Sandy Hirtz of CEET BC asked this question over at the CEET BC Ning.
"British Columbia Liberal leadership hopeful Kevin Falcon says public school teachers should be paid according to their teaching skills, not their length of service or level of professional training. He thinks a merit-based pay system should be implemented. What do you think?"
Here is my response.
When we think of merit pay, it is an attempt to turn the skills teachers have into a commodity. This works for some other professions because it is easier to attach financial value to what people do.
If you work in a profession where your work has a measurable financial impact, you can determine which of your employees has had the greatest financial impact by looking at various factors, including total sales in a marketing or sales profession, number of cases won and settled in law, etc… So it makes more sense to reward your employees for the good work they’ve put in. If you follow the research Daniel Pink has collected though, you’ll find those rewards don’t help the people in those professions work better, in some cases it actually hinders their profession.
Whether or not merit pay will improve teacher [performance] is a moot question however since there are no obvious financial gains from a teacher who performs well, or at least no gains that one can see in any useful time frame. If we buy the argument that people who are better educated make more money, and that a good teacher leads to better educated students, then over a time-frame of a generation, you could expect to see results if all of your teachers were suddenly better or worse at what they do.
In the context of schools though, this just doesn’t make sense. (Edit =>) We can’t wait a generation to see results and determine if teachers have actually been effective. So instead we are going to use ineffective measures which are not in fact related to the economic impact of good teaching, but are in fact a measure of the "turn them into factory workers" mindset of the 1860s.
However, I don’t actually think that the goal of merit pay is to pay good teachers more, or to bring an business model to education, I think it is actually intended to be used to pay teachers (overall) less. Essentially, the state controls the test, and the measures of how well teachers are doing, which means that what teachers are paid is not up to collective bargaining, but instead up to a bunch of factors controlled largely by the education ministry. I’d never want to cede that much control to an organization which has brought us such beauties as standardized testing, and BCESIS.
Michal says:
I was recently talking about this with an educator who has worked in the USA and Canada, and is about to head overseas for a while. She surprised me by saying that she was FOR a merit-based pay system. Her main argument was that there are some exceptional teachers and there are some teachers who…well, are not. She thought that the former should be compensated for their hard work, skill, and experience. My question to her was: how would this be evaluated? There is no way that our province has the money or any other resources to go and observe/evaluate every single teacher and interview students and track the many variables that would constitute the kind of success (?) that this system is supposedly seeking to promote. It concerns me that this would only leave us with a system of evaluation that would look only at test scores, which are easier to collect. What a shame and waste that would be. No Child Left Behind, anyone?
Thank you for your post, David.
January 15, 2011 — 9:40 pm
Julia Clark says:
Okay…a deep breath here before I start.
A teacher is a teacher…how many times have I heard this statement through my union? countless. And each time I hear it, I cringe.
But is merit pay going to fix it? Absolutely not.
What instead needs to evolve/change is teacher evaluation. In my school district, a teacher only needs to be formally evaluated once AND this is done generally in the first few years of teaching.
What instead needs to change is the amount of chances pre-service teachers receive if they fail their practicums.
What instead needs to change is the archaic concept unions hold on to-, ‘a teacher is a teacher’.
How about supplementing teacher’s salary with a Professional Development account instead of a measly $30 classroom room fund?
Until then, our profession will continue to have wrongly suited people teaching,
January 16, 2011 — 12:29 am
Bernie Soong says:
David, great entry. I was talking with a colleague about this topic after Kevin Falcon went public with his idea. One thing that came from our talk was it is natural for those who enjoy their job, and work hard at it, to look upwards. However for teachers, it seems there isn’t anywhere upward to go… except to apply to be administrators or for the few district positions available. Well that is exactly where good teachers should not go! Good teachers should stay in the classroom with the students. If I give the merit pay model the benefit of the doubt, it could provide another so called ‘step’ for teachers who wish to excel but stay in the classroom where they belong. However with that said, I am still of the opinion merit pay isn’t the way to go. I said it before in a previous blog entry that I think merit pay may promote the narrowing of our education system. If teachers are to be paid more based upon how their students score on standardized tests (among other things), it could promote a system where students are taught to score on tests, or succeed in ways that the teacher may benefit, and not actually learn. This simply cannot happen. I absolutey agree that giving the ministry “that much control” would be foolish on the part of teachers also. Well said David!
January 16, 2011 — 1:51 am
David Wees says:
Your point about career options for teachers is well taken. What’s interesting is that I’ve worked in the private system for the past 6 years, and in the three private schools I’ve worked in, there have been ways for me to advance my career, while remaining a classroom teacher.
First I became a head of grade, which meant I was in charge of ensuring the 9th grade curriculum was properly run by all the teachers at that grade. At the next school I joined the technology committee and I ended up running workshops for teachers in technology for 2 years and helping shape the school policy on technology. At my current school I’m the learning specialist for technology which is a 66% time position with 33% of my time in the classroom. None of these past three roles has come with a salary increase, but all of them have felt like promotions. It isn’t the money that motivates me to want these opportunities, it’s the increase in responsibility that I feel and the challenge I feel in doing something new.
I agree with you completely, there needs to be more opportunities for teachers to advance between administrators and teachers.
January 16, 2011 — 2:16 am
BC Teacher says:
Here’s the problem with the notion of merit pay, which Kevin Falcon and his ilk refuse to acknowledge: I have little control over who is in my classroom. I have no control over how these students live or what they do after they leave my classroom.
Case in point–the first semester, the class average for my English 11 class was 48%. Next semester, same grade, same curriculum, the class average was 73%. Did I suddenly become a better teacher? How would I be awarded “merit” pay?
High stakes testing–where teachers’ pay is based on how well students perform? Leads to cheating. Take a look in places ie the US where high stakes testing is in place. And then ask yourself: do you really want to emulate a system that is known world wide to be a failure. (Look at their international exam scores).
I agree that there needs to be something for teachers between the classroom and administration. And it needs to be properly compensated–just like one would expect in business.
Let’s face it all this right wing rhetoric about education is designed to destroy public education. BC students still perform well on international tests in spite of what this present government is doing to undermine public education.
June 17, 2011 — 10:11 pm
Starleigh says:
The teachers that I know work very hard because they care about the success of students. Merit pay operates on the assumption that teachers simply aren’t trying hard enough and if they were more motivated they’d try harder and get better results. Obviously the people proposing this haven’t met very many teachers.
June 24, 2011 — 3:31 am
David Wees says:
Yep. I agree, our system is struggling for some kids not because teachers aren’t working hard, but because a "standardized system" is never going to be effective for 100% of kids.
June 24, 2011 — 8:54 am