Union blocks teacher bonuses, says all teachers should get them regardless of quality
This is a pretty telling story about the pernicious influence of unions in the education system. I’m the first to admit that the problems with our education system run much deeper than the unions, and that blaming unions is an easy way out half the time. But not always. The Boston Herald reports:
Grinchlike union bosses are blocking at least 200 of Boston’s best teachers from pocketing bonuses for their classroom heroics in a puzzling move that gets a failing grade from education experts.
The Boston Teachers Union staunchly opposes a performance bonus plan for top teachers – launched at the John D. O’Bryant School in 2008 and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Exxon Mobil foundations – insisting the dough be divvied up among all of a school’s teachers, good and bad.
Well that does sort of defeat the point, doesn’t it?
I have a great deal of faith in the potential of a public school system, but at this point I really do think that school choice is the only thing that can shake up the very entrenched mess we’re in. Between lousy, overpaid school administrators, bureaucrats, and teachers unions the incentive to change and innovate is very small. And children pay the price.
The frustrating thing is that so many of the innovations we’ve seen in school reform are working. More from the article:
Union head Richard Stutman bristled at criticism he doesn’t have his members’ interest at heart. “We’re not taking money away from teachers,” Stutman claimed.
He also objected to the suggestions his union is a foe of school reform, insisting he backs the incentive program – so long as the bonus goes to all teachers, not just AP instructors.
“There’s no one solely responsible for the development of these students,” Stutman said. “They should all share in the money.”
But by thwarting performance bonuses, the union is hurting students, argued Morton Orlov, president of the Massachusetts Math and Science Initiative at MassINSIGHT, the business-backed group that administers the bonuses.
Orlov said the 10 state schools that accept the bonuses saw a 39 percent increase in students who passed the AP exam.
“You can think of this as smart money,” Orlov said.
Ligia Noriega, headmaster at the Excel High in South Boston, wants the bonus program at her school.
“These incentives push people to work a little bit harder,” Noriega said. “We have to start thinking outside the box.”
The box in question, however, is a big one, and it won’t be easy to get the thinking that happens outside of it put into practice. Charters, vouchers, and other tools that offer students and parents more choice over their education may only be so successful in directly improving results, but what they do achieve is a shake-up of the system. They hold fire to the feet of the powers that be, and that’s a good thing.
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“There’s no one solely responsible for the development of these students,” Stutman said. “They should all share in the money.”
That is mindblowing.
Isn’t it? I mean, obviously there is no one person responsible. The parents are responsible. All the teachers are responsible. The student is responsible. But surely we can determine who is doing their job better than others at helping students achieve success within the school and then reward them for it? Isn’t this the way the rest of the world works?
Baffling.
In response to another comment. See in context »If you want to be frustrated further: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill?printable=true
In response to another comment. See in context »I read this when it first came out. Awful, inexplicable, shameful – I won’t run out of words to describe it so I’ll just stop myself.
In response to another comment. See in context »Damn this is completely irresponsible, our schools are a mess, someone needs to take a hit, why this is like rewarding people who crashed the world economy with bonuses. Or maybe rewarding failure is becoming as American as Apple Pie.
Sadly, libtree, that seems to be the trend.
In response to another comment. See in context »Mr. Kain,
Only people who have never taught imagine that performance based bonuses make any sense in education at all.
1) My personal experience with bonses outside of an educational situation is that they are never given out on the any basis other than who the boss likes. They invariably go to someone the HQ who works closely with the boss. No one in a remote location or who the boss does not personally know ever gets a bonus.
2) In the area of public education, it is impossible to determine a objective metric that measures who is or is not a “good” teacher. Students are not widgets, each student is different and each class is different. A teacher may be really effective with one student but the rest of the class (and vice versa) or with one class but not another. How do you compare a teacher who is teaching 45 non-college track students in classroom designed with seats for 40 that does not have air conditioning against another teacher with 25 college track students in air conditioned room. No matter what measure of performance you select, the latter is going to measure up better than the former. Does the latter deserve and bonus but the former does not? Will offering bonuses make the former “perform better” while not offering them not?
Are there incompetent and lazy teachers out there, sure, I have seen them with my own eyes. Will a bonus system make them any better? No. Are there really good teacher who do their very best despite horrible circumstances. Sure, I have seen them too but they do what they do without any bonuses.
The whole idea bonuses for teachers only makes sense to people who know nothing about actual teaching.
The whole idea of bonuses for teachers is just non-sense.
David,
I disagree entirely, though I think you’re right to the extent that actually determining who the good teachers are can be very difficult.
My way of restructuring this would be to tie principal pay more directly to overall school performance, and then put the principals more directly in charge of merit pay for teachers. This way you have the incentives properly structured, and the actual decisions made at ground level. In the current system, of course, merit pay/bonuses are more difficult to properly distribute.
(P.S. I have taught, so I understand the difficulties facing teachers and with bonus pay. But I don’t share your overall view that it is impossible, only that we haven’t thought it through properly at this point.)
In response to another comment. See in context »Mr. Kain,
Under your plan, if I were to teach in a school made up mostly of the children of migrant farm workers (who themselves will often work in the same field as their parents) there is simply no way I would ever get a bonus. If I were to teach in a school made up mostly of the children of college professors, doctors, judges, and the like, so long as I were not a fall-down drunk, I would never fail to get a bonus.
The bonus system cannot overcome the huge disparities between schools. What is needed are systematic solutions for all schools, teachers, and students. Dangling a carrot that only a few teachers might hope to get solves nothing. What is needed is more teachers, who are better trained, with smaller student to teacher ratios, and adequate classroom support.
I know someone who helps build cruise missiles. They do not get bonuses, they get the best trained engineers with the best equipment in the best facilities and with the best support and so they build the best bombs. Individual engineers come and go but the system to designs these bombs is always the best. That is what we need in public education, a great system, not extra scraps for a few teachers.
In response to another comment. See in context »And yet in other places, the unions just roll over while good teachers are bulldozed and bullied by state governments eager to boost test scores at the cost of – well, everything else.
I have a rather unique perspective on education reform, having been the victim as a high school student of reform done very poorly. (I’d link you to a really great article about it, but it’s unfortunately behind a paywall.) I’m not saying the reforms weren’t necessesary – obviously most students were failing – but I think most of the blame was heaped by all on the older teachers and not of the district that had neglected us for decades. I remain convinced our principal should have been fired, and several of the teachers whose contracts were cancelled, kept.
Ridiculous as the idea is, part of me would love to see the students vote on who gets the bonuses. I suspect that would be more fair and provide a better assessment of who is actually deserving of them than either the union or the district.
Okay, in fairness, I have to say the principal has improved a lot since then. But she was patently in way over her head, and bringing in a successful retired principal as a “mentor” just made things a lot worse. Even though it was years ago, the experience was traumatic – far more so than just being in a bad school.
In response to another comment. See in context »Joseph, take a look at the idea I had for bonuses in my response to David. I’d like your thoughts.
In response to another comment. See in context »That’s actually a very good idea.
One of the things they did wrong at my school was give bonuses to teachers who would transfer in, breeding resentment among longtime teachers (who in some cases were quite good). That’s basically the worst way to structure something like this. I’m not opposed to some kind of merit pay, I just think assigning it across the board – or worse, determining school budgets on that basis, as was done under Jeb – is nearly as bad as nothing. (That, and the FCAT was really a badly designed metric.) I’d oppose any kind of system based on NCLB on that basis, but like I said, I think (as I usually do) that your idea is generally good and the union in Boston is being shortsighted.
And there was at least one way that the union did make things worse for my school, insofar as I think they may have forced the hand of the superintendent in putting the entire staff’s contracts under review, which was likewise not helpful and only heightened suspicions that the teachers were being scapegoated (which to be honest I shared).
In response to another comment. See in context »E.D. – My wife did education organizing in Illinois for special needs students and was so disheartened by the experience she is predisposed not to enroll our children in public school. Parents, regardless of income, have almost no sway in a public school system which somewhat amazed my wife. Living in Nashville, the statements from the teacher’s union and the administration basically trigger me to vomit in my mouth. Merit pay is fought here because the reward for good teachers is to choose the school they are assigned to. It’s a constant churn in the poor, African American neighborhoods with the best teachers creating de facto magnets in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Administrators like having the leverage of assigning teachers to “bad schools” as an auxiliary method of discipline. As you state above, the kids are the ones who suffer (and Nashville’s choice system is a joke).
That said, I would encourage you to look at the word choice of the article. This is a straight up hit piece. I wandered over to the union website – it’s always a good idea in a labor dispute to get both sides. The teacher’s union agreed to take the bulk of the money offered by Exxon, but balked at having the corporation augment their contract rates. Read the counter point: http://www.btu.org/leftnavbar/bulletincurrent.html#LETTER.BLOCK3
There’s no word there of the Gates Foundation and I would be interested to see if their involvement in teacher merit pay was misreported.
O’Bryant is a competitive entry math/science magnet – the students have already chosen to be there and competed to gain entry. This money is being given to the highest achieving students at a high achievement high school. Not to be cold, but if you’re in an AP class in a magnet school you are probably not the at risk youth we wring our hands about as a society. I’m not sure about O’Bryant, but AP classes were somewhat plum assignments in my high school. The kids care and work hard, teachers get to assign more advanced material. In Nashville, we are fighting to get the city to give merit pay to better teachers who stay in poorly performing schools. Here we see a corporation fighting to give the best teachers money to serve the best students – what problem is this solving? I’m not against teachers receiving merit pay, but this is not the type of merit pay structure I would want in my schools.
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What they don’t tell you about the MMSI grant is that there are also funding extensive test prep sessions for the students and for the AP teachers. I’m an AP teacher who stands to benefit significantly from the bonuses they’re handing out to teachers, but I’m pretty disenchanted with what MMSI is doing. Everything we’ve been given is geared towards test taking, even though the curricula for many AP classes calls for teaching things that aren’t necessarily tested. They’re gaming this to “prove” that merit pay works.
The big problem with merit pay that people don’t seem to understand is that quality is not always valued in the public schools. In the private sector, it makes sense to pay a more productive employee more money because they make the company more money. But a good teacher doesn’t make the school system any more money. There’s not much incentive for a school system to pursue quality teachers. In many districts, if a ten year professional with two masters degrees comes up against a 23-year-old just out of college in the job market, the kid gets the job. Why would you trust these districts to properly evaluate and reward teachers on the basis of merit?
I would add that rewarding test scores for a science AP class would incentivize book learning over lab learning. As a scientist, this is exactly the wrong incentive.
In response to another comment. See in context »