Pay for Performance: Make 'em Earn It, Darn It

Ask any aspiring politician how he feels about teacher salaries, and he'll give you the right answer. It was Evan Esar who once said, "America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week." You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes teacher salaries are sufficient, not to mention the virtual non-existence of those believing teachers are paid too much. I believed it can be argued, however, that some teachers are, in fact, over-paid.

The new trend in the teacher salary debate is not simply a need to increase compensation in general, but rather to increase compensation for those teachers who are deserving. Brooke Dollens Terry, a policy analyst for the Center of Educational Policy, addresses this issue in a recent publication entitled, "Applying Free Market Principles and Common Sense to Teacher Compensation." The idea is simple: rather than paying teachers based on a standard salary schedule that increases compensation based on years of experience and advanced degrees alone, apply the performance-based principles that have worked for Fortune 500 companies for decades. Reward employees monetarily based on the results of their labor, rather then their labor alone.

Through my six years of teaching experience, I've known both exceptional teachers and below average teachers. Both types of teachers have one thing in common: they are evaluated based on a limited observation by an administrator, and while this observation may result in a non-renewal of contract (only in extremely rare and drastic situations) it does not have any affect on the teacher's salary. Salary is simply determined, as noted in Ms. Terry's article, by the amount of years a teacher has been in the classroom.

Ms. Terry does successfully identify the reasons performance pay is needed in public schools. She fails to address, however, as most policy analysts do, substantial suggestions for criteria upon which to base this said performance. She quotes studies that reveal not only that "teachers reach full effectiveness after four years... (and that) a teacher with 25 years of experience is no more effective than a teacher with 15 years of experience," but also "that possession of a master’s or doctorate degree has no impact on teacher effectiveness and does not translate into increased learning in the classroom." Should this be true, then on what criteria, exactly, should we be basing performance pay?

Observation alone, especially limited observation, should never be the sole determinate of a teacher's salary, though it most definitely could play a part. Classroom observations and along with other ideas for performance pay criteria are outlined below:

• Combine administrator observation with department chair observations. Department chairs are more closely involved with individual teachers, especially in large schools, working on curriculum development and alignment, assessment evaluation, utilization of departmental resources, etc. My first department chair new my weaknesses as a first year teacher better than anyone. However, my current department chair has bared witnesses to some of my greatest successes in recent years. If teacher salaries are to be based in part by administrator evaluations, they must be done by those administrators or campus leaders that are most directly supervise those teachers.
• Student Performance. I must say, for the better part of my school policy study, I have been adamantly against basing teacher pay on student performance. I like the dentist metaphor, which states that a dentist cannot be judged based on the health of his patient's teeth because he has no bearing on how the patient cares for his teeth outside of his office. So many outside variables affect a student's performance that are out of a teacher's scope of influence. However, I do believe a school or administrator can identify trends in student performance. Was a teacher able to raise the average scores of her students on standardized scores in a low performing school? Was she able to help her students maintain high scores at a traditionally high performing school? I, in no way, believe student performance should be the only factor, but do believe it should be taken into consideration.
• Peer/Student evaluation. For fear of personal interests or opinions, evaluations of teachers by their students and peers have been generally avoided. College campuses often ask students to evaluate their professors, yet we feel that secondary and elementary students are unable to evaluate the quality of instruction they receive from their teachers. I believe that with the right medium of evaluation and in the appropriate setting, these evaluations could prove to be incredibly valuable. I know that if I thought my students were writing evaluations of my performance that would be submitted to my administrator, I might think twice the next time I assign busy work because I don't have the energy to attempt to authentically engage my students that day.
  
• Advance degrees and professional development. While Ms. Terry discusses findings that discount a relationship between student performance and teacher education, as a teacher with a graduate degree, I would have to disagree. I personally experienced the improvement of my teaching ability over the three years I was in graduate school and after. I strongly believe the training I received during that degree program helped me to better understand the operations on my campus and how I could better utilize the resources available to help my students. I also believe professional development is essential for any teacher that wishes to continue to grow and change with the continually growing and changing needs of her students. Rewarding a teacher based on her efforts to expand her own education only seems to make sense.

I'm interested to hear what other suggestions those inside and outside the education industry have for performance pay criteria. If school districts are going to take this idea seriously, they must be presented with concrete plan of action, firm directions for which to implement this idea. An obvious step in successful implementation would have to be fostering a more performance-based culture among public schools, but before we can even go that direction, we have to sell the idea to those who have the power to enforce it. While the ideas and the sentiments expressed by policy analysts such as Ms. Terry make us want to say "Yes! Make a change!", they neglect to show us exactly how.