Merit Pay: Is it now time to pull back high stakes testing along with ‘Merit Pay’ as a reward?

Dr. Hans Andrews

This is a multi-part article. This is part 3 of 3.

Some merit pay and high stakes testing responses

Andrews (2013) received a response from a secondary school principal relative to his experience with merit pay in his school in Caledonia, Michigan: The introduction of merit pay can ultimately slow or stop the process of school improvements. Competition, through merit pay, leads the culture of a building, school, or school district in the opposite direction. He saw the idea of ‘recognition’ providing an opportunity for growth for all teachers in a much more cooperative setting (p.3).

A second response received on recognition vs. merit pay came from a public school teacher who had lived under a merit pay system in her school:

One of the reasons I went into teaching is because I knew I’d make the same as my male counterparts. The large factor I learned with merit pay is that it pits teachers against each other. How do l know? I worked in a district that issued merit pay. If my reading scores were higher than my colleagues I got more pay. This made us scramble not to take on special education students or physical or other health impairment (POHi) students, and we hoarded our ideas. It was awful!

An elementary teacher from Colorado, USA, submitted the following comments on her experience with both merit pay and recognition climates in schools she had worked:

The first school I worked had a pay for performance and there was virtually no collaboration and none of the first grade teachers got along at all or worked together. It was horrible! Throughout my teaching career I have only worked at one school where there was any teacher recognition, and the morale, collaboration and congeniality at that school was significantly higher than it was at the other two schools I taught.

Lack of removal of weak/ incompetent teachers

There are very few of the weakest teachers removed from their teaching positions as they are ranked as positive in most of the evaluations. Grissom (2017) studied why principals gave such high ratings to almost all of their teachers through their evaluation processes. When I 00 principals in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools district reported their evaluation findings to these researchers (Susanna Loeb and Jason Grissom, 2017) they rated many more of their evaluated teachers at the lower end in their instructional ratings.

A total of 15% were listed in the ‘ineffective’ range. On the other hand, when reporting on what was called their high-stakes personnel evaluations, it was found that almost everyone was given a 3 or 4 rating (effective and highly effective). In these ratings the number dropped to 3% who were identified as less than ‘effective’.

The evaluator concluded that if the low performers were to be properly identified and given remediation, and/or dismissal, the formal assessments as given to the researchers need to be closer to the principals’ assessments that were given in the high-stakes personnel evaluation in the teachers’ file. This study pointed to one of the reasons that nothing appears to happen to those teachers who are not performing if they are being given ratings that are higher than they have been observed in their teaching by their supervisors in the evaluation process.

Thomas (2010) in his Newsweek article on the need to fire bad teachers referred to the fact that far too often the weakest teachers get assigned to teaching the neediest students in the inner-city schools. He referred to a study by Kati Haycock of the Education Trust whose research found that those children having two weak teachers in a row will never recover.

This same writer referred to how strong the teachers’ unions have become very powerful. In New York City he found in 2008 only three teachers were dismissed for cause. This was out of over 30,000 tenured teachers in the system. Some of the other statistics presented on the number of teachers dismissed for their poor performances were:

Chicago, Illinois 2005 - 2008 0.1%

Akron, Ohio 0%

Toledo, Ohio 0.01%

Denver, Colorado 0%

Thomas also pointed out that the administrations of many schools, while not removing their poor teachers, move them around into other district schools in a process widely known as ‘the dance of the lemons.’ He summarizes his comments by showing that across the country 99 percent of the teachers evaluated are given ‘satisfactory’ ratings. Mathews (2017) criticized the reformers of the American education system. He referred to a 2009 study as ‘The Widget Effect’ by the New Teacher Project (TNTP).

It was found in the study that the classroom assessment systems were a sham. There were less than one percent of the teachers rated in the ‘unsatisfactory’ category. He further stated:

Since reform seems to be crumbling as test results have proved erratic and unusable with subjects such as science and history that don’t have standardized state tests. So are principals triumphant, eager to assert their assessment responsibilities, show some spine and rate teachers honestly? The answer is no.

Mathews further reported that an Education Week reporter Loewus (2017) found principals try to make nearly all of their teachers happy and that ‘it takes too much time’ as a reason that principals do not let their sub-par teachers know they need to make improvements.

Loewus quoted one school principal: It’s even worse if several teachers need help. It’s not possible for an administrator to carry through on 10 unsatisfactory teachers simultaneously. Once somebody is identified as unsatisfactory, the amount of work, the amount of observation, the amount of time and attention that it requires to support him/her can become overwhelming.

In a review of a policy in Australia on how they dealt with removing some of their poorest teachers, offering $50,000 ‘retirement incentive’ bonuses developed in Southern Australia, Victoria and Queensland, Andrews (2011) responded:

It is amazing to see the Southern Australia Education Minister’s recent announcement to pay poorly performing teachers with a $50,000 ‘retirement incentive’ bonus! How unbelievable in this day and age. At a time when school districts around the world are unable to properly staff their classrooms, provide adequate supplies and attract our best students into the profession, this comes as a kick in the rear to our profession. When will our educational leaders ‘bite the bullet’ and properly apply accountable teacher evaluation principles and either improve these incompetent teacher perfonnances or remove them?

Williams (2017), in a follow-up survey by the Southern Australia (SA) Association of State School Organizations, presented the key results as finding over 90 percent of parents opposed this program. In addition, 70 percent of the 76 principals who responded also opposed these type of payouts. Teachers gave support for the program at a 60 percent level. The largest outcome of the survey was finding that overwhelmingly parents and principals indicated that governmental units should change the focus to rewarding the good teachers and make it easier to fire the bad ones.

Summary

The movement of high stakes testing in school in the U.S. and numerous other countries has changed both the curriculum and teaching environments for teachers and their students. In order to encourage states and school districts to ‘buy-in’ to this movement large monetary incentives have been made available. In the Race to the Top (RTTT) program states vied against each other to show how they would improve hiring practices to bring in better teachers, develop much improved teacher evaluation processes, move to dismiss incompetent or low performing teachers, offer large monetary incentives (merit pay) to those teachers who had the most success in raising test scores of their students. The earlier research on merit pay and teacher evaluation practices should have been a red flag that there would be little chance that merit pay would now work. It was not found successful in almost all schools across the U.S. that had tried merit pay in the past 40+ years.

The promises made by states and school systems were not carried out seriously, or competently, and the results of these very high financially funded programs have now been reviewed and evaluated as producing few positive results. Teachers were not given better evaluation processes but were left to let the school administrators evaluate them, in large part, by their student test scores.

Merit pay did not reach the amounts that were promised to teachers. Improved teaching efforts seemed to be neglected as an outcome of lack of improved evaluation, smaller pay than anticipated, and the inability or neglect of administrators learning to evaluate teachers beyond their student test scores. The removal of the incompetent, and low performing, teachers was not carried out with the exception of a very small number. In fact, many more teachers were moved into a higher rank than were moved down and dismissed. It seems that it is now time to deemphasize the high stakes testing, move back to emphasizing a well-rounded curriculum, offer ‘recognition’ rather than ‘merit pay’ to teachers in all areas of our schools who are performing at a high level in their subject and curriculum areas. Merit pay should now go the way of the junk pile of tried and unsuccessful experiments in education.

Governing boards, administrators, teachers and students will all benefit from a future in their schools absent of the high stakes testing and merit pay presently offered as the incentive for those having improved testing scores and that now dominate the curriculums in so many of our schools around the world.

References

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Hans A. Andrews, EdD is Distinguished Fellow in Community College Leadership, Olney Central College, IL, USA; Instructional Administrator and Community College President. Author: Recognition vs. Merit Pay for Our Best Teachers and Accountable Teacher Evaluation: Toward Highly Qualified and COMPETENT TEACHERS. He can be reached at Ottawa, Illinois, 61350 USA. Email: andrewsha@sbcglobal.net. Phone: 815-431-8934

Thomas, E. (2010, March 5). Why we must fire bad teachers. Newsweek. Retrieved on July 7, 2018, from http://www.