Economist, September 23, 2009, Wednesday

Economist

September 23, 2009, Wednesday

Economist

You get what you pay for

Posted by: Economist.com | NEW YORK
Categories: Education
DANA GOLDSTEIN and Matthew Yglesias are having an interesting discussion about merit pay for teachers. Ms Goldstein questions the effectiveness of merit pay:

Forty years of psychological research demonstrates that when someone is faced with a complex, creative task—like teaching—money is an ineffective motivational tool, and may even delay progress. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by autonomy, and by the feeling that they are part of a larger, socially important enterprise.
Interesting, but let's come back to that later. Mr Yglesias says

I don’t think the idea is that ineffective teachers are going to suddenly will themselves into becoming great teachers in order to grab some incentive pay. The point is that if you’re employing a bunch of teachers, any of whom might depart in favor of employment elsewhere, you want to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers who are least likely to quit. And one way to do that is to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers—rather than simply your longest-serving ones—who are getting paid the most money.
Mr Yglesias would like to see teachers paid on the basis of effectiveness, rather than seniority or education. Opponents will understandably ask, how do we quantify effectiveness? Would we use test scores, student evaluations, end-of-year reviews, or a combination of measures? It is somewhat vague and subjective, and there is no perfect way to measure a teacher's effectiveness. However this is true in other industries where outcomes are often ambiguous and multiple measures are used to evaluate performance. Perhaps it is impossible to tell a very effective teacher from a mildly effective teacher. But it is very possible to tell an effective teacher from an incompetent teacher. Yet at present, in most school districts, those two teachers are treated the same. One of the biggest problems with teacher evaluation is that we don't trust the evaluators, perhaps because they are often the products of the same quality-ignoring system.

Still, maybe Ms Goldstein is right. Perhaps we shouldn't be focusing on the pay of individual teachers. She approvingly quotes C. Kirabo Jackson, a labour economist at Cornell University who studied schoolchildren in North Carolina for 11 years. Mr Jackson told Education Week, "If it's true that teachers are learning from their peers, and the effects are not small, then we want to make sure that any incentive system we put in place is going to be fostering that and not preventing it... If you give the reward at the individual level, all of a sudden my peers are no longer my colleagues—they’re my competitors. If you give it at the school level, then you’re going to foster feelings of team membership, and that increases the incentive to work together and help each other out."

Interesting. Let's assume the opponents of merit pay are right and that we can't figure out the effectiveness of individual teachers. Can we figure out the effectiveness of individual schools? Mr Jackson seems to think so. And parents certainly do, which is why they choose to live in certain school districts or send their kids to private schools. And, if Mr Jackson is right, we ought to be rewarding those schools that are more effective with more money. Those schools can then figure out which teachers to hire in order to stay on top. Hmm, I think I just solved the problem.