Written by S. Rainsford
Our current education system is intent on the destruction of standards. Standards provide a form of measurement, of comparison between the good and the bad. Standards also enable us to track improvements or detractions from plans; they set expectations and enable us to follow them through. Without standards we’re aimless. Aimless seems like a good way to describe the state of education in America.
I once spoke to a family friend, we’ll call him Dave, who had been a teacher for a few different schools across south-eastern cities. He believed that to truly improve the state of schools in these areas, which mostly served under-privileged children, the administration needed to change the way in which teachers were compensated. He suggested that teachers ought to be paid based on the percentage improvement they facilitate among their students. Thus, in practice, a teacher who elects to support struggling students and successfully contributes to their performance will receive pay increases on a sliding scale. This would mean that our teachers would be incentivized to prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable among our student population, raising the quality of education and student outcomes across the board.
This principle is self-evident, and yet, our current education system is seemingly opposed to this basic fact of life: incentives. Remuneration in our public education system is primarily based on two measurements—experience (i.e., number of years teaching) and certifications. This means to increase one’s salary as a teacher in a public school you would need to seek secondary education, adding a master’s or taking certification programs. Do teaching credentials have any effect on student outcomes? The correlation is doubtful (Clotfelder, Ladd, and Vigdor, “Teaching Credentials Don’t Matter for Student Achievement”)—which is to say that our insistence on utilizing it as a proxy indicator of teaching quality is wholly imbecilic.
Dave’s reasonable suggestion has been tried—with remarkably effective results. Research in 2009 found that performance pay resulted in a massive change in student outcomes. These researchers analyzed 300 schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, with a change of nearly 10% to math and language scores in only two years of incentive pay being in place. What this paper also found was that general increases in funding on a school-wide basis did have a small impact on student outcomes—but that this method was not cost effective, and overall demonstrated poorer results compared to performance pay on a teacher-by-teacher basis. The evidence that people respond to incentives is clear—and yet in America we refuse to use these strategies.
The critic might badger us with claims that “test scores can’t accurately demonstrate the performance of a student!” (and implicitly, a teacher’s ability to educate those students). Even assuming this presupposition is true—what exactly is their suggestion? It is not an option to simply leave performance unmeasured, and yet it seems that this is what the education elite would have us do. In Inside American Education, Thomas Sowell noted that our teachers’ unions—a politically effective and uncompromising sort—evaluate a system’s success by how “committed” a governmental body is to education. In other words, by how many rote disbursements of cash they are willing to send into the education machine.
What does this communicate to those we’ve entrusted with America’s education? All the wrong things. Andrew S. Grove, the business mogul and former CEO of Intel, noted that:
“… unions and most government jobs lean toward pure experience-only salary scales. Apart from whether this is fair or not, the message from management is that performance doesn’t matter much. Consider teachers in many school systems. A good one gets paid the same salary as a bad one if they both have been around for the same length of time. How a teacher is evaluated is not usually tied even symbolically to compensation.”
What ought we conclude from this? Performance pay is already in place. Teachers are incentivized—but incentivized towards all the wrong sorts of things. Their “performance” is measured by how many years they have taught, not if those years have been well spent, and what sorts of credentials are on their resume, not if those credentials affect student outcomes. What America needs is reorientation at all levels of our education system. We need to track, evaluate, and incentivize good behavior for all parties involved. This is the path forward for our students, and our nation. As the late Charlie Munger once said:
“Show me the Incentive, and I will show you the Outcome”