps, have it right here in this forum. Take a look at the video and feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts and comments.

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If you can’t view the embedded video, try clicking here:  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

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Merit/performance pay always brings to mind (a) the divisiveness among a staff being differentially paid for the same job, (b) the placing of “difficult” or unsuccessful students between a teacher or administrator and her paycheck, (c) the many opportunities for favoritism and corruption among those who make decisions about who does a “good” job and who does a better one, and (d) the myriad logistical issues including how to measure the effectiveness of a resource room teacher, a music teacher, a phys-ed teacher or any teacher of a non-tested subject.

What is presented to the world as a way to reward “good” teachers and incentivize “good” teaching actually would more appropriately be labeled demerit pay.  Paying “bad” teachers less. I can imagine merit pay becoming codified as a “good” teacher’s standard salary and “merit” hurdles being placed in the paths of teachers as they try to move up the salary scale, in effect, paying some less than the standard wage rather than rewarding some with more pay. What we really want is to be paid well (or, at least, fairly) for a very difficult and very important job.

Finno-philia

The successes of Finnish schools have become a focus (perhaps more of an obsession) with educational reformers in the United States and elsewhere.

While the BBC video and article, Why do Finnish Schools Get the Best Results? constructs a portrait of public education that few can fail to admire, we cannot uncritically accept the they-are-great-we-stink argument and react inappropriately to the “crisis” in our own system. This film and the current educational reform movement raise a number of interesting and, perhaps, troubling questions that I believe must be addressed as we shape education policy both for the United States and in our local school systems.

• What do we consider success? Is it scores on tests in mathematics, science, and literacy?  Is it the development of skills, attitudes, and social abilities that enable learners to lead productive, satisfying lives?
• What about Finnish society makes their schools effective?
• Are Finnish (or Korean, or any other) methods appropriate for American schools?
• What do we in the United States do well?  How can we make sure that we don’t lose our strengths in the process of educational reform?
• What are the purposes of schooling?  How do we construct learning environments that help all stakeholders achieve their goals?
• What are the purposes of testing? Do the assessments we use address those purposes? Do they support learning and teaching?

Serious, informed, good-faith discussion needs to replace polemics if we are to address the weaknesses, exploit the strengths and improve the state of education in the United States at the federal, state and local levels.  An example of why this is necessary and of how it is not what is happening now is this new-found Finno-philia.  If Finnish schools are characterized by shorter school hours, supportive administrators, mixed ability grouping, academic freedom, and professionalism, we have to wonder why we ignore these things and focus on high-stakes testing, deprofessionalizing educators, authoritarianism and longer hours as we try to emulate their success.

Click here to read the article and watch the short video.  Then, let’s start a productive discussion here that can inform our own work in the classroom and in our discussions with family and friends, the public and the policy-makers.

Debating the School-Reform Debate

One-room Schoolhouse, Fruita, Utah c. 1900 Photo © 2002, Mitch Bleier

No, I have not seen the new education “reform” film, Waiting for Superman, so I will refrain from having or expressing an opinion on any content other than what I have seen in the trailer. My familiarity with some of the players in the film does, however, push me to respond quickly with a call for those engaging in the school-reform debate to inform themselves about the facts used in the arguments and about the motives of those who are most vocal in these arguments, and to examine their own assumptions about public schools and those who attend and work in them.

At the dawn of the 19th century, a group of wealthy, charitable New Yorkers sought and received a charter from New York State for the Public School Society of New York, whose intention it was to provide education for poor children not served by charitable and religious institutions, who might otherwise fall prey to “immorality and vice,” and, presumably, begin to prey upon the decent people of New York City. These early education-reform efforts took the form of monitorial or Lancasterian methods of schooling in which one teacher, assisted by a number of monitors drawn from the most capable of students, could educate hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand children.

Much recent reform, including the pervasive standards movement has been driven by the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. Decentralization, NCLB, re-assertion of mayoral control, RTTT, and the charter school movement have brought us to where we are today. Public schools are in trouble. Funding, public confidence, and political support, so necessary for success and improvement are eroding at an alarming rate. This is a call for educators to keep themselves informed of the issues, and the arguments on all sides of these important education debates…and to be clear about their own stance on these issues. This may require a rethinking  of the purpose(s) of public education, and a reassertion of the rights of children and the benefits to society of a well-educated population well-equipped to question and challenge the status quo.

Here are links to some resources to help us all keep on top of things:
Please feel free to respond to this post and to add resources here.

• Bridging Differences – a long-running back-and-forth conversation between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch about education issues and education policy
• Waiting for Superman – the official website of the film
• The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting for Superman – the official website of the response to Waiting for Superman
• Not Waiting for Superman – another response to the film–this one initiated by Rethinking Schools.
• New York City Charter School Center
• Stories from School – National Board certified teacher leaders share how education policy impacts classrooms

Lancasterian Schooling for the Poor

Draft of National Standards for K-12 Released to Public

The National Governors’ Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) has release of the first official public draft of the K-12 standards [for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science] as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a process being led by governors and chief state school officers in 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The NGA Center press release asserts that “[t]hese standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs.”   The NGA center announcement of the “first public release” of the draft for comment, also states that “[t]he standards are expected to be finalized in early Spring.”  So comment quickly!

Any thoughts about standards, the idea of national standards, or these standards in particular? Post them here.

[Note:  The links in this post no longer function but the standards can be found on the CCSSI Website.]

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References:

Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) Draft K-12 Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science

NGA Center (2010, March 10). Draft K-12 Common Core State Standards available for comment: NGA Center, CCSSO release first official public draft. Retrieved from http://www.nga.org/portal/site/nga/menuitem.6c9a8a9ebc6ae07eee28aca9501010a0/?vgnextoid=e50b863754047210VgnVCM1000005e00100aRCRD&vgnextchannel=759b8f2005361010VgnVCM1000001a01010aRCRD

NGA Center (2009, September 9). Fifty-One States And Territories Join Common Core State Standards Initiative (original news release announcing project)

Will the noble experiment born in Philadelphia die in Austin?

This is a response to the cover story of the February 14, 2010 New York Times magazine, How Christian Were the Founding Fathers? (reference and link below), which examines the enormous influence of the Texas State Board of Education on the content and language of American textbooks, and the process by which that influence is shaped and wielded.

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We humans project on our gods—both spiritual and temporal—qualities to which we feel we ought to aspire no matter how unlikely it is that we will realize those aspirations.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Jefferson Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, David Duke, Ronald Reagan, Tom Metzger all find their way in to someone’s American pantheon.  All share admirable, strong, leadership qualities, at least in the eyes of their worshipers.

The founders had ideas—ideals.  They didn’t always (or ever) completely live these ideals, but they forged a vision from which Americans have continuously constructed a unique and complex country over the past 240 or so years.  That country reflects the founders’ ideals, albeit heavily mediated by who we are at any particular point in history.  At times we are and have been slave traders, abolitionists, prairie sod busters, poor Europeans fleeing oppression and extermination, enslaved Africans, entrepreneurs, street vendors, railroad builders, dustbowl refugees, carpetbaggers, hegemonic colonialists, hard-working, God-fearing Christians, equally-hard-working, but not-quite-as-god-fearing atheists, pioneers, invaders and invadees, suffragists, villains, thieves and scoundrels, self-made women and men, tax cheats, philanthropists, saints, pioneers, persecutors and the persecuted.

To be sure, the rich, the powerful and the well-connected make the “important” decisions.  But they cannot build a nation that perfectly mirrors their vision.  All of the people shape a nation and a national character.  America’s founders’ vision, embodied in a surprisingly small number of documents, could not take shape until its ideas played out on the stage of real people in the real world.  Foremost among the insightful provisions that they built into the “American experiment” are (a) the ability of later generations to change the plan in light of unanticipated future circumstances, and (b) the construction of internal obstacles (checks and balances) to prevent that change from happening lightly or unilaterally—a dynamic inertia that would preserve the spirit of a new country while allowing it to be forever modern.

So while it may be informative to debate what exactly the framers intended and what they would think about abortion, environmental degradation, science education, or any currently pressing political or social issue, it is more important to emphasize that they sought to give us a living, breathing democracy—“if [we] can keep it.” These people, living in undemocratic times, engaging in undemocratic activities (enslavement, misogyny, genocide), created a scheme by which we could define and re-define democracy, evolving the system to which they gave birth to a point at which many of their own actions would be seen as criminal.  They sought to protect us (posterity) both from them and from ourselves.  Today, patriotism, dubbed by Samuel Johnson as the last refuge of scoundrels, has become the first refuge of scoundrels—intolerant, cynical, self-righteous zealots who would shape the common home of well over 300,000,000 people to their own purposes—their own authoritarian utopia.

Perhaps the Internet, with its Niagara of information and ideas and its unprecedented demand on scholarship for intellectual tools and habits including skepticism, demand for evidence, debate and analysis, will provide a way for the people to define the real America…for now.

The recent death of Howard Zinn, who long championed the historical perspectives of the oppressed, the poor, and the disenfranchised, shines a glaring light on the Texas State Board of Education’s once again seeking to dictate to a whole country what its children will read, and what it ought to believe.

Re-writing history—revisionism—is not an insidious practice, but is, in fact, the job of historians.  But unless we all have access to all voices, and unless our children are equipped with the intellectual tools with which to meet the maelstrom of information and ideas, we will live our lives and make important decisions for ourselves, our families, our communities, our country and the world under a shroud of ignorance.

We require local curriculum development, professional standards for guidance, access to primary documents and artifacts, as well as access to multitudes of resources, and an emphasis by educators on helping learners develop the skills and habits necessary to make sense of the complex world in which they live.  This will enable today’s students to affect their own future, to determine what kind of country and what kind of world we will be living in tomorrow, and to demand that their voices will shape that world.

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Reference

Shorto, R. (2010, February 14). How Christian were the founders?: History wars: Inside America’s textbook battles. New York Times, pp. 32-47.

Notes on December 10th P.D. session on Chapter 6 of Using Data to Improve Learning for All

Min, Paul and Scott planned a session on the Final Thoughts section of Using Data to Improve Learning for All that shifted the focus from the book to our work at the Bronx New School.

Scott started us off by framing and focusing the session.  Paul recounted statements elsewhere in this blog in response to the book.  He acknowledged that when you talk about data, it usually sparks a loud and contentious debate, but reminded us that, as professional educators, we work for a system–in fact we work for several systems:  local, state and federal–to which we are responsible.  Data, whatever the purposes for its collection is simply “another vehicle for knowing children.”  He urged us to be accountable without compromising our integrity.  Finally Paul observed, that “people who make decisions about children usually are those who are furthest from children,” and asked us to consider why that is and what are its implications.

Min led us thorough a few children’s word games–hangman** and staircase–using data-related terms to help us generate language for our discussion and to help exhausted teachers put the

A Thoughtful Conversation About Education Policy

Since 2007, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have been bridging their differences via an online conversation about big issues in education policy. Their lively and informative blog on the Education Week web site addresses key issues in education including the charter school movement, control of education by non-educators, accountability, the present and future of unions in education, testing, and performance pay.

These two powerful, opinionated, well-informed, and often dissonant voices remind us that thoughtful discussion of educational issues and consideration of more than one side of complex issues of policy and pedagogy are both possible and productive.  Please take some time to look at their Bridging Differences blog.  If you go back into the archives, you can get a sense of the development of major educational policy arguments over the past few years and see how the ideas and positions of both Ravitch and Meier have evolved.

Click here for the Bridging Differences blog.