One frequent proposal for “reforming†education is the idea of “merit pay†for teachers. Traditionally, teacher salaries have been determined by seniority and educaton level. To some people, this is a silly way to set someone’s salary. If Bob’s doing a better job of teaching than I am, why should I make more money than Bob because I’ve been around for a couple of years or because I have a Ph.D? Instead, why not give good teachers the compensation they deserve, so that they are recognized for their good work and are more likely to remain a teacher?
It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea, but where it has the potential to fall down is: who decides who the good teachers are, and how? Right now, a majority of merit pay proposals appear to be tied to test scores. But there are a lot of things that a good teacher can do that don’t directly show up in test scores. And any particular student’s test scores are going to depend on what that child has done and experiences up to that point, so you’d have to find some formula that isolates the specific teacher’s effect. Even that can be difficult because many subjects have a cross-curricular component. If I spend time helping students identify causes and effects in a reading assignment, and that skill helps them in English class, how can a test trace that? Likewise, if the English teacher is so skilled that she helps students understand the historical context of something like Anne Frank’s diary, how is an English test going to demonstrate that skill?
This goes back to Dewey and his vision of education – true education gives you tools and understanding so that you can navigate the problems and questions that you run into while you’re trying to live your life. There’s no way to measure that in an objective test, any more than you can show you’re a qualified driver by taking a written test. You have to show that you can drive the car by driving the car. As a teacher, I need to keep that in mind when I develop my assessments. I can’t just give a bunch of tests, or even a bunch of papers, and assume I know what my students know. I have to talk to them. I have to see them solve problems. I have to see them adapt and transform the information presented into something that has meaning to them. And by the time I’ve done that for ten months, then I have a sense of who has learned what. If someone is going to evaluate me and tell me whether I am being effective or not, then I expect that evaluator to put at least as much effort into it.
To some extent, we have systems for this in public education right now. My colleagues can recognize when my students connect content in English or science class to some kind of historical information. My principal reads my lesson plans and observes my classes. When I started teaching high school, there were plenty of points along the way where people could say, “Dave, you’re just not getting the job done right now.†But they also followed that with, “And here are some things you can do to get better,†and they worked with me until I improved. That’s a process that’s ongoing, to put it mildly, but I can look at myself in the mirror and say that I’m a good teacher with a straight face. And other people can say it too, because they know me, they know my students, and they know what we do. If those systems for identifying good teachers were the ones that were being modified to implement a merit pay system, I think there would be less controversy.
There would still be some, of course. There are good reasons for the current system. I have a good relationship with my principal and I trust her judgment when she says I’ve fallen short and when I’ve done well. Not every employee has that rapport with his or her boss, and if a teacher and a principal aren’t in sync then the evaluation process can get hairy. An objective system is supposed to prevent that kind of abuse. There is also a logic in saying that teachers with more experience and more training will be better, so it’s good to reward these things. Nonetheless, I think that there are ways for administrators, principals, teachers, and communities to work together to develop a system that honestly identifies and rewards the excellent teachers. But if all we talk about are test scores, we are not going to find it.