In Florida, Governor Jeb Bush is pushing a proposal to relate teacher's pay to student's test scores. Teachers will get a bonus according to the degree to which students that they are teaching are able to improve their standardized test scores over the course of the school year.
Imagine that you were creating a new basketball team. Unlike the other teams, you decide to pay players solely on the basis of the highest grade they obtained while they were in school and the number of years they have spent on your team.
I guarantee that this would be a recipe for a basketball team guaranteed to sit at or near the bottom of the standings for eternity. Indeed, those games that other teams play against such a team would simply be considered scrimmage games – an opportunity to practice. In the same way, American schools that follow this model, when compared to schools that make an effort to distinguish good from poor teachers and provide an incentive for teachers to improve the quality of their work, are also going to find themselves hovering at or near the bottom of their standings.
If you want to create a good team -- a winning team -- then you will need to find some way to measure the quality of different players, then make sure that you bring the best players into the positions that they are best suited to play. The sports pages are riddled with statistics, all of which are used to determine the 'merit pay' of players.
Now, the merit pay system used in basketball is not perfect. There are intangibles such as teamwork and entertainment value (the ability of a particular player to draw fans because he makes the game more entertaining) that are difficult to measure and figure into a player’s statistics. Yet, they are important to distinguishing the quality of the player. Yet, a coach would have to be mighty foolish to take this as an argument against looking at the statistics and using that information, in part, to determine how much an individual player is worth to the team.
Yet, the argument used against merit pay for teachers tend to follow the lines of, “The system is not perfect; therefore, it should not be used.” The standard argument falls along the lines of coming up with some list of shortcomings for a merit pay proposal, and using those shortcomings to argue against merit pay.
If this line of reasoning were valid, it would be as applicable to merit pay for basketball players as it is for teachers – because the system for determining merit pay for basketball players is not perfect either.
The proper way to evaluate a proposal is not to measure whether it is perfect. No proposal will ever be able to pass such a test. The proper form of evaluation is to compare a proposal to alternative proposals and see which is the least imperfect. The alternative proposal in this case is a proposal to base a teacher’s pay entirely on how many years the teacher has been working, and to condemn any attempt to even try to measure the quality of that teacher’s work.
Problem: Inaccurate Tests
There certainly are some problems with merit pay based on test scores. One of the issues that we would need to keep an eye on is the quality of the tests.
Imagine a school system that bases merit pay on tests scores. Then, the voters select a school board that insists that the local tests include the following question:
(97) "Intelligent Design" is an example of a scientific theory.
Plus, they insist that the correct answer is, ‘TRUE.’
In a system that gives merit pay for test scores, such a system would be giving merit pay to teachers who actually make their students stupider. Those students who think that ‘TRUE’ really is the right answer to this question demonstrate that they either have no idea of what constitutes a scientific theory, or no idea what ‘intelligent design’ says. Either way, they have some flaw in their education.
However, the proper conclusion to draw in these types of cases is not to abandon the concept of merit pay. It is to accept that we also have a responsibility to fight to make sure that the tests themselves are good tests.
If we use this as a reason to oppose merit pay, then we are in fact arguing, “Because the current system is producing so many people who do not understand issues such as this, we should preserve the current system.” It is a rather poor argument.
Problem: Cultural Bias
In addition to the possibility of an undereducated society putting wrong answers on the test, there is a problem with test writers putting cultural bias into their tests.
For example, boys tend to be substantially more knowledgeable about sports than girls. To the degree that questions in a standardized test make use of this background of sports knowledge, to that degree boys will have an advantage over girls. Similar problems exist for students who belong to ethnic cultures that differ from the culture of those who created the tests. Teachers whose students do not share the same cultural assumptions as those who created the tests will be punished relative to those teachers whose students share the same cultural knowledge as the test makers.
However, this is not an argument against merit pay. This is an argument for putting more effort to eliminating cultural biases in tests. Our reasons for doing this extend far beyond the benefit of allowing merit pay based on test scores to work more efficiently. Even if we do not base merit pay on these tests scores, cultural bias still is harmful to certain students. It affects the student’s comparative standing among other college graduates and affects the ability to get scholarships. It also has a psychological affect on a student’s self-esteem.
Saying that cultural bias is an argument against merit pay is like saying that the discovery of a rotten apple in an apple barrel gives reason to toss out the perfectly good apple sitting next to it. The proper response to this type of problem is to throw out the rotten apple. In this case, cultural bias in standardized testing is the rotten apple.
Standardized testing plays havoc with the philosophy of relativism because standardized testing works on the assumption that there are right answers. Creating test questions that actually count certain answers wrong goes against the doctrine that no answers are actually right or wrong – that any answer a particular student likes for a question is ‘true for him’ and deserves just as much respect and consideration as any other answer.
However, the problem here is not to be found in the standardized tests. It is to be found in the doctrine of relativism. There is nothing at all wrong with claiming that there are right and wrong answers, and it is possible for students to get some answers wrong. Furthermore, it is the job of those who opt to be teachers to do the best job they can in helping the students to accurately identify and distinguish (objectively) true propositions from those that are (objectively) false.
Problems: Unmeasured Qualities
A system that bases merit pay on improvements on test scores do not measure all of the qualities that make a teacher a good teacher. There are other qualities that must be considered as well.
(1) Character development. If we want our children to grow up in a society in which they can live safe and secure lives, then we are going to want him to grow up in a society where their neighbors have been caused to acquire a solid moral character -- honestly, kindness, integrity, and the like. Standardized tests do not measure a teacher's ability to promote these qualities. As a result, there are aspects to being a good teacher -- a teacher very much deserving of merit pay -- that these tests do not cover.
(2) Concern for students. Teachers are in a good position to determine the state of a child's emotional and physical health as well as the quality of the student's life outside of school. He can detect signs of abuse, illness, and injury that might otherwise go unnoticed. A good teacher may be able to get help for a student who is abusing drugs or alcohol or engaging in other forms of risky behavior, or who may have become depressed or even suicidal. There is a significant difference in quality between the teacher who is concerned about the well-being of his students and one who could not care less.
These are just two examples of other qualities that we would like to look at in determining whether an individual is or is not a good teacher.
This is quite similar to the problem that being a good basketball player is determined by more than the number of points an individual player scores. Teamwork and entertainment value are also important, but are difficult to measure.
The answer to this problem is, again, not to abolish the practice of determining pay based on qualities that can be measured. It is an argument for combining this with other systems that consider these intangible qualities. There is nothing inconsistent with arguing for a system that will give a teacher a bonus of $N for bringing about an increase in her student’s test scores of I over the course of a school year – plus give that teacher merit pay (or not) depending on other criteria.
Assuming that test scores must either be the sole criteria for merit or it should not be used at all is to construct a straw man – to defeat a position that no rational person has in fact sought to defend.
Yes, I agree that there are a lot of issues associated with the subject of merit pay. The proposal is not perfect. Yet, the lack of perfection is not an argument against the system. If it were, then all systems must be abolished because none of them are perfect.
The problem with most critics of merit pay is that they do not offer an alternative proposal. If they did, then the two proposals can be compared to determine which has the fewest imperfections. Instead, their arguments are entirely destructive. “Your merit pay system has these problems; thus, it is a bad idea.”
It is only a “bad idea” if it has more problems than an alternative system.
The alternative system, which says, “Pay all teachers the same regardless of their individual skills and talents in the area of actually making their students smarter,” has far more problems than this merit pay system. It is a system that tells teachers that they do those who care nothing about the quality of their work are just as important and deserve just as much praise and reward as those who care a great deal.
It is a recipe for mediocrity. It is a recipe that creates a society of individuals who are less well educated than they actually need to be.
Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent us from adoping a system now, aware of its problems, and then go to work making adjustments to deal with those shortcomings. Indeed, we would need to start somewhere, and then start collecting the data that would be necessary to improve the system. Critics of such a system must not only say that 'there are problems'. They must assert 'we cannot make sufficient improvements as we see the results of our proposal.'
Besides, we are not talking about a system where a teacher's entire pay is determined by these measures. We are talking about adding a few hundred to a few thousand dollars of merit pay. Most of the existing, "pay the person regardless of the quality of his work" system will remain intact.
As I have argued earlier; when we die or suffer any catastrophe in our lives, in almost all cases we are made to suffer substantially because of our ignorance – because we did not know something that would have otherwise saved us from this danger. Poor education makes all of us worse off than we would otherwise be.