U.S. President Barack Obama
“Too many supporters in my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom.” –Barack Obama
The Obama administration has pushed merit pay for teachers to the top of it’s education reform agenda. Proponents say that this will increase the quality of educators in the classroom by disconnecting pay to tenure and amount of education the teacher has completed, instead tying salaries to student performance.
I taught in a technology magnet (public) school located in an urban, Florida neighborhood. The school’s population was split evenly between average/high achieving and under-performing students. Each year, the average/ high-achieving student’s standardized test performance helped the school earn an “A”. The entire faculty and staff (expect administrators) received a performance bonus. The extra money in our paychecks may have boosted morale and teamwork, but I didn’t notice any changes in teacher’s behavior.
Analysis of student test data in this example does not correlate to teacher quality. Maybe the problem lies in relying on the current structure of standardized tests whose design was driven by No Child Left Behind.
My son was required to take his first standardized test last year, in second grade. He’s in a dual immersion program and receives most of his instruction in the Spanish language every day. His errors are often due to language comprehension errors rather than conceptual misunderstandings. Should his teacher be financially penalized because an 8 year-old child gets nervous on a test and forgets how to answer a question correctly in a foreign language?
Obama has little regard for the viability of multiple-choice, standardized tests in his reform agenda. He’s created a contest, Race to the Top, in which districts compete for a slice of a $4.3 billion grant. One of the deciding factors in the awarding of funds is a state’s ability to work with other states to adopt a common set of standards and assessments. Obama communicates that the contest is not based on any political motives or ideology. This is not entirely true. The contest rules disallow four states, including budget-strapped California, to participate because they have laws on the books prohibiting the connection between teachers’ pay and student achievement.
It’s a bummer for me to realize that the Race to the Top contest is similar to No Child Left Behind. In both initiatives, funding is promised in return for student learning gains proven by data. Another similarity is that states are left to flesh out assessment instruments on their own. If our nation’s leader desires a national curriculum with aligned assessments he will achieve his goal efficiently by converging a team of instructional design professionals. If he truly wishes to improve education for all Americans, then he would not pit states against each other in a competition for funding through a contest that eliminates states from competing based on philosophical differences.
