When the recent mortgage collapse began, realtors and loan officers were raking in record bonuses for making deals while their companies were going under. No one was factoring in the delinquent payment rate.
Economist Daniel Pink has examined what motivates employees in his new book, Drive. He concludes that bonus pay may work for piece work in a factory but is actually a terrible idea for more complex tasks. Bonus pay actually stifles creativity and problem solving for most people. Instead of coming up with innovative solutions, most people will go only for the shortcuts to make their bonuses.
If bonus pay doesn’t work in business, why would it work in education? It doesn’t.
Previously I wrote that rewarding students for learning doesn’t work. Nearly a year ago, I warned that teacher merit pay is unlikely to work. Now a new study pretty much confirms these reservations.
In three years study on merit pay in the Nashville Public Schools, teachers were paid bonuses of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 depending upon how well their students did on the state’s standardized test. The study concluded that paying teachers for higher student test scores had no impact in improving student outcomes.
This study is getting wide circulation by opponents of merit pay. By itself, this is only one study questioning the validity of merit pay. The problem for proponents of merit pay is that they can’t point to a single scientific study that supports the idea. Virtually all the research points in the other direction.
Teachers are likely to teach to the test and forget about other learning. Long-term education is sacrificed for short-term test scores, and the temptation to cheat is always there.
When teacher contracts first supported differentiated pay based upon years of service and additional college credits, it was very progressive for the time. Research does show that schools which have teachers with more years of service and higher degrees also have students with higher achievement. But good schools may simply be more likely to attract highly qualified teachers and keep them. Are there better ways to improve teaching and compensate teachers?
A collaborate effort between the Denver school district and its teachers’ union shows some promise. With Denver’s Procomp teachers may receive pay increases through a basket of measurements including test scores, principal evaluations, classroom observations, additional training, agreeing to teach in more challenging schools, just to name a few.
Atlanta has experimented with whole school merit pay. So instead of teachers competing against each other, staff members see an advantage of working together for the betterment of the entire school. Unfortunately, Georgia is presently rocked by a test cheating scandal, which raises questions to the validity of test scores in that state. Atlanta had the most schools identified for cheating in the investigation.
Now Milwaukee Public Schools has received a $7.5 million federal grant to experiment with merit pay. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel fired off an editorial, “Give Bonuses a chance,” in supporting the concept. The editorial reflected the common perception supporting merit pay without any research basis, typical of this editorial board of late.
If Milwaukee uses the money only to establish a strict pay-for-performance system based upon student test scores, we are probably wasting the taxpayer’s money. But if the school system uses test scores only as one measurement of teacher performance, if we are willing to invest in additional teacher training,perhaps we may be on our way to better teaching and achievement.
