The movement to link teacher pay to performance in the classroom has taken several giant steps forward this year-in Iowa, Arizona, and Toledo, just to name a few places-but it took two steps back last week. In California, hundreds of teachers rejected $600 bonuses awarded to employees at schools that have demonstrated significant improvement in test scores as part of the state's new accountability system, donating their rewards to charity instead. In Cincinnati, where a much-praised and -studied union contract negotiated last year called for teachers' pay to be linked to their performance, the union president who backed the plan has been ousted and the new leadership is calling for the district to overhaul the system.
What's notable about both setbacks is that the arguments made by teachers (and those who represent them) reveal just how far educators are from accepting practices that are commonplace in nearly every line of work.
As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, some California teachers call the performance bonuses "bribes" and "blood money" that pit colleagues against each other. Faculty at one school object that the bonuses suggest that "teachers have somehow been holding out on their students in order to get test-score related compensation." Another teacher insists, "Every teacher I know works hard to help students succeed. If we've been more successful at Lowell, or had more motivated students, does that make our efforts more worthwhile?" These complaints boil down to the idea that teachers are all equally saintly in their devotion and thus should be rewarded equally, and that offering them more money could not possibly influence their motivation since they are all working as hard as humanly possible.
In Cincinnati, some teachers who have gone through the first phase of an elaborate (and union-devised) evaluation system now complain that the evaluations are too subjective and it's unclear what is expected of them. Forty six percent of union members voted against beginning the evaluation process before it was even started. A survey by the Cleveland Teachers Union found that two thirds of its teachers were opposed to pay-for-performance, and only 18 percent favored such a plan even if it were done fairly. This amounts to a rejection of the very principle of paying teachers based on how effective they are.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer gets it exactly right in a recent editorial: "Rewarding teachers who excel is crucial to professionalizing the field, and in turn for getting practitioners proper respect." Some of the points made by teachers have merit, "but not as much merit as the public's distaste for an education system that pays teachers not for what they know or do, but merely according to how much time they have spent in a classroom. That antiquated seniority system undermines every effort to portray teaching as a profession, complete with all of the intellectual and emotional challenges the term implies."
"Teachers rejecting test score bonuses," by Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, July 30, 2001
"Teachers balk at evaluations in Cincinnati," by Scott Stevens, Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 30, 2001
"Merit Pay," Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 4, 2001