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The
Folly of Merit Pay
By Alfie Kohn
EDUCATION WEEK
September 17, 2003
There's
no end to the possible uses for that nifty little Latin
phrase Cui bono?, which means: Who benefits? Whose
interests are served? It's the right question to ask
about a testing regimen guaranteed to make most public
schools look as though they're failing. Or about the
assumption that people with less power than you have
(students, if you're a teacher; teachers, if you're an
administrator) are unable to participate in making
decisions about what they're going to do every day.
And
here's another application: Cui bono when we're
assured that money is the main reason it's so hard to
find good teachers? If only we paid them more, we'd have
no trouble attracting and retaining the finest educators
thatwell, that money can buy. Just accept that
premise, and you'll never have to consider the way
teachers are treated. In fact, you could continue
disrespecting and de-skilling them, forcing them to use
scripted curricula and turning them into glorified
test-prep technicians. If they seem unhappy, it must be
just because they want a bigger paycheck.
In
2000, Public Agenda questioned more than 900 new teachers
and almost as many college graduates who didn't
choose a career in education. The report concluded that,
while "teachers do believe that they are
underpaid," higher salaries would probably be of
limited effectiveness in alleviating teacher shortages
because considerations other than money are
"significantly more important to most teachers and
would-be teachers." Two years later, 44 percent of
administrators reported, in another Public Agenda poll,
that talented colleagues were being driven out of the
field because of "unreasonable standards and
accountability."
Meanwhile,
a small California survey, published last year in Phi
Delta Kappan, found that the main reason newly
credentialed teachers were leaving the profession was not
low salaries or difficult children. Rather, those who
threw in the towel were most likely to cite what was
being done to their schools in the name of
"accountability." And the same lesson seems to
hold cross-culturally. Mike Baker, a correspondent for
BBC News, discovered that an educational
"recruitment crisis" exists almost exclusively
in those nations "where accountability measures have
undermined teachers' autonomy."
That
unhappy educators have a lot more on their minds than
money shouldn't be surprising in light of half a century
of research conducted in other kinds of workplaces. When
people are asked what's most important to them, financial
concerns show up well behind such factors as interesting
work or good people to work with. For example, in a large
survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute,
"salary/wage" ranked 16th on a list of 20
reasons for taking a job. (Interestingly, managers asked
what they believe matters most to their employees
tend to mention moneyand then proceed to manage on
the basis of that error.)
Educational
policymakers might be forgiven their shortsightedness if
they were just proposing to raise teachers' salaries
across the boardor, perhaps, to compensate them
appropriately for more responsibilities or for additional
training. Instead, though, many are turning to some
version of "pay for performance." Here, myopia
is complicated by amnesia: For more than a century, such
plans have been implemented, then abandoned, then
implemented in a different form, then abandoned again.
The idea never seems to work, but proponents of merit pay
never seem to learn.
Here
are the educational historians David Tyack and Larry
Cuban: "The history of performance-based salary
plans has been a merry-go-round. In the main, districts
that initially embraced merit pay dropped it after a
brief trial." But even "repeated
experiences" of failure haven't prevented officials
"from proposing merit pay again and again."
"Son
of Merit Pay: The Sequel" is now playing in
Cincinnati, Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, and
elsewhere. The leading advocates of this
approachconservatives, economists, and conservative
economistsinsist that we need only adopt their
current incentive schemes and, this time, teaching really
will improve. Honest.
Wade
Nelson, a professor at Winona State University, dug up a
government commission's evaluation of England's mid-19th-
century "payment by results" plan. His summary
of that evaluation: Schools became "impoverished
learning environments in which nearly total emphasis on
performance on the examination left little opportunity
for learning." The plan was abandoned.
In The Public Interest, a right-wing
policy journal, two researchers concluded with apparent
disappointment in 1985 that no evidence supported the
idea that merit pay "had an appreciable or
consistent positive effect on teachers' classroom
work." Moreover, they reported that few
administrators expected such an effect "even though
they had the strongest reason to make such claims."
To this day, enthusiasm for
pay-for-performance runs far ahead of any data supporting
its effectivenesseven as measured by
standardized-test scores, much less by meaningful
indicators of learning. But then that, too, echoes the
results in other workplaces. To the best of my knowledge,
no controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term
enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any
incentive system. In fact, numerous studies have
confirmed that performance on tasks, particularly complex
tasks, is generally lower when people are promised a
reward for doing them, or for doing them well. As a rule,
the more prominent or enticing the reward, the more
destructive its effects.
*
So why
are pay-for-performance plans so reliably unsuccessful,
if not counterproductive?
1.
Control. People with more power usually set the
goals, establish the criteria, and generally set about
trying to change the behavior of those down below. If
merit pay feels manipulative and patronizing, that's
probably because it is. Moreover, the fact that these
programs usually operate at the level of school personnel
means, as Maurice Holt has pointed out, that the whole
enterprise "conveniently moves accountability away
from politicians and administrators, who invent and
control the system, to those who actually do the
work."
2.
Strained relationships. In its most destructive form,
merit pay is set up as a competition, where the point is
to best one's colleagues. No wonder just such a proposal,
in Norristown, Pa., was unanimously opposed by teachers
and ultimately abandoned. Even those teachers likely to
receive a bonus realized that everyone
losesespecially the studentswhen educators
are set against one another in a race for artificially
scarce rewards.
But
pay- for-performance programs don't have to be explicitly
competitive in order to undermine collegial
relationships. If I end up getting a bonus and you don't,
our interactions are likely to be adversely affected,
particularly if you think of yourself as a pretty darned
good teacher.
Some
argue that monetary rewards are less harmful if they're
offered to, and made contingent on the performance of, an
entire school. But if a school misses out on a bonus,
what often ensues is an ugly search for individuals on
whom to pin the blame. Also, you can count on seeing less
useful collaboration among schools, especially if
an incentive program is based on their relative standing.
Why would one faculty share ideas with another when the
goal is to make sure that students in other schools don't
do as well as yours? Merit pay based on rankings is about
victory, not about excellence. In any case, bribing
groups doesn't make any more sense than bribing
individuals.
3.
Reasons and motives. The premise of merit pay, and
indeed of all rewards, is that people could be
doing a better job but for some reason have decided to
wait until it's bribed out of them. This is as insulting
as it is inaccurate. Dangling a reward in front of
teachers or principals"Here's what you'll get
if things somehow improve" does nothing to
address the complex, systemic factors that are actually
responsible for educational deficiencies.
Pay-for-performance is an outgrowth of behaviorism, which
is focused on individual organisms, not systemsand,
true to its name, looks only at behaviors, not at reasons
and motives and the people who have them.
Even
if they wouldn't mind larger paychecks, teachers are
typically not all that money-driven. They keep telling us
in surveys that the magical moment when a student
suddenly understands is more important to them than
another few bucks. And, as noted above, they're becoming
disenchanted these days less because of salary issues
than because they don't enjoy being controlled by
accountability systems. Equally controlling
pay-for-performance plans are based more on neoclassical
economic dogma than on an understanding of how things
look from a teacher's perspective.
Most
of all, merit pay fails to recognize that there are
different kinds of motivation. Doing something because
you enjoy it for its own sake is utterly unlike doing
something to get money or recognition. In fact,
researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that the use of
such extrinsic inducements often reduces intrinsic
motivation. The more that people are rewarded, the more
they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to
get the reward. If bonuses and the like can
"motivate" some educators, it's only in an
extrinsic sense, and often at the cost of undermining
their passion for teaching.
For
example, a recent study of a merit-pay plan that covered
all employees at a Northeastern college found that
intrinsic motivation declined as a direct result of the
plan's adoption, particularly for some of the school's
"most valued employeesthose who were highly
motivated intrinsically before the program was
implemented." The more the plan did what it was
intended to doraise people's extrinsic motivation
by getting them to see how their performance would affect
their salariesthe less pleasure they came to take
in their work. The plan was abandoned after one year.
That
study didn't even take account of how resentful and
demoralized people may become when they don't get
the bonus they're expecting. For all these reasons, I
tell Fortune 500 executives (or at least those foolish
enough to ask me) that the best formula for compensation
is this: Pay people well, pay them fairly, and then do
everything possible to help them forget about money. All
pay-for-performance plans, of course, violate that last
precept.
4.
Measurement issues. Despite what is widely assumed by
economists and behaviorists, some things are more than
the sum of their parts, and some things can't be reduced
to numbers. It's an illusion to think we can specify and
quantify all the components of good teaching and
learning, much less establish criteria for receiving a
bonus that will eliminate the perception of
arbitrariness. No less an authority than the
statistician-cum-quality-guru W. Edwards Deming
reminded us that "the most important things we need
to manage can't be measured."
It's possible to evaluate the quality of
teaching, but it's not possible to reach consensus on a
valid and reliable way to pin down the meaning of
success, particularly when dollars hang in the balance.
What's more, evaluation may eclipse other goals. After
merit-pay plans take effect, administrators often visit
classrooms more to judge teachers than to offer them
feedback for the purpose of improvement.
All these concerns apply even when
technicians struggle to find good criteria for
allocating merit pay. But the problems are multiplied
when the criteria are dubious, such as raising student
test scores. These tests, as I and others have argued
elsewhere, tend to measure what matters least. They
reflect children's backgrounds more than the quality of a
given teacher or school. Moreover, merit pay based on
those scores is not only unfair but damaging, if it
accelerates the exodus of teachers from troubled schools
where they're most needed.
Schoolwide merit pay, again, is no less
destructive than the individual version. High stakes
induce cheating, gaming, teaching to the test, and other
ways of snagging the bonus (or dodging the penalty)
without actually improving student learning. In fact,
some teachers who might resist these temptations,
preferring to do what's best for kids rather than for
their own wallets, feel compelled to do more test prep
when their colleagues' paychecks are affected by the
school's overall scores.
*
It may be vanity or, again, myopia that
persuades technicians, even after the umpteenth failure,
that merit pay need only be returned to the shop for
another tuneup. Perhaps some of the issues mentioned here
can be addressed, but most are inherent in the very idea
of paying educators on the basis of how close they've
come to someone's definition of successful performance.
It's time we acknowledged not only that such programs
don't work, but that they can't work.
Furthermore,
efforts to solve one problem often trigger new ones.
Late-model merit-pay plans often include such lengthy
lists of criteria and complex statistical controls that
no one except their designers understand how the damn
things work.
So how
should we reward teachers? We shouldn't. They're not
pets. Rather, teachers should be paid well, freed from
misguided mandates, treated with respect, and provided
with the support they need to help their students become
increasingly proficient and enthusiastic learners.
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