Eduleadership

An Australian study has found that the top decile (10%) of teachers teach in one semester what the bottom decile of teachers cover in an entire school year. The study measured teacher performance by tracking primary students’ literacy and numeracy scores over a three year period.

Not surprisingly, the study is renewing interest in merit-pay proposals, since merit pay requires objective measures of performance. It could also be used to assign the best teachers to the neediest students:

As well as being used to identify, reward and retain the best teachers, Dr Leigh says his methodology could be used to send the best teachers where they could contribute most.

If indigenous students had teachers from the top quarter rather than the bottom, then the findings imply the two-year black-white test score gap could be closed within seven years. link

The study also found that credentials, experience, and other factors that currently determine teacher salary have no bearing on student achievement. This begs the question, If it’s acceptable to pay certain teachers more because of the presumption that they are better (based on their higher levels of education or experience), why would we not pay teachers more for actual, measured superiority in performance?

It seems to me that teacher pay scales are based more on adult needs than student needs. It is comforting to know that one’s salary will rise slightly each year, and it is helpful given that our living expenses tend to rise as we age. However, with the number of second-career teachers now in the field, this ceases to serve as a compelling rationale.

In nearly every private-sector field of employment, people are paid for their performance. More experienced people tend to earn more, but this is because experience is correlated with measurable accomplishments. In education, we have erected contractual barriers between performance and earnings, which is as clear an example of “The Buffer” as I can imagine.

Things are changing, though. For example, Pittsburgh principals will soon be paid on the basis of performance rather than experience. As we increase our ability to gather valid data about student performance, we will see an increase in performance-based pay, mostly in the form of bonuses or stipends, which will likely replace the bonuses for a Master’s degree or second-level credential.

Secondary schools, of course, will still struggle to gather valid data to make judgments about teacher performance. No amount of statistical wrangling can untangle the influence of each of six or more teachers a 6-12 student sees each day. Similarly, the value-added approach is unworkable for specialists, so any merit pay scheme will have to have different options for people in different positions.