My Sunday started out with a very interesting discussion on The Sunday Edition, on CBC Radio One. Merit pay for teachers has been all over the new since BC Liberal leader candidate Kevin Falcon proposed the idea for the BC education system.
For today’s Sunday Surf I’ll give you several links to articles on the topic. I’d also like to share some of my ideas.
Here’s a link to The Sunday Edition. CBC will post the discussion later if you are interested in listening to it. It was a good one, and is worth a listen.
Here is a Maclean’s article on the subject. Read some of the comments, wow, some people are really strident
Here is an article by Peter Holle, founding President of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, an award-winning western Canadian based public policy think tank. He was part of the discussion this morning and is pro merit pay.
This is an older Globe & Mail article, Feb. 2010, the merit pay idea is not new, but it’s a good one.
If you want to read more, Google merit pay for teachers, and you will have your choice of thousands of pages of information.
Here’s what I think. Not all teachers are equal but I don’t think it’s related to pay at all. There are many problems with the idea of merit pay. One is that it would be very expensive. Several states in the US tried it and had to stop because they couldn’t afford it.
Also, how does one measure the work of a teacher? Standardized tests. I don’t think that is a good measure. There are so many variables that affect the results of EQAO or other tests. For one thing, they are a snapshot. I’m not sure if you know this but the Ontario government brags about how student performance on EQAO has improved over the past seven years, but they changed the test. They made is shorter, and arguably easier.
Merit pay would undermine morale, and it’s already low in some places because teachers in Canada are not really valued by our culture and because often board administration does not treat them respectfully. Merit pay would pit teachers against each other because there is no way that everyone could get it. This would likely reduce collaboration and the sharing of ideas which is some of the best PD out there.
Merit pay would encourage cheating. According to Ben Levin, who was Deputy Minister of Education and is a professor at OISE, there is a lot of research out there that shows that merit pay often leads to cheating. There is already some cheating on EQAO because of the pressure on teachers, schools and boards. Children are asked to stay home so as not to bring down the class. Students are given the answers. Merit pay would only make this worse.
Merit pay suggests that teachers are not performing well right now. I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Canada ranks pretty well in the international results of the OECD’s PISA results. Of course, the PISA is a standardized test of 15 year olds, so, how much does it tell us? As in every profession, some teachers are excellent, many are good, most are average, and some suck. It is true though that in other professions, the people who suck will most likely not be in their jobs for long.
John Ralston Saul talks about meritocracy creating an increasingly
mediocre society because it brings together the elite, who think alike. Therefore loses the advantages of a diverse culture. It’s a sort of
Social Darwinism. Is this what we want for education? For more on
that read Sauls: The Unconscious Civilization or Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.
Finally, maybe politicians should get a lower base pay and merit pay if
they perform well. We could base it on GDP increasing over their
terms, regardless of the current economic conditions; they should be
able to overcome a recession, no? Or maybe we could base it on
reducing poverty levels by 20%? That would help education also. Maybe
a full pension should require a little more than two terms in office,
it could be based on merit. Come on Kev, let’s try for some workable
improvements rather than this ridiculous political posturing.
Personally, I would rather have a system in which teachers are motivated by a love of learning, respect for children, and a belief that our society is improved by people who think critically about things and can engage in respectful discussion. These aren’t areas which can be easily assessed by standardized criteria.
So what to do? I have some ideas about improving education and teacher performance and they start with better training and PD. I personally, would rather have extra money spent on educating teachers and giving them the tools they need to be the best they can be at their jobs.
What do you think?
LOVE THIS POST!!!!
I have more to say then time to write, but I would say that you & Kath summed up my thoughts perfectly. Measuring what makes an excellent teacher is so individual and almost impossible to do. Teachers are underpaid, in my opinion, and yes, there are so many teachers that get their yearly raise without deserving it, but merit pay can’t possibly be the answer.
WOW! Great thoughts, Erin. As a teacher (and, I like to think at least, a good one) I shouldn’t be afraid of merit pay for teachers, because I feel confident that I do my job well, therefore would earn merit pay.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with that thought.
As you rightly point out, one of the key issues is going to be: how do we measure “merit”? Do we base it all on summative assessment (i.e. standardized tests)? That would be horrifying! A dedicated, passionate, creative and excellent teacher working in an underprivileged school with high levels of ESL students would rank way below a mediocre, tuned-out, plodding teacher at a school in a more privileged school. Standardized tests already do a poor job of assessing student performance, but they would do an even worse job of assessing teacher performance.
As for cheating, I agree it would only increase. I worked at a school where even the administration encouraged teachers to “cheat” on Alberta’s standardized tests. Poor performers were asked to stay home on test day so they wouldn’t bring down the school’s average, and in some cases, 100% of students were given scribes for the test (students in a higher grade who wrote their answers for them). When these practices were stopped, results on the test plummeted.
Also, having worked in the private sector for 10 years before teaching, I’ve seen merit pay schemes in the real world. I’ve sat in budget meetings where we tried to figure out how to distribute merit pay, and I’ve been on the receiving end of nonexistent “bonuses” because the criteria were impossible for everyone to achieve. Merit pay schemes are also usually one-size-fits-all: anyone has a chance at a bonus if the company’s performance improves by 10%, e.g. but no two classrooms or schools are exactly alike, so how (and who?) would devise the criteria for teachers’ merit pay? How would we ensure it was fair? And that it would drive the desired results?
I also think (and I believe that management research supports this idea) that people are motivated far more by factors other than pay. So it would follow that if we want teachers to change their practice in any given way, merit pay would not be the best way to motivate them.
Another thought: teachers are truly an essential service, like police, doctors, etc. Would the public support merit pay for doctors or police?
Very thought-provoking!