OK, so this thread got me thinking:

http://www.ohiochatter.com/forum/threads/22949-Senate-Bill-5-Targets-Collective-Bargaining-for-Elimination!

One of the things under SB5 is introducing a "merit based pay system" into schools. There is some (little) discussion there, but I wanted to devote a thread to it. There are obvious flaws to the merit based system, but there are also some positive things.

Let's keep ALL merit based pay discussion here, and all SB5 discussion over there. How would it work? How would your system overcome the flaws? Just curious what the OC pros think.

Discus



Discuss

Mods: Sorry, I forgot that the other thread was moved to politics. If you feel this belongs there as well, please move it.

Are you talking about for educators?

The same way it works with every other organization - systematically identify and develop core competencies that are reviewed on some temporal basis (doesn't necessarily have to be every year) by those that have developed into a leadership role.

Manhattan Buckeye;680435 wrote:The same way it works with every other organization - systematically identify and develop core competencies that are reviewed on some temporal basis (doesn't necessarily have to be every year) by those that have developed into a leadership role.

How does a special education teacher make money on a merit based system? A SPED teacher's kids could keep getting worse and worse, with no increase in "test" scores. A core teacher has test results, but school "classes" differ in intelligence. What about elective teachers? Teachers of the Arts?

Our district has some types of merit based pay already. Criteria to get more money is based on participation in Professional development. Extra summer hours at the end of the year and before school starts. You can also get a stipend from a program called PAS performance advancement system. In this program you can submit a research project at the beginning of the year. These projects must be geared toward measurable goals ranging from attendance, state test scores, district test scores and other areas involving student achievement. This is Data driven.

You must submit your strategy and what you are going to measure to guage success or failure. You then submit a group of students that are going to be in your test subject group and their data from the previous year. Projects must be pre approved to be eligible. At the end of the year you submit your data and if you can prove your strategy led to improvment(most people choose test scores or attendance) you get a 2500 dollar stipend.

I got this stipend in 2007 for coming up with an incentive program to improve attendance in a target group of students who had low attendance the previous year. I went to different organizatoins and stores and asked them to donate prizes. Students were given "Scholar Dollars" for every day that they showed up on time and with the proper supplies. At the end of each nine weeks they got to spend their money on these donated gifts. At the end of the school year i submitted documentation that the students had increased their attendance by more than 10 percent.

I know this isnt exactly a full out merit based pay system but these are examples of how you can increase your pay by doing extra work or training. This also allows teachers who might teach special ed or who teach in inner city to reach incentives even if scores remain low. If you make the merit pay about test scores then the teachers will not want to teach in the schools with low scores and the students will lose out.

GBlock - Nice example. A good edition and start to our discussion.

ETB, how does your boss know you are doing your job correctly now? Do they give you feedback on what you need to improve or what you are good at?

OneBuckeye;680474 wrote:ETB, how does your boss know you are doing your job correctly now? Do they give you feedback on what you need to improve or what you are good at?

Yes, through the evaluation process. The only problem is that there are MANY administrators that don't focus on poor performance. EVERYONE knows the teacher that is performing poorly, yet there are many admins that just move them along... just like we do kids through the school system.

Everyone wants scores, scores, scores, but education is about learning, and developing an appreciation for learning. Not about scores. When you focus on scores, or grades, etc., you only start to care about one thing... the grade. You study to the test, etc. You get the same thing with merit pay, IMO. You no longer focus on the learning process, and developing life-long learners, but you start to focus on what increases your pay.

ernest_t_bass;680483 wrote:Yes, through the evaluation process. The only problem is that there are MANY administrators that don't focus on poor performance. EVERYONE knows the teacher that is performing poorly, yet there are many admins that just move them along... just like we do kids through the school system.

Everyone wants scores, scores, scores, but education is about learning, and developing an appreciation for learning. Not about scores. When you focus on scores, or grades, etc., you only start to care about one thing... the grade. You study to the test, etc. You get the same thing with merit pay, IMO. You no longer focus on the learning process, and developing life-long learners, but you start to focus on what increases your pay.

So why wouldn't an admin use his evaluations rank his teachers. Best to Worst. probably by current rank. For example you could have Teacher , Sr. Teacher , Princ Teacher, SR Princ Teacher etc. So they rank all the Sr teachers best to worst as one group and give them merit raises accordingly. When you hit the top of that groups pay scale you get a promotion and so on. That is how a company would do it.

ernest_t_bass;680440 wrote:How does a special education teacher make money on a merit based system? A SPED teacher's kids could keep getting worse and worse, with no increase in "test" scores. A core teacher has test results, but school "classes" differ in intelligence. What about elective teachers? Teachers of the Arts?

Again, the same way it works in other organizations, including educational organizations (e.g. colleges) - an administrator with a math background shouldn't evaluate or identify core competencies that a special education teacher should develop. We have department heads and deans at colleges for this very purpose - it would be a major overhaul to create this type of structure in public schools, but if we're serious about improving our schools perhaps a major overhaul is needed. The funding is there, we need to spend smarter, not more.

OneBuckeye;680488 wrote:So why wouldn't an admin use his evaluations rank his teachers. Best to Worst. probably by current rank. For example you could have Teacher , Sr. Teacher Princ Teacher, SR Princ Teacher etc. So they rank all the Sr teachers best to worst as one group and give them merit raises accordingly. When you hit the top of that groups pay scale you get a promotion and so on. That is how a company would do it.

Yes, it would make sense, but you start to focus on "where you are on the ladder." Teachers then become selfish, and some WILL forget about the students, and focus only on advancement. There are many teachers who are not in it for the money, but there are also many who would be (for more money) under the merit pay system.

ernest_t_bass;680492 wrote:Yes, it would make sense, but you start to focus on "where you are on the ladder." Teachers then become selfish, and some WILL forget about the students, and focus only on advancement. There are many teachers who are not in it for the money, but there are also many who would be (for more money) under the merit pay system.

Welcome to the real world. But if one would not be able to forget about the students if they were to only focus on advacement. Because the students are the teachers customers in the end. To meet the core compentencies the MB mentioned they could not do that.

Manhattan Buckeye;680490 wrote:Again, the same way it works in other organizations, including educational organizations (e.g. colleges) - an administrator with a math background shouldn't evaluate or identify core competencies that a special education teacher should develop. We have department heads and deans at colleges for this very purpose - it would be a major overhaul to create this type of structure in public schools, but if we're serious about improving our schools perhaps a major overhaul is needed. The funding is there, we need to spend smarter, not more.

One of Kasich's proposals was to eliminate the "top heavy" structure. Proposing something like this would just add to the top. Admins HAVE to make more than teachers, or no one would be an admin. You can't necessarily have "head teachers" be involved in the evaluation process of their peers, as they are not trained or certified.

ernest_t_bass;680498 wrote:One of Kasich's proposals was to eliminate the "top heavy" structure. Proposing something like this would just add to the top. Admins HAVE to make more than teachers, or no one would be an admin. You can't necessarily have "head teachers" be involved in the evaluation process of their peers, as they are not trained or certified.

Who do you directly report to now? They would be the ones to see if you meet these compentecies. No need to add people and admin.

OneBuckeye;680494 wrote:Welcome to the real world. But if one would not be able to forget about the students if they were to only focus on advacement. Because the students are the teachers customers in the end. To meet the core compentencies the MB mentioned they could not do that.

Understood on this end, 100%. But you also have to realize that education is not designed to "push a product" like the private sector jobs, but to educate the future of our nation. Our job is not to get students in and out of here as quickly as possible, so efficiency is not a main key.

ernest_t_bass;680492 wrote:Yes, it would make sense, but you start to focus on "where you are on the ladder." Teachers then become selfish, and some WILL forget about the students, and focus only on advancement. There are many teachers who are not in it for the money, but there are also many who would be (for more money) under the merit pay system.

To turn the argument around, how do you think businesses work? You can't just forget about your work product in order to advance, the work product is the key towards advancement. It doesn't necessarily have to be just about money, but making the organization better and promotional opportunities - there are negatives, office politics would be an issue, and it isn't as if there are annual audits to see how profitable the organization is given that it is a non-profit endeavor obviously. But if paying top teachers more improves schools, it isn't a problem to me to get more qualified individuals in the system. Everyone that attended public schools has had good teachers and bad, for those that have worked in the private sector it is very odd to see the crappy teacher get paid the same as the great teacher because they've put in the same amount of years.

OneBuckeye;680500 wrote:Who do you directly report to now? They would be the ones to see if you meet these compentecies. No need to add people and admin.

Administration. Admin are not necessarily there to evaluate you on teaching the content, but more of your delivery.

ernest_t_bass;680483 wrote:Everyone wants scores, scores, scores,

I think that's a flaw in the way we look at education currently. Different teachers with different students will get different results. Should a teacher get paid more because they have motivated students who are really smart? Or should they get paid more because they do the best job getting their students to learn? I'm not sure how you measure that, but just looking at a test score over simplifies it IMHO.

Manhattan Buckeye;680503 wrote:To turn the argument around, how do you think businesses work? You can't just forget about your work product in order to advance, the work product is the key towards advancement. It doesn't necessarily have to be just about money, but making the organization better and promotional opportunities - there are negatives, office politics would be an issue, and it isn't as if there are annual audits to see how profitable the organization is given that it is a non-profit endeavor obviously. But if paying top teachers more improves schools, it isn't a problem to me to get more qualified individuals in the system. Everyone that attended public schools has had good teachers and bad, for those that have worked in the private sector it is very odd to see the crappy teacher get paid the same as the great teacher because they've put in the same amount of years.

Agree.

ernest_t_bass;680501 wrote:Understood on this end, 100%. But you also have to realize that education is not designed to "push a product" like the private sector jobs, but to educate the future of our nation. Our job is not to get students in and out of here as quickly as possible, so efficiency is not a main key.

Maximizing what the students learn in the time given is an example of efficiency, and thus, efficiency still does have an important role in the educational system.

And, in a way, a teacher is pushed to "produce a product" as much as a manufacturer in that they are pushed (or should be, anyway) to produce students that come out of their classes showing a significant improvement in their education.

FatHobbit;680505 wrote:I think that's a flaw in the way we look at education currently. Different teachers with different students will get different results. Should a teacher get paid more because they have motivated students who are really smart? Or should they get paid more because they do the best job getting their students to learn? I'm not sure how you measure that, but just looking at a test score over simplifies it IMHO.

Therein lies the conundrum.

O-Trap;680509 wrote:Maximizing what the students learn in the time given is an example of efficiency, and thus, efficiency still does have an important role in the educational system.

And, in a way, a teacher is pushed to "produce a product" as much as a manufacturer in that they are pushed (or should be, anyway) to produce students that come out of their classes showing a significant improvement in their education.

ernest_t_bass;680498 wrote:You can't necessarily have "head teachers" be involved in the evaluation process of their peers, as they are not trained or certified.

Changing this mindset would be a good start. Performance isn't about "training" or "certification"--I've no doubt that President Obama is vastly smarter and more qualified than the vast majority of teachers in the US, and I think he'd do an incredible job teaching something like history/civics (he was a wildly popular lecturer at Chicago). Yet because he doesn't have a teaching certificate, our system presumptively labels him untrained/uncertified/unqualified to teach. That's just ridiculous.

If I were designing a merit-based pay system, I'd use extensive weighted evaluations from administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and students, combined with comparisons to baseline performance from year-start/year-end. My preference would be to set the payscale so that it has a range of salary increases from 0 to 10-12%, with teachers slotted into each band based on where they shake out. E.g., score them 1 to 5 based on the weighted results of the previous metrics, then give the 5s (high performers, top 20%) a 12% raise, the 4s an 8% raise, the 3s a 6% raise, the 2s a 3% raise, and keep the 1s flat (or fire the bottom 5%, or something like that). The numbers are just examples--it would depend on the particular school system and its finances, but I think that's the general idea, and how many businesses operate.

Manhattan Buckeye;680503 wrote:To turn the argument around, how do you think businesses work?

I have a problem every year during my annual review because they want me to justify why I should get a raise. They always try to get me to give them a number to base my performance on. Like "Sally answered 4500 phone calls last year and Bob paid 2000 claims. What did you do so we can decide how much of a raise you should get?"