Merit Pay Controlled by Teachers

I raised this idea in an earlier post, but I want to be a little more explicit. When it comes to the controversy around merit pay for teachers, I think there are some definite bad ideas out there, like basing merit on student test scores. But the current system, where pay is based on seniority, also has drawbacks.

Some principles I start with:

• Evaluations of teacher performance should not be based on standardized tests taken by students. Instead, evaluations should match the primary work of the discipline. For example, English teachers should be evaluated on their students’ interest and confidence in reading and writing, their ability to read and write increasingly complex texts of a wide variety, their ability to present their ideas verbally, etc. This is messy.
• Certainly, students’ abilities should guide a teacher’s evaluation, but this should be based on a comparison between students’ abilities when they entered the class and their abilities when they left it. Extenuating factors should be taken into consideration where appropriate. This is also messy.
• Teachers should not earn pay increases due merely to perseverance. There may certainly be an expected yearly increase to match cost-of-living, etc., but this need not be required and teachers should have the opportunity for greater increases based on performance.
• Schools should continue to encourage teachers to be well-educated, which means keeping pay increases for degrees while providing additional monetary support in attaining those degrees.

Given these principles, it should be clear that any effective evaluation of teachers will be more complicated, nuanced, and time-consuming than a standardized test and will require more expertise in teaching and the subject area than most principals or assistant principals can reasonably be expected to have.

This is why I think we need to restructure “administration” in public education. A school will always need a principal: someone with a guiding vision for the school who can speak for it, be its public face, and be the deciding voice in difficult decisions. However, beneath this guiding position, the administration should split into two branches: operations and academics. The operations branch would handle concerns like budget, scheduling, school food, discipline, etc. The academics branch would be focused solely on training and evaluating teachers. The two branches would have to come to agreement on decisions that would impact both (such as scheduling, for example), but otherwise they would function independently.

The academics branch would be staffed only by teachers with proven expertise: a board of educators, if you will. These members would continue to teach in the school (perhaps two or three courses), but the majority of their time would be focused on working with and evaluating teachers. In schools with distinct subject areas, each subject area should be represented by at least one experienced teacher on the board.

This board would be able to pay close attention to teachers, offer guidance, and make substantive and informed decisions about teachers’ effectiveness and development. Effectiveness would be measured against the general collective wisdom of the board and the standards defined by the board for specific disciplines. This may or may not reflect larger district, state, or national standards, depending on the winds of the current political climate. At any rate, this board would decide on the pay increases of each teacher, whether or not remediation should be given to a teacher, and whether or not to recommend that a teacher be released.

This system would also benefit the operations side of the school because they would now be able to focus purely on operations.

As for costs, the division of these priorities would mean that fewer administrative staff would be needed for operations, which would free up some funds for the academic branch. Also, since each member of the academic branch would also continue to teach at least two courses, it’s not a net loss for the school. The bottom line is that schools will not become more effective unless we are willing to invest in that effectiveness: better pay more wisely distributed for teachers, reasonable class sizes, sufficient resources, etc.

I realize the gap between thinking about this idea and enacting this idea is massive, but so are the problems facing education.

I would love to see others critique, expand, or refine this idea (besides just telling me I’m a foolish dreamer). Is this a good idea? Has it been tried somewhere already? What new problems does it raise? Is it worth the effort to try it? What would it take to make the experiment a reality?