In New York City, Principals and Supervisors are paid to get scores up at their schools...no matter what. This forces many principals of failing schools to lie and cheat on tests in order to make it look like there has been 'improvement' over the school year.

This policy also punishes those principals and supervisors of schools that are already doing well. High schores cannot be changed very much, and therefore school administrators do not get the bonuses.

Huh? Aren't we awarding failure? If a principal of an excellent school wants to receive his or her bonus, then he/she will make sure that every other year the school has a disaster in scores, so that every other year he/she can get the bonus for 'improving' the schools they are in.

We believe this policy needs to be changed. Now, before another generation of children must attend schools without books, adequate teaching staff, good nutritious food, after-school programs, etc., all because the money is going toward bonuses and salaries of teachers held in 'rubber rooms'

'FAILING' PRINCIPALS DUE 777G BONUSES
By DAVID ANDREATTA, NY POST, August 8, 2005

LINK

Principals of 89 city schools deemed failing under state and federal standards - including two that are being forced to close - are in line for $777,000 worth of bonuses, state and city education records show.

The bonuses are based on student improvements made during the 2003-04 school year and are now being disbursed by the city Department of Education, which last year lost an arbitration battle to withhold the awards from 10 principals of failing schools.

The $777,000 payday for principals does not include the hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses the city must also shell out to supervisors and administrators at those schools.

All 89 schools were classified as being "in need of improvement" under the federal No Child Left Behind law - a distinction that critics charge is unfair because schools are judged based on the performance of single subgroups, like special-education students.

Indeed, there are many schools on the list that are considered gems of the city school system.

Five of the 89 schools, however, were also placed on a state watch list known as "schools under registration review," which most educators agree is a more accurate representation of failing schools.

Last year, the city fought unsuccessfully to deny bonuses to some principals of schools under registration review, claiming it was unfair to award merit pay for improvement at schools that couldn't even meet basic standards.

Lori Mei, the city Department of Education's manager for assessment and accountability, said the intention of the merit-pay system is noble, but that it has to be reworked in contract negotiations with the principals union.

"We definitely believe that we have to relook at the bonus structure," Mei said. "I get e-mails from principals asking for clarification, saying they had a very good year and don't understand why they didn't get the bonus."

The merit-pay system, pushed by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and accepted by principals in 1999, gives bonuses of between $5,500 and $15,000 to principals based mostly on whether their schools placed in the top 25 percent in improvements on student standardized tests.

It also tracks the improvements of individual students, which supporters of the bonus system say is critical to determining which schools are advancing.

Peter McNally, vice president of the principals union, said the formula is fair, if confusing.

"These schools deserve the bonus because they have definite challenges," McNally said. "Those lists look at grade performance. The bonus structure looks at student progress."

But some principals say schools with consistently high test results, where there is little room to improve, should be equally rewarded.

"Those of us at better schools, who make the cut year after year, aren't even on the radar screen for these bonuses," said one principal of a top-notch Bronx school.

Joel Klein Hands Out Bonuses To Superintendents Who No Longer Work For the Department of Education

It seems to us that there is alot of money given to everything and anyone OUTSIDE of public schools, and it looks like we need to radically change the political leadership in New York State:
New York State Legislature: Something's Gotta Give

Published: September 17, 2003
Commentary
The Folly of Merit Pay
How should we reward teachers? We shouldn't.
By Alfie Kohn, edweek, 09/17/03

LINK

How should we reward teachers? We shouldn't.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 that-well, 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 money-and 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 board-or, 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 approach-conservatives, economists, and conservative economists-insist that we need only adopt their current incentive schemes and, this time, teaching really will improve. Honest.

To this day, enthusiasm for pay-for-performance runs far ahead of any data supporting its effectiveness.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 effectiveness-even 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 loses-especially the students-when 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 systems-and, 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 employees-those who were highly motivated intrinsically before the program was implemented." The more the plan did what it was intended to do-raise people's extrinsic motivation by getting them to see how their performance would affect their salaries-the 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.

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.

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.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.

Alfie Kohn's books include Punished by Rewards (Houghton Mifflin) and the forthcoming What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? and Other Essays (Beacon). He lives in Belmont, Mass., and, virtually, at www.alfiekohn.org. Copyright 2003 by Alfie Kohn.

Rescuing Our Schools From 'Tougher Standards'

Vol. 23, Issue 3, Pages 31,44
"Iowa's Move Toward Pay-for-Performance on Verge of Collapse," Sept. 10, 2003.
"Denver Aims to Expand Performance-Pay Plan," April 30, 2003.
"Report Urges Experimentation With Teacher-Pay Schemes," June 5, 2002.
"Cincinnati Teachers Rebuff Performance Pay," May 29, 2002.
"New Law Allows Ky. Districts to Pilot Differentiated Pay," April 17, 2002.
"Teacher Performance-Pay Plan Modified in Cincinnati," Sept. 19, 2001.
"N.Y.C. Administrators to Receive Merit Pay for Boosting Scores," June 6, 2001.
"Iowa Approves Performance Pay for Its Teachers," May 16, 2001.
"Teacher Merit Pay," Commentary, April 4, 2001.

September 17, 2003
Why don't teachers prefer merit pay?
Hmm. Can someone explain to me just why anyone should believe these arguments against merit pay for teachers? I'm serious. I just don't get it. I do understand that money doesn't solve every problem, that teachers are often motivated mainly by the love of teaching, and that the frustrations teachers go through will not be assuaged with extra take-home pay. But these specific criticisms just seem surreal to me:

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. That's funny. Like most people in the business world, I work at a job where my raises and bonuses are tied to performance. I don't see this as patronizing. Being expected to work hard when there's no chance of being paid more than the person in the next office who slacks off - now that's patronizing.

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...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... Are these bonuses made public? Are teachers going to go around demanding to know who got bonuses and who didn't? Are teachers expected to be so immature that they will demand to know who got bonuses, are incapable of understanding that a bonus is based on meeting a set of standards for the year, and will then sabotage the performance of other teachers to get that money? I don't see this sort of competition in my job, despite the fact that we're all hoping to get bonuses. Are teachers really expected to be that cutthroat?

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. Funny, I don't know many people who hold back and work hard only when there are monetary incentives. I do know people who expect to make more money and receive more praise when they improve their work performance, because even though their drive comes from within, it's nice to have the external validation. Also, I would think that teachers, of all people, understand that kids sometimes need outside incentives to better their performance. Why isn't this type of extra motivation considered valid for teachers as well?

Again, I know that school districts don't necessarily have cash to spread around, and that money doesn't solve everything. As this article points out, money isn't even listed as the most common reason for leaving the teaching profession. But I find these efforts to damn merit pay as quite bizarre, and I've yet to see anything that could convince me that teachers wouldn't be happy with better pay for better work, just like everyone else in the working world. If you've got an argument for that, be sure to share it with me.

I also note that the article equates paying people "fairly" with paying everyone on some measure other than merit, which doesn't seem fair to me. The author is also one of those people who believes that any sort of high stakes or accountability measures are bad simply because some people are motivated to cheat when the stakes increase, as though this were a valid criticism of the stakes, rather than the people involved. These statements make me even less likely to give his anti-merit-pay arguments due consideration.

July 7, 2003
Public Sector Takes its Cue from the Private Sector

LINK

Merit pay (or pay for performance) programs, once the province of private sector businesses, are spreading throughout the public sector. A 2001 IPMA-HR public sector survey found that 45% of its respondents had a variable pay plan. Of that 45%, 80% reported using pay for performance.

Numerous public school systems are currently grappling with the finer points of merit pay. Pay for performance systems are in place in Orlando, FL, Tarrant County, TX, and Lancaster County, PA, to name a few.

As compensation in the public and private sectors becomes more closely aligned, we look at the development of merit pay programs in the federal government and public school systems.

FEDERAL MERIT PAY

In May 2003, the House of Representatives passed a high-profile pay for performance measure proposed by the Bush administration. Passed as an amendment to the fiscal 2004 Defense authorization, it cuts the cost-of-living salary increase of civil service employees to 2%. The remainder of the customary wage hike is available as a $500 million fund to be used for permanent, performance-based raises for high-performing employees. Administration officials are hopeful that the fund, which applies to all federal agencies, will help with recruitment and retention efforts.

Many lawmakers, however, were critical of the proposed system. In April, they expressed concerns at a joint House and Senate hearing that base pay was too low and performance evaluation systems too troubled for the measure to be effective. "I almost feel like we're putting the cart before the horse," said Jo Ann Davis, R-VA, chairwoman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on the Civil Service, Census and Agency Organization. The measures were issued in the hopes that establishing the fund will encourage the overhaul of existing performance evaluation systems.

A telling poll conducted by federal consultants at FPMI in 2002 revealed the conflict at the heart of criticisms of federal pay for performance programs. While 80% of the roughly 1,000 respondents indicated that the federal government needs to improve its pay for performance system, only 35% wanted to allow their managers more latitude in making pay determinations. A striking lack of consensus on how to implement the necessary changes was also revealed.

As merit pay programs are slowly adopted across the public sector, the opinions revealed by this poll can be seen as pandemic. Most employees are dissatisfied with the performance appraisal systems that emerge, and few believe that their managers are capable of overcoming cronyism and developing a system that works.

The White House has echoed this lack of faith in the fiscal 2004 budget, accusing federal agencies of giving 85% of their senior executives "the highest possible performance rating-an assertion that virtually everyone in Washington is way above average." Other surveys of federal employees have revealed widespread dissatisfaction with the way federal managers deal with poor performers.

These critiques may be seen as the growing pains of public sector merit-based compensation programs. Often the subjects of intense scrutiny and debate, these programs are seen as necessary to align pay with performance and reward employees for their value to their organizations. As federal agencies seek the proper measures for performance appraisal, seasoned HR vets may recall an era when pay-for-performance plans were just as contentious in the private sector.

MERIT PAY IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Meanwhile, public schools seeking to adopt merit pay plans are quickly realizing that developing goals to successfully motivate teachers is a daunting task. Teachers' unions have made their position clear: no teacher is to be measured by test scores alone. Claims that home life, learning disorders, and other circumstances beyond the control of teachers have profound effects on test scores form the core argument against a quantitative method of performance evaluation.

The work of University of Tennessee statistician William Sanders, however, provides a creative blueprint for the quantitative measurement of public sector performance. His methods chart the progress of students against their own scores from the previous year in an attempt to measure the effectiveness of each teacher. Known as the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, it challenges the claim that good teaching is impossible to define. It has, of course, been highly controversial.

Subjective measures also have their problems. In a public school, where one principal may supervise twenty to thirty teachers, the time commitment required to thoroughly evaluate an entire teaching staff may be prohibitive. Many schools are already criticized for under-supervising their teachers, and their administrative budgets leave them little room for improvement. There is potential for further mimicry of the private sector, as some schools involve supervisors, co-workers, and students' parents in a 360-degree review.

Confidentiality poses another problem. Qualitative merit pay systems work best when evaluations and raises are kept confidential. No one knows what his or her coworkers make, and dissension is managed. In a public-sector environment, where pay is a matter of public record, how are endless debates about raises and evaluations to be avoided?

Budgetary restrictions, in many cases, nip this problem in the bud. When merit-based raises increase pay by a mere one percent, employees are unlikely to protest too much. However, this begs the question: If public sector pay for performance is merely a way of saying "thank you" to strong performers, is it worth the effort?

MOTIVATION

As public and private sector compensation methods become more closely aligned, telling questions are raised about what motivates public sector employees. Is the difference in motivational makeup between a state employee and Joe Businessman so great that efforts to institute private sector compensation systems are doomed?

Public sector employees are expected to work in order to serve the community, motivated more by service, challenge, and recognition than monetary reward. Some opponents of merit pay in the public sector argue that these factors make efforts to adopt the compensation systems of the business world futile, as they won't improve performance. Proponents counter that the loyalty of the public sector employee should not be taken for granted. Many see merit pay as a potential solution, giving high-performing employees the recognition they crave.

The tailoring of any merit-based compensation system is a painstaking process with a long incubation period. As many believe it to be a necessary struggle, the criticisms of those in the public sector will have to be answered as they are in the private sector: in time.