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You're absolutely right that these teacher evaluation schemes based entirely on test scores are the pits. I hope NEA and AFT and other teacher groups can get it together to devise a fair, scientifically-sound way to factor student achievement into teacher evaluations, tenure decisions, and salaries. Teacher need to stop being only reactive on this issue, because it isn't going to go away. All other professions are measured on their outcomes, including those where the outcomes are behaviors by other people. I promise you, doctors and nurses who try to get diabetics to change their eating habits undergo the same frustrations as teachers who try to get failing students to learn better.

You are absolutely right AGAIN.

Everyone should scroll back at your stories and ask where else could decision-makers find a better discussion of reform.

Great post as always Claus.

I've made the point several times that most of the hard-core advocates AND critics of "merit" pay (or performance pay, or strategic compensation) actually know very little about how it really works. Its usually equally advanced as Satan incarnate or a miracle cure with equal enthusiasm, depending on your political angle on the subject.

As with most things, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

We do have some districts who have been performance based for several years that can give us some insights into the questions you pose. Denver Public Schools is a good example of a large urban district that has completely abandoned the step and level approach and developeded a pay system not based on experience and education credits. While Denver has its struggles (who doesn't with these national budget cuts), their performance pay system isn't even in the top 50 issues Denver is dealing with (from my observations).

My district, Eagle County Schools, has arguably the most aggressive implementation of performance pay anywhere in the country. Eagle County has been off the step and level system since 2002 and pays people exclusively on evaluations, test scores, and market factors like high needs, inflation, etc. Our attrition is sitting at about 6% so far this year and I've got 3,000 applications for about 25 current open teaching jobs. Certainly some of this is related to the job market for teachers, but I can show that trend from 2007 as well. I'm not having any trouble keeping teachers and recruiting teachers using a performance based system.

There are other districts as well, like Houston Independent, who put performance pay on top of a step and level systems. There are many more districts like this we could learn from so we've got data to inform our discussion and not just posturing and conjecture.

Care must certainly be taken that we are using quality evaluation and assessment tools in meaningful ways and that we are continually making efforts to grow our thinking around those. I would argue that moving to performance pay advances that discussion tremendously, I've seen it happen.

A central truth is that if you treat employees with kindness, respect, and allow meaningful creative input into their jobs and the direction of the organization you will get buy in, loyalty, and greater productivity. Douglas McGregor wrote of this some 50 years ago.

Despite what critics would have you believe, performance pay systems are not mutually exclusive of "Theory Y" approaches to management and leadership. Again, take it from someone living it.

Look forward to your next post and thanks for entertaining my reply.

Jason Glass
Eagle, CO

I whole heartedly concur with the idea that a lot of the media pundits who are in favor of merit pay based on measurement of results are themselves in profession that has no real way to measure results. I just sent a letter to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel yesterday to that effect. One of their columnists was very, very in favor of our Florida Senate Bill 6 (vetoed last Thursday) which would have tied 50% of teacher pay to test scores. I wonder, if he was being paid based on results, wouldn't he have to make at least 90% of his readership agree with his views?

Jason--Thanks for your long comment. As you've guessed, I'm most worried about the bravado of commentators who see 50% as some kind of magic threshhold, despite the lack of evidence for that particular approach--and the warnings of assesmsent experts not to be hasty. What happens when states legislate ambitious plans in times of dire need? (And don't worry about typos.)

David--The real measure for opinionators (and that includes me, I guess) would be to figure out how often they're right--and then how often they move their readers to act accordingly. Is there an index for that?

All of your "will theys?" are important--performance pay will likely impact lots of things, in ways that can't be predicted. Some of those things are mostly conjecture--impact on teacher morale, collaboration, recruitment issues, who will choose to stay and who will go, etc.

The most important reason not to base teacher pay on test scores is that the scores themselves--no matter how the data is sliced and diced--are not reliable indicators of learning, in the way that policy-makers think they are. Their value is entirely based on the quality and curricular alignment of the assessments. In spite of the fact that some folks think "growth models" solve all of the data validity problems, statewide assessments were not designed to measure individual learning. Most of them were written to tell teachers and schools which easily measurable skills were being mastered, class by class. To attach individual scores to kids, then trace those scores to a single teacher (again, a process fraught with major technical and logistical difficulties) doesn't yield particularly useful or convincing information. We still need statewide tests. But we need to use the information they give us correctly.

Here's what I wonder: Surely policy-makers have been told this, repeatedly. Legislators are reasonably intelligent people, dedicated to doing the right thing for kids--aren't they? So why did this become a pitched battle?

You're right. The increasing black/white political polarization of ed policy issues is downright frightening.

I'm a bit late to this post, but glad I found it. The tone and the pace of so-called reform both trouble me. And for full-time teachers, it's hard to keep up with everything going on. For the lobbyists, policy makers, politicians and pundits, there's plenty of time to work on advancing their agenda, while we're busy working. It seems like every time I look up, I'm a bit behind on the latest threat to public education. And when we're always in reaction mode, we get caught up looking like naysayers.

I'm caught in that mode myself a bit, but I hope you'll take a look. In my blog, I've tried to break down the problems of state tests in teacher evaluation by exposing what "they" don't understand about my job, my students, and my school.

http://accomplishedcaliforniateachers.wordpress.com/

I'm the parent of a student with autism in Los Angeles Unified School District. In 2005, Mayor Villaraigosa attempted to "take over" the school district, published a 40+ page "plan" that had ELL and Special Needs students labeled "leftovers" on page 40-something toward the back of the document.

Our Special Education Community Advisory Committee sent him a letter, which was never answered, asking why he wasn't working more on taking care of our children from the perspective of his job - the running of the city of LA. We asked that he provide safe neighborhoods for the children to walk to and from school without fear of gang-bangers. We asked that he build clinics in or near schools for accessible health care. We asked that he provide jobs for the parents of our students so they wouldn't have to come to school hungry but were "ready to learn" (92% of our 82,000 special needs children are also Title I). We asked that he work with agencies to assist in appropriate placement of our foster and homeless youth.

There are so many factors outside of the classroom and school building that contribute to a teacher's ability to teach. The last thing needed is a "standards test" that places the onus on teachers for problems that occur outside of the classroom. Our teachers do their job for the love of teaching and it is a challenging job in LAUSD. With over 56+ foreign languages spoken (up to 96, I believe, if including dialects) the language barrier alone makes for a long climb to bring children up to "standards" level. When their parents are not available to help because they're working two jobs or due to cultural differences these students are expected to help raise brothers or sisters instead of study - the problems with creating standards as a measurement of the teacher's ability is false and a smoke-screen for the bigger and more global problem of how we, as a society are raising all children.

The point is to prepare children to be productive, engaged citizens who understand the basics of civic duties (voting, following laws, etc) and the social norms of living together in a diverse community. Not all children will go to college. But we need plumbers, contractors and other workers. Many schools are losing shop classes and dropping such programs that used to be an alternative, but still credited students towards graduation.

Our California High School Exit Exam discriminates against disabled students. I have a friend who's son with autism has taken the test 5 times, and keeps failing the math portion by 1 point. She was told long ago that there was a black hole where the math processing should be in his brain wiring. This kid will never pass, yet he's required over and over and over again to suffer through it. We call it "serial testing" and it should stop. Most of the legislators who voted for it probably would fail if required to take it. Nearly 50% of our disabled kids drop out and part of the problem is that they can't pass this insane test.

Charter schools also discriminate against ELL and special needs students in LAUSD. I've collected data for several years now and these schools take "easy" kids who need little or no more specialized services to access curriculum (few, if any Mentally Challenged, Autism, severe physical disability, etc). They claim high test scores, but don't take the students who would bring the numbers down to a more realistic level compared to neighborhood public schools. The public schools take more students with disabilities, their test score go way down, they become "program improvement" then are ready for take-over by the charters who will then warehouse our students with disabilities. It appears to be set up as a racket for charters to acquire public property at our expense. Four of our seven State School Board members have personal or monetary interest in Charter schools, yet do not recuse themselves when voting on charter-specific issues that would help their bottom line. It's disgraceful. Remember my mentioning of Villaraigosa earlier? He was backed by big, "westside" developers and it seems that they have an agenda with the charters to attempt taking over public property. Charter organizations have lots of money to lobby unlike our students with disabilities and English Language Learners or their parents/guardians. There is no level playing field.

Our expectations that all children should be college-ready is false. Testing only helps the test-taking industry and dumbs down our teachers' ability to do their jobs effectively. Race to the Top is a joke. We need another stimulus package - and one that doesn't allow districts to take 50% off the top from IDEA funding so our divisions of special education won't have to continually borrow from the general fund to provide legally required services to our students with disabilities. Fully fund IDEA. Create an Education Work Project to stop the hemorrhaging of our teachers and staff due to this budget crisis. Stabilize public education across the board. Use the expertise of teachers and administrators, not the test-taking industry or legislators who have never set foot in a classroom. The Canadian model of annual review by administrators and educators is a great model and one we need to get back to.

Education should not be a business. Our students and teachers are not widgets.