The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail.
Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment.
So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be significantly better than the existing system, which has zero incentive for the teachers to get results.
Except, of course, wanting to educate -- which is ostensibly the reason they got into the profession in the first place. It probably wasn't for the pay.
Also, you can't say teachers are poorly paid by neglecting they only work 8 months of the year, have a gold plated medical plan, and can retire with a lifetime very generous pension.
Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month.
> it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling
Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.
Sales is a great example.
In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!
Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.
But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.
Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.
Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.
Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.
This problem can't be.
Currently, teachers have zero incentive to get results. I bet you'll see results that follow incentives. Of course it won't be perfect - but I bet it'll be much better than the current disaster.
People like money. Especially the people who say they aren't motivated by money :-)
In an ideal world, our perfectly spherical students would enter the classroom "at grade level" and ready to proceed to the next level.
But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75? Or are we in a "we started back, and are going to beat them by going slower" mentality, and even getting 0.75 grade per year would be a win?
Conversely, if you're at a magnet school, you may be taking in students already a few grades above the norm on day one of class. There are kids who can absolute bury the needle on a standardized test-- "12th grade equivalent" at 5th or 6th grade. You could simply babysit them all year and still clear the bar.
I also expect there's a huge amount of dealing with Karen parents too-- I suspect an firm hand in holding back underachieving students could result in parental backlash. Too many parents would rather see the kid tossed out the moment he turns 18, even if they haven't gotten them career or independent-life ready.
Well, obviously, they've been making less than 1.0 grades per year so far; you'd expect them to keep going at that rate, not to suddenly double their rate.
Most of human history has seen the bulk of humans living in rural areas within all manner of labor exchange schemes.
"Modern Capitalism" was founded with "work from home" as a significant factor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work
Since the phrase 'piece work' first appears in writing around the year 1549, it is likely that at about this time, the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home, rather than within the master's workshop.
I never wrote that all work was done in the office, sheesh. Besides, any organized labor project is going to need the labor on site. Piece work can only be done if no coordination or teamwork is needed.
> the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home
Sounds like speculation to me. Where are those apprentices going to get the tools? Is he just going to carry the anvil home with him? How about the forge? Even hand tools have historically been pretty costly items, up until just a few years ago.
> Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?
Not much history is taught in public schools - not my fault. But I have a cite for you:
"Chapter 2 examines the material and religious foundations of capitalism that were laid down during the so-called Dark Ages."
-- The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark, pg. xiv
Huh? No, it's not. The first step may be learning what "capitalism" means. It's a specific economic system that developed in early modernity. It's not some "natural state of man" any more than feudalism was before it.
At best they are niche and contraversial (admittedly it's the phrase "revolutionary and controversial" that most commonly appears on his book reviews).
I spoke of modern capitalism which is a well understood term, as acknowledged by bandrami.
If you wish to speculate on undocumented pre history then it's reasonable to assume that work from home predates first documentation and goes back as far in time as large works with small parts existed.
There are plenty of things companies do, pretty pervasively, that have been proven both scientifically and empirically to be detrimental.
> in the vague opinion of your management tree
I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.
It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.
Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.
In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.
teachers already run the line of barely enough compensation to make it worthwhile except for those who are inclined towards teaching.
teachers are expected to do too much and there are too many goals imo for the position. whether we want it to be the case or not there is a huge social and mental health aspect to their jobs, and the standards look to be wildly inconsistent even within the same city as to what a successful education means.
like would you want to put a ton of effort in on a project knowing that the very next quarter you’re going to have to basically change the entire stack you’re working with and have a completely different set of regulations and project goals? and on top of it all, you need to get your team to even take the project seriously? and to make it even more fun a bunch of your teams’ families and friends are telling the world that the language you picked is awful and evil and are trying to regulate it out of use?
how much would you want for conditions like that every single project?
Management methods are full of cargo cult "science".
That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).
> or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers
Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.
Most teachers can predict each of their student's year-end educational performance by the end of the first parent-teacher meeting week. Students whose parents who are not involved or where there is no culture valuing education at home are pretty much screwed, no matter how much effort is spent on them, and students whose parents are dialed in and taking an active role in their educations are going to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is even there.
Basing a teacher's bonus on student performance will have one effect: Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.
There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes". Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".
Who needs teachers, then, if they are so ineffectual? Might as well replace them with a canned video course.
BTW, every school knows who the good teachers are and who the useless ones are. They get paid exactly the same. Do you think that's a good system?
> There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes".
Of course they are.
> Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".
Company revenue is the sum of all the contributions of its workers. A student outcome is not the sum of the other student's outcomes, and is measurable independently.
> Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.
Sure. And there are only so many of those positions available.
Replacing teachers by canned video courses does not a priori sound like a bad idea.
The central reason why this is not done is that school also serves as daycare, so you need some employees to supervise the children, i.e. removing the teachers will hardly decrease the employee count. All together, if we consider the additinal cost of creating the video courses, this measure would hardly decrease the cost of schooling. So politicians think "never change a running system" and "avoid the trouble with the teacher's unions" and leave everything as it is.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be done but you would need a pretty sophisticated model to try to figure out who is or isn’t effective. Then once you turned on the model you would need to constantly tweek it to handle metrics based tampering.
I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time.
They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them, did the $10 grand bonus motivate them to get it done on time?
They were offended, saying they were professionals and would have worked just as hard without it.
I laughed, and didn't buy it. Do you?
Here's another case. There was an earthquake in LA, and one of the cloverleaf freeway interchanges fell down. They contracted out the job with a tight deadline, and a bonus of ONE MILLION BUCKS per day it was finished ahead of schedule. It was finished several weeks ahead. Ka-ching!
Money talks, BS walks.
The examples you give are straightforward. You already have a bunch of people who know how to do a job, so you pay them to do it quickly. Basically you are giving them money to go and tell their families they are going to be working late for a while and they have to postpone their holidays. These are both examples of a simple task with a definable, specific goal. Everyone can tell when the junction is built.
With this teaching math thing, there is no finish line. The people who decide if the kids pass are... teachers. Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes. You want to adjust for how easy the task is because you don't want easy classes to get paid and difficult classes to be excluded from getting the bonus. But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.
Finally there's the problem of feedback. Incentives work when the person who is incentivized knows how things are going and knows how to change the outcome. It is not clear at all that teachers know that if they just show Billy Bob the times tables as a rhyme then he will pass his test. It is not clear at all that teachers even know whether Billy Bob understands the times tables, or is just repeating what is being said.
This is the problem with all incentive engineering schemes. I'm an engineer too and I wish it were simple. But the history of it is rife with all sorts of catastrophes.
Sigh. Why do people keep bringing this up? Of course you'd need an assessment test that is not under the control of the teacher. Nobody sets up an incentive program where the person being incentivized evaluates himself.
Come on. Give me a reasonable riposte.
Here's what I wrote:
> But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.
So how do you intend to grade the teacher's work, except by other teachers, who are in the same position?
This is just like having board members appointing CEOs out of the same pool.
In fact, it's a pretty hard problem to deal with in general, and it appears many places in society, so it's fair to ask how this would be dealt with.
If we're going to build an incentive system, we don't want it to be gamed.
The classic example is poor Asian immigrants that produce successful professionals within one or two generations. Strict behavioral expectations in the home, coupled with an attitude of parental sacrifice for their child's educational opportunities causes significantly better results decade over decade. But this is an attitude that often doesn't translate to many American households.
Vouchers might be one way to help, but it still requires parental involvement in creating the incentive for the child.
You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers.
The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out.
This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay.
We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558...
So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US.
Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind.
This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.
1. Because tests are a crappy way of assessing knowledge.
There are students who are amazing test takers, but don't really understand the material. There are students who are terrible test takers, like they have test anxiety, but have an incredible understanding of the material if you talk to them and they work through a problem in front of you.
2. Because it's a terrible teaching methodology.
No one wants to learn about something because it's on the test. That's horrible motivation. They want to learn about something because it explains something cool they could never understand, because it provides a new perspective, because they get to do an exciting thing, because it's a fun competition with others, etc.
When you have to teach to a test, people teach to a test. There's pressure from administration to do it because the merit-based pay isn't just for you personally, it's also for the school as a whole. When test scores don't go up your school gets punished too. So now you drill the specific problems on the test over and over again. Do test scores go up? Sure, by that 0.1 standard deviations we talked about. Does joy go up? Does understanding go up? No.
3. Because tests can only test so much.
Practically, only so many topics can be on the test. There are big topics that are important to know in every class. There's tension here: if you design a test that's in a sense fair for a machine, you pick a random page, a random paragraph and ask a specific question about that paragraph, well, ok, you have a test that tests everything. Sort of, at least at the level of memorization. But, immediately people would say this is a terrible test for a human: why does it matter that my child remember the minutia in page 32, paragraph 3, when there are 7 big topics in this course, the topics that are important to build on for next year, and my child mastered them all? And that's fair criticism.
So now, tests become about the big things. Which makes sense, that's what you need for the future. But that interacts with 1 and 2. So now you drill the big topics over and over again. It becomes a game about memorizations.
4. Because we start teaching test taking skills instead of material
Many people are not good test takers. And that's fine! The goal of tests is not to test if you're a good test taker. It's to test if you know the material. We specifically design tests to avoid testing how good you are at taking tests.
Well, when the stakes are so high at Mr/Ms's Smith's retirement fund is on the line, and St. Margaret's operating funds for next year are on the line, people teach test taking. This is miserable for students. You basically teach it by taking a lot of tests over and over. And then of course teaching test taking strategies.
5. Because it makes losers and winners.
If a teacher and school knows that Jimmy isn't going to make it to grade level, will they work with Jimmy so he can do his best. Maybe catch up a little this year? Maybe find an alternative teaching style. Maybe there's a 10% chance that it will work out for Jimmy and he'll go on to university and do amazing things. No. Teaching to the test and merit based pay means that teachers will dump Jimmy. Even if they don't want to do that, the administration makes them. Jimmy is a liability, sure, but it's worse. All the time spent on Jimmy becomes a liability too. Better to just discard him to the scrap heap, he's unlikely to pass the test anyway. We'll double down on our efforts to help Bob instead. He's middling, he has a 70% chance to pass the test. If we double down maybe we increase that to 90%. That's much better for us. This is terrible for students and it feels really bad as a teacher too.
There's much more that is wrong, this is just a short summary.
It doesn't teach people to become educated, curious, smart, interesting, kind, well-rounded. To ask interesting questions. To want to learn. It forces teachers to turn people into widgets and to discard them like widgets.
Incentives are whack across the board in education.
At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself.
We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.
The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.
If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.
But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts.
Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.
Citation needed.
Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.
If you have a system with a dedicated school for violent and behaviorally challenged kids, there would be a much larger number of angry parents reacting to the idea of integrating those students with their children.
That's gonna go over great in Fairfax County.
As a guy said once, there are neither beginnings or endings to the wheel of time.
If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.
This is hardly ever true, for any kind of system.
Declining achievement levels, the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools, and the disparities between different racial groups.
Nope. Do the homework here.
> the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools
Another claim remarkably free of any data
> the disparities between different racial groups.
African American kids today score better than white kids 30 years ago did.
Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3])
The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it).
In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future.
[1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214.
[2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall)
[4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)
Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs.
Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.