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February 01, 2007
Edumatters in Tejas
I ran across a couple of interesting links at this week's Carnival of Education, found at serial Carnival organizer The Median Sib. Bucky, a Houston teacher at Brown Bag Blog, takes aim at a number of alleged weaknesses of Houston Independent School District's merit pay system. A bit about the Houston program here:
The new plan is the first to link bonuses to individual teachers' efforts. In general, the district's complex formula looks at a student's test scores one year and the same student's scores the next, and judges the teacher based on how much that student improved, compared to peers of the same income level.
District officials say the goal of this value-added method is to ensure that all students, whether they are low-performing or gifted, have a teacher who moves them forward each year.
The formula relies on scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the national Stanford 10 exam and the Spanish-equivalent Aprenda.
I don't know that one of Bucky's suggested fixes--"If HISD really wanted to bring our scores up, they'd give that bonus money to the kids instead"--makes a lot of sense. Obviously he thinks the money should be spent differently, but what does it mean to just give the money to the kids? To spend it in the classroom? On what?
But I don't want to sound like I'm just picking on him, because he identifies some real weaknesses in HISD's merit pay system. In particular, it appears the district didn't remedy the financial disincentive that seems to be characteristic in public education with respect to disadvantaged student bodies (i.e. higher salaries are in more affluent areas, which makes it much less likely that good teachers will get in front of the students that need them most). San Diego's supe tried to overcome this through offering bonuses to experienced teachers to get them to transfer to low-performing schools, but the idea was torpedoed by the teachers union. If Houston were to do something along those lines, it would go a long way to reversing the trend.
I think there's a bigger problem here, as identified by AFTie Michele: teachers weren't in the loop when the system was set up, resulting in a lot of miscommunication and, especially, a real lack of buy-in. Little Rock is having a good deal of success from a merit pay pilot, and one reason is that teachers in the schools agreed to sign on to the program. Correspondingly, participating teachers didn't report the poor morale or lack of collaboration that critics allege take place with merit pay.
It's also worth pointing out that while the Little Rock experiment is set up in elementary schools, the Houston program involves high schools, resulting in a different set of challenges, particularly in the low-performing schools Bucky describes (high administrative turnover, much more transient students). It's a safe bet the Houston program didn't take a lot of this into consideration during the design process.
The Little Rock experiment has illustrated that merit pay can be used successfully. But it's clear that setting up an effective merit pay program on the secondary level is quite a bit trickier. The question in my mind is how to improve the Houston program, not whether to throw it out entirely. So here are a few suggested fixes:
- As noted above, give experienced teachers bonuses for volunteering to teach in low-performing schools. Plenty of other fields offer some form of hazard pay; education should be no different.
- Bring on the union reps. No, seriously--if it will produce teachers more committed to the process, I'm all for giving them a say in how the program will operate.
- One of Bucky's gripes is that the program is tied to TAKS, Texas's standardized test. How about a multi-tiered system--one bonus connected to TAKS, another connected to individual student performance, and yet another tied to the school's individual grades? It would give teachers more opportunities for reward, and with at least some compensation tied to collective performance, there could also be greater incentive for collaboration among teachers.
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Comments
Thanks for the plug, Ryan. I agree that my flippant suggestion of a system rewarding the kids for doing well on standardized tests would prove ultimately unworkable. But at least it would carry the advantage over the current system of addressing a major variable in the desired outcome. The current rewards system is random, gives rewards that are not fully explained to the teachers, and encourages teachers to complete with each other for who can get the best students.
There's probably a reason why my job involves talking to adolescents about dead people instead of designing reasonable incentive packages. But if we're really going to throw money at this problem, I genuinely believe the answer isn't in paying teachers more, but in paying more teachers. We'll work for bread crumbs anyway, but if you lower student-teacher ratios, you do allow teachers to give more time to those students needing the extra help.
By way of nitpicking, the Houston Chronicle piece on the bonus system mistates the formula slightly for the teacher reward system. The pay is based predominantly on the TAKS test. There may be some students' progress based on the Aprenda test, but as far as I know the Stanford 10 exam is not used for assessing students. That's a shame, because from my experience minority students overall do better on the Stanford 10 than on the TAKS. This suggests to me that the Stanford 10 has less of a cultural bias built into it.
Since a major motivation for our high stakes testing is Governor Perry's "Closing the Gaps" initiative, one would think that a test with less of a cultural bias in it would be desireable. But when one thinks that, one is clearly not understanding the politics involved in having a test designed by a state agency rather than one designed by academic professionals.
Posted by: Bucky | February 3, 2007 05:27 AM
