Teacher Incentives Debate Heats Up in DC

Education news in DC this week is about the contract counter-proposal offered by Washington Teachers Union (WTU) leadership to DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee. The counter-proposal did not contain any major surprises in its substance, and still appears to be far apart from the contract DC schools offered last September.

If you haven't been following the negotiations, here's why they are so important.

The DC Teachers Union, however, continues to react with anathema to the idea of measuring how good a job each individual teacher is doing. The union did suggest a counter-proposal to Ms. Rhee's merit pay plan, however: a plan to institute "school-wide financial incentives." The idea is that instead of looking at, say, Mrs. Thompson as an individual to see how much her 7th graders have improved in reading thanks to her instruction--and then to pay her appropriately -- the union would like DC to look at each school and give a chunk of money to each school that does really well, with some freedom to the staff at each school to divide up the dollars how they see fit.

What to make of this counter-offer? Well for starters, it's not a bad idea by any means. Anything that gets us as a society to start thinking about and paying teachers based on how good they are instead of how old they are is a plus. And the union is right to suggest that teachers will collaborate if they see their own salaries tied to the performance of their peers -- although any good teacher would also recognize that if she's being judged individually that she'll stand to do better if her peers are doing a good job as well, and thus have an individual reason to collaborate. So should Rhee take the counter-proposal and call it a day?

Not by a long-shot. At best, a highly effective teacher pay system would consider school-wide financial incentives as a supplementto, and not substitute for individual teacher merit. In other words, the primary factor in how much we pay a teacher should be how much her students learn, and if the whole school did well too then maybe we tack on a small, proportional bonus. But if you only do the latter, you run across the real risk that inert teachers, who unfortunately tend to be a substantial number of teachers who already have tenure and who go to school perhaps with good intentions but who don't get much in the way of results, will not change their behavior at all. Instead, such teachers might free-ride on the hard work of any dedicated teachers in a school. Moreover, the school-wide system completely fails to recognize the outstanding efforts of thousands of incredible teachers who teach at chronically failing schools that might not otherwise quality for school-wide incentives because of poor leadership, a critical mass of ineffective teachers, or any other reason.

To make this point as real as possible, think about the last time that you worked in a group on something that the group as a whole was accountable for. What grading system do you think would make you --and your peers -- work harder on the project: a system where everyone in the group gets the same grade at the end regardless of how hard any one individual worked, or how much they slacked off? Or a grading system where each individual gets a grade based on how well the tasks they were individually responsible for ended up, and where if the whole project was excellent the whole group got extra points?

Your answer should be the same for the way in which we pay our teachers.

Aaron Tang is the co-director of Our Education, a non-profit organization working to build a national youth movement for quality education. He also teaches 8th grade history in Saint Louis, MO.