New Ways of Paying Teachers

The edReformer blog today had an interesting article entitled How to Pay Teachers. The article describes how teachers are evaluated and paid at Summit Prep school in California. The upshot is that teachers gather evidence to demonstrate their competence in seven teaching areas. The seven areas are Assessment, Content, Curriculum, Instruction, Knowing Learners and Learning, Leadership, and Mentoring.

What I found so interesting about the article is how much control and influence teachers have over the information that is determining their evaluations as teachers. If a teacher thinks she is terrific in Mentoring, then she would be responsible for gathering documentation to show the value of mentoring, perhaps a series of lesson plans from a "mentee" showing progress over the year.

First off, I think that giving teachers control and influence over their evaluations just makes sense from a perspective of fairness. It also makes sense from the perspective of motivation. Workers who feel that they have control over important aspects of their work tend to feel more motivated. Finally, the Summit Prep system gets teachers thinking about what is being expected of them and how to show that they are doing it well. In my opinion, it is the last benefit that is going to pay the biggest dividends. One major aspect of teaching that I feel is weak for most teachers is reflection about the quality and nature of the teaching they do. Teachers at Summit Prep who do not reflect on their teaching will find themselves at the bottom of the pay scale for years at which time an administrator is likely to notice the teacher's lack of progress and fire him or her.

My only question, which does not seem to be addressed in the post, is whether spending time to gather all the information teachers need to be evaluated gets in the way of teaching. Other than that, this seems like a great system for evaluating teacher performance.

Can teachers be trained?

My wife showed me a great article from the New York Times called Building a Better Teacher. The article looks at some attempts to figure out what knowledge and skills are important to teachers, and, more importantly, how to teach that knowledge and those skills to teachers.

The good news is that some people are having success both in terms of determining the required skills and knowledge and also in the teaching of those. Unfortunately, the list of skills is not short. One teaching taxonomy mentioned in the article contains 49 points. It is hard enough getting most teachers I know to think about one new thing. Trying to get them to think about 49 potentially new things is going to be close to impossible. Now, once a teacher looks carefully at the list, he or she is going to immediately see a lot of points and say "Oh, I do that!". The problem is getting a teacher, who is already busy and usually feels overworked and under appreciated, to even look at the 49 point list in the first place.

Still, it is good news to me that people are getting a handle on the skills and knowledge that are truly, provably relevant to teaching.

I will probably buy the book with the 49 point list, called Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov. If it's good, I'll be sure to post about it.

Predicting Teacher Success

Fantastic article in The Atlantic about teacher evaluation and predicting teacher success.

I wonder if and when the ideas and principles found by Teach for America will come to Canada. One would hope that every Board of Education across the continent would be jumping at the chance to hire better teachers. However, there is so much junk entrenched in the bureaucracy of education and the union-board relationships that it will be years, probably decades before any of this gets applied.

Here's hoping that it will be sooner rather than later.

Teacher Merit Pay and Teacher Merit.

The Globe and Mail had an article about teacher merit pay in their Saturday edition this weekend. The article was similar in many respects to Malcolm Gladwell's article "Most Likely to Succeed", minus the football comparison.

The Globe article highlighted many problems with merit pay, and I won't repeat them here, since I have already blogged on that topic.

One point that I felt that the Globe article missed was that teacher merit is, in the end, about teacher merit. Which teachers are truly helping the majority of students learn and succeed? Those teachers need to be encouraged and rewarded (although not necessarily with money). Which teachers are failing to help and teach the majority of their students? Those teachers need to be helped so that they can improve, or, if they cannot improve enough, they should be gently removed from the profession.

The problem with the idea of teacher merit is that I don't think that a good definition of teacher merit in terms of measurable quantities currently exists. Gladwell and the Globe article discuss the idea of evaluating teacher performance by looking at standardized test results over several years, but there are no specifics. Between the lack of specifics, human inertia, and teacher union resistance, I suspect that a good definition of teacher merit through measurable values is several decades away.

So, until we have that definition, I fear that we are stuck with the status quo. Too bad. I, for one, would be happy to know whether I am actually doing a good job of teaching or whether I just think that I am doing a good job.

Looking at the States

Another New York Times column of interest, "The Quiet Revolution". David Brooks talks about what Obama is doing for education reform in the United States.

The most interesting part of the article for me is where Brooks talks about teacher unions as one of the main obstacles to education reform. This makes me uncomfortable, because I am a member of a teachers' union, but I feel like I am a strong proponent of education reform. I fully recognize that teachers' unions can be stupid and short-sighted when it comes to changes and reforms. But one thing that I think education reform advocates miss is that a lot of reforms in the past have been poorly executed and have hurt teachers in ways that hurt the education system. The teachers' unions are all, to some degree, trying to prevent those kinds of mistakes from happening again.

Brooks says:
The changes also will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs. There is no consensus on exactly how to do this (my italics), but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores, and that teachers who do not need to be identified and counseled. Cracking the barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay would be a huge gain.

The problem with making a reform when "there is no consensus on exactly how to do this" is that the reform can easily be done poorly. And teachers have too many experiences of short-sighted, foolish, or politically motivated administrators and politicians shoving lousy "reform" down their throats to be sanguine that this particular reform will magically come out all right.

For my part, statements like "there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores" sound great, but what exactly does that mean in terms of dealing with teachers. Are three years of bad results evidence of bad teaching? Five bad years? Two good years, then three bad ones? A good year, two bad ones, another good year, then another two bad ones? It seems like no one knows, yet the reformers want programs in place NOW to link student results to teacher pay and job security. Pardon my cynicism, but I find it hard to believe that a program put in place with this little understanding has much of a chance of working fairly or properly or efficiently.

If education reformers want to get the majority of teachers on their side, the reformers need to come up with some valid and verifiable ways of linking student outcomes to teacher pay. Anything else is going to harm and infuriate the teachers who are the ones who will truly be implementing any reforms.

Edreformer looking at teacher evaluation

Edreformer has two blog entries today looking at teacher evaluation. Frequent conversation as teacher evaluation and Rhee-engaged. The entry about Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC laying off teachers who were poor performers rather than lowest on the seniority list is quite interesting.

Both entries and their links talk about the need to improve teacher evaluation, and I agree completely. Teachers who are weak need to be told that and they need to be helped to get better or they need to be removed from the system. And evaluations simply CANNOT be once a year or once every two years if they are to be effective. The evaluations need to be regular and positively focused. As well, teachers who are doing a good job need to be publicly praised, materially rewarded, and set up as role models for other teachers.

The one thing that I did see missing from the talk about teacher evaluation was proper support for all teachers, both weak and strong. So many teachers who try to do good jobs are told that they cannot have the resources (books, computers, movies, etc.) that they need, typically for budgetary reasons. But how can we expect teachers to be excited and passionate about teaching when almost all their ideas are shot down for non-pedagocial reasons? It is so easy for those teachers to give up on doing a good job and just inhabit the system. As part of any modified system of teacher evaluation, the education system needs a complimentary system to make sure that needed resources.

How is a teacher like an NFL Quarterback?

Wow, Malcolm Gladwell continues to blow my mind!

Most Likely to Succeed compares the difficulty of finding a good NFL quarterback with the difficulty of hiring a good teacher. How are the two similar? "There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired."

Some more quotes from the article:

"Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher."

"A group of researchers ... have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom."



Gladwell shows that good teaching trumps almost any other factor in education. My question is, "how do we use this"? His suggestion for the education field is to hire teachers without tenure and pay them based on performance, letting go those who are not good enough. An interesting suggestion, but determining teacher performance is always problematical.

How do you decide which teacher brings the most value to the school? How do you mesh teaching performance with contributions to the school like coaching sports teams, directing school plays, or supervising the student's council? How do you score quality versus quantity? Is it better to coach five mediocre sports teams or one National Champion?

If Malcolm can write an article about that, then he will REALLY blow my mind.