Motivation in the 21st Century

The testing debate is really heating up this week, with cheating investigations continuing in Atlanta and New Jersey, and teachers in Ogden, Utah, choosing whether to resign or sign a new merit-pay contract. Meanwhile, New York City's mayor Bloomberg has canceled the city's merit-pay pilot program, yet reinforced his support for performance pay in general.

The only good news, recently, on the issue of merit-pay comes from Ohio, where Republican Governor Kasich has made the entirely reasonable decision to hand teachers the task of creating a fair merit-pay process. To comply with Race to the Top requirements, the final plan must include teacher evaluations that weight student academic achievement for at least 50% of teacher ratings. However, if done right, the decision to let teachers design the details could result in a merit-pay system that has the support of teachers because it supports teachers in making the efforts they understand to be essential to their jobs, like collaborating with colleagues and developing relationships with students' families.

I'm encouraged by efforts of politicians to respect and defer to the knowledge and skills of teachers when designing education policy, but I'm having trouble getting truly excited about even a good merit-pay program. Focusing efforts on merit-pay program details begs the question of whether merit-pay is an effective incentive, and if so, what it actually incents. Early studies have shown that offering performance bonuses of 20% of salary might slightly motivate top-performing college students to enter teaching, but any motivational effect on current teachers to change their teaching is unproven at best. A McKinsey study revealed that bonus pay isn't even in the top five motivators for current teachers to consider teaching in a high-need school, and a RAND study revealed that many teachers in NYC's merit-pay pilot program "reported viewing the bonus as a reward for their usual efforts, not as an incentive for changing their behavior."

For another perspective on how to truly motivate creative and thoughtful teachers, check out Vicki Davis's excellent article on "The Freedom to Teach" in today's Washington Post. Davis's thinking is exactly what 21st century students need. As Levar Burton always said on Reading Rainbow, "You don't have to take my word for it!" because a few members of the 'Net Generation would like you to hear it from them:

More Links:

Biz Journal article on Atlanta educators resigning amid cheating scandal

CNN report on upcoming cheating investigations at 34 New Jersey Schools

Deseret News report on Ogden teacher contract

Wall Street Journal article on the new teacher rating system in NYC

Columbus Dispatcher article on decision to ask teachers to design merit-pay process

McKinsey's "Closing the Talent Gap" study

Edweek reports on RAND study of NYC merit-pay

FOUR, FOUR, FOUR improvements in ONE

The big news out of the Big Apple this week is that the city is ending its merit pay pilot program after a study showed that the merit pay had no effect on student achievement. Analysts at RAND, the independent research company that designed the study of the program, suggest that the small bonuses were not motivating enough to change teacher behavior in the current context of one-test-fits-all carrot-and-stick "accountability."

The NYC merit pay program focused on motivating existing teachers to work hard to boost student scores, but what if we shift the focus to motivating existing hard workers to lend their efforts to same goal? This would more closely resemble the national strategies of top-performing Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. McKinsey&Company, another research company, recently released the report of their comprehensive study of what factors might motivate current teachers and top college grads to teach in high-needs schools.

Much has been made of this study, and the reports and commentaries I had read focused heavily on radically increasing (essentially doubling) teacher pay in order to draw top students into teaching, especially in high-needs schools. However, the study itself does not suggest that increasing teacher salary is the only, or even necessarily the most effective strategy to provide the highest-need students with top-tier teachers. In fact, the results of the study imply that the most effective progress could be made by combining a few different strategies targeted to different populations.

Salary increases were especially motivating for top grads in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) who expect to take their pick from a range of well-paid career options. Salary also motivated top college grads, but the study found that simply marketing teaching careers to college students and providing drastically better training for entering teachers would go a long way toward motivating top grads to pursue teaching careers.

The one group not very motivated by salary increases was current teachers. These folks, who had already spent a few years working in the system, placed more value on good working conditions, professional development, and excellent school leadership. The fabulous news here is that all three of these indicators also independently raise student performance, and all three can be achieved by simply attracting excellent school leadership to work in the highest need schools. The McKinsey report proposed several different "scenarios" to attract top-tier teachers, but by focusing on independent variables instead of combined effects they missed this simplest one.

Links:

Edweek article on the end of the NYC merit-pay pilot program

McKinsey's Closing the Talent Gap

Read my lips: reform requires taxes

In today's news, Illinois Schools Superintendent Christopher Koch pointed out that funding cuts are bad for education reform. Now, I wasn't a huge fan of the Illinois reforms to begin with (the big focus was on preventing teacher strikes and paying teachers for high test scores), but Koch is right that education reform is going to take some serious funding.

Real reform, like the suggestions from Iowa's roundtables and the initiatives AFT president Randi Weingarten highlighted last week at the AFT Teach conference, will require real funding. Selling this reality to parents, pundits, politicians, and private sector CEOs will be the biggest challenge we'll face in achieving the long-term goal of improving the US education system to rival those of Finland, Singapore, and South Korea.

While we work on the mid-term goal of selling folks on the idea of higher taxes to fund real school reform, we could act in the short-term to divert funding away from unproven and disproved reform efforts, such as bonus pay for high test scores and developing standardized tests for preschoolers.

More links:

Evansville Courier Press on Koch's funding frustration

AFL-CIO blog summary of Weingarten's remarks

AFT Quality Education Agenda for evidence-based, equitable, scalable, and sustainable reform

A business leader, a university president, and a teacher walk into Iowa....

Interesting news out of Iowa today as Governor Branstad prepares for his July 25-26 Education Summit. Today's roundtable discussions with business leaders, college and university presidents, and teachers were made available for live streaming and the videos of each roundtable are to be posted after the events. It looks like the Iowa Department of education will also make the summit presentations widely available during that event in a couple of weeks.

Just one comment for now, about integrating a few of these ideas. Business leaders rightly pointed out that teachers need to be appropriately compensated for their work, just as employees in the private sector are. The group focused on increasing pay for teachers in higher-demand positions (challenging schools, math and science instruction, special education) as well as performance-based pay. Later, in the teacher roundtable, teachers pointed out that one stellar teacher in a mediocre school cannot independently raise the field of education or the even the function of the school where they teach; great schools are the result of great coordination.

This is why any serious performance-based pay system must be implemented at the school level, rather than at the level of individual teachers. Whole schools must be accountable for rising or sinking together, just as whole businesses are. John Bloomhall, president and CEO of Diamond Mills (an animal feed company) suggested during the business leaders' roundtable, "If I had a classroom, I'd put the [students] in charge of being successful: 'Your job is to make sure every kid gets a passing grade." This is the strategy we need for schools: we need to tell school communities that it is their responsibility to make sure every teacher succeeds, and we need to give them the resources to do it.

You can access the videos here: https://educateiowa.eduvision.tv/default.aspx