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Is there merit in merit pay for teachers?

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Is there merit in merit pay for teachers?

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IS THERE MERIT IN MERIT PAY FOR TEACHERS?

by

Shirin Parsavand

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Shirin Parsavand

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Scattered Experiments, Mixed Results 3
Chapter 2: Better Working Conditions, Stronger Evaluations Needed 9
Conclusion 12
References 13

iii

Abstract

The Obama administration is using billions of dollars in federal stimulus grants
to encourage schools to offer merit pay to teachers. A growing body of research on
teacher effectiveness has put new emphasis on the importance of recruiting and retaining
strong teachers. But questions remain about the effect of merit pay on teachers’
motivation and student achievement. Teachers unions often object to plans to use
standardized test scores in evaluating teachers and determining pay. Still, some teachers
unions have worked with districts to develop merit pay plans. The Los Angeles Unified
School District plans to experiment with merit pay and a coalition of charter school
organizations in Los Angeles is working on its own merit pay experiment with funding
from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One way to overcome opposition may be to
make sure teachers who are rewarded are helping their entire schools and not just the
children in their classroom.
1

Introduction
It sounded like a case of death by task force. The Los Angeles Unified School
District’s teachers union spent six months participating in a study of teacher effectiveness
then came out strongly against its recommendation to use test scores in deciding on
teacher evaluation and pay. School board members who had pressed for changes
expressed frustration.
“We’re back where we started a year ago,” board member Tamar Galatzan said in
April after the board heard from members of the task force, including teachers union
President A.J. Duffy. “I don’t feel the sense of urgency that I think we need.”
The union likely succeeded in delaying a merit pay plan or limiting its scope to
trial projects at a few schools. But with billions of dollars in competitive federal grants at
stake, task force chairman Ted Mitchell said he’s convinced Los Angeles Unified will go
forward with plans to base how teachers are paid at least in part on student performance.
The nation’s second-largest school district is among many districts responding to
new federal incentives as they consider rewarding teachers whose students show
improvement on state tests. Merit pay, or as some proponents now prefer to call it,
performance pay, is just one part of the education reform agenda the Obama
administration is pressing states to adopt through competitive grants. Billions of dollars
from the federal stimulus program are going toward encouraging states and school
districts to expand charter schools and to close or shake up low-performing schools.
Using students’ test scores to help determine teachers’ pay is one of the most contentious
parts of the Obama administration’s plan and in some places, including Los Angeles,
2

teachers unions and their allies have fought hard against the idea. But the political climate
toward public sector unions, including teachers unions, seems to have changed as a result
of the recession. Political leaders are increasingly willing to cross labor unions as the
economic collapse has meant a loss of revenue for wages and pensions. The focus on
teacher effectiveness also is fueled by a growing body of research pointing to teachers as
the most important factor in student achievement – at least the most important one that
schools can control. Three federal grant programs – the $4 billion Race to the Top
program, the $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant program and the $600 million
Teacher Incentive Fund – all encourage states and school districts to identify and reward
effective teachers.
Lost in most of the public debate about the idea of merit pay is the difficulty of
determining whether or not a teacher is effective. The evaluation systems in place in most
school districts don’t reveal much about how well a teacher performs. They often allow
teachers to be rated only as “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” -- and nearly all teachers
are labeled satisfactory. Even teachers early in their career seldom receive a poor
evaluation. A study of 12 school districts and four states found that 41 percent of
administrators reported that they never denied a teacher tenure or failed to renew the
contract of a probationary teacher (Weisberg et al. 2009, 6).

3

Chapter 1: Scattered Experiments, Mixed Results
School districts scattered around the country have provided higher pay for student
performance for decades. The plans have shown mixed results and drawing a direct
connection between merit pay and improved student performance is difficult. The
initiatives come as many firms in the private sector are moving away from performance
pay based on numerical measures (Adams, Heywood and Rothstein 2009, 89). A best-
selling book called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us argues that
companies are much more likely to find creative solutions to problems by giving
employees more autonomy and the chance to gain a sense of mastery. In an interview,
author Daniel Pink said monetary incentives might make even less sense for teachers than
for many other workers.
“Here are people who have explicitly chosen a profession that offers not much in
the way of remuneration,” Pink said. “Do you think you can give them 500 bucks and
they’re going to work a lot harder?”
As the federal government prepares to ratchet up its spending on merit pay plans,
foundations already are putting their considerable resources into experiments with the
idea. In Los Angeles, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given a coalition of
charter school operators a $60 million grant to design new ways of training, evaluating
and paying teachers. There is support in public opinion too, for paying teachers based on
how well their students perform. A recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of
California found that 62 percent of Californians surveyed support merit pay. Basing merit
pay on improved student performance on standardized tests drew more support in the poll
4

than basing it on high test scores or the length of teaching experience (Baldassare et al.
2010, 5).
Around the country, some school districts have been experimenting with merit
pay for years. One of the most well known and highly regarded systems is Denver’s
ProComp, which gives teachers various ways to earn salary incentives, including
improvement in their students’ test scores, coming up with professional development
plans and serving in schools with high poverty rates and teacher turnover. In Denver,
ProComp started in 1999 with a two-year trial program that focused on whether students
were improving, then expanded to give teachers other ways to earn incentive pay. Denver
Public Schools seems to have avoided one pitfall of some bonus plans – pitting teachers
against one another – because the pool of funds isn’t limited and because ProComp
encourages teachers to work in teams to come up with professional development plans.
In fact, some of the most promising results have come out of giving teachers
additional pay to develop staff training for the entire school.
“What made a difference was teachers looking at the data together and sharing
strategies,” said Shirley Scott, a professional development coordinator for Denver Public
Schools.
Along with coming up with professional development plans, some teachers work
with principals to develop detailed plans for what their own students will learn, and earn
higher pay if their students meet the targets. Teacher Don Diehl said he thought at first
that principals would manipulate the system to reward favored teachers, but that hasn’t
been his experience. He’s earned extra pay in multiple ways by serving in a high-poverty
5

school, by having students meet his objectives and by having students exceed
expectations on state tests.
Some teachers like ProComp because it gives them a chance to earn extra pay
without moving into administration. Taylor Betz, in her 16
th
year of teaching, said she
probably would have become an administrator or done curriculum work without
ProComp. But after a couple of years as a math coach, she welcomed the chance to go
back to the classroom when the district turned a middle school into a sixth- through 12
th

grade school.
Betz moves around her tenth-grade classroom with energy, checking in with
clusters of students as they solve a problem out of Alice in Wonderland: determine how
Alice’s size changes as she eats the cake that makes her taller and drinks the drink that
makes her smaller. She leans across a student’s desk, resting on her elbow as she asks:
“So what happens if it doubles?” She coaxes students to consult with one another to
break their reliance on her: “Carlos, will you do me a favor? Go over there and talk to her
about what she’s doing.”
Betz can earn as much as $10,000 in extra pay when her school meets all of its
goals, including incentives for working in a high-poverty school and teaching in a subject
without enough teachers. Although the extra pay helped convince her to remain a teacher,
Betz said she’d still teach at a high-poverty school and work just as hard without it.
“People that become teachers don’t go into it for the money,” Betz said. “They
want to work with kids, want to do something, feel like they’re a part of something.”
Diehl said he likes getting recognition for doing well and the system motivates
him to monitor more frequently whether students are meeting the goals he sets for them.
6

But he would be studying how well his students perform and trying to do the best job he
could as a teacher, regardless.
“Those are things that I would do, period,” he said.
Fifth-grade teacher Leslie Dodge has earned about an extra $7,000 in years when
her students and school have shown improvement on state tests. Dodge appreciates the
extra money, but said schools shouldn’t only consider money when looking at how to
recruit and retain teachers. A lack of autonomy can chase away good teachers, she said.
Dodge, who has taught for 34 years, is now at a high-performing school, but at her last
school the pressure to bring up test scores led to strict rules about what material had to be
taught when.
“New teachers want direction,” she said. “All I’m saying is don’t make it so
defining and constraining that this is all you can do on this one day.”
Teachers unions traditionally have resisted merit pay systems, often citing
problems with linking student achievement to teachers’ performance. Even supporters of
merit pay note that there are problems with using students’ test scores in determining
which teachers are the top performers. Some commonly noted objections are that about
half of public school teachers teach subjects or grades that are not subject to standardized
tests, that the tests measure memorization and other less complex tasks, and that some
students may be taught by many teachers, making it difficult to determine who had the
greatest effect on performance (Toch 2008, 35). In Los Angeles, the union representing
Los Angeles Unified teachers said they should not be evaluated or paid based on
standardized test scores because they “are not valid measures of student learning” and
7

that financial incentives for higher scores would discourage teachers from collaboration
(United Teachers Los Angeles 2010, 2).
In the Denver Public Schools and nearby Douglas County, Colo., teachers unions
cooperated with administrators to develop the plans. In Douglas County, a spirit of
mutual trust allowed the district and teachers to develop the performance pay plan that
began in 1993, said Brenda Smith, president of the Douglas County Federation of
Teachers. Smith spoke on the plan in March at a roundtable discussion in Denver for
school and political leaders, including Colo. Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Education
Secretary Arne Duncan.
Smith is a believer in the system, but she knows questions surround it, including
whether standardized tests are a good measure of teaching and exactly what defines an
outstanding teacher. She also brought up Drive author Pink and said she agrees that extra
pay is not what motivates teachers to perform at higher levels.
“What really makes teachers want to get better is the sense they are engaged,” she
said.
Scott, the Denver schools’ professional development director, said it’s too soon to
tell whether ProComp is improving student achievement, because of changes to the
program since it started. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder found
substantial improvement on state reading and math exams in Denver Public Schools from
2002-03 to 2008-09, but did not tie the improvement conclusively to the additional pay in
ProComp (Wiley, Spindler and Subert 2010, 21-26).
Scott is more certain that ProComp has helped Denver Public Schools recruit
teachers, especially to schools where it was hard to fill vacancies. Teacher turnover is
8

down too. In schools with a high concentration of poor students, where all teachers are
eligible for incentive pay, retention rates have shot up since 2006-07 when ProComp was
fully implemented, the CU Boulder researchers found. But the researchers cautioned that
other factors may be at work in the higher retention rates (Wiley, Spindler and Subert
2010, 68).
The president of the Denver Public Schools’ teachers union isn’t sure ProComp
will help with retention over the long term. The Denver Classroom Teachers Association
(DCTA) supported the introduction of ProComp, as long as teachers could opt out
initially (teachers hired since 2006 have been required to join). DCTA President Henry
Roman said changes to ProComp since 2008 meant that bonuses come at the expense of
salary increases to teachers over time, so veteran teachers may do better by moving
elsewhere.

9

Chapter 2: Better Working Conditions, Stronger Evaluations Needed
Even many districts that do not offer merit pay do give teachers additional pay for
agreeing to teach in high-poverty or low-performing schools. In a recent briefing paper
for policymakers, the research center Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE)
urged more schools to offer incentives for schools and subjects for which it’s hard to find
teachers. At the same time, PACE noted that working conditions may be more important
than pay in keeping teachers from leaving their schools, or moving out of the profession
altogether. Teachers are more likely to stay in their schools if they have a say in decisions
affecting their classrooms, strong leadership and a collegial working environment, the
paper said (Mayo, Allen and Reimann 2010, 4-5).
These factors may all be more difficult to mandate or even encourage than
offering teachers higher pay for selecting a certain school or subject. Deciding how to
reward teachers for performance is even trickier still. Despite the positive attention to
systems like ProComp, just changing how teachers are evaluated – never mind how they
are paid – on a widespread basis won’t be easy. Principals perform evaluations in most
schools, but one survey found they often were poorly trained in how to do it and rarely
had any oversight. The culture in many schools also discourages principals from
spending time in individual teachers’ classrooms, even when this is not explicitly spelled
out in teacher contracts (Donaldson 2009, 11).
Meanwhile some recent research suggests that rigorous evaluation systems can be
used to manage individual teachers’ performance effectively. As a group, teachers with
higher evaluation scores have students who make greater learning gains than teachers
with lower scores, according to a study of Connecticut’s Beginning Educator Support and
10

Training (BEST) program. The study found a link between teacher evaluation ratings and
students’ reading achievement. Students of teachers with high ratings gained the
equivalent of three more months of learning during a school year than did students of
teachers with low ratings (Toch and Rothman 2008, 11).
Some research suggests that taking evaluation seriously and not granting tenure to
the lowest-performing teachers could by itself lead to much higher student performance.
One analysis of data from the Los Angeles schools said that if the school district replaced
all of the teachers whose students were in the bottom quartile of test-score gains, it would
result in a net increase in student gains of around 1.2 percentile points per year (Gordon,
Kane and Staiger 2006, 14).
Yet widespread change to the teacher evaluation system may depend on changing
school district salary schedules that are based now just on experience and degrees earned.
In a report for the nonpartisan think tank Education Sector, Thomas Toch and Robert
Rothman described a “Catch-22.” That is, when all teachers are paid the same, principals
don’t want to take the time necessary to perform careful evaluations. Teachers unions
argue that since principals have not taken evaluations seriously it would not be fair to
base pay on evaluations and teachers must be paid according to a single salary schedule
(Toch and Rothman 2008, 18).
But as teachers who are members of the Baby Boom generation retire, they are
being replaced by younger teachers with different ideas about the teaching profession. A
2007 survey commissioned by the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality
of first-year teachers found that 76 percent of secondary teachers and 81 percent of
elementary teachers would rather be at a school where administrators gave strong support
11

to teachers than at one where they could earn significantly higher salaries (Rochkind et
al. 2007a, 20). In the same survey, 84 percent of new teachers said making it easier to fire
unmotivated or incompetent teachers would be an effective way to improve teacher
quality (Rochkind et al. 2007b, 100).
Merit pay advocates argue for working on multiple fronts at once, improving
evaluation systems while at the same time experimenting with different ways of paying
teachers. That’s what LAUSD’s Teacher Effectiveness Task Force recommended (Los
Angeles Unified School District 2010, 5).
“We do have to begin to move, however imperfect it is, now,” Mitchell, president
of the State Board of Education and chairman of the task force, told the Los Angeles
Unified school board in April.
As LAUSD works to change its policies, five charter school organizations are
using the funding from the Gates Foundation to work on evaluation, professional
development and higher salaries for teachers who are considered “highly effective” and
would serve as master teachers and mentors to other teachers.
All of the charter school organizations have different pay structures now. At the
16 schools run by the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, all teachers get
bonuses if their school meets student achievement and attendance targets.
Administrators and teachers in the charter school coalition are now looking at
what makes an effective teacher and how to measure student achievement, said Judy
Burton, president and CEO of the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools. She said
all of the charter school organizations plan to try out new teacher evaluation schemes this
fall but will wait two years before rolling out a new pay plan.
12

Conclusion
Burton said she thinks paying teachers based on performance can serve to
motivate them, but more important is identifying the teachers who can strengthen their
colleagues’ performance in the classroom.
“Our intent is not just to compensate teachers who are more effective but to build
the capacity of all of our teachers,” she said.
The debate over whether merit pay motivates teachers is not likely to end soon,
especially given the lack of conclusive evidence that it improves student achievement. So
for now, merit pay advocates’ best bet for winning acceptance for the plans may be to do
as Burton suggests: Make sure those who are getting paid more are helping their entire
school, not just the students in their classrooms.

13

References
Adams, Scott J., John S. Heywood, and Richard Rothstein. 2009. Teachers, performance
pay and accountability – What education should learn from other sectors. Washington,
D.C. Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/books-
teachers_performance_pay_and_accountability/.
Baldassare, Mark, Dean Bonner, Sonja Petek, and Nicole Willcoxon. 2010. PPIC
statewide survey: Californians and education. Public Policy Institute of California.
http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/survey/S_410MBS.pdf.

Betz, Taylor. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. March 18.

Burton, Judy. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. April 2.

Diehl, Don. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. April 2.

Dodge, Leslie. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. March 17.

Donaldson, Morgaen L. 2009. So long, Lake Wobegon? Using teacher evaluation to raise
teacher quality. Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/06/teacher_evaluation.html.

Gordon, Robert, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger. 2006. Identifying effective
teachers using performance on the job. A Hamilton Project discussion paper.
Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/200604hamilton_1.pdf.

Los Angeles Unified School District. Teacher Effectiveness Task Force Final Report.
April 13, 2010.
http://etf.lausd.net/sites/default/files/Teacher%20Effectiveness%20Task%20Force%20Re
port%20_vfinal__0.pdf.

Mitchell, Ted. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. April 27.

Mayo, Andrea, Mark Allen, and Chris Reimann. 2010. Reforming education in
California: A guide for candidates and citizens. Policy Analysis for California Education.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pace/PUBLICATIONS/PERIODICAL/2010_REFORMI
NG_ED_IN_CA_WEB.pdf.

Pink, Daniel. 2009. Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York:
Riverhead Books.

14

Rochkind, Jonathan, Amber Ott, John Immerwahr, John Doble, and Jean Johnson. 2007.
Lessons learned: New teachers talk about their jobs, challenges, and long-range plans: A
report from the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality and Public Agenda.
New York: Public Agenda. http://publicagenda.org/files/pdf/lessons_learned_1.pdf.

Rochkind, Jonathan, John Immerwahr, Amber Ott, and Jean Johnson. 2007. Getting
started: A survey of new public school teachers on their training and first months on the
job. In America’s challenge: effective teachers for at-risk schools and students. ed. Carol
A. Dwyer, 89-103. Washington: National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality.

Roman, Henry. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. March 18.

Scott, Shirley. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. March 19.

Pink, Daniel. 2010. Interview by Shirin Parsavand. Jan. 13.
Toch, Thomas. 2008. Fixing teacher evaluation. Educational Leadership 66, no. 2: 32-37.
Toch, Thomas and Robert Rothman. 2008. Rush to judgment: Teacher evaluation in
public education. Washington, D.C.: Education Sector.
http://www.educationsector.org/usr_doc/RushToJudgment_ES_Jan08.pdf.

United Teachers Los Angeles. Statement on teacher effectiveness task force
recommendations. April 27, 2010.
http://www.utla.net/system/files/TeacherEffectiveness_Response_20100427.pdf.

Weisberg, Daniel, Susan Sexton, Jennifer Mulhern, and David Keeling. 2009. The widget
effect: Our national failure to acknowledge and act on differences in teacher
effectiveness. New York: The New Teacher Project.
http://widgeteffect.org/downloads/TheWidgetEffect.pdf.

Wiley, Edward W., Eleanor R. Spindler, and Amy N. Subert. 2010. ProComp: An
outcomes evaluation of Denver’s alternative teacher compensation system 2010 report.
http://static.dpsk12.org/gems/newprocomp/ProCompOutcomesEvaluationApril2010final.
pdf.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Obama administration is using billions of dollars in federal stimulus grants to encourage schools to offer merit pay to teachers. A growing body of research on teacher effectiveness has put new emphasis on the importance of recruiting and retaining strong teachers. But questions remain about the effect of merit pay on teachers’ motivation and student achievement. Teachers unions often object to plans to use standardized test scores in evaluating teachers and determining pay. Still, some teachers unions have worked with districts to develop merit pay plans. The Los Angeles Unified School District plans to experiment with merit pay and a coalition of charter school organizations in Los Angeles is working on its own merit pay experiment with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One way to overcome opposition may be to make sure teachers who are rewarded are helping their entire schools and not just the children in their classroom.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Parsavand, Shirin (author)

Core Title Is there merit in merit pay for teachers?

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism

Publication Date 08/06/2010

Defense Date 06/29/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,Denver Public Schools,Los Angeles Unified School District,merit pay,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance pay,ProComp,Teachers

Place Name California (states), Colorado (states), Denver (city or populated place), Los Angeles (counties)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Celis, William, III (committee chair), Kaplan, Sandra N. (committee member), Suro, Roberto (committee member)

Creator Email parsavan@usc.edu,shirin.parsavand@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3283

Unique identifier UC1281804

Identifier etd-Parsavand-3721 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-366016 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3283 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Parsavand-3721.pdf

Dmrecord 366016

Document Type Thesis

Rights Parsavand, Shirin

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu