Let me start by disclosing the following. I am an active member of the National Education Association, a teachers' union. And I resent the way the question was phrased.
As I write this I do not have access to a transcript. Basically the question set up an erroneous situation, that businesses give bonuses for better performance, and the teachers unions are standing in the way of doing the same in school, what's wrong with such an approach. And the followup was whether there was anything the candidates disagreed about with the unions.
Before I became a teacher I spend more than two decades working in data processing, including as a manager. a bit more than a third of my time was in local government, the rest in the private sector. I am now in 13th year of public school teaching. I have also been a salesman. I think I have an appropriate background to respond to this issue. And whether or not you agree, I intend to.
First, there are very few jobs in the private sector which merit pay and raises are based on quantifiable measures. A salesman is very much the exception, since if he is on commission his compensation is directly a result of the volume of his sales, often with the percentage of commission increasing as the volume of sales goes up, or with specific bonuses for meeting certain sales targets. Top level executive often are rewarded by meeting targets, usually having to do with stock values or exceeding estimates placed by stock analysts. In the latter case that can lead to the executive taking steps that maximize the short-term value of the stock even at the risk of its long-term value - he is rewarded for quarterly or annual performance, and long-term value is not part of the equation. We have seen this have serious negative consequences for more than a few American corporations, but it is pay for performance so I mention it.
Government employees can get bonuses for specific accomplishments, but by and large they are compensated based on the qualification of their job and the time in grade. In some cases if their performance is judged outstanding they can either be given an additional step increase or even be promoted to the next grade. If this sounds like it has parallels to military compensation, it should not surprise. One can get an accelerated promotion for outstanding performance. Of course, in the military, and in civilian arms of government, it is not usually done on the basis of purely quantitative measures like tests or production. One may well be scored on some evaluation form, but the determination of each component of that score is still very much of a qualitative judgment. Please bear that in mind.
Most proposals for merit pay for teachers are based on test scores, whether achieving some set level or showing some measure of improvement. Of course, in the NCLB model we are comparing this year's 3rd graders with last year's, so it really is not a meaningful comparison because there is no control for the different characteristics of the two cohorts of students. That is one serious problem. Another of course is that overall score performance correlates heavily with socioeconomic status. Another is that such schemes break down by secondary school and are still problematic at the elementary level, because not all subjects have test: what do you do with music, art, home economics, physical education, technology education, and so on?
Even the use of improvements, of gain scores, is full of problems. If you compare this year's end of year test to last years even for the same student, part of what you are measuring is what happens during the summer, over which neither the teacher nor the school have any control.
The question also displays a real ignorance, because one of the more important experiments in differential compensation, that in Denver, was designed with major input from the local teachers union. Perhaps had the questioner been aware of this the form of his question would not have been so gratuitously dismissive of the role played by teachers unions.
Many people misunderstand the nature of teaching. And the assumption that pay for performance is going to meaningfully improve the quality of education has no research to support it. Oh, there is evidence that test scores may go up, but that is usually because of teaching to the test, of narrowing the scope of the curriculum and the instruction. And this becomes even more pronounced when the rewards for "good" performance are accompanied with sanctions for "bad" performance. I have written about this before, and the best book that illustrates this is by Nichols and Berliner, and is entitled Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools
Let's separate out a number of issues.
1) teacher compensation
2) teacher quality
3) the role of teachers unions
TEACHER COMPENSATION
One can justify differential compensation for teachers. We already have some degree of this in different "ladders" or scales, which depend upon education: BA, BA + 15 Credits, MA, etc. We often offer additional compensation for additional responsibility: mentoring a new teacher or supervising a student teacher, serving as a department chair, giving up free time to write curriculum, sponsoring or coaching a student organization. We are seeing some additional compensation for going into difficult teaching situations, and increasingly states and districts are compensating teachers who undergo the rigorous process of national board certification - and here I note that I receive 7,000/year more because I am National Board certified. Several of the candidates have elements of such incentives in their educational plans.
It is not as clear that differential compensation by subject area is as workable, say for special ed, hard to find foreign languages, math, and/or science. For one thing, that would be creating a basic inequity between elementary, where a teacher is responsible for all core subjects, and secondary where we are departmentalized. And within the team approach common in middle schools, where a group of teachers share the same students who may even move as a class, such a differential compensation undermines the idea of the teachers working in common, doing activities across the curriculum, to best serve the needs of the students, which after all should be the goal of our educational efforts.
Were I compensated on the basis of test scores, I would have received a huge increase this year, because of the much higher rate at which my students passed the state test. of course, next year in all likelihood I would then receive a similar sized pay cut when my pass rate drops heavily, as in all likelihood it will: the student I have this year came to me far less prepared than those of last year. I can tell right now that unless the state is manipulating the cut score used to determine passing, a much higher level of this year;s students will fail to meet state standards. In part this is because of previous preparation. It is also because I have two classes with a significant percentage of students who are totally unmotivated, and in checking their records and sitting in parent-teacher conferences, this behavior is demonstrated across their course load. I was not that much better a teacher last year than the year before, and I am certainly not that much worse now. It is inherently unfair to compensate me for thing outside of my control.
TEACHER QUALITY
The intent of a merit pay approach is supposedly to improve teacher quality. Again, there is no evidence that such an approach bears any edible fruit. There are far better ways of determining teacher quality, provided you can agree on what such quality is (beyond the circular reasoning of raising test scores). Student involvement, willingness and ability to adjust instruction to meet the needs of the students, ability to manage a classroom (without basic classroom control what learning that occurs has little relationship to the instruction offered). In the 1980s researchers thought that f they analyzed the behaviors of teachers recognized as effective and simply insisted that those behaviors be demonstrated by other teachers it would improve instruction. That led to a statewide teacher of the year being denied a merit pay because s/he did not demonstrate one of the items on that state's checklist of behaviors of effective teachers, and had enough integrity to refuse to do it for show so that it could be checked off. There is no one way of teaching, and far too many attempts to "improve" education fall prey to the desire to standardize. Let's start with this - our kids are quite varied, nonstandardized, and any approach to education that fails to take this into account or deliberately ignores is not going to be particularly effective and may in fact do more harm than good.
THE ROLE OF TEACHERS UNIONS
Let's be honest: this is an anti-public school mantra that has unfortunately become a standard of the mainstream discussion. It is part of the overall anti-union movement of the right, but unfortunately we are now often seeing it from so-called liberals as well. Autocratic leaders don't like unions because it provides the individual worker with the strength and method to stand up to the whims and abuses of powerful individuals.
Unions are far from perfect. Like any organizations their control can be taken over by those who abuse the power they have. But for every corrupt union leader like the president of the DC local, Barbara Bullock, who was quite corrupt, I can give you a high government official (Duke Cunningham, the Air Force purchasing officials) or corporate leader (Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, Dennis Kozlowski). Unions can help ensure workplaces that are sane, non-abusive, and guarantee due process for teachers so that they can concentrate on teaching and not have to worry about keeping their jobs because they don't sleep with the principal or because they give a C to the daughter of a school board member or fail the star quarterback for cheating. Oh, and those three scenarios are not hypothetical. I can give chapters (plural) and verses from districts around the country if I chose to.
The premise of the question was faulty and the framing was argumentative. A far better way of approaching the issue would have been to avoid the confrontational, the 'gotcha," the rightwing talking points against unions. How can we best ensure that we can hire and keep the best quality teachers for all of our students and guarantee that those who are ineffective are weeded out? Some of the candidates have actually addressed a good deal of this in their educational plans, but the framing of the question did not allow them to explore the issue more thoroughly.
It would be interesting to have a debate only on education. And it would be far better were the questions not asked by reporters who lack expertise, but by people like teachers, superintendents, school board members, and - yes - parents and students. After all, these are the people who will be most directly affected by what ever policies a president attempts to implement.
Do we need to rethink teacher compensation? Probably. But that is actually a subsidiary question. Before that we need to rethink what we mean by quality teaching. Only then can we decide how we should recruit, train, evaluate and retain the teachers we need for ALL of our children.
And we cannot determine what quality teaching is outside of understanding what the purpose of education is, why we have public schools. We attempted to start this discussion last year with our education plan and panels for the 2nd and final YearlyKos convention.
A number of years ago I had a conversation with Jay Mathews, principal education writer for the Washington Post, in which I mentioned I had been asked if I were willing to consider a 1/2-time position at H-B Woodlawn, a school that is full of very gifted kids which takes a somewhat different approach, with a lot of emphasis on student freedom and responsibility. It was commonly known as "hippie high" for the spirit of the 60's that continued to permeate the school. Jay said to me that those bright and self-motivated kids didn't need me. By this he meant that a strong and dedicated teacher was more needed in an inner city school. I disagreed with his framing. ALL students are entitled to the highest quality teaching possible. And even the brightest and most self-motivated students need teachers who know how to challenge them.
I have 6 classes, three of which are students taking AP Us Government, most of them 10th graders. They are very bright, and usually self-motivated. Some are far brighter than me. Some are used to being brighter and quicker than all of their teachers. Our high school is an awakening for them, because they will encounter teachers brighter than they are, and a lot of teachers who will keep them on their toes, challenge their thinking, force them to go further and deeper. These bright and gifted students, like their compatriots across the nation, too often do not get teaching that challenges them (although in our school they usually do). That is wasting an incredible wealth of talent.
I have three other classes. One is a group of just over 20 who have a strong personal interest in social studies which has led them to participate in a program where they take two social studies courses per year. They are somewhat more motivated for my class. The other two classes are ordinary, "comprehensive" level kids. Some of them are turned off to school. Some lack academic skills, having been promoted to high school without learning how to work, to learn, to organize. Working with them is a real challenge. They need someone really skilled and willing to try multiple ways of challenging, provoking, enticing, to try to find a connection that will light a spark. It is a very draining process, and I have those 50+ kids at the end of my day. I can see improvement, even if it would not yet show up on a standardized or external test.
I realize that I cannot generalize from my own experience, or my own school. I am using my experience as an illustration of something I know from continuing to read professional literature, from engaging in online discussions with educational professionals, both my compatriots in other high schools and some think tank types and university professors.
We have serious educational issues in this country. Mrs. Clinton is right that by and large our public schools have served us well. That is one reason the generalized bashing is so bothersome. Gov. Richardson is wrong with the statements he makes about international comparisons on science and math, and that illustrates another problem: far too many even on "our side" have fallen prey to using the alarmist rhetoric that has been put forth to bash and delegitimize public schools.
N o Child Left Behind is a symptom, not the disease. The label has become so charged that we probably do need to get rid of it. Many of the provision in the original law do not cohere, and in some ways the regulations issued by the US Department of Education have exacerbated the effects of the poorly designed provisions of the law. Because it is the basic mechanism for the federal role in K-12 education we do need to address it. But by itself fixing or replacing NCLB will not solve our underlying issues about public education. And we will not have a meaningful national conversation about those issues where once every other debate we get an education question and it, like the one tonight, is more intended to force the Democrats to fight with the teachers unions or be deemed as captive than it is to illuminate the candidates' ideas about our educational policy.
I realize that this diary is somewhat long. I have not had time to go through and revised this - it was written largely in one draft because that is the only way I am able to post it. And I am posting it at a time (shortly after midnight) when it might not get that much traffic. I will be unable to pay any attention to a diary tomorrow because of commitments with a guest speaker in the morning, and having to pay attention to the replacement of my furnace in the afternoon. And I will have little time for blogs over the weekend. Perhaps at least a few people will see this. And perhaps despite its prolixity this diary will be of use to a few readers.
It is the viewpoint of one person. I am a classroom teacher. I also follow educational policy issues. Perhaps the combination makes what I write more useful, perhaps it only means that I am too much involved to be able to see things "clearly" - or so I have been accused by some who think all of our public schools are falling apart.
This is what it is.
Peace.
I now have to get some sleep.
Peace.
Peace.