SPECIAL REPORT: Pay for performance coming to Michigan schools

By John Foren

Nohemi Leake of Kalamazoo believes we should be sprinting in the Race to the Top. Maria Martinez of Wyoming, near Grand Rapids, wants to put a stop to this Race.

Think there’s a consensus over President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top education reform plan, which emphasizes performance-based pay for teachers and school officials?

Hardly. It’s not just education experts and school employees who are all over the board in how they feel about it.

The same disparate views are echoed by everyday people whose lives don’t revolve around the latest education theory. They just want to know that their kids are learning what they need to.

“I personally think it’s a good idea,” Leake, 35, said of basing pay on how students perform. “In any other job that’s how it would work.”

Leake has four kids, ages 1 to 8, including a kindergartner and third grader. She’s a PTO officer at Kalamazoo’s El Sol Elementary School and is hardly down on teachers. She thinks most are doing a good job, but remembers seeing teachers while growing up who seemed to stay on the job forever, no matter how they were doing.

Martinez, though, worries that her 9-year-old son – who struggles with reading – will get overlooked as teachers focus on stronger students in order to boost test scores and class performance measures. She’s already not happy with the attention he’s getting in his class of 35 children at Wyoming’s West Elementary.

“If they are ignoring him now, they are going to ignore him more,” Martinez said. “… My personal opinion is instead of giving bonuses, use that money to get more teachers.”

Race to the Top offers $4.3 billion in federal funds through competitive grants to states that commit to roughly 20 education priorities. Those priorities, as set out by the Obama administration, include performance pay, more room for charter schools, and better efforts to turn around failing schools.

Everyone, it seems, has his or her own thoughts on improving our education system and whether Race to the Top will do it.

Critics say it’s a formless grab bag of ideas that dangles millions of dollars in federal funding in front of cash-starved states.

“Instead of Race to the Top, it became Dash for the Cash,” said Doug Pratt, spokesman for the Michigan Education Association, a leading critic of the effort.

Proponents say at least it represents something, anything, being done to improve our schools and keep up with the rest of the world.

“Instead of sitting here wringing our hands, let’s take some leadership,” said Jim Ballard, of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals.

Michigan: Millions at Stake

At the heart of the plan is performance pay and evaluating school staff based on student achievement.

Michigan is competing for up to $400 million in Race to the Top money, but there are a lot of hoops in order for state officials to get their hands on some of the cash.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm in January signed a five-bill package approved by the state Legislature that echoes the administration’s key measures. The reforms require annual evaluation of teachers and administrators by using data on student growth; requires administrators to be certified (like teachers); permits more charter schools to open; and allows the state to intervene in low-performing schools.

Nearly all local school districts signed memos of understanding agreeing to participate in the changes, a factor the administration takes into account in its decision on who gets funds. But few union locals signed on, discouraged by MEA leaders.

The MEA said that Race to the Top didn’t tackle real priorities such as class size and early childhood education and that locals were being asked to agree to a plan that wasn’t even finalized. Many of the day-to-day details will have to be worked out at local bargaining tables, promising a complicated and hectic summer and fall for contract negotiations.

And, in perhaps the highest-profile issue, the MEA said research doesn’t back up linking teacher evaluation to student growth and warns that in the end there will be an over-reliance on high-stakes tests.

That’s where the real debate begins.

Measuring Teacher Achievement

“It worries me,” education expert Kevin Hollenbeck, vice president of the Upjohn Institute, said of performance pay.

As an economist, Hollenbeck generally believes in incentives. But “as always the devil’s in the details,” he said.

Hollenbeck, former president of the Michigan Association of School Boards, worries about tying too much to test scores and whether teachers will tailor their work to whatever will drive up their evaluations. That won’t necessarily lead to better student learning, he said.

Coming up with a good assessment tool for teachers is complicated, he said. For instance, how do you account for the overall makeup of a class and the notion that the best teachers are assigned the worst students?

“What concerns me is that teaching is a team process and so what makes the most sense to me, particularly in the elementary grades, is (school) building incentives rather than individual incentives,” Hollenbeck said.

Playing Favorites

Larry Christopher, a social studies teacher in Hastings, southeast of Grand Rapids, thinks merit pay will fall victim to a huge “buddy system” in which administrators reward their favorite teachers.

Christopher, 51, is head of the district’s teachers union, so Race to the Top is going to be a big part of his life.

He’s not looking forward to it.

There’s no evidence that tying salary to performance increases student achievement, he said, and Christopher shares Hollenbeck’s concerns over how to make sure certain teachers aren’t penalized for having more difficult students.

“My thought is it’s a lot like so many grandiose ideas, ideas that on the surface seem to have some merit,” he said. “As you begin to look at the practicality of trying to implement, the policy it’s fraught with problems.”

Still, Christopher concedes, teachers are in a “no-win situation” with the public over the issue.

“If this comes to a vote, if this comes to a public relations battle, teachers are going to lose it across the board,” he said.

That’s because, as Leake attests, many people seem to like the notion of evaluating performance on something measurable.

But critics say a model that works in, say, manufacturing, doesn’t fit in education.

“We’re not creating widgets, we’re not creating brake pedals, where it’s much more quantifiable,” counters Pam Schultz, president of the Jackson County Education Association.

Teachers are concerned that any evaluation measure won’t accurately reflect the full picture of their work, only a snapshot of test scores and other numbers, Schultz said.

“The way we deliver education, everything has changed so much,” she said. “I think we’re a little behind on changing. (But) we’re going gung ho and trying to change everything so much, we’re almost overstepping, almost going too fast.”

That’s a good thing, proponents say: The education system needs an overhaul, and change must come swiftly and sharply.

“I think there’s a very important need,” said Sharif Shakrani, an expert on accountability in education and co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University.

“What the U.S. Department of Education is saying is we want to be able to provide this huge amount of money to the states. We don’t want this money to simply be added to the budget, we want it to be targeted to improving achievement.”

Will Money Buy Results?

Shakrani calls Race to the Top “drop-from-the-sky-type funds” that should greatly help states in dire need of school money.

He likes the program’s emphasis on helping chronically failing schools, saying, “If something is not done, these schools will be where they are five years from now.”

He’s not as high on broadly judging teacher pay on student performance. For instance, how can a teacher be held accountable for the scores of a 7th grader who may not have been taught well in previous grades, he said.

“To say that the student’s performance and achievement is only a function of the teacher who taught him the last time is really far-fetched,” said Shakrani.

But performance evaluations are just one component of Race to the Top, he said, and may not be as stark as some think. Teachers won’t be fired if their students don’t do well but may instead get professional development, Shakrani said.

At its heart, the new system allows educators to use data to dig deeper into why some students learn and some don’t, he said.

Ballard, executive director of the secondary principals group, admits “people are scared to death because there are more unknowns than knowns” over performance evaluation.

But Ballard is among those who think Race to the Top is pushing the education envelope and it’s about time.

“In this day and age of testing and numbers, performance has become a reality, so let’s not fight it, let’s embrace it and deal with it in a constructive manner,” he said. “We can’t go on doing what we’re doing. Michigan doesn’t have the time.”

Educators just need to look to major businesses to see how setting performance measures can boost results, he said. Education may not be the same as business but Ballard said it still has to be accountable.

“How can you justify schools where none of the students in that school meet minimum expectations?” he asked.

“This is not a one-year thing. … If we can say over three-year period, kids in your class come out behind other teachers, maybe that’s about your teaching ability.”

Jack Jennings, who heads the Center on Education Policy in Washington D.C., agrees that student performance has to be used in some way to evaluate teachers, though the specifics need to be worked out.

“When you judge cars you judge performance, it’s just the way things are,” Jennings said.

“If you go to a doctor you want to know if the doctor has a good rate of care … you want to know about the survival of their patients. What happens to student s and their achievement has to be an element (of an evaluation system).”

Comprehensive Reform?

Jennings said he’s most excited about Race to the Top because it marks a coherent national education strategy and a consistency that’s been missing.

Frederick Hess of Washington’s American Enterprise Institute isn’t buying it. He’s especially perturbed by the notion that something, anything, must be done to overhaul America’s education system.

“I find that ludicrous. We’ve been hearing this for 45 years,” Hess said. “The notion that it is OK to behave incoherently or in a slapdash fashion because something is change is nuts.”

A prime example, he said, is No Child Left Behind, the Bush Administration education strategy that set unobtainable goals that didn’t mesh with what some states were already pursuing.

He fears Race to the Top is already leading to what happened with No Child Left Behind: states turning to pricey consultants crafting policy aimed at appeasing the feds or getting a slice of the pie.

Hess likens it to a “new laundry list of best practices for the moment from Washington.”

Yong Zhao, an education expert and researcher at MSU, says there’s not enough evidence to show teacher performance is the sole contributor of student performance.

“In my perspective, I’m not sure the system is not working,” Zhao said. “It’s not working for some people and it’s working for others. It’s like the U.S. democracy. You could say the democracy is not working in some ways but you don’t say forget the Constitution.”