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What happens when we pay public high school teachers based on performance

• marviel 2y ago
  From Conclusion: > This paper has studied the effects of the introduction of flexible pay for pub- lic school teachers on the composition of the workforce, teachers’ effort, and student achievement. A switch away from seniority-based salary schedules toward pay-for-quality in a subset of Wisconsin school districts resulted in high-quality teachers moving to these FP districts and low-quality teachers either moving to dis-tricts which remained with the salary schedules or leaving the public school system altogether. As a result, the composition of the teaching workforce improved in FP districts. Effort exerted by all teachers also increased and, subsequently, test scores improved.
  • micromacrofoot 2y ago
    > test scores improved I understand that using test scores makes for easier science, but I grew up with some level of "teach the test" and in my anecdotal experience you turn schools into the dullest cram schools when performance is measured this way. I did fine on tests but I hated it. The only reason I didn't drop out was because I didn't realize I had the agency to do so.
    • Clubber 2y ago
      This. My kid is naturally curious and she can tell you everything about the things she gets curious about. She'll spend hours digging for information on a subject. She absolutely hates school though.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• robertlagrant 2y ago
  While it's difficult to study in a controlled way, any serious, considered attempt to improve the status quo in state schooling is an extremely good idea.
• setgree 2y ago
  I saw this discussed on Marginal Revolution today as well. My main question is whether the gains are fundamentally zero-sum, at least in the short term. Some districts implement flexible pay and some don’t, and then the best teachers move to get paid more. And the places that get left behind…? In the long-run, increased pay ought to lead to more high-quality teachers entering the profession. But in the short term, this scheme seems likely to redistribute talent in ways that reinforce existing patterns of inequality.
  • iLoveOncall 2y ago
    Well the whole point of such an experiment would be to generalize it.
    • erehweb 2y ago
      Sure, but if the gains in an experiment come from cannibalizing other districts, then it's not a good guide to what will happen when everyone's in the experiment. Do you attract more people to the profession? Or do people get discouraged by seeing variable outcomes they can't predict ahead of time?
      • iLoveOncall 2y ago
        Given that we have the whole private sector as benchmark for your questions, I'm pretty sure the outcome would be positive.
  • slibhb 2y ago
    > But in the short term, this scheme might judt redistribute talent in ways that reinforce existing patterns of inequality. Aren't you assuming that rich districts with higher grades implement flexible pay? I think it would be the poor districts with worse grades that would be most likely to want to shake things up.
    • masklinn 2y ago
      The main characteristic of poor districts is that they’re poor, which means they don’t have the means to implement high pay schemes. Rich districts do.
• calderwoodra 2y ago
  The results confirm my biases, so probably too good to be true?
  • kspacewalk2 2y ago
    Is the statement "monetary rewards for performance improve overall performance" considered bias, or just common sense?
    • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
      It’s just false (for cognitive work). E.g. https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/Workingpapers/PDF/wp0511.pdf https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/Workingpapers/PD...
      • kspacewalk2 2y ago
        >However, psychological research suggests that >>>excessive<<< rewards can in some cases produce supra‐optimal motivation, resulting in a decline in performance. To test whether >>>very high<<< monetary rewards can decrease performance...
• pipeline_peak 2y ago
  Is this a practical solution in America where taxes are more limited than other nations?
  • kspacewalk2 2y ago
    The implication being that countries with more taxes can afford to waste money by paying bad teachers well?
    • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
      It’s the same logic as slashing your social security net because a fraction of a percent might abuse it.
    • goda90 2y ago
      The implication is that countries that fund education more can actually pay good teachers well, so there's room for paying bad teachers less.
      • dwater 2y ago
        Countries that fund education more can pay enough to attract a larger pool of candidates, and then choose only to hire the best of that pool. Unlike the current state of most school districts in the US, who will hire anyone that can meet the minimum qualifications, but still have huge numbers of vacancies. Many districts have lowered the requirements so they can bring in even less qualified people. From my reading, the Nordic countries view teaching as a high value profession on par with doctor and lawyer, and this results in potential teachers having to work very hard to land a job and keep it.
        • kspacewalk2 2y ago
          Canada (or at least Ontario where I live) pays teachers relatively well, hire on merit, but results are quite mediocre when measured objectively (and, for what it's worth, correlate with my own subjective anecdata). This is at least partly due to perverse incentives introduced by the seniority system. You can hire the best, but if you promote and give raises to the ones who put in the most time, the best won't necessarily stick around nearly as much as you want them to. According to the main rule of taxation, you're going to get less of what you're taxing. I we can generalize it and say that you'll get more of what you're incentivizing.
• jader201 2y ago
  Should add (2021) to the title.
• dwater 2y ago
  I was a public school teacher that worked in a district that attempted to measure teacher value add. There was limited pay for performance based on that metric. And the district I worked in was majority racial minority and majority living in poverty. "Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement." "The main dataset contains information on the universe of Wisconsin teachers, linked to student test scores to calculate teacher VA." "Student Test Scores and Demographics.—Student-level data include math and reading test scores in the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE 2007–2014) and the Badger test (2015–2016), for all students in grades 3 to 8, as well as demographic characteristics such as gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic (SES) status, migration status, English-learner status, and disability." What this study is saying is that paying teachers more for improved performance by their students on standardized tests results in higher standardized test scores of their students. That does not surprise me. In my experience, this system encouraged teaching to the test (focusing the majority of instruction on test prep rather than traditional instruction) and widespread cheating. Both of these efforts raise standardized test scores. The study assumes that standardized test scores are a direct measure of teacher quality and student achievement. In my experience that is not true.
  • azinman2 2y ago
    My fear as well. Is there a better way to assess teacher quality, especially in challenging student environments?
    • readyman 2y ago
      Don't assess teacher quality. Eliminate poverty by eliminating capitalism, a system that literally depends on it.
      • CoastalCoder 2y ago
        > Eliminate poverty by eliminating capitalism, a system that literally depends on it. Could you give an example of where this has worked?
• andy99 2y ago
  Hot take: you need to define performance and you can't without market feedback. So being about to freely chose a school and direct your money to it has to be the first prerequisite to even thinking about performance based pay. Some bureaucratic performance definition will just have people optimize for that.
• mberning 2y ago
  We frequently put the burden on teachers and “the system” for outcomes, but rarely do we talk about improving our cultural and societal attitudes towards education. If you come from a family and community that does not value education and views it as free child care, how good your teacher is does not matter very much.
  • StefanBatory 2y ago
    .. and when it's socially acceptable to say "Oh, I suck at math" even from parents, that's making things even worse.
• thiago_fm 2y ago
  Make dumb study, get dumb results. Even running a study like this inside the same school you would get wrong data and come to the wrong conclusions, just think about it for a second. Worse is people wasting time in academia researching ideas with so many holes in it. This is why measuring schools makes no sense, the creators of the study were likely top students at their time, yet they lack some basic common sense. Grading is broken, first start by coming with a better alternative
• rappatic 2y ago
  There's a very interesting chapter in the _Freakonomics_ book about catching cheating teachers. The authors use it as an example of incentives gone wrong: to hit their bonuses for high test scores, teachers have cheated in all manners of ways, from helping their students during standardized tests or literally changing their answers after students hand in the papers.
• whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  Hard to think of an argument why they shouldn’t be. You can argue the raw materials are something they can’t control but plenty of other industries have the same issue, real estate, hiring, and we still pay them on performance. Think we’d see accepting poor behavior, teachers writing off or actively bullying students tank if this were implemented properly.
  • goda90 2y ago
    A real estate agent or a hiring manager can still walk away from a really bad property, candidate, etc. A teacher can't walk away from a really bad kid (or really bad parents!) without leaving the profession entirely.
    • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
      >A teacher can't walk away from a really bad kid They do every single day
    • sparrish 2y ago
      Not true. They expel 'really bad kid's every year. It's hard to do but happens.
      • dwater 2y ago
        Teachers do not expel students, administrators or districts do. Teachers have very little recourse for dealing with "really bad kids (or parents)".
        • sparrish 2y ago
          Are you saying Teachers have no input into the process at all?
          • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
            They have input when it’s a success, when it’s not a success it’s everyone’s fault but theirs. Funny how that happens.
• jmuguy 2y ago
  More people need to be encouraged to become teachers - full stop. Its a valid concern that there are some teachers that are not good, and would be weeded out by performance based metrics. However - everyone else at the school knows who the bad teachers are. They're obvious. They're the ones leaving their class unattended. Doing the bare minimum. These people can't be weeded out right now because there's a shortage of teachers. The need to keep a warm adult body in that room outweighs the need to discipline and then fire teachers that aren't doing their jobs. As a thought experiment would we also suggest performance based police salaries? Or do we acknowledge that being a cop potentially sucks and that one aspect of making sure we don't only have bad cops is making the job attractive enough that we're not just picking from the bottom of the barrel. /edit To be clear - I'm suggesting we encourage more people to become teachers by paying them more and secondarily making them deal with less bullshit.
  • gadders 2y ago
    >>These people can't be weeded out right now because I thought one of the causes was unions? qv "rubber rooms" etc.
    • jmuguy 2y ago
      I'm speaking from the experience of being married to a teacher at a very large highschool in a medium sized city here in the US. In all the years of her talking to me about her work I don't think she's ever mentioned her union. Maybe she's just not at the admin level and dealing with it but given the number of vacancies at her school (which is considered one of the best in our city) - I don't even think the union is coming into play. They need staff.
      • gadders 2y ago
        Maybe it's location based. Looking at other HN stories today, maybe we swap all the Software Developer H1B visas into teaching :-)
    • goda90 2y ago
      Substitute teachers typically aren't part of unions but schools are forced to keep bringing in the ones that don't care at all because there's just not enough.
• synergy20 2y ago
  the focus on our school district is about DEI these days, that's the major measurement for schools and teachers here.
• czbond 2y ago
  If they want to improve teachers performance - reduce the $hit modern society is making them deal with. They're very under paid. How would you like to deal with corraling 23'ish hyper nut jobs all at different levels? That you have to be their parents, psychologist, DEI, identity fosterer, special education teachers etc. Funding in many schools isn't there now for specialists to do these roles.... because teachers wanted to earn more after inflation, so cuts made - more responsibilites to teachers. So the teachers are having to take on the role of many of society's "dump bucket" of stuff that parents should be taking care of.
  • dwater 2y ago
    When I worked in a relatively well to do suburban district I had class sizes up to 35 students. Because I was a math teacher, administration did their best to keep our class sizes under 30, teachers of other core classes were more likely to have 30+ students, and classes that didn't have standardized tests might have more than 35. If I recall correctly, every year I taught 9th graders, who are often hyper nutjobs.
    • czbond 2y ago
      Props to you! Sanity is fleeting with 30+ 9th graders
  • paulryanrogers 2y ago
    DEI? Did you mean IEP?
    • czbond 2y ago
      Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Districts have placed individual responsibility to the teachers in many cases with a strong DEI push - even stronger than had existed pre-covid.
  • drewbug01 2y ago
    > Funding in many schools isn't there now for specialists to do these roles.... because teachers wanted to earn more after inflation, so cuts made - more responsibilites to teachers. This seems as though you're implying that it's the greedy teacher's fault that our school systems shove ever-increasing responsibilities upon them. As if the total pot of money in the system is a fixed, immovable sum, and so that if a teacher wants a raise it must mean that something elsewhere has to give. Is there any shred of evidence to support that kind of thinking, though? We can quibble about salaries and outlier districts all day long if you want, but fundamentally it's not like teachers are the most highly-paid group of workers out there. And governments manage to find money to increase funding to other systems year after year (the police, for example).
• alienicecream 2y ago
  They fight over who gets to teach the asian and white kids.
  • thaumasiotes 2y ago
    They do that anyway. It's always more pleasant to teach polite, intelligent children than noisy idiots.
  • czbond 2y ago
    I'd suggest more any familial units with manners and respect - regardless of wealth or race. Lots of white kids who act poorly in rich & poor neighborhoods the teachers don't want to deal with but have to.
• spaceprison 2y ago
  It seems like the only way to really assess a teachers performance is by evaluating the outcomes of their students over time. Since teaching career progression in the US is mostly tenure based I've always wondered why there wasn't a more longitudinal approach to their assessment. The product is the students ability to achieve over time. One batch of good test results doesn't measure anything other than the teachers ability to get good outcomes for the test.
• crzyman 2y ago
  This is an interesting example of how there is a difference betweena policy being a "heat pump" and a "resistive heater", and that both can occur simultaneously. The problem with "heat pumps" is that they necessitate a "cold" side, from which they "pump the heat" to the "hot" side. Their goal isn't to increase the overall "heat" in the system, it's to move the "hot" all to one side. A "resistive heater" can add "heat" to the system more evenly, but is less efficient and you won't see "temperatures" rise nearly as quickly. And that both can occur at the same time.
• kkfx 2y ago
  I adverse using metrics for value people, while I do not adverse metrics per se, as a companion information for statistical purposes. The issue with metrics used for something it that they became a target, not a measure anymore. They push toward conformism, witch happen to be antithetic to innovation. Using metrics to understand at a large scale what happen, if a method work or not, where to improve etc might be useful and harmless. Using them as a way to prize or penalize have regularly very bad results. The ancient quis custodiet ipsos custodes it's equally valid for metrics, who evaluate those who design the measure?
• mmh0000 2y ago
  I can not overstate how much I love LLMs. The important bits for those of us with a busy day: The key findings of the research include: Higher Salaries for High-Performing Teachers: Districts that adopted the flexible pay scheme offered higher salaries to high-performing teachers, which attracted quality teachers from districts that did not adopt the scheme. Improved Teacher Quality: The introduction of performance-based pay resulted in improved overall teacher quality in districts that adopted the new pay scheme. This was due to both the attraction of high-quality teachers and increased effort from current teachers. Enhanced Student Achievement: There was a noticeable improvement in student achievement in districts with flexible pay schemes. The increase in teacher quality and effort directly contributed to better academic outcomes for students.
• RecycledEle 2y ago
  I teach in Texas. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) awards school districts for things like students earning industry IT certifications. This can be more than $1k per certification. Teachers know what will happen if they try to excel in these areas: they will be fired. Coworkers explained this to me, but I did not listen. I explained to a school board member that I was going to try to get my 9th graders certified. He replied that if even one student failed to earn their certification that I would have failed and he would have to fire me. I tried to reason with the idiot, but he made Dilbert's point haired boss seem competent. I managed to get about half of my students Microsoft certified. I left that school district in part because my life was hell there. One secretary in particular was very offended because she had to figure out how to spend the school district's money on certification exam vouchers and had to add students to a field trip to compete in an electronics competition. We took 2nd in the state, and I left the school district. Now I'm an adjunct at a community college. If you want to fix Texas Public Schools, elect competent school board members. If you want teachers to perform well, reward them instead of punishing them. When a teacher brings state money into the district, give them at least half of that money.