Some pundits have labeled the Michigan Legislature’s race in December to pass “Race to the Top” education reform legislation one of the most significant acts in the capitol in the past decade.
No doubt, it was complex legislation requiring an unusual amount of bipartisan negotiation under tight time constraints.
The legislation creates the opportunity for a handful of new charter schools in areas with poor-performing public schools. It creates a new bureaucratic attempt to identify and turn around worst-performing public schools. It raises the legal drop-out age from 16-18. It provides for alternative certification of teachers. All of those are mildly provocative reform steps, but an average parent or student would be hard-pressed to see how those changes might revolutionize their classroom experience in the next few years.
And, ungrateful as it might sound, this race for $400 million in federal funds to divvy up across Michigan is a race for pennies on the dollar. The statewide School Aid fund is $13 billion a year. So, the Race to the Top money, IF Michigan gets it, amounts to about 3 percent of annual state K-12 funding. And that state funding amount doesn’t include local property tax funding for local schools. Bottom line… Again, it would probably be pretty hard for parents to see the direct financial impact of the federal funds in their neighborhood schools.
But one component of the Race to the Top legislation worth watching in your local school board meetings is the potential for new ways of evaluating and compensating educators.
In the Center for Michigan’s hundreds of Community Conversations in the past two and a half years, we’ve regularly heard a citizen desire for new ways of both rewarding great educators and ridding schools of chronically under-performing educators. In September 2009, a Fresh Thoughts special report explored how numerous Michigan districts are experimenting with teacher merit pay and we outlined some of the pros and cons of the merit pay approach.
Michigan’s Race to the Top legislation now intensifies local educator evaluation and compensation decisions in a couple of key ways.
First, under the legislation, local school districts must “implement a rigorous, transparent, and fair performance evaluation system that evaluates job performance at least annually; establishes clear approaches to measuring student growth and provides teachers and school administrators with relevant data on student growth; and evaluates job performance taking into account multiple rating categories with student growth as a significant factor. Job evaluations must be used to inform decisions about the following: job effectiveness (ensuring ample opportunities to improve); promotion, retention,
and development (while providing coaching, instruction support, or professional
development); whether to grant tenure or full certification (both to teachers and
school administrators); and removing ineffective tenured and untenured teachers
and administrators (after giving ample opportunities to improve and ensuring that
these decisions are made using rigorous standards and streamlined, transparent,
and fair procedures).”
Secondly, local school districts “shall implement and maintain a method of compensation for its teachers and school administrators that includes job performance and job accomplishments as a significant factor in determining compensation and additional compensation. The assessment of job performance shall incorporate a rigorous, transparent, and fair evaluation system that evaluates a teacher’s or school administrator’s performance at least in part based upon data on student growth as measured by assessments and other objective criteria.”
What are your local teachers, school administrators, school board members, and involved parents thinking and saying about all this?
8 Comments
John,
The other world that most people live in is the world that hires and employs most of the graduates of our school system. We regularly are evaluated for performance and have our compensation based on that performance (exceptions seem to be unions and education). When you don’t meet the performance requirements you receive training and if you still don’t meet the performance requirements you are replaced. It works very well and has been around for decades. In the world of education their seems to be to much emphasis on continuing education for the teachers and staff rather then focusing on the students and learning (not teaching). This is a major cultural disconnect with the real world. It must be confronted and resolved rather than this continous effort at “dialoque”. Many in the system do not want to be judged on their performance because maybe they can’t “hack” it. Why else do they resist it?
Ron Modreski
I’m responding to Ron’s comments about how teachers are not judged on performance as other workers are in society. I am all for improving education and the outcomes for students. However, it is very frustrating when people insist on using business models to gauge the effectiveness of teachers. Teaching is an art–it is something one learns and perfects over time. Teaching students so that they learn is not as simple as some would like to think. A good analogy is a salesperson’s performance. There is a lot of knowledge of a product or service needed to pitch it, along with a good understanding of the potential customer. The end results (a sale) are not always in the control of the salesperson. There are many variables that come into play as to who receives a sale, if there is even one. The same can be said for how a student learns. If we are to “grade” how a teacher performs, then we must use many measures–not just how a student does on a test. These grading measures need to be developed with trained educators involved in the designing process, too. With this being said, I understand that if a salesperson does not sell enough, he/she is let go. Let us hope that this discussion of how effective teachers are does not rest solely on test scores. The answer to the problems with education are myriad. I believe the responsibility lies equally between teachers, students, and parents. The students who do not have supportive parents are the ones who many times are not successful. I also agree there are teachers in the field who have outstayed their effectiveness. (That can be said for many businesspeople too!) I’ve come across many students who do not value their education until it is “late in the day” for them–in high school. We need to capture students early and infuse in them a love of learning and good study skills so they are better prepared when they reach adolescence and begin to question the need to do anything other than what they like to do (computers games, social activities, etc.). By “we” I mean everyone–teachers, parents, society in general.
Merit pay and performance evaluation are two very bad ideas, as they are understood and used today.
Annual performance review implies that once every 365 days someone will sit down and tell you what good you have done for the organization. Based on that evaluation your pay may be adjusted or career ended.
Carrot and stick. Doesn’t work any more. See http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html or read some of Dan’s books. Overcome your “Functional Fixedness”
Worse yet a teacher’s “merit” is to be determined by the performance of students on tests the teachers had no say in designing and that have repeatedly been proven to be less than useless in indicating individual student or systemic capability/improvement.
Teachers are no longer allowed to teach. They are being shaped into talking heads delivering mandated knowledge to obedient (comatose?)listeners. All the innovative, imaginative, creative and courageous teachers and students having been culled from the herd by the shepherd, NCLB. (Read “Life Without Lawyers”)
Yup, we hired a bunch of well trained professionals, and now we have to figure out how to fire them. “Duh?” anyone?
This insane merit and evaluation scheme will produce a flock of “Sheeple,” exactly what this state has too many of now.
Make a personal list of the good and bad things your direct reports have done over the last year. We remember the bad and have little clue of what good has transpired. For the same group list the date of the last time you had a meaningful dialogue with any of them.
Evaluation of teachers and students (or anyone for that matter)is a daily process, with a record created for reference (paper and pencil works just fine) and reviews conducted at least once a quarter unless the daily data accumulated over time indicates action (praise, more training, capturing good ideas, identifying real problems) required.
And yes, this comment is an evaluation of performance – take it as an opportunity for a course correction in your thinking and behavior. We are past the point in this State’s history for “Knee Jerk” political sound byte solutions to nonsense problems.
Do no harm.
Chuck – You nailed it.
The whole RTTT process in Michigan is best described as:
Ready.
Fire.
Aim.
Is the problem with merit raises or whose controlling the system? This problem began with the Fed’s coming in and setting “Stantandards for testing student performance”. Since that stroke of genius the Feds have moved into control every aspect of education and the system is worse now than when we started. I say let’s get federal and state bureaucrats out of the picture and take control back for our children’s lives again. We were better off before the federal and state gov’t “help” (sic). Tell the gov’t to go back to doing what the constitution prescribed their function to be and nothing else.
The problem with both Race to the Top and merit pay is that evaluation is still based almost solely on standardized tests. While tests can provide good evidence of learning of some skills and knowledge, they are woefully inadequate at assessing some of the most complex learning outcomes – ones that are the hardest to teach and the hardest to learn. When rewards are attached to success only in teaching and learning the lower range of cognitive skills, the end result is a general dumbing down of the whole system.
In response to the first comment about holding people accountable in business: Yes, when there is a clear, measurable outcome that encompasses the sum total of what you aim to accomplish, that system works. In business, that is the bottom line. It’s easy to tell if it’s black or red, and how much it is.
Compare that with measuring how much a child loves to read or is curious about science. Most of the measures of those of things are superficial and indirect rather than direct measures. If we reward them, we can easily get results (number of books read, number of science projects completed) that look good on paper but miss the point Yet those are outcomes that good teachers strive for everyday.
Please resist easy comparisons between business and education. Kids aren’t widgets, and learning isn’t a profit.
None of this gets to the root cause – the failure to recognize and understand education as a system. Dramatic re-thinking is neeed, not just nibbling around the edges – and it does not have to cost more!
Just ask the kids! At least in the higher grades, right after a test, a class, or even a semester, they can tell you what did and didn’t work for them. This should be done just to improve the process-like the manufacturing sector. Could it be that one insensitive comment by a teacher can disengage a student, just as one good teacher can inspire? Can one poor math book cause a student to believe it can’t be mastered? Data collection provides insight.