On the foolishness of "Merit Pay" for teachers.

[Tyler Durden]

First, I am not a teacher. I run a Quality Division at a heavy manufacturing company.

We base IMPROVEMENT issues on 6 Sigma concepts. This is to say, if we wish to improve a process:

1. We set up controllable inputs,
2. We stabilize and normalize the process to respond to these inputs,
3. We design an experiment using those inputs,
4. We then define measurement criteria that are regularly challenged to demonstrate their validity to measure the process accurately.

Let us begin.

INPUTS
To define a Teaching Process for measurements, the inputs must be equal or adjusted for normality.
1. Are the students properly prepared in previous settings for the subject at hand?
2. Do the students have the tools needed to succeed under nominal effort, such as books, computers, reference materials?
3. Is the facility heated/cooled/cleaned/maintained to optimize performance, or at least equalized throughout the sample?

STABILIZE AND NORMALIZE THE PROCESS
This is one of the more difficult phases, involving the removal of roadblocks to a normal process.
1. Are the teachers normalized for experience, educational background?
2. Are the teachers tested for emotional/psychological/physical stability under pressure?
3. Are the students screened for outlier removal from the experiment (disruptors, psychological or physical instability)?

DOE
Now we can design the experiment.
1. Determine the duration of the experiment.
2. Set any patterns for sampling for data.
3. Continue to normalize inputs.

MEASUREMENT CRITERIA
Now, and only now can the measurement criteria be determined. This is of course the hardest of all areas, and I do not feel qualified to define them. This being the case, I will only mention these items.
1. Are the criteria reviewed for validity?
2. Are the criteria germane to each subject, grade level, experience, etcetera?
3. Are the criteria measurements strictly monitored with an eye toward the process' stability?

Now you see the issues in using any criteria to measure a process. In Manufacturing, this is almost child's play compared to a teaching venue. This can also be said of a Service, a Sales Function, a Raw Materials production and delivery function and so on.

But without the first phase: CONTROLLABLE AND EQUAL INPUTS, you cannot proceed as the experiment yields no valid empirical data.

[Ellen Forradalom]

1. The Blueberry Story makes this point

http://www.jamievollmer.com/blue_story.html

She began quietly, “We are told, sir, that you manage a company that makes good ice cream.”

I smugly replied, “Best ice cream in America, Ma’am.”

“How nice,” she said. “Is it rich and smooth?”

“Sixteen percent butterfat,” I crowed.

“Premium ingredients?” she inquired.

“Super-premium! Nothing but triple A.” I was on a roll. I never saw the next line coming.

“Mr. Vollmer,” she said, leaning forward with a wicked eyebrow raised to the sky, “when you are standing on your receiving dock and you see an inferior shipment of blueberries arrive, what do you do?”

In the silence of that room, I could hear the trap snap…. I was dead meat, but I wasn’t going to lie.

“I send them back.”

“That’s right!” she barked, “and we can never send back our blueberries. We take them big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with ADHD, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all! Every one! And that, Mr. Vollmer, is why it’s not a business. It’s school!”

[Tyler Durden]

4. I can only applaud.

That, and wonder why EVERYONE cannot see that paradigm.

[Ellen Forradalom]

5. Because a huge swath of the population

does not believe in science. They don't know what it is, and they dismiss its product, even as they enjoy its applications.

Making matters worse, these people tend to gravitate towards politics..and what is a bigger political football than public education?

[LanternWaste]

9. That's a wonderful analogy!

That's a wonderful analogy! :thumbsup: Thanks for that-- I think it'll be a useful counter-point in future discussions I have regarding this topic.

"it’s not a business. It’s school!”

So true, so true.

[Ellen Forradalom]

10. It's not just the Statue of Liberty who accepts your tired, your weary, your poor

Your neighborhood public school does too.

[Fredda Weinberg]

12. I wish the subject were so simple

My mother taught public vocational school. These kids didn't get regular diplomas ... but studies showed they had higher employment rates than the general population.

I remember the grants she received; they delivered quantitative results and hard standards. The cause may have been co-opted by our political opponents, but the underlying pedagogy is sound.

[Ellen Forradalom]

18. Interesting point

The scope of her job was perhaps narrower than that of much of public education. Nowadays, we offload a lot of functions onto the public elementary and high schools. In addition to the three Rs, we need them to provide health, sex, consumer, and art education; individualized education for those with special needs; socialization and the administration of social services; and, frankly, plain old babysitting. (For the record, my son is in public school, and I gladly underwrite all of the above with my taxes, time and checkbook.) The schools need to provide this across the board to all comers, and schools which are not comparable are compared to one another. This makes the questions of merit pay and school standards very complicated.

[Fredda Weinberg]

19. Complication is key ... which is why I went into information systems

The problem is not intractable - my mother and I dealt with all those other issues later in her life, but our support for public education never wavered. My entire life, I've heard her rail against those who taught "against the test", but they were her sincere colleagues. In the end, it was up to her to demonstrate that the resources were there for vital programs if they were handled by effective administrators.

I left Delray Beach, Florida years ago, but my mother had a chance to pay a visit a decade after we started our first kids, cops and computer cut crime program - which we left in the hands of licensed teachers and financed by the state. Very satisfying to see a total turnaround in a 'hood and she got to see it.

As for merit pay - she supported it and honestly, deserved it. But I won't argue the point ... if you never met someone like her, you wouldn't understand. But standards? They definitely can be measured and properly "normalized". I know it's a math term, but doesn't have to imply that anyone develops less than their natural potential.

[fishwax]

13. It's not a business, it's a school

:applause:

[LynzM]

14. Beautiful story, great point

Thanks for posting this, Ellen. Hadn't seen it before. :hi:

[wtmusic]

2. At your job you must provide consistently high-quality, nearly identical

output. But IMO it's pretty obvious that the output from a school will have a wide range of "quality" for the very reason that the input IS uncontrollable, and that the focus should be on improvement rather than test scores, for example.

[Tyler Durden]

3. That is exactly the problem.

So many wish to treat Teaching as if they were producing "widgets." It simply won't work.

We have to resign ourselves to supplying the optimum inputs ie schools, prep, and supplies to each child or the system simply fails no matter HOW we decide to measure it: you can always "game" an experiment, and when a manager sees his "division" start to fail, that's what they do.

[wtmusic]

7. 12-graders who can't spell or perform basic multiplication

is what we're getting in CA Title 1 public schools these days. They push them through the system whether they perform or not, because to hold them back them means the school loses money (student drops out because of stigma of being held back). It's getting truly ridiculous--a high school diploma means nothing.

[Fredda Weinberg]

20. That's been so for decades ... but there used to be manual jobs

Those are gone, but we haven't increased social mobility.

[Sabriel]

6. I support merit pay for politicians

If they get the bills I support through the Legislature and don't get vetoed, then they deserve a raise.

If they don't measure up, they face the possibility of being closed down.

And they'll need to be tested every 3-5 years to see if they measure up to other legislators.

Oh, and they'll need to engage in continuing education and professional development, to ensure that they stay current with political best practices. That'll have to be done on their own time, of course.

That's a start.

[supernova]

8. Education was one of the first areas

where overly-zealous conservative business types tried to apply business concepts and outcomes to the public arena and what they considered "failing" schools.

They're still at it and their outcomes are no better than before. Training little human beings to think isn't the same activity at all as making identical cogs, though they want to make you think so. When their "ideas" inevitably don't work, they indulge in blaming everyone else: it's the teachers' fault or these kids are too poor to be teachable. They never stop to think their entire approach is exactly the wrong one to apply to education.

I really want get those types of nincompoops as far away from our schools as possible. I just hope our kids can survive their "ministrations."

[Henryman]

11. Please check your assumption....

...that these INPUTS can be adjusted for normality.

[supernova]

17. How so?

I'm curious.

[Tyler Durden]

23. But they CAN.

ANOVA, MANOVA, Transformations such as Box-Cox...

These statistical tools and many others can be used to adjust or rule out data to show "NORMAL DISTRIBUTION" which must be present to demonstrate SIGNIFICANCE of DIFFERENCE in the results of an experiment.

I'm not throwing these out to be fancy, just to show that people playing the "Merit Pay" game aren't doing their homework. The data does not conform to normally distributed "data populations," and therefore makes invalid results of DOE.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

15. I support merit pay for weathermen.

If the weather is sunny, they get a bonus.

If the weather is rainy, they get docked.

[Selatius]

16. Because you can't reject "bad inputs" (needful students) you adapt by diverting more resources to...

addressing the problem. The best way, in my mind, is more qualified teachers relative to the number of students. The greater the classroom size, the less one-to-one time a teacher has with any student on average. This is not good and will only contribute to further degradation of the public school system. You've got to increase one-to-one time with students, especially students with problems, to have a better chance of teaching them concepts used throughout life.

There are schools in Los Angeles, for instance, right now that simply couldn't handle the hypothetical scenario of a 10% or lower drop-out rate. Why? Because there aren't enough teachers and classrooms on top of the already over-crowded facilities that currently exist to cover all the extra students who would be around in such a scenario. The point is, the infrastructure is now, intentionally or unintentionally, encouraging a higher drop-out rate simply because of its degraded nature.

[MadHound]

22. More teachers would be lovely

Trouble is, voters in the school districts don't want to pay the extra money to get more teachers, don't want to pay the extra money to raise teachers' salaries in order to attract and retain high quality teachers, and don't want to pay the extra money in order to have the space and equipment that every decent school should have.

There is no other job, public or private, that allows people to vote on the salaries of the workers, amount of money spent on supplies and facilities, or provide regular, binding, non qualified input on how the job gets done. This simple fact is over half the reason why we're having so many education problems. Does any other business or profession run on this model? No, only experts are allowed input, on the issues. Yet somehow they expect to hold teaching to a different standard and expect the job to be done. What's even more amazing is that most of the time, teachers still manage in spite of all of that to get the job done.

[aikoaiko]

21. ....:or adjusted for normalcy"

You say that you need controllable and equal inputs, but didn't you qualify it with "or adjusted for normalcy"

Can't this be done with the issues involved with learning?

[Tyler Durden]

24. OF COURSE. But they aren't.

As was said up the thread: no other profession has its recompense determined by vote.

And if I may add:

No business has itself hamstrung for funding to make process, data and facility improvement by vote (millage) either. When we make the teaching of ALL CHILDREN on an EQUAL BASIS the singularly most important issue in the country (as it should be), then actually, I believe the issue of "Merit Pay" will go away on its own due to the performance of the system.