Pay for Test Scores
Basing teacher pay on student test scores has got to be one of the worst ideas yet. Ask a teacher. Or ask a researcher. Both of them will tell you that it just doesn’t work.
The most recent blow to proponents of pay for test scores came from a study in Nashville, released in September by Vanderbilt University researchers. They tracked nearly 300 teachers for three years. Half of them could get bonuses of up to $15,000 for raising scores. The other half got no bonuses.
“We sought a clean test of the basic proposition: If teachers know they will be rewarded for students’ test scores, will test scores go up?” said Matthew Springer, executive director of Vanderbilt’s National Center on Performance Incentives. “We found the answer to that question is no.”
In human terms.
The results of the Nashville experiment were no surprise to Tanya Caruso, president of the Eagle County (Colorado) Education Association, which has had a merit-pay program for the past decade. “All teachers want kids to do well,” she says. “More money isn’t a better incentive than watching your kids succeed. We’re all doing everything we possibly can-we can’t work any harder!”
Eagle County now rewards teachers partly on the basis of scores of all the kids at their school and partly on scores of all the kids in the district.
But the pay scheme started out with an attempt to link teachers’ pay to their own students’ individual test scores. “It was crazy,” Caruso says. “You start with 20 kids and end up with 15 different kids, and some of them are going somewhere else for reading, plus there are the art and music people, who don’t have test scores.
“I see other school districts trying to attach pay to individual test scores, and I think, ‘Good luck with that!’ Been there, done that. You should look at those scores, of course, but not attach them to pay.”
Pay for Test Scores
Basing teacher pay on student test scores has got to be one of the worst ideas yet. Ask a teacher. Or ask a researcher. Both of them will tell you that it just doesn’t work.
The most recent blow to proponents of pay for test scores came from a study in Nashville, released in September by Vanderbilt University researchers. They tracked nearly 300 teachers for three years. Half of them could get bonuses of up to $15,000 for raising scores. The other half got no bonuses.
“We sought a clean test of the basic proposition: If teachers know they will be rewarded for students’ test scores, will test scores go up?” said Matthew Springer, executive director of Vanderbilt’s National Center on Performance Incentives. “We found the answer to that question is no.”
In human terms.
The results of the Nashville experiment were no surprise to Tanya Caruso, president of the Eagle County (Colorado) Education Association, which has had a merit-pay program for the past decade. “All teachers want kids to do well,” she says. “More money isn’t a better incentive than watching your kids succeed. We’re all doing everything we possibly can-we can’t work any harder!”
Eagle County now rewards teachers partly on the basis of scores of all the kids at their school and partly on scores of all the kids in the district.
But the pay scheme started out with an attempt to link teachers’ pay to their own students’ individual test scores. “It was crazy,” Caruso says. “You start with 20 kids and end up with 15 different kids, and some of them are going somewhere else for reading, plus there are the art and music people, who don’t have test scores.
“I see other school districts trying to attach pay to individual test scores, and I think, ‘Good luck with that!’ Been there, done that. You should look at those scores, of course, but not attach them to pay.”
Pay for Test Scores
Basing teacher pay on student test scores has got to be one of the worst ideas yet. Ask a teacher. Or ask a researcher. Both of them will tell you that it just doesn’t work.
The most recent blow to proponents of pay for test scores came from a study in Nashville, released in September by Vanderbilt University researchers. They tracked nearly 300 teachers for three years. Half of them could get bonuses of up to $15,000 for raising scores. The other half got no bonuses.
“We sought a clean test of the basic proposition: If teachers know they will be rewarded for students’ test scores, will test scores go up?” said Matthew Springer, executive director of Vanderbilt’s National Center on Performance Incentives. “We found the answer to that question is no.”
In human terms.
The results of the Nashville experiment were no surprise to Tanya Caruso, president of the Eagle County (Colorado) Education Association, which has had a merit-pay program for the past decade. “All teachers want kids to do well,” she says. “More money isn’t a better incentive than watching your kids succeed. We’re all doing everything we possibly can-we can’t work any harder!”
Eagle County now rewards teachers partly on the basis of scores of all the kids at their school and partly on scores of all the kids in the district.
But the pay scheme started out with an attempt to link teachers’ pay to their own students’ individual test scores. “It was crazy,” Caruso says. “You start with 20 kids and end up with 15 different kids, and some of them are going somewhere else for reading, plus there are the art and music people, who don’t have test scores.
“I see other school districts trying to attach pay to individual test scores, and I think, ‘Good luck with that!’ Been there, done that. You should look at those scores, of course, but not attach them to pay.”
http://www.nea.org/home/42390.htm
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