Over at Dave Ellis’ other blog, Holland 2002, he added the same post on education and creativity as he did over here and got a couple of interesting responses.  Specifically, his other co-blogger and friend Adam Barhamand responds in the comments:

Do we even need a US Department of Education? Besides the creation of standardized tests that create unhealthy study and competitive environments and lower the bar for schools desperate for a buck, what exactly does ED do? Does anyone know?

Adam goes onto outline his thoughts on the benefits of merit pay for teachers, and the importance of higher salaries for bringing in top tier talent.  In reading his comment, I realized that I too was similarly confused on where the DOE budget goes every year.  Good thing we have “THE INTERNET” to help find out!

In the 2009 Budget, there is approximately $64 Billion of education funding allocated across 3 primary categories, 1) elementary and secondary, 2) post secondary, and 3) other.  As seen below, approximately $36 Billion of that goes to elementary and secondary, with the rest going primarily into the post secondary fund.  In my previous post, I attempted a piggyback on Malcolm Gladwell to advocate for the necessity of better teachers across our schools, and then outlined his hiring approach. An alternative (additional?) way of approaching this problem would be to build in a more significant pay for performance reward system– a piece which he also highlights in the article.picture-3

THE MERITS OF PAY FOR PERFORMANCE:

The use of financial incentives to shape behavior is one of the key takeaways from the formal study of economics. Specifically, if one builds financial incentives into work, people are more likely to pursue this task. It’s the classic carrot bait and hungry rabbit story.  

Now, while economists have had to cede ground to the argument that people are motivated by things other than money, they do have a point that at the margin, money is a valid motivator.  So, holding all other things constant, the possibility of financial reward will often motivate some type of action towards the specified ‘carrot’ for the majority of people.  While money cannot buy happiness, it often doesn’t hurt… and to the extent that these financial rewards are desired, people will expend some energy towards attaining the goals attached to the reward.So in theory, incentivizing teachers will increase motivation. 

Despite the potential benefits of a pay for performance system, according to a 2004 Hoover Institute Policy Review piece, only 5.5% of public schools incentivize teaching performance. While the Department of Education has a Teacher Incentive Fund, it constitutes less than 1/3 of 1% of the total budget ($200,000,000– to be fair, not a drop in the bucket either). Furthermore, given a formal tenure system,incentives drop precipitously as one is locked into a job without a strong possibility of being fired.  In other words, at many schools, there are not strong incentives in place in either the negative (potential of being fired) or positive direction (reward for high performance).  

The reasons for not implementing a pay for performance system (or pain for performance, as would be the case with the removal of tenure) are compelling. Specifically, as soon as incentives are in place, there is the possibility of juking them to attain the reward… the example of a rabbit that takes steroids to get the carrot (ok… that may be pushing the analogy too far…). For example, if you implement a testing system to measure performance gain, teachers may begin teaching to the test, a behavior that, while increasing scores, may not impact the underlying ‘learning’ effect as directly.  

Proposal

While the above problems of incentivized performance are significant, the potential impact on effort and the ability to remove low performing teachers is compelling enough to warrant consideration of a PFP program given sufficient thought given to how to implement it effectively.  I outline two proposals which might make this type of system more effective.

1) Test Triangulation- Teachers ‘teach to the test’ to the extent that they see it as the most effective way to increase this incentivized performance metric.  In the worst case scenario, this means a teacher gives the students the answers to the test, demonstrating to administrators their students are ‘high performers’, and thus gets the highest reward.  In measurement theory, this problem is facilitated by a failure to triangulate measures.  While measures do get at the underlying construct (student learning or teacher performance), they do so with some error.  And in focusing on the underlying construct from 1 angle only, you fail to get the depth perception on what the construct really looks like (e.g. greater systematic error).  While more testing is never a great solution in that it takes time away from the student’s learning, getting at underlyilng performance from multiple angles with multiple measures is crucial for having an effect PFP system.  In my view, any incentive structuring must find a way to increase the ways to measure teacher performance beyond a single test (i.e. inclusion of presentation, observation, teacher evaluations, etc.), so that the underlying ‘teacher quality’ is best measured by the administrators.  If this isn’t the case, you fail to reward the good teachers and tend to retain the bad.

2) Control Variables- There are often several factors out of the teacher’s control that add undue influence on whether students are making significant academic progress.  In talking to my sister the other night (who has taught internationally, in the city and in the suburbs), she rightly noted that student learning is never only the result of the teacher’s skill.  Last year, while in a Minneapolis charter school, she clearly saw her students making less progress as compared to her suburban students this year.  Is she the same teacher?  Yes!  What accounts for this performance variability is not her teaching then, but factors like poverty, hunger, under-developed cognitive skills that varied across these contexts.  A proper pay for performance system has to find a way to control for these factors in evaluating quality so that teachers do not solely enter the high performing school systems where they too can benefit from grade/ evaluation inflation.  This point is captured in the criticisms of “No Child Left Behind” that argue that situational factors often make the goal of all students learning at the same rate an impossibility.

In essence, these two points mean that we need to use a more complex formula to measure teacher performance and properly allocate bonuses and pink slips.  Instead of a measure of teacher performance as student test improvement, it is crucial to measure teacher performance as a function of multiple metrics of improvement (triangulated), while controlling for extraneous factors outside of the control of the educator.  While it is a more complex formula, it is by no means impossibe to construct… and there should be enough data out there to do it in an empirically valid way.

The transition into a system like this would be difficult.  Tenure is notoriously difficult to remove given unions and their (understandable) attachment to security, and pay for performance systems are costly to implement. Given that the removal of tenure is rarely paired with any other performance benefits, teachers are essentially told that they will lose security and get nothing in return.  If you could remove tenure but increase a pay for performance system (a positive incentive), this change might be an easier sell.  The financial challenges however are still significant.  I will attempt to address this point in the final (and hopefully shorter) post.