It seems simple, right? Offer bonuses to teachers that bring big gains in student achievement, and you’ll get better performance out of your teachers. But, a pack of studies over this past year seems to have rained on the teacher performance pay parade. Back in June, a study from Mathematica on an initiative in Chicago found “no evidence that the program raised student test scores”. This study, like many of its type, compared the “value-added” of teachers participating in the performance pay program against those who did not as measured by student test scores.
In September, in one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind, the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt concluded a three-year study on a performance pay program in Nashville and found that, “students of teachers randomly assigned to the treatment group (eligible for bonuses) did not outperform students whose teacherswere assigned to the control group (not eligible for bonuses).”
Just today, Ed Week reported that a study by Harvard Economist Ronald Fryer on a teacher pay program at over two-hundred schools in New York City found, “no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”
Wow, that’s a lot of smart people supported by big research budgets saying that the education reform cabal wants to throw money in a hole. Unfortunately, these studies missed the point and confused the policy question. And, a simple look at management research on motivation over the last century would have confirmed the results of these studies before they began.
Each of these studies were constructed to test the notion that paying teachers who reach higher academic gains will incentivize those teachers to focus and work in a way that they otherwise would not. The studies frame additional payment for performance as a motivator. If it works in the private sector, it must work in education, right?
Except that a significant body of research has shown that it actually doesn’t work in the private sector. Or any sector for that matter. In one of the original and classic works of organizational psychology, “One More Time: How do you Motivate Employees?” (1968), Frederick Herzberg combined dozens of his own studies (of several sectors of the economy) with 16 other studies from all over the world on what motivates people in the work place. Herzberg’s study found the strongest motivational factors across the board concerned “a sense of achievement”, “recognition”, and the “work itself”. Where was pay on this list? Pay was never actually found to be a motivator. In fact, the combined results of these studies showed money to be more de-motivating than motivating. And, on the scale of comparison with other factors, it was on the low end of influence in either direction.
Unsurprisingly, the Chicago, Nashville, and New York found results consistent with Herzberg. However, that does not mean that pay for performance is bad human capital policy in education. Where performance pay will ultimately prove effective is not as a motivator, but as a simple factor in labor economics. Performance pay will not bring a teacher (who likely did not take their teaching job under the promise of performance incentives in the first place) to suddenly leave their B game at home and bring their A game. But, higher pay will attract more talented people into the teaching workforce who might otherwise not consider it. Performance pay will make competition around the average teacher vacancy more intense. That competition would be good for students. And, by framing pay for performance around the attainment of better than average student achievement goals, the performance bonus provides a market signal specifically to those who think they can hit the target.
I agree that the studies cited were aiming to ask a question that the pay for perfomance strategists are not trying to answer, and in essense prove a null-hypothesis, your quick analysis didn’t cover some of the ground that WAS of value in a couple of the studies cited. Sure, anyone who simply discounts the strategy of more remuneration for those who are more effective are typically making a policy or emotion-driven assertion and not a research-based one, but some of the problems posed by the WAY that value (in the value-add construct) is assessed and derived in some of the models are very real. And the assertion by many PfP advocates, including Arne Duncan, that since these models are ‘better’ than current evaluation methodologies (if we can call them that) we should ignore their inadequacies, is just disingenuous.
Clearly, it is vital to our industry that we understand who our best and brightest are, and what it is that they do for us. And tying individual teachers to potent assessments of growth in student performance is a prerequisite to building that understanding. I believe that it is also similarly important that we find a way to bring some market forces to the school and district human capital field, as it is insufficient to expect personal philanthropic impulse to keep a high-flyer committed to the work against their own financial best interest.
That said, your assertion that the extra performance pay that a person might receive if they are measured to have high value-add is likely to influence them to enter the field is, well, similarly unsupported in the literature. In fact, the current range of performance bonuses have been almost completely discounted as market motivators in most of the TIF evaluations. And the few that seemed to have an effect, the amounts were so large that they are unlikely to be sustainable with traditional district resources. It is unclear how something that we agree and the research shows doesn’t motivate ‘existing’ teachers is expected to motivate ‘potential’ teachers. Increased pay, and the presence of pay for performance bonus opportunities are not one and the same thing.
Isn’t it possible that PfP program will obscure the real argument that what we really need to to is pay ALL teachers more? heck, just compute the cost of just babysitting for six hours a day for 180 days and 24 kids and you’ll see that we’re paying teachers on average HALF what we would pay a babysitter.
D.
Derek, as usual, you cut right to the heart of the issue. I think the recent study by McKinsey, “Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top third graduates to a career in teaching”, supports your point very well. In this study, McKinsey studied what 3 countries with high performing education systems (Singapore, Finland, and South Korea) seem to be doing in their human capital strategies. The study found that these countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent (the top third) as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute.
These countries attracted talented people to the marketplace by a combination of several cross-cutting incentives and management strategies. To quote the report,
“these nations make admissions to rigorous teacher training programs highly selective; some pay for these programs’ tuition and fees and gives students a salary or a living stipend while they train. In addition, government closely monitors the demand for teachers and regulates supply to match it, so that teachers who complete this selective training are guaranteed jobs in the profession. They offer competitive compensation, so that the financial rewards from teaching suffice to attract and retain top third students given the dynamics of these nations’ labor markets. They offer opportunities for advancement and growth in a professional working environment, and bestow enormous social prestige on the profession. Officials in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea view the caliber of young person they draw to teaching as a critical national priority.”
Not surprisingly, these nations view teaching much as Herzberg predicted would produce the best results. And, like you said Derek, pay would only be a piece of the total human capital puzzle in our PfP programs to get the results that we seek.
Your point on raising all teacher salaries raises another thought. The Chicago, Nashville, and New York studies have been quite successful in monetizing the amount of money that goes into financial incentives and what they yield. And like you said, where they have shown growth is when the number is quite high. It seems one conclusion might be that the cost of producing students who meet the needs of our society through teachers competing in our existing labor market is higher than any of us have thought; much like Medicare or Social Security. But it should also help us see that the money alone will not do it. In fact, if Herzberg is right, the next batch of studies would seem to do better by investigating how managers of teachers can give teachers a “sense of achievement”, “recognition”, and a sense of motivation from “the work itself”. We might make great strides in achievement by focusing on those things without the need for huge increases in pay.
If higher pay doesn’t seem to make a significant difference then the question needs to shift to asking how schools can maximize teacher’s “sense of achievement” and “recognition” as well as the “work itself.” This brings us back to school cultures and the need to develop educators who are empowered to make important decisions re. curriculum & instruction.
I think you are right, Judy. It would also seem to put more focus on central office strategies that emphasize school autonomy in recruiting and dismissing teachers, curriculum, school schedules (including working later and into the summer), and pay.
Your reference to the McKinsey study in response to the first comment raises an issue that, in my opinion, has had a mysteriously low profile on the current national reform agenda. While pay for performance has gotten plenty of attention, especially in Race to the Top states, the overall approach to teacher recruitment lacks the “cross-cutting incentives and management strategies” that have yielded such impressive results in the high-performing countries that the study describes. In addition to providing competitive compensation to motivate talented applicants, I think the success of the overall reform effort depends on our ability to take practical steps to achieve that level of “social prestige” that exists in the countries that outperform us by a large margin. Although the concept is certainly abstract, there are concrete areas in need of improvement- from the rigorousness and selectivity of teacher preparation programs at the collegiate level to removing the obstacles that talented teachers encounter when it comes to career advancement that don’t seem to be getting the attention that they deserve. We should be planning now to ensure that competitive compensation for teachers is backed by the promise of a professional trajectory that is both challenging and rewarding that top college graduates are looking for when they choose a career.
I agree that we pay teachers a lot less than their work deserves and the crazy narrative coming out of Wisconsin and fox news about teachers leading Lavish lifestyles is just plain stupid. The Daily Show lampoons it perfectly.
Just in case there are some who still believe that bs. Just follow this simple math. If all we asked teachers to do is babysit, not teach, just watch over our little ones while they played and paid them 6 bucks an hour. 6 hours a day, 180 days, that’s 6480 dollars that a parent would pay per year. Now multiply that by 24 kids per class, that’s 155,520 per teacher and that’s elementary school. When you add the truth that teachers work longer than 6 hours a day, and more than 180 days, that they are educated and credentialed professionals, and that they do a LOT more than babysit, well you get the picture. There is an incredible disconnect between the value of this service and the costs we pay for it.
That said, I don’t buy the whole top third narrative as our society is not likely to position the teaching profession competitively with doctors and lawyers, and even if we did, I don’t think we’d be well served by lots of folks becoming teachers just because the job pays well and not because they love children, and are committed to seeing them have productive futures.
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