Tag Archives | merit pay

Two approaches to ed reform, but one may do little to reform

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On April 27, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher empowerment, Teacher quality, Testing and Accountability, Unionism

Two divergent approaches to education reform are operating in public education today. Both are focused on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of human capital, but while one seeks greater centralization of power the other seeks greater decentralization.

Recent tenure, evaluation, seniority and merit pay reforms are examples of state government trying to improve education by giving school boards more power and mandating that they use this power to increase teacher productivity. Teacher unions, which were created to curb the power of school boards, oppose this power transfer since it’s their power that is being redistributed to school boards.

School board members seem ambivalent about receiving more centralized management power. They like having this additional power but know teacher unions, which play a significant role in local school board races, will fight them if they use it. So board members are trapped between governors and state legislators who will expect them to use these new powers to improve teaching and learning and teacher unions who will demand board members maintain the status quo.

When faced with this dilemma in Florida, our school boards have traditionally followed the letter of the law to satisfy the state while maintaining the status quo in the districts to keep peace with their unions. I predict school boards in states such as Indiana and Ohio will do the same when implementing their states’ new tenure and merit pay laws. Even though these new state tenure and merit pay laws are intended to benefit low-income children, particularly low-income children of color, they won’t because low-income families lack the political clout to counterbalance the pressure school boards will receive from college-educated, middle-class teachers.

Parental empowerment is the other education reform approach sweeping the country. Magnet schools, homeschooling, virtual schools, dual enrollment, tax credit scholarships and charter schools, among others, are enabling more parents to customize their children’s education by matching them with the learning options that best meet their needs. This latter approach is shifting power from school boards to parents and is opposed by board members and teacher unions.

Ultimately parental empowerment will be what generates systemic and sustainable improvements in publicly-funded education. As parents demand more and better learning options for their children, teachers will have more opportunities to be innovative and entrepreneurial, thereby allowing them to be more empowered, also. Unleashing the knowledge and skills of teachers and parents is the best way for public education to maximize its human resources.

Why teacher unions oppose both teacher and parent empowerment is an interesting story I’ll address in a future post.

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A constructive look inside the classroom, but a word of caution

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On March 16, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher quality

The Florida House today passed a landmark teacher pay and tenure bill – one Gov. Rick Scott said he will sign it into law — but one evaluation remains overlooked. Under the bill, parents could get a report card on their own student’s teacher.

The disclosure provision in SB 736 is narrowly drawn: “Each school district shall annually report to the parent of any student who is assigned to a classroom teacher … having two consecutive annual performance evaluation ratings of unsatisfactory, two annual performance evaluation ratings of unsatisfactory within a 3-year period, or three consecutive annual performance evaluation ratings of needs improvement …”

So this particular public rating is a distant cousin to the kind of value-added performance database of 6,000 third- through fifth-grade Los Angeles school teachers that was constructed and published last fall by the Los Angeles Times. First, no one will be rated and ranked. Second, no one’s teaching ability will be reduced to a numerical score. Third, this will draw on multiple years’ worth of evaluation. Fourth, this disclosure will be limited to teachers who have been judged as poorly performing.

Still, this is a significant step. It will give parents information that puts teachers on the spot, which will probably give pause to both. The ticklish part here is that evaluations will always be flawed to some degree, and we still are learning how best to deal with classroom factors such as student absenteeism or mobility, parental support, and the disadvantages of poverty. We’re still calibrating how to assess team teaching or courses, such as art and physical education, that are not as easily assessed.

These evaluations are sufficiently complex that they might be best offered with a warning label for parents. But they do have intrinsic value and play a constructive role in a public education system that keeps inviting parents to take advantage of different learning options and to find the right match for their children. This kind of data is also destined, much like the comparative performance scores that were revealed by the No Child Left Behind Act, to lead us to a greater understanding of what happens in the classroom. That’s never bad.

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Rhee keeps heaping praise on Florida

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On March 11, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher quality

The St. Petersburg Times caught up with Michelle Rhee today and asked for her thoughts on the Florida Senate’s swift approval of a measure that would revamp the hiring and firing of teachers and install performance-based evaluations. Rhee told reporter Jeff Solochek, “We’re very excited about the progress that’s been made … We’ve been using Florida as an example across the rest of the country as a state that is taking an aggressive stance on these important issues.”

Rhee has been highlighting these issues frequently in Florida, where she works as an informal education adviser to newly elected Gov. Rick Scott. The state’s legislative session just opened this week, and what the Senate did this week for the teacher bill, the House is expected to do next week. When that’s done, Rhee won’t be finished in the Sunshine State. She tells the Times that she plans to return to promote proposed changes to charter school governance.

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The State of the Sunshine State

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On March 8, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General

Florida Gov. Rick Scott will deliver his first State of the State speech this evening, and whatever he may say about education, political observers in the Sunshine State already are calling this legislative session one of the most consequential, and controversial, for public education.

Michelle Rhee has visited the state several times, in part to encourage legislators to pass Senate Bill 736, Florida’s latest effort to revamp teacher contracts and evaluations. SB 736 is already on the Senate’s calendar, and lawmakers are seeking to remake the educational landscape with bills that would facilitate universal vouchers or a widely expanded array of online educational opportunities. All this would spark a volatile debate without the governor’s proposal to cut 10 percent off the per-pupil formula paid to public schools to help bankroll operational costs. The state must close a $4 billion budget gap.

RedefinED will have updates on these and other measures as the Legislature convenes during the next couple of months. This is a list of bills we’ll be paying attention to: Continue Reading →

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Merit pay the MLB way

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On January 29, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher empowerment, Teacher quality, Unionism

As redefineED editor Adam Emerson observed last week, Andy Rotherham and I both like using professional sports comparisons when discussing how to improve teacher employment and compensation practices. But whereas Andy thinks school districts should “act more like professional sports franchises so they can protect and incentivize the talent they most want to hold onto,” I see individual schools as being analogous to professional teams and school districts functioning as the league office.

Major League Baseball does not hire and fire players, nor decide their pay. These decisions are made by individual teams. This decentralized decision making benefits teams and players. Teams are able to hire the players that best meet their needs, and players have 30 different employment opportunities rather than just one. Multiple employers enable baseball players to earn more money by selling their services to the highest bidder, a process called free agency, and to customize their contracts within the parameters of league rules. Some players prefer the security of longer-term contracts, even if it means less money, while others accept less job security in exchange for more money. The players’ union would fiercely resist any attempts by MLB to centralize hiring, firing and compensation decisions, as would the teams.

If public educators were interested in replicating the success of Major League Baseball, we’d move hiring, firing and compensation decisions to the school level. School districts would stop owning and managing schools and instead focus on providing an effective regulatory environment within which the publicly-funded schools under their jurisdiction would operate. In essence, every district school would operate like a charter school. Teacher unions would represent teachers’ interest by ensuring state and district regulations were good for teachers and helping them negotiate contracts with their preferred schools.

The few professional sports leagues that have tried centralized team ownership and player employment have all failed. Public educators understand why.

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Improving the old, creating the new

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On December 3, 2010 in Customization, Education and Public Policy, General

Midway through this week’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C., I was reminded of an observation Thomas Kuhn made in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. While researching how scientific fields progress, Kuhn found that during paradigm shifts communities work to improve the old paradigm while simultaneously creating the new paradigm that will render much of the old paradigm irrelevant.

Ending social promotion is a good example of this phenomenon in education today. Reformers in Washington were discussing the importance of ending social promotion while advocating for a customized public education system in which assembly-line education, and therefore grade-level promotion, no longer exists.

Tenure reform and merit pay are also good examples. These reform discussions usually assume employment and compensation will continue to be centrally determined, but in the new paradigm these decisions will probably be made at the school level or below, which means they will have little or no systemic implications. Tenure and merit pay are not contentious issues today within charter school and virtual learning communities. Continue Reading →

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