Should teachers be paid bonuses for improved test scores from their students? The research says NO! by Bill Gee
(centrist)
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Ten years ago when I was a teacher in the public school system, I took a good hard look at my contract. What I was particularly interested in was my pay schedule. I saw that once I managed to get my tenure, I was guaranteed by my contract to receive incremental increases in my pay every year for the next 20 to 25 years, regardless of whether my students learned anything from me. There were no bonuses worked into the contract for performances “above and beyond” the call of duty. Some, not all, extracurricular activities came with a stipend, but often the amount of time and preparation that came with these activities rarely covered the extra money in my paycheck.
If I wanted to remain in public education, this was the reality that I had to live with.
The Influence of NCLB
Following the landmark “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) law, school administrators started seeking new ways to incentivize teachers to improve overall test scores for their students. After all, once a school had met its minimum standards to retain accreditation and the Federal dollars that came along with it, the data did not have very many uses. At the same time, with ever-increasing budget restraints, many administrators and politicians felt that the union-protected tiered pay schedule was a good place to cut significant chunks out of school budgets.
The idea that emerged was that if we can link teacher pay with the overall performance of students on standardized tests, then teachers would be incentivized to motivate students to perform better, and so-called “ineffective” teachers would be penalized.
As one might imagine, the pushback from teacher unions was strong. The NCLB law was already unpopular among teachers as a system designed to punish urban (and primarily minority) school districts by threatening to cut off what little funding they already had, and suburban teachers argued that the NCLB tests focused too much on reading and math skills and not enough on science, social studies and the arts.
Pay for Performance
The way that a pay-for-performance system would work within an existing tiered contract structure, would be that higher performance on tests would trigger a compensation bonus to the teacher to be paid at the end of the academic year. The higher the achievement, the higher the bonus. The bonuses would be part of a bonus “pool”, where teachers would be essentially competing with each other for the larger piece of that pool.
Teachers and their union representatives were skeptical that such a system could work, and advocates saw a potential to possibly save school districts thousands of dollars while improving overall education outcomes. What was missing was proof.
The Experiment (2007-2010)
The test location for the pay-for-performance bonus plan was New York City. In cooperation with the New York City Unified School District, the New York state Department of Education and through a grant by the Rand Corporation, 427 high-needs schools were selected for the program. Teachers in each of the selected schools were asked to participate in the experiment on a voluntary basis for the three-year study, with the option to end the program at any time. In the first year, 205 schools agreed to participate. In the second year, it was down to 198, and in the third year 196.
Over the course of the study, over $50 million in bonuses were distributed to the participating schools. In the first year, 62% of the schools won bonuses, in the second year, 84% won bonuses, but in the third year, the state significantly increased the minimum standards for teachers to win bonuses so only 13% of the schools won bonuses. The program ended with the 2011 school year and the decision to re-start the program was pending the results of a detailed analysis of the test score data.
The Results
The top “Key Finding” from the RAND study reads as follows:
The Study Found No Effects on Student Achievement
Overall, SPBP Did Not Improve Student Achievement in Any Grade Level.Analyses of student achievement on the state’s accountability tests found that the average mathematics and ELA test scores of students from elementary, middle, and K–8 schools randomly chosen for an invitation to participate in SPBP were lower than those of students from control schools during years 1, 2, and 3. The magnitudes of the estimates, however, are very small and statistically significant only for mathematics in year 3. The results are not significant when we controlled for testing effects from multiple years and subjects. These results were robust under various analytic approaches. Similarly, there were no overall effects on Regents Exams scores for high school students in years 1 and 2. We tested for but did not find differential program effects by school size and found no relationship between student achievement and the CC distribution plans for bonus awards among staff. (Page xx)
This significant finding should go a long way to silence the debate that the profession of teaching should be treated much the same way as most other professional careers. What it shows is that no matter how “motivated” a teacher may be to improve the overall performance of their students, there are too many variables outside the teacher’s control that can have a beneficial or detrimental effect on overall student performance. To put a teacher in the same type of bonus structure as say, a sales representative for an insurance company, is like trying to compare an apple with a jet engine.
Find Another Plan
With ever-shrinking school budgets and more pressure than ever on urban school districts to perform, clearly what the government has come up with so far does not appear to be working. They tried the “stick” by threatening to close underperforming schools who fail to meet minimum testing standards. They tried the “carrot” by awarding bonuses to teachers who can improve their students’ performance, and both approaches have basically failed.
Social scientists have long-argued that poor student performance is more likely a result of socio-economic conditions rather than the school environment itself, and the evidence of that fact is overwhelming. So why is it that policymakers insist that we must “test” our way to better educational outcomes through unfunded mandates like NCLB?
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a child who has a strong family support network, eats a healthy diet, and feels safe in their neighborhood is much more likely to score well on standardized tests than a child who has fewer or none of those things.
If we are really serious about improving academic outcomes and by association, our long-run economic future, isn’t it time we addressed the REAL problem?
Source: Marsh, J., et al. (2011) A Big Apple for Educators: New York City’s Experiment with Schoolwide Performance Bonuses. (Final Evaluation Report). Rand Education & Vanderbilt/Peabody College. (Limited Distribution) ISBN 978-0-8330-5251-3
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Posted By: Paul Benedict
Date: July 27, 2011 11:33:11 AM
Nice article. Thanks for the information.
Two implausible assumptions: "we can measure individual teacher performance when a student sees several teachers a day," and "we can measure student performance accurately based on a single day of testing in which students have little personal stake" each cancelled each other out.
Teaching is almost impossible to rate in terms of a business model. Good teaching is more like a family. Each teacher is unique and each student is unique.
Vouchers may work if teachers, students and parents are all given enough choice. Choice allows for greater innovation and adaptation to student needs... Individualized instruction that can actually reach into the home environment may arise from the correct use of vouchers. The bone crunching steam roller of the educational bureaucracy can be as big an enemy as anything else.
