Teacher Incentive Pay Doesn't Work. Unions and Teachers-"We Told You So."

We've watched the clever cartoon evaluating incentive pay on YouTube and found performance improved for manual labor, and not creative or intellectual work.



That left many wondering why the Bush and Obama administrations want to persue a system that included merit pay. Now, a new study drives a stake through the heart of the whole teacher incentive pay idea.

Education Week: The most rigorous study of performance-based teacher compensation ever conducted in the United States shows that a nationally watched bonus-pay system had no overall impact on student achievement—results released today that are certain to set off a firestorm of debate.

Nearly 300 middle school mathematics teachers in Nashville, Tenn., voluntarily took part in the Project on Incentives in Teaching, a three-year randomized experiment conducted by researchers affiliated with the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University.

But it yielded only two small positive findings, limited to 5th graders in the second and third year of the experiment. No effects were seen for students in grades 6-8 in any year of study.

The findings arrive in a highly charged teacher-quality policy environment, in which many states and districts, with support from the Obama administration, are overhauling current practices for preparing, evaluating, and compensating teachers. And they come at a particularly inopportune time for the U.S. Department of Education, which is scheduled to announce a fresh slate of grantees this month under a federal program designed to seed merit-pay programs for teachers and principals.

On average, students taught by the teachers taking part in the program did not make larger academic gains than those taught by teachers in the normal wage group. The sole exception was in grade 5 in the second and third years of study. In those years, the incentive pay was linked to statistically significant increases in student scores—an increase, the report states, equal to between a third and a half year of learning. But the effect did not appear to persist. “By the end of 6th grade,” the study states, “it does not matter whether a student had a treatment teacher in grade 5.”

“It’s a really well-designed study, and it’s really important because a lot of the debate about performance pay has been evidence-free,” said Steven N. Glazerman, a principal researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, a Princeton, N.J.-based evaluation firm.

“A lot of the discussion about performance pay is based on a faulty assumption that the reason we don’t have higher test scores is that teachers are shirking their responsibilities,” said Helen F. Ladd, a professor of public policy and economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C., about the findings.

Mr. Mance of the Tennessee Education Association said the study confirms what many teachers and unions have long believed: that teachers are already hardworking. For this study to show positive results, he said, “you’d have to have teachers who were saving their best strategies for an opportunity to get paid for them, and that is an absurd proposition.”

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Chipping away at History: Texas conservatives Given Pass, Changes no Big Deal.

Professional industry magazine, Education Week, reports a recent study determined the Texas Board of Education conservative activists changes were minor, and overblown in the press.

So…leave the changes in this time? Leave the changes in next time too? They were bad ideological changes, but not that bad, "for the most part." Actual history has a liberal, fact based slant, that needs to be balanced. What a report:

Criticism of Texas Social Studies Standards Overblown, Analyst Says By Erik Robelen: You may recall all the controversy earlier this year over the work by the Texas state school board, led by a bloc of social conservatives, to revamp the state's social studies standards. But if you look at the final product, the controversy was way overblown, according to Gilbert Sewall, the founder and director of the American Textbook Council, an independent research organization in New York City that reviews history textbooks and other educational materials.

In a new commentary posted on The Answer Sheet, a blog from The Washington Post, he offers some analysis that is sure to ruffle feathers among the board's sympathizers and its sharp critics. "Whatever the fine points and actual language, millions of Americans think Christian extremists on the Texas state school board have completed a radical history overhaul destined to corrupt textbooks nationwide," he writes. "If it is a conservative victory, it is a Pyrrhic victory … "No doubt a few changes—out of thousands of items—were pointed. Republicans tried to use state power to spin historical accounts as they saw them, exactly as multiculturalists have done since the 1990s. Claims of a radical assault on history are false."

Multiculturalists spin? As defined by Wordweb, multiculturalism is the doctrine that several different cultures (rather than one national culture) can coexist peacefully and equitably in a single country. What a outrage? Is that comparable to a Christian extremist spin? But that’s okay, because “for the most part,” not much has changed.

In the end, Sewall contends that the "final Texas standards are for the most part conventional and inclusive. A few items betray a conservative viewpoint. They do not warrant the attention and defamation they have received nor the hysteria they have generated. Little has changed. The new standards on the whole conform to what's already in textbooks, and the impact on history textbooks nationwide will be very limited."

Who will feel comfort in, “the impact will be limited?” This time, and next time too?

Sewall … suggests that in some cases, conservative board members and their allies generated more negative attention with their rhetoric than with what actually ended up in the new standards. And indeed, as he notes, a lot of initial revisions were softened after debate. "The truth is, in the final version, the board majority made many adjustments or retractions to meet criticisms. The one world history item that originally dropped Jefferson restored him. Dolores Huerta stayed. Latino contributions to Texas history remain largely intact. Diversity was alive and well."

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Walker: Fire all the Teachers! But Student Test Scores Wrong Way to Go.

To hear governor candidate Scott Walker talk about it, teacher evaluations based on student tests is tough love, and another way to finally weed out freeloading union teachers. But why base anything on research when strict disciplinary remedies illicit stronger, more predictable voter reactions and outrage. From Upfront with Mike Gousha (Goo-shay):



The facts say otherwise, and once again reinforce the shoot from the hip style of the Republican Party and why were in this deep recessionary hole. From the Economic Policy Institute:

American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers. Many policy makers have recently come to believe that this failure can be remedied by calculating the improvement in students’ scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading, and then relying heavily on these calculations to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.

… there is not strong evidence to indicate either that the departing teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains.

A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that … such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation. Some states are now considering plans that would give as much as 50% of the weight in teacher evaluation and compensation … Based on the evidence, we consider this unwise. Student test scores are not reliable indicators of teacher effectiveness, even with the addition of value-added modeling (VAM), a new Economic Policy Institute report by leading testing experts finds.

The distinguished authors of EPI’s report, Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers, make clear that the accuracy and reliability of analyses of student test scores, even in their most sophisticated form, is highly problematic VAM results show that they are often unstable across time, classes and tests; thus, test scores, even with the addition of VAM, are not accurate indicators of teacher effectiveness.

Student test scores, even with VAM, cannot fully account for the wide range of factors that influence student learning, particularly the backgrounds of students, school supports and the effects of summer learning loss. As a result, teachers who teach students with the greatest educational needs appear to be less effective than they are.

Furthermore, VAM does not take into account nonrandom sorting of teachers to students across schools and students to teachers within schools. Furthermore, creating a system in which teachers are, in effect, competing with each other can reduce the incentive to collaborate within schools—and studies have shown that better schools are marked by teaching staffs that work together.

Finally, judging teachers based on test scores that do not genuinely assess students’ progress can demoralize teachers, encouraging them to leave the teaching field.

Demoralizing teachers, by demonizing their unions or poorly funding mandates on educators, is really the point here. Oddly, teachers in private schools doing a similar job or more poorly are never mentioned. Voucher school advocates have never suggested similar tests for private school teachers, complaining instead that such meddling would interfere with the free market and inhibit innovation.