Pay for performance?

I've been reading the postings of faculty in special education on a private discussion board, lately. The discussion has turned to "pay for performance", since it is part of Race to the Top plans. Funny what people will do to get their piece of the action. With Michigan's economy swirling around the drain, our State Superintendent is eager to draft a proposal that will get some of that RTTT money for our state. But that leaves a lot of teachers very unhappy about what kinds of soul-selling we might be in for if we are granted the money. Here's my comment to the discussion board on "pay for performance":

This conversation takes me back to discussions I remember from my time as a teacher-in-residence at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Some professional perks are comparable and some just aren't.

We don't directly offer pay for performance to doctors, if you think about it. For instance, if a cardiac surgeon only takes on the most difficult and risky procedures, because she is one of the few who can do them, she may lose a large percentage of her patients relative to other doctors simply because these are patients who are all but dead unless they get this very risky surgery. If we pay for the number of patients she saves, she'd be out of business. But we pay her to compensate her for her rare knowledge, the costs of doing business (including malpractice liability insurances), all her years of training, and so on.

Attorneys (and I think of Geoffrey Feiger, Jack Kevorkian's attorney at one time, who is an incredible showman and may actually be a pretty smart and effective attorney in spite of his remarkably bad social skills) sometimes do actually get paid for performance in the same way that policy-makers are now discussing paying teachers for performance: achieve a favorable outcome and get a bigger piece of the pie. If an attorney like Feiger sues someone for damages on behalf of his client, and wins, he gets a cut of the "take"; if he loses, he gets a smaller fee, or if he was particularly confident of his success, he may get nothing for losing.

So, for a special educator, if he is the "teacher of record" and his students, using the "value added" growth model (William L. Sanders) achieve at a higher than predicted rate, he gets the bonus. If lower than the growth model would predict, he gets nothing, and may, in fact, get fired if he repeats this pattern for several years. Or, not using the "value added" model, his students achieve at less than a year's average growth, he never gets a bonus, and, after a certain number of years of this "failure to perform", he gets remediated right out of the profession.

So, where does that leave my friend, the beloved music teacher, whose students often were chronic "failures" in academics, but were able to shine in her marching bands and choirs? How is her pay for performance determined? Does she get the bonus for building self-esteem? Does she get drummed out of the profession (pun intended) for not building their math skills?

I like to think of teachers as members of a school community and hope that the children that they see are the responsibility of the whole school, from the custodians and cafeteria workers through the administrators and curriculum leaders. But the playing field is still so uneven that I have a hard time envisioning a pay for performance "system" that adequately smoothes out all the wrinkles. We thought that a good start was to incentivize National Board Certification, and then strategically cluster NBCTs in schools where the needs were high, to improve outcomes for kids. Emerging research is equivocal about the success of such ventures. We also have looked at differentiated career ladders, creating tiered licensure systems, and a number of other methods to recognize the commitment of teachers to continuing their educations, and to committing themselves to remaining in education. But we're still not getting the "one right solution" if ever a solution were to be found.

Sometimes I think that we just give up too easily, like exasperated parents who have exhausted their resources of patience with their children and spank them out of sheer frustration. The system of carrots and sticks, part of which is "pay for performance" seems to be going down that path.

Back to writing in the scholarly mode...