The 21st Century Principal

“How reward power is exercised affects outcome. Compliance is most likely if the reward is something valued by the target person. Thus, it is essential to determine what rewards are valued, and a leader should not assume that it be the same for everyone.” Gary Yukl, Leadership in Organizations

As our political leaders and state level policy makers continue to try to find ways to “improve our K-12” systems of education, one persistent idea that just won’t go away is the idea of merit pay and punishment by accountability. They still remain faithful to the idea that somehow teachers will raise test scores if they are offered a big enough carrot or if their livelihoods are somehow placed in jeopardy enough to bring about a level of fear strong enough to give them the test scores they desire. After over a decade of “test-reward-and-punish” policies under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, you would think they would finally give up. Instead, money is still being poured into even more standards development and testing, in the hope that somehow education reform magic will happen. What these educational policymakers and politicians just don’t understand is performance pay and punishments are dead in the water before they are even implemented.

One of the reasons for the uselessness of merit pay is captured succinctly by Gary Yukl in his book, Leadership in Organizations. Rewards will only bring about compliance if those rewards are something valued by the "target person.” Don’t get me wrong, teachers and educators want to be paid fairly and be able to live comfortably, but educators know going into the the job that what they are doing is an endeavor much greater that a paycheck. Most are just not built to pursue the big carrots for their own sake. That is one thing that politicians and policymakers don’t get. Perhaps they are motivated by greed, but many of us are not.

Another problem with the carrot and stick approach to education reform is that many educators just don’t believe that test scores are a worthy goal to pursue. Most teachers who have been in the classroom see the tests for what they really are: a single measure focused on a small portion of learning given at a single point in time. That means the test can give s snapshot of only a sliver of learning, but it can’t be the ultimate goal of learning because so much of learning falls outside testing. Our current public education system is asking educators to believe that test scores are an important goal of learning, and many aren’t buying it, and never will.

As Yulk points out, “Even when the conditions are favorable for using rewards, they are more likely to result in compliance rather than commitment.” Rewards only get people to do what is required; they do not engage people’s hearts and minds totally in the goal of education. Under rewards, people aren’t committed to their jobs, the kids, or to the profession. Our current system of accountability and testing along with its reward and punish for test score performance will never work because at its heart, because teaching requires more than compliance; it requires dedication and commitment and no amount of money can purchase that.

"In the workplace, there is no getting around the fact that "the basic purpose of merit pay is manipulative." Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

Merit pay is one of those ideas in education that just won't die. When budgets get tight, policymakers and politicians both look at the money being spent on educator salaries and the idea of paying educators based on performance starts looking attractive. "If only we identify the best teachers and pay them more, all will be well," they think. Then, the task of trying to identify and operationalize what a "best teacher" looks like begins, and it immediately falls apart. There's never been any agreement on what characterizes a "good teacher," and there probably never will. The current reform and accountability craze would have us believe "test scores a good teacher makes," but those of us who've been in classrooms for sometime know that tests don't always tell us what a good student is much less a good teacher. The pursuit of trying to find a specific, clear definition of good teaching and a good teacher is impossible, because teaching and learning, for that matter, are way too complex to reduce to a simple operationalized definition.

As Kohn points out, the problem with merit pay is that it is manipulative. It is simply an attempt to control educators and elicit a behavior, and in most cases, the desired behavior is the production of higher test scores. The problem is, many of us educators know "getting higher test scores" is a superficial goal. Getting a high score on a North Carolina Final Exam or End of Grade Test means very little in the lives of our students. We can't say to our students, for example, "If you get a high grade on this reading End of Grade Test, you'll be successful in life." If we do say that, we're trivializing education. So the idea of manipulating teachers to get them to raise test scores by merit pay is doomed to fail for those of us who see education's purpose as more universal and global. Educating good bubble-sheet bubblers is quite different than educating solid citizens who can take their place in the world and perhaps change things for the better.

In the end, merit pay will always fail in education, because the enterprise in which we engage is much too complex to be subject to its manipulative effects. Merit pay has been tried and it failed every time. Unfortunately, those who still have the faith in manipulation by reward just can't seem to let go of an anachronistic view of human motivation.

According to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s press conference (which you can see here from WRAL), he is going to seek the following in his budget which he plans to present to the North Carolina State Legislature:

• Expansion of early childhood education by about $3.6 million.
• Increase textbook funding by $23 million.
• Increase beginning teacher pay from $30,800 to $35,000 over the next two years.
• Provide an average 2% pay raise for experienced teachers.
• Institute a new long-term pay plan for teachers that combines experience, education, merit, mentoring, and market needs. In addition he seeks to offer higher pay to teachers choosing to work in hard-to-staff schools.

At this point, it appears that McCrory’s long-term pay plan which he called “Career Pathways for Teachers” looks to be a compromise between the idea of merit pay and traditional ways in which teachers are rewarded. Giving teachers pay raises based on experience and degrees formed the basis of North Carolina’s previous teacher pay scales.

What will be perhaps harder to implement is the idea of merit pay, especially if based on test scores. The obvious problems being that not all teachers’ classes are subject to tests, and the fact that current use of value-added and growth scores are being increasingly challenged in the courts. I would also add that the reliability and validity of value-added measures and their use in a high-stakes manner are also disputed as well. Add these concerns with the fact that studies on merit pay tied to student achievement mostly show that such pay schemes do not work any way, and it would seem this part of the pay plan is a waste of time and money. 

McCrory’s idea to offer higher pay to teachers choosing to teach in hard-to-staff schools is also not surprising. This has been tried as well and with mixed results. McCroy’s idea of letting market conditions determine teacher pay may seem sound to those outside education, but one can only imagine what that measure will do to morale and collaboration in a school.

Governor McCrory also stated that he was committed to moving the decisions regarding this differentiated pay scheme to the local level which is interesting, but it remains to be seen how that will actually be implemented. The question will be how much freedom local districts will really have and how much will be dictated from above. Also, how willing are districts to take on this task? Most struggled with simply trying to identify the top 25% under a bill passed during last year’s legislative session. This was due in part to trying to find a way to fairly and effectively identify deserving teachers. Is the legislature willing to budget enough money for everyone who qualifies, even if that amount is more? Or would they simply give districts a set amount of money and tell them to distribute it as a bonus? Performance pay schemes have been implemented before in North Carolina but were abandoned when the state could no longer afford them. Under the old North Carolina ABC for Accountability program, teachers could receive $1,500 or $750 based on their school’s test performance. This pay stopped when the budget collapsed and there was no political will to find the money to continue funding it. Will politicians in Raleigh be committed to the pay scheme or will they once again abandon it when “times get tough?”

As an educator, I applaud Governor McCrory for listening to educators which it is clear that he has done in some of his proposals. All teachers do deserve pay increases. The past few years have not been kind to North Carolina teachers and teachers nationwide. The real test Governor McCrory faces is whether he can get this plan, or some variation of it, through a legislature that has demonstrated an incredible unwillingness to budge from many of its far right stances.

The North Carolina Legislative Task Force concluded its series of meetings to study teacher pay in North Carolina, and here’s their recommendations in a nutshell:

• Raise beginning teacher pay and not raise the pay of any other teachers.
• Future raises for any teachers should be performance-based or merit pay tied to test scores.
• The General Assembly should direct the North Carolina State Board of Education to study educator compensation models and submit recommendations to the General Assembly AFTER this fall’s legislative elections.

That’s it. Those are the recommendations of this so-called Task Force. While they might have buried these exact recommendations in tons of verbiage, these basically do the following:

• Endorse Governor Pat McCrory’s plans to only raise pay for beginning teachers. (Why am I not surprised that this Task Force turned into a rubber-stamp committee of the McCrory administration and our current legislative leaders?)
• Recommend that the state adopt some kind of merit pay scheme, even though that’s been tried and proven to not work multiple times. It has been even tried in North Carolina. (Again, considering the state of our North Carolina Legislature, I am not surprised at all they basically endorsed plans put forth by the American Legislative Exchange Council and many others who see merit pay as the salvation for everything.)
• Finally, recommend another study, this time by passing the buck the North Carolina State Board of Education. Of course this passing the buck was by design due to their own earlier law. Isn't it really interesting though that the State Board of Education is to REPORT BACK AFTER THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS this fall? You can certainly read much into that move!

There’s absolutely nothing in their findings that wasn't out there and already being discussed. Meanwhile, North Carolina is hemorrhaging teachers who are seeking greener pastures elsewhere, and there are so few teachers graduating from colleges to replace them. In addition, morale for teachers in this state has never been lower, and all our state leaders can do is study so that they can again study the studies? This is all due to a legislature, who at least judging by their actions and appearances, absolutely detest public education.

Some other interesting things coming out of this exercise in political pointlessness, were the comments made by some of the teachers on the task force.

“I’m struggling to understand why we were brought here.’' Teacher Timothy Barnsback stated. He also called the whole ordeal’s four meetings “Presentations and Propaganda.”

Johnson County History teacher Richard Nixon said the report ignores veteran teachers who have been frozen out of their contractual pay increases for six years. He stated, “I don’t recall anyone saying we should raise salaries for beginning teachers and leave the rest down the road.”

It is clear that our North Carolina Legislature continues to predictably be no friend to public education. After passing a slate of legislation all designed and directed toward dismantling the teaching profession, it isn't really surprising at all that nothing substantive comes out of this North Carolina Legislative Task Force on teacher pay. Our state political leaders have certainly remained steadfastly dedicated to their anti-public education agenda, and they are counting on kicking this "teacher pay can" down the road past this fall’s elections.

UPDATE: Read WRAL's article here "Teacher Pay Report Gets Chilly Reception" and also you can read the Legislative report here: "NC Educator Effectiveness and Compensation Task Force Report."

For those still holding out hope for that merit pay will be the salvation of public education, here's yet another study that points out that such practices are a waste of time. Roland Fryer from Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, has a study entitled "Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools" that is to be published in The Journal of Labor Economics.This study once again affirms that many of us who have spent our lives in education know full well:

Merit pay schemes are a waste of effort and time.

In this study, Fryer points to these findings about merit pay:

• No evidence that teacher incentives had a positive effect on student achievement. In fact, in this study, STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT MAY HAVE DECLINED.
•  Incentives did not change student nor teacher behavior.

"Rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: they can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation , they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes." Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

I would send a copy of Drive to our state legislators and even our governor, but I'm not sure they read books.

It's clear that North Carolina governor Pat McCrory still doesn't get it. In today's Charlotte Observer, he once again is pushing that same old tried and failed thinking that for some reason he just can't let go: merit pay for teachers. He doesn't realize that it has been tried, and it does not work. In fact, North Carolina even had merit pay bonuses for test scores throughout the early part of the 2000's and it was dropped when the budget shortfalls started. I would send him a copy of Daniel Pink's book Drive and the Vanderbilt Merit Pay Study if I felt he would read it, but sadly, like our entire North Carolina Legislature, ideology rules over reason every single time. For once, I would like to see a politician in our state capital and sit down and look at the facts, and maybe even read a book or a genuine research study rather than an ALEC written bill or some think tank report.

Governor McCroy, and many others in our state political leadership just don't get this from the Vanderbilt Study:

"Offering teachers incentives of up to $15,000 to improve test scores produced no discernible differences in in academic performance..." Washington Post, "Teacher Bonuses Not Linked to Better Student Performance Study Finds"

Daniel Pink's book would also make a great addition to the governor's reading list as well as a few Alfie Kohn and Dan Ariely books. It appears even our governor doesn't understand teacher motivations. Yes, it's true that teachers and educators haven't gotten pay raises for the past few years. Teachers just want fair compensation for the work they do. Most that I know, aren't motivated by money, and our governor just doesn't understand that because perhaps his motivation is driven by that.

Governor McCroy does need to look at finding pay raises for all educators and not in the form of "performance pay" either. It simply will not work, unless you're looking for a way to be cheap and perhaps keep from giving all educators a raise. Let's hope that's not what the governor is trying to do. So far, there's no test alone that determines the quality of a teacher or educator. Defining teacher and educator effectiveness is just too complex to reduce to some kind of numerical rating system. At worst, Governor McCroy's selectively giving raises by merit pay, to beginning teachers, and only to science and math, shows that he still doesn't value all of our educators. He still doesn't get it and apparently can't even think and act for himself because these are the same tired ideas that politicians have been pushing for years.

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama writes in the book In My Own Words: An Introduction to My Teachings and Philosophy:

“As children grow older and enter school, their need for support must be met by their teachers. If a teacher not only imparts academic education, but also assumes responsibility for preparing students for life, his or her pupils will feel trust and respect, and what has been taught will leave an indelible impression on their minds. On the other hand, that which is taught by a teacher who does not show true concern for his or her students’ overall well-being will not be retained for long.”

Educators teach students not subjects and not grade levels. That statement has obviously been repeated so much that it is now a bit of a cliché, yet it is still profoundly true. Even the words of the Dalai Lama seem to advocate for teachers of students in the words above. As His Holiness points out, there is no teaching, hence no learning without compassion. It is literally impossible to teach students and not care deeply about their welfare and support. As instructional leaders, here's three lessons for teaching from the Dalai Lama.

• Teachers have a responsibility to support the children they teach. There is no escaping this responsibility. Those who want to teach the young must care for them. To support our students means we care about more than just their ability to get high test scores. It means providing them the emotional support they are sometimes not getting at home. It means being there for them emotionally, when no one else can. Unfortunately, that is not something objectively measured through value-added statistics and multiple choice tests. How can compassion be reduced to some rating scale?
• Teachers have a responsibility to not only teach the academics, but also prepare students for life. If we really want our teaching to have a long-term impact on the lives of our students, we must assume the responsibility of providing them with the preparation they need for life. By default, a willingness to prepare those we teach for life signifies compassion for who our students are and where they’re going. Preparation for life should be more than test scores. It should be more than success measured by money and financial status. It should be more than success measured by educational attainment. Preparing students for life means we equip them to become compassionate citizens of the 21st century.
• Teachers who teach without compassion are ineffective. Forget value-added measures and teacher evaluation systems. Without compassion, none of those things matter. If you want to see an effective teacher, look at the level of concern they have for their students. If you want to see an ineffective teacher, look for a teacher who sees students as test scores and an opportunity to earn a bonus. That’s the whole problem with merit pay. It appeals to greed and “what’s in it for me” not necessarily what’s good for the children. Compassion should be the teacher's primary motivation, not greed.

The greatest lesson from the Dalai Lama's teaching is that those who would be the greatest and most successful teachers are those who have compassion in their hearts not themselves.

The Education Commission of the States (ECS), an organization whose stated mission is "to help states develop effective policy and practice for public education by providing data, research, analysis, and leadership" has released  a report entitled "More on Pay-for-Performance." In that report it describes Pay-for-Performance models, and it reviews the current research regarding pay-for-performance policies in schools. The studies they review are the following:

Nashville Tennessee's Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT): In this study, it was found that bonus pay alone does not result in higher student performance.

Study of Six Teacher Incentive Fund Sites (Louisiana, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas): This study boasted a laundry list of positives: 1) Greater academic growth, 2) Increases in teacher retention rates, 3) Increases in schools meeting AYP goals, 4) Increases in high school graduation rates, 5) Significant increases in math and reading proficiency, 6) Increases in teacher collaboration. According to the ECS report though, this wasn't a "study" at all because an experimental design was not used in the research so no one can really say these positives were attributable to the pay incentives.

What's more of interest in the ECS report are its suggesting policy implications.

• "The theory of action for pay-for-performance may be flawed." The report draws the same conclusion that many of us educators in the field have been screaming loudly: "Incentives alone may not be sufficient to prompt improvement in teacher and student performance and to attract high-quality teachers to hard-to-staff schools and subject areas." There's no doubt that teachers want more pay. Who doesn't? But teaching and learning is such a complex process, achievement can't be reduced to a single test score. Paying incentives for test scores is morally wrong, and most teachers know that scores are the result of much more than the teaching and instruction they provide. As far as incentives for teachers to teach in hard-to-staff schools? What about dealing the with conditions at those schools that make them hard-to-staff? There's a reason teachers don't want to teach in those schools, and it certainly isn't necessarily just pay. The whole idea that you can use pay-for-performance schemes in education is flawed and will only turn our schools into places where test scores matter more than kids.
• "Performance pay incentives may have a low motivation value as compared to accountability systems." In other words, the authors of the ECS study review suggest that NCLB may have "diminished the power of pay incentives." NCLB's penalties and sanctions could have possibly affected the effects of incentive pay, but what is objectionable to many educators is having a entire system of incentive and punishments based on test scores. That kind of system elevates "the test" to the center of everything that happens in the classroom. Most teachers find no joy in teaching test preparation. Both performance pay and performance punishments suck the joy from teaching and learning.
• "Pay-for-performance reforms may take several years to realize their desired outcomes." This ECS statement frightens me. We know what pay-for-performance systems based on test scores do in the short term. The "test" is elevated to the center of the curriculum. Schools and classrooms turn into test-prep factories churning out students who have either acceptable or unacceptable scores. The whole idea of implementing that model long-term may destroy public education in the US. The truth is we don't know that the long-term implementation of performance pay will improve education either.
• "Securing sustainable funding for pay-for-performance remains a challenge in the current economic climate." With this statement, the ECS is right on target. Even if states were to implement pay-for-performance schemes, they have difficulties funding the current pay schedules much less new pay schedules. What if they changed to a pay-for-performance scheme, and in the third year of that scheme, two-thirds of the teachers in a state meet the pay-for-performance standards specified by the pay scale? But the state only budgeted enough money for a third meeting those standards. State funding streams do not increase based on the performance of schools and teachers. It is relatively fixed.  The state in this case has two options: a) find more revenue, b) freeze the incentives pay due to lack of revenue. States rarely are willing to increase revenues because that usually means more taxes. They usually resort to the second option. They freeze pay. I can only imagine the effect of telling two-thirds of teachers in the state who were expecting a bonus, now suddenly finding out the money's not coming. But wait a minute! That's happened in North Carolina for the last four years. The state did away with testing bonuses when the economy went awry. Teachers were to get $1,500 or $750 bonuses based on test scores. Instead, they got nothing. Ultimately, what ECS is suggesting here is that pay-for-performance schemes for states may not be sustainable in both short term and long term.

In response to those politicians in Florida and elsewhere who have pushed their merit pay bills through in the face of research that says it won’t work, and also in the face of many experienced educators who tell them the same, I post Daniel Pink’s TED video “The Surprising Science of Motivation.” I suspect it is just as Pink says:

“What worries me as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted in folklore more than science.”

The idea of merit pay and pay for performance will not work. It will not improve education, and in the end, we can only hope it does not cause major damage to public education. Perhaps though, that is the ultimate goal any way. With the public education system in shambles due to bad education policy, there is no option but privatize. Then again, maybe this whole push for merit pay is indicative of who and what we truly idolize in this country:  we think the answer to all our problems lie in free markets and business. We forget that our current economic mess was caused by that which we idolize.