Teacher performance pay: what a waste!

According to a new study from Mathematica, there’s no evidence for improved student achievement or teacher retention as a result of the highly touted teacher performance pay program in Chicago; despite protestations by Education Secretary Duncan, just as there has been no evidence so far of any benefits for the teacher bonus pay program in NYC that has cost at least $38 million this year.

The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) was developed by the Milken Family Foundation in the late 1990s; yes, Michael Milken, former junk-bond salesman, indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud. The TAP program is now being funded by a $27 million Teacher Incentive Fund grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Nevertheless, Chicago and NYC will no doubt continue to waste more millions on these misconceived programs and the feds will continue to push states to adopt them; because our decision-makers seem happy inhabiting their evidence-free zones.

There are currently 34 districts and states across the country receiving federal money to implement teacher performance pay; according to EdWeek, and seven of them use a form of the same model now been proven to be ineffective in Chicago.

This push by the feds is counter to a huge amount of accumulated evidence in social science research that extrinsic motivators like performance pay don’t work and often do harm; for example, as explained in this lecture by Daniel Pink; or this study by researchers at the London School of Economics, or this literature review, published in Science magazine.

As the director of research at LSE, Luis Garicano has written, the evidence of the harmful effects of these programs indicate that instead, managers should “ reduce the power of incentives, so promotions would be again more based on seniority and less on measured performance. “ !!!!

Which of course flies in the face of the propaganda now being propounded by this administration, in their attempt to abrogate seniority-based protections in the teacher contract.

Teachers themselves consistently respond in surveys that monetary incentives like bonuses are unlikely to work to improve teacher effectiveness, in contrast to reducing class size, which more than 90% of teachers believe would be the best way to improve their effectiveness.

Yet even the Mathematica researcher who found no positive results in the Chicago program seems to advocate wasting even more money on this program, according to his quote in Edweek:

“You have to wonder whether the result would have been different if the payouts had been larger or more meaningfully differentiated,” Mr. Glazerman said.

Sure. When thousands of teachers are being laid off across the country, and class sizes are rising at unprecedented rates, why not waste even more millions on programs with no research backing?

Race to the Top or to the Bottom? Make your voice heard!

Patrick has posted his comments on the proposed regulations for the US Dept. of Education’s Race to the Top grants – check them out!

The deadline for comments is Aug. 29 – please, even if you just write a sentence or two, make your voices heard, if only to protest the way they have left parents out of their list of “key stakeholders,” as Patrick was the first to point out. Among those cited instead are charter school operators and private foundations. Remind you of anyone?

Here is a link to the proposed regs on how this $4.3 billion funding should be divvied up, where you can also post comments.

The federal government wants to use the promise of these funds to bribe states to lift their caps on charter schools, despite any research showing that charter schools deliver superior results. Currently NY State has a cap of 200 for charter schools, which will soon be reached. Without a cap, the Bloomberg administration will be able to start hundreds more charter schools over the next few years. The DOE has publicly stated that they want to reserve 100,000 school seats in NYC for charter school students – which will require the closing of many more neighborhood public schools. No community, no matter where you live, will remain free from this threat.

The US Dept. of Education is also proposing that states be required to develop data systems that will allow tenure decisions and teacher pay to be linked to student standardized test scores, and closing a lot more schools, while reopening them with new staff. Their agenda is almost identical to that of Joel Klein, which has wreaked such havoc here in NYC.

As of this morning there were over 500 comments, most of them highly critical of the proposed regs, all of which you can access on the govt. website here.

Some of the best are from Diane Ravitch, Julie Woestehoff of PURE, a parent organization in Chicago, Helen Ladd of Duke University, Paul Barton, education researcher and consultant, Sean Corcoran of NYU and the Economic Policy Institute, and many others, including several classroom teachers. See also these letters to the NY Times, uniformly critical of Duncan's proposals. Here are comments from Charles Finn of California:

Yet again we have a system designed by bureaucrats, not educators. It gives classroom teachers virtually all of the responsibility for improving education (it's their salaries on the line, not those of principals and other administrators) while giving them no power whatsoever. Super-high-stakes testing is one of the major problems with education today -it is not the solution! Our current tests are inappropriate, and improperly used. Even the people who created them are appalled by the way scores are being used. It's time to stop the madness and actually talk with parents, teachers, and students about what is working and what is not in our schools. Politicians have their own agenda, and it's not about kids. "Race To The Top" will likely go down as President Obama's biggest blunder.

Together, the responses make a very compelling case that these proposed regulations are not only unsupported by research and experience, but will also likely lead to even worse conditions in our neediest schools.

The deadline for comments is Aug. 29 – please, even if you just write a few words let the US Dept. of Education hear from you by clicking here. Let them know that parents are the most important stakeholders of all. And please share your comments with the rest of us.

Arne Duncan in NYC: is the federal stimulus bill a Trojan Horse?

The good news: Arne Duncan came to NYC, and appeared at a press conference with the mayor and Chancellor Klein. He promised about $535 million from the federal stimulus package for NYC public schools in each of the next two years, as well as $300 million for Title I, approximately $100 million for special education, and more than $25 million in educational technology funds. (For more details, see Wonkster, GothamSchools, NY Times City Room, and the NY Post.)

Bad news: Though this infusion of cash will help fill the gap in the city education budget, it will not address the cuts in state aid to our schools, which are estimated to be $700 million or more.

More bad news: The press conference was held at yet another charter school, Brooklyn Explore Charter School. Here is an excerpt from the DOE press release:

Named a National Charter School of the Year by the Center for Education Reform, Explore Charter earned an A on its 2007-2008 Progress Report. The school serves 425 students, and more than 1,700 families are on the school’s waiting list.

Unmentioned is the fact that this school also has class sizes of 16, according to Gotham Schools.

By relentlessly promoting the success of NYC charter schools -- that is, those schools that are not under their total control -- the administration appears to forget that they have denied the vast majority of our students who attend regular public schools the same advantages. In fact, at our regular public schools, class sizes greatly exceed state and national averages and grew even larger in nearly every grade this year – as a direct result of the DOE's obstinate failure to comply with state law, .

Even more bad news: At the press conference, Duncan gave lavish praise to the myriad "reforms" of the administration, and pledged to disperse lots of cash from his new $5 billion slush fund for all those programs pushed by the Klein administration – such as encouraging more teacher performance pay based on test scores, dysfunctional "data systems", and similar initiatives that, unlike smaller classes, do not benefit our kids.

For more on this, see Diane Ravitch in Politico:

…along comes Arne Duncan, our new Secretary of Education, and everything he has said to date might have just as well been said by Bush's Secretary Margaret Spellings. Duncan paid his visit to New York City and toured a charter school, not a regular public school. He declared that the nation's schools need more testing, as though we don't have enough information already to act on our problems. He declared his support for charter schools, where only 2% of the nation's children are enrolled...

It looks like Obama's education policy will be a third term for President George W. Bush. This is not change I can believe in.

Performance bonuses: DOE throws away money to benefit adults rather than our kids

In the DOE press release yesterday about the teacher performance pay program that will cost $20 million of taxpayer money this year, amidst budget cuts to schools, that are causing the loss of critical enrichment and intervention programs, Klein claimed that “The biggest winners, though, were the students in these high-needs schools, who received the instruction and support they needed to reach new levels of performance.”

Yet despite these encomiums, today’s Gotham schools has an analysis showing very little difference in test score gains between the elementary and middle schools participating in the program and schools throughout the city as a whole; and no difference at all for high schools.

Sure, teachers who are receiving the bonuses may be happy, but I wonder how many of them actually believe in the integrity or the efficacy of the program. See Gotham schools here: Teachers are happy with bonus program, but questions remain.

In short, another way in which this administration seems intent on throwing money away in ways that may benefit adults, but not our kids.