Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Once again, as the country faces severe economic distress and uncertainty, students are seemingly assuming economic significance for long-term growth and stability. Similar to previous economic downturns, schools are being targeted to be transformed from financial liabilities to laboratories of excellence representing the hope for our nation's economic future. Of course, educational reformers who are looking for structural changes during a cyclical downturn argue that schools are not adequately preparing the nation's future workforce. In an effort to develop a highly skilled workforce for the future, educational reformers claim that the push to eliminate tenure, evaluate teachers based on standardized test scores and favor charter schools over traditional pubic schools will in the end produce better students. However, educational reformers have made a significant mistake in targeting public school resources and teachers' incentives and punishments over teaching and learning processes. As a result, these efforts have failed to take into account the political economy of public schools.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a plan Monday to award merit pay to Chicago Public Schools principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics as critics questioned whether the program will lead to gains in student achievement. The performance rewards-which may be based on student test scores, school climate and leadership skills, among other factors - are part of an overhaul of principal preparation and evaluation at CPS. They will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to implement a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.

The term "merit pay" has gained a prominent place in the debate over education reform. First it was D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee trumpeting it as a key to fixing the D.C.'s ailing public schools. Then a handful of other cities gave it a go, including Denver, New York City, and Nashville. Merit pay is a big plank of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's reform platform. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has just launched his own version of merit pay that focuses incentives toward principals.

For months-no, years-the ESEA discussion has been nothing short of maddening. While many pundits decry the lack of a "clear route to reauthorization," an obvious bipartisan solution has been sitting there, ready for the picking. It goes something like this: Step away from federal heavy-handedness around states' accountability and teacher credentialing systems; keep plenty of transparency of results in place, especially test scores disaggregated by racial and other subgroups; offer incentives for embracing promising reforms instead of mandates; and give school districts a lot more flexibility to move their federal dollars around as they see fit.

Bad Teacher offers the most straightforward accounting of the underlying assumptions of paying-for-scores that I've yet seen, in print or on screen. A lousy, unmotivated teacher who desires breast implants is inspired to work much harder to earn the cash. There you go: honest, straightforward, incentive-driven--and utterly disinterested in social justice or the larger purposes of schooling. She changes her behavior because there are rewards for doing so. There's no expectation that the change is permanent, that it alters the content of her character, or even that she'll teach any better--only that she'll teach harder. And, it should come as no surprise that she looks for an opportunity to cheat when her other efforts aren't getting it done. At the same time, for all these thorny issues, I'd absolutely argue that her kids are better off after she learns about the bonus than they were before.

Thousands of students getting free or reduced-cost school lunches may not be eligible for the program, a report released by the state auditor this week finds. But school districts have little incentive to question applications because a higher participation rate also increases their state aid, the report states.

In my previous post, I explained that the new push to rate schools of education by the student outcome gains of teachers who graduated from certain education schools is a problematic endeavor… one unlikely to yield particularly useful information, and one that may potentially create the wrong incentives for education schools.  To reiterate, I laid out 3 reasons (and there are likely many more) why this approach is so problematic. Here, I divide them out a bit more - 4 ways.

Students, teachers and advocates say they are watching once-respectable schools corrode before their eyes as the facilities are swamped with more high-needs students, and teachers have fewer incentives to stay.

October 2011 Steven Glazerman Hanley Chiang Alison Wellington Jill Constantine Dan Player

Here the report lets the cat out of the bag: one of the keys to effective CMO behavior management is bribing students to behave. The report notes that "paycheck" of merit/demerit systems are the "backbones of culture-building efforts." At KIPP schools, one of the CMOs honored as "successful," students are, on average, paid $40-$50 a week to incentivize compliant behavior.

Two years ago I first heard about a new Charter School in New York City called The Equity Project, founded by a TFA alum named Zeke Vanderhoek.  There was an article in The New York Timesabout how they were going to pay their teachers $125,000 in return for more work and accountability.  Teachers could also earn bonuses of up to $25,000.  They were also featured on 60 minutes.  I have to admit that I considered applying.  That's a lot of money.  Even veteran teachers in New York City with 30 years experience make just about $100,000.  With 8 years in New York City, I'm up to about $75,000.

After the second year of CPS rolling out TAP, we found no evidence that the program raised student test scores. Student achievement growth as measured by average math and reading scores on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) did not differ significantly between TAP and comparable non-TAP schools.We also found that TAP did not have a detectable impact on rates of teacher retention in the school or district during the second year it was rolled out in the district. We did not find statistically significant differences between TAP and non-TAP retention rates for teachers overall or for subgroups defined by teaching assignment and years of service in CPS. 

"Education is a not a scientific enterprise. The purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it, to make it more similar to some ideal that we envision. (I wrote about this distinction at some length in my new book. I also discussed on this brief video.) Thus science is ideally value-neutral. Yes, scientists seldom live up to that ideal; they have a point of view that shapes how they interpret data, generate theories, etc., but neutrality is an agreed-upon goal, and lack of neutrality is a valid criticism of how someone does science. Education, in contrast, must entail values, because it entails selecting goals. We want to change the world - we want kids to learn things --facts, skills, values. Well, which ones? There's no better or worse answer to this question from a scientific point of view."

Everyone loves a bump in pay, extra time off, or other form of reward or recognition.  The problem is when managers start to rely on these types of extrinsic motivators too much and stop looking for the deeper intrinsic motivators that lead to long-term satisfaction and well-being at work.

On July 5, Georgia released the results of a state investigation into suspicious test scores in the Atlanta public schools. The state reported that 178 educators in 44 of the district's 100 schools had facilitated cheating-often with the tacit knowledge and even approval of high-level administrators, including Atlanta's award-winning former superintendent Beverly Hall, who conveniently parked herself in Hawaii for the investigation's denouement.