We originally posted this back in May when the Seattle teachers’ contract negotiations were just beginning. Now it’s late summer, and the school district has shown its hand — a controversial proposal (it has named “SERVE”) to link teacher evaluations to a standardized test (not designed for this purpose) and give the superintendent unprecedented power to fire teachers at will — this post becomes even more relevant. This could lead to a teachers’ strike in September. Some parents have said they are ready to stand with their children’s teachers on the picket lines, because high-stakes testing for our kids and teachers, and a superintendent who is accountable to no one is a poisonous and unacceptable proposal. — sue p.
Also of note: the reemergence of the “Our Schools Coalition” in this dialogue also deserves renewed scrutiny. This post discusses the shady genesis of that Astroturf group which is now pushing for these unsound “reforms” without any mandate from the true members of the community — parents like us who actually have children in Seattle’s public schools who are on the receiving end of these “reforms.”
Thanks to Seattle Citizen over at the Seattle Public Schools Community Blog for recently finding this article: “The Folly of Merit Pay” by Alfie Kohn (posted below). And thanks to Alfie Kohn for shedding some sense and insight on the discussion of what motivates strong teachers.
Though written in 2003, this essay is more than relevant today as the ed reformers try to force or weasel their idea of merit pay upon our teachers — even though studies show that cash is not what motivates the best teachers to do their best. Kohn points out that teaching is a collaborative, cooperative profession whose practitioners are motivated by genuine learning and understanding on the part of their students, and not by cash bonuses and competition with their colleagues down the hall.
This is in stark and noble contrast to the efforts by some enterprises here in Seattle that are trying to push an agenda on our school district that ties teacher pay to standardized student testing. These are enterprises like the Alliance for Education and the League of Education Voters, which claim to merely fundraise for the district (A4E), or claim to represent the interest of regular voters (LEV). In truth, the Alliance has an “education reform” agenda that is largely funded by Los Angeles AIG billionaire Eli Broad’s foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates’ foundation. LEV is also primarily funded by the Gates foundation.
In an article in the April 6 Seattle Times “Schools group urges contract changes”, the Alliance and LEV claim to have formed yet another group, a “Our Schools Coalition,” and are trying to convince the media that it represents people like us and we all want “merit pay.”
None of us know what this is or how it came about. And it doesn’t represent any parents or public education supporters I know. It is clearly another faux grassroots (aka Astroturf) organization and an effort by billionaire education “reformers” to influence the upcoming teachers’ contract negotiations here in Seattle, and to weaken the teachers’ union.
As for the poll that the “Coalition”/Alliance/LEV/Gates/Broad paid for that allegedly claims parents and community want “merit pay,” by all accounts it started off as a highly questionable and biased “teacher quality” survey, which was withdrawn when genuine school community members protested, and reemerged as a very slanted push-poll taken of a curious cross section of community members (including some teachers via their private cell phone numbers).
UPDATE: The private phone numbers and contact information of 10,700 Seattle Public Schools children and 1,400 SPS teachers were provided by the school district to the polling and marketing firm, DMA Marketing/Strategies 360. This was stated on the “Our Schools Coalition” petition web site, but has since been deleted. Parents and teachers who learned of this fact were very disturbed by this use of private information. Apparently such sharing of student “directory information” is allowed under FERPA — unless parents sign an opt-out form at the beginning of the school year. How many of Seattle Public Schools’ 46,000 families know this is debatable. Chances are, most parents and teachers would not want their children’s or their own contact information shared with a private for-profit marketing and polling firm.
SECOND UPDATE (8/20/10): We have since discovered that the private contact information of 10,700 Seattle Public School children and 1,400 teachers was in fact provided by the district to Schools First and the Alliance for Education, respectively. A staff member for Schools First then passed on the list of student information (illegally, we believe) to the political marketing firm of Strategies 360/DMA Marketing, while the Alliance apparently passed on the teacher contact info to 360/DMA, in order for the marketing firm to conduct the push-poll on which it based its “coalition.” See: “Should the School District Be Allowed to Give Our Kids’ Phone numbers, Addresses and Photos to Every Tom, Dick and Pollster?”
The bottom line is, if the agenda of the “Coalition”/Alliance/LEV/Gates/Broad gang is legitimate and likely to gain genuine support from the local schools community, why don’t these folks run a honest poll and take genuine input? Why all these shenanigins with skewed surveys and politically manipulative push-polls and fake “community organizations” to create the illusion of “community support”?
Kind of makes you wonder what they are hiding.
Okay, here’s a voice of reason:
EDUCATION WEEK
September 17, 2003
The Folly of Merit Pay
By Alfie Kohn
There’s no end to the possible uses for that nifty little Latin phrase Cui bono?, which means: Who benefits? Whose interests are served? It’s the right question to ask about a testing regimen guaranteed to make most public schools look as though they’re failing. Or about the assumption that people with less power than you have (students, if you’re a teacher; teachers, if you’re an administrator) are unable to participate in making decisions about what they’re going to do every day.
And here’s another application: Cui bono when we’re assured that money is the main reason it’s so hard to find good teachers? If only we paid them more, we’d have no trouble attracting and retaining the finest educators that—well, that money can buy. Just accept that premise, and you’ll never have to consider the way teachers are treated. In fact, you could continue disrespecting and de-skilling them, forcing them to use scripted curricula and turning them into glorified test-prep technicians. If they seem unhappy, it must be just because they want a bigger paycheck.
In 2000, Public Agenda questioned more than 900 new teachers and almost as many college graduates who didn’t choose a career in education. The report concluded that, while “teachers do believe that they are underpaid,” higher salaries would probably be of limited effectiveness in alleviating teacher shortages because considerations other than money are “significantly more important to most teachers and would-be teachers.” Two years later, 44 percent of administrators reported, in another Public Agenda poll, that talented colleagues were being driven out of the field because of “unreasonable standards and accountability.”
Meanwhile, a small California survey, published last year in Phi Delta Kappan, found that the main reason newly credentialed teachers were leaving the profession was not low salaries or difficult children. Rather, those who threw in the towel were most likely to cite what was being done to their schools in the name of “accountability.” And the same lesson seems to hold cross-culturally. Mike Baker, a correspondent for BBC News, discovered that an educational “recruitment crisis” exists almost exclusively in those nations “where accountability measures have undermined teachers’ autonomy.”
That unhappy educators have a lot more on their minds than money shouldn’t be surprising in light of half a century of research conducted in other kinds of workplaces. When people are asked what’s most important to them, financial concerns show up well behind such factors as interesting work or good people to work with. For example, in a large survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute, “salary/wage” ranked 16th on a list of 20 reasons for taking a job. (Interestingly, managers asked what they believe matters most to their employees tend to mention money—and then proceed to manage on the basis of that error.)
Educational policymakers might be forgiven their shortsightedness if they were just proposing to raise teachers’ salaries across the board—or, perhaps, to compensate them appropriately for more responsibilities or for additional training. Instead, though, many are turning to some version of “pay for performance.” Here, myopia is complicated by amnesia: For more than a century, such plans have been implemented, then abandoned, then implemented in a different form, then abandoned again. The idea never seems to work, but proponents of merit pay never seem to learn.
Here are the educational historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban: “The history of performance-based salary plans has been a merry-go-round. In the main, districts that initially embraced merit pay dropped it after a brief trial.” But even “repeated experiences” of failure haven’t prevented officials “from proposing merit pay again and again.”
“Son of Merit Pay: The Sequel” is now playing in Cincinnati, Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, and elsewhere. The leading advocates of this approach—conservatives, economists, and conservative economists—insist that we need only adopt their current incentive schemes and, this time, teaching really will improve. Honest.
Wade Nelson, a professor at Winona State University, dug up a government commission’s evaluation of England’s mid-19th-century “payment by results” plan. His summary of that evaluation: Schools became “impoverished learning environments in which nearly total emphasis on performance on the examination left little opportunity for learning.” The plan was abandoned.
In The Public Interest, a right-wing policy journal, two researchers concluded with apparent disappointment in 1985 that no evidence supported the idea that merit pay “had an appreciable or consistent positive effect on teachers’ classroom work.” Moreover, they reported that few administrators expected such an effect “even though they had the strongest reason to make such claims.”
To this day, enthusiasm for pay-for-performance runs far ahead of any data supporting its effectiveness—even as measured by standardized-test scores, much less by meaningful indicators of learning. But then that, too, echoes the results in other workplaces. To the best of my knowledge, no controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any incentive system. In fact, numerous studies have confirmed that performance on tasks, particularly complex tasks, is generally lower when people are promised a reward for doing them, or for doing them well. As a rule, the more prominent or enticing the reward, the more destructive its effects.
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So why are pay-for-performance plans so reliably unsuccessful, if not counterproductive?
1. Control. People with more power usually set the goals, establish the criteria, and generally set about trying to change the behavior of those down below. If merit pay feels manipulative and patronizing, that’s probably because it is. Moreover, the fact that these programs usually operate at the level of school personnel means, as Maurice Holt has pointed out, that the whole enterprise “conveniently moves accountability away from politicians and administrators, who invent and control the system, to those who actually do the work.”
2. Strained relationships. In its most destructive form, merit pay is set up as a competition, where the point is to best one’s colleagues. No wonder just such a proposal, in Norristown, Pa., was unanimously opposed by teachers and ultimately abandoned. Even those teachers likely to receive a bonus realized that everyone loses—especially the students—when educators are set against one another in a race for artificially scarce rewards.
But pay- for-performance programs don’t have to be explicitly competitive in order to undermine collegial relationships. If I end up getting a bonus and you don’t, our interactions are likely to be adversely affected, particularly if you think of yourself as a pretty darned good teacher.
Some argue that monetary rewards are less harmful if they’re offered to, and made contingent on the performance of, an entire school. But if a school misses out on a bonus, what often ensues is an ugly search for individuals on whom to pin the blame. Also, you can count on seeing less useful collaboration among schools, especially if an incentive program is based on their relative standing. Why would one faculty share ideas with another when the goal is to make sure that students in other schools don’t do as well as yours? Merit pay based on rankings is about victory, not about excellence. In any case, bribing groups doesn’t make any more sense than bribing individuals.
3. Reasons and motives. The premise of merit pay, and indeed of all rewards, is that people could be doing a better job but for some reason have decided to wait until it’s bribed out of them. This is as insulting as it is inaccurate. Dangling a reward in front of teachers or principals—”Here’s what you’ll get if things somehow improve”— does nothing to address the complex, systemic factors that are actually responsible for educational deficiencies. Pay-for-performance is an outgrowth of behaviorism, which is focused on individual organisms, not systems—and, true to its name, looks only at behaviors, not at reasons and motives and the people who have them.
Even if they wouldn’t mind larger paychecks, teachers are typically not all that money-driven. They keep telling us in surveys that the magical moment when a student suddenly understands is more important to them than another few bucks. And, as noted above, they’re becoming disenchanted these days less because of salary issues than because they don’t enjoy being controlled by accountability systems. Equally controlling pay-for-performance plans are based more on neoclassical economic dogma than on an understanding of how things look from a teacher’s perspective.
Most of all, merit pay fails to recognize that there are different kinds of motivation. Doing something because you enjoy it for its own sake is utterly unlike doing something to get money or recognition. In fact, researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that the use of such extrinsic inducements often reduces intrinsic motivation. The more that people are rewarded, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. If bonuses and the like can “motivate” some educators, it’s only in an extrinsic sense, and often at the cost of undermining their passion for teaching.
For example, a recent study of a merit-pay plan that covered all employees at a northeastern college found that intrinsic motivation declined as a direct result of the plan’s adoption, particularly for some of the school’s “most valued employees—those who were highly motivated intrinsically before the program was implemented.” The more the plan did what it was intended to do—raise people’s extrinsic motivation by getting them to see how their performance would affect their salaries—the less pleasure they came to take in their work. The plan was abandoned after one year.
That study didn’t even take account of how resentful and demoralized people may become when they don’t get the bonus they’re expecting. For all these reasons, I tell Fortune 500 executives (or at least those foolish enough to ask me) that the best formula for compensation is this: Pay people well, pay them fairly, and then do everything possible to help them forget about money. All pay-for-performance plans, of course, violate that last precept.
4. Measurement issues. Despite what is widely assumed by economists and behaviorists, some things are more than the sum of their parts, and some things can’t be reduced to numbers. It’s an illusion to think we can specify and quantify all the components of good teaching and learning, much less establish criteria for receiving a bonus that will eliminate the perception of arbitrariness. No less an authority than the statistician-cum-quality-guru W. Edwards Deming reminded us that “the most important things we need to manage can’t be measured.”
It’s possible to evaluate the quality of teaching, but it’s not possible to reach consensus on a valid and reliable way to pin down the meaning of success, particularly when dollars hang in the balance. What’s more, evaluation may eclipse other goals. After merit-pay plans take effect, administrators often visit classrooms more to judge teachers than to offer them feedback for the purpose of improvement.
All these concerns apply even when technicians struggle to find good criteria for allocating merit pay. But the problems are multiplied when the criteria are dubious, such as raising student test scores. These tests, as I and others have argued elsewhere, tend to measure what matters least. They reflect children’s backgrounds more than the quality of a given teacher or school. Moreover, merit pay based on those scores is not only unfair but damaging, if it accelerates the exodus of teachers from troubled schools where they’re most needed.
Schoolwide merit pay, again, is no less destructive than the individual version. High stakes induce cheating, gaming, teaching to the test, and other ways of snagging the bonus (or dodging the penalty) without actually improving student learning. In fact, some teachers who might resist these temptations, preferring to do what’s best for kids rather than for their own wallets, feel compelled to do more test prep when their colleagues’ paychecks are affected by the school’s overall scores.
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It may be vanity or, again, myopia that persuades technicians, even after the umpteenth failure, that merit pay need only be returned to the shop for another tuneup. Perhaps some of the issues mentioned here can be addressed, but most are inherent in the very idea of paying educators on the basis of how close they’ve come to someone’s definition of successful performance. It’s time we acknowledged not only that such programs don’t work, but that they can’t work.
Furthermore, efforts to solve one problem often trigger new ones. Late-model merit-pay plans often include such lengthy lists of criteria and complex statistical controls that no one except their designers understand how the damn things work.
So how should we reward teachers? We shouldn’t. They’re not pets. Rather, teachers should be paid well, freed from misguided mandates, treated with respect, and provided with the support they need to help their students become increasingly proficient and enthusiastic learners.
Copyright © 2003 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author’s name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.
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