Comments on: Relationship-Building, Merit Pay, & Testing

By: What Is Going On With David Brooks? | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

Tue, 12 May 2009 19:24:22 +0000

[...] I’ve posted about a relatively incoherent colum he wrote last month (see Relationship-Building, Merit Pay, & Testing). [...]

By: Larry Ferlazzo

Larry Ferlazzo — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:28:26 +0000

Dorothy,

What you’ve done sounds creative, though it sounds like it could get a little tricky with colleagues deciding who among them gets the extra units. That would be my primary concern.

Larry

By: Dorothy

Dorothy — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:57:01 +0000

Well, you guys are trail blazers with these kinds of ideas So merit pay does get discussed from time to time by the media and politicians. But our Teachers’ Union has managed to circumvent it by successfully advocating for schools to get increasing numbers of management units (worth NZ$4000 per unit per annum) which can be awarded to high performing teachers BUT the whole staff is required to discuss who gets these extra units!
So in our staffroom lists were co-constructed in a very open process of what kinds of activities justify these units. So eg I get one for overseeing the technology (technicians and computers/networks) on top of my teaching duties; sports coaches; drama coaches; special needs teacher managing all the teacher aides etc etc.
This is on top of the ‘traditional’ extra units paid to deputy principals and team leaders for their leadership roles.
So it is possible for a hard working and exemplary classroom teacher to have 3 extra units of pay – and democratically agreed by colleagues.
Would that work in your district/state/country?

By: Larry Ferlazzo

Larry Ferlazzo — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:55:21 +0000

Dorothy,

Sorry for the delayed response. I’m curious — is merit pay much of an issue in New Zealand, or is it another one of our uniquely bizarre U.S. ideas?

Larry

By: Dorothy

Dorothy — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:37:02 +0000

What a ‘hot-potato’ subject. I will be watching developments with interest. As a teacher from a very low socio-economic school and part of a long term schooling improvement initiative our students do perform (surprisingly) well on tests. And our teachers are working incredibly hard on both the relationship building (which includes sports coaching, drama, culture groups etc) and the academic. If we need some differentiated pay scale, how ’bout value added ? Our students arrive at school at 5 years of age with a mean performance of 3 yrs (in literacy). Our goal is to catch them up and have them moving beyond by the time they are 10 yrs. So value added could be great compared with some of the schools from other parts of the city
Just kidding – we succeed by being collaborative, not divisive.
Dorothy
Auckland, NZ

By: Larry Ferlazzo

Larry Ferlazzo — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:08:53 +0000

Bill,

Thanks for the support, and for added reflections.

I’ll definitely explore the sources you suggested, and re-read your post on the topic.

Larry

By: Larry Ferlazzo

Larry Ferlazzo — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:07:53 +0000

Mr. Steve,

You make a good point that we need to be aware of the “world as it is” as well as “the world as we’d like it to be.”

While we want to make changes, we also need to figure out how we, and our students, can best cope with what we have now.

Larry

By: alicemercer

alicemercer — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:52:25 +0000

There's a term for that in business, cost vs. cash centers. Here's an excerpt from a post I did on measuring the success of teachers:

Generally in a business you have two types of departments, cost centers (they cost money to run, and don’t have a direct revenue stream), and revenue centers. Folks in revenue centers get measured on dollars. For instance, when I was at Wells Fargo they looked at the ROA, return on assets, and ROE, return on equity, that departments and individuals generated. Most of what I worked in were cost centers. They tried to make us more efficient by having us “bill out” to the departments we supported, but really we weren’t on subject to the numbers near as much as the revenue folks. Teaching is like working in a cost center, and the evaluations there are pretty darn subjective. If Killian and others are complaining about a lack of accountability in teaching, it’s endemic to jobs that don’t involve taking in money.

Can you measure that?

By: Bill Ferriter

Bill Ferriter — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:27:09 +0000

Hey Larry,

I enjoyed this read and couldn’t agree with you more when you talk about the “unmeasurability” (is that a word?!) of the relationship building work that teachers do.

Have you seen this bit by Matthew Ladner over on Jay Greene’s blog:

http://jaypgreene.com/2009/02/19/the-no-stats-all-star/

In it, Ladner talks about “white-space” employees—-those people who make contributions that can’t be measured so they don’t look like all-stars on the stat sheets, but they always play for champions.

Interesting concept.

The other thought that comes to mind for me is that people who want to connect relationships to test scores are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Relationships fall within the realm of social norms and merit pay falls within the realm of market norms.

Much research has been done by a guy named Dan Airely that it’s almost impossible to mix these two sets of behavioral expectations—-people will work in one realm or the other, but not both.

Here’s a post I wrote about that recently:

http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2009/03/the-impact-of-market-norms-on-education-.html

I always enjoy it when our thinking runs parallel….your experiences challenge me to think deeper.

Rock on,
Bill

By: Mr Steve

Mr Steve — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:20:19 +0000

I think that building a student’s self confidence will show an improvement on the upcoming state tests. Of course this is where we get into the area of causal and correlational impacts on test scores. Classrooms aren’t labs where we can isolate one constant to verify a hypothesis about the role student self-confidence plays on testing. How do you objectively measure self-confidence?

However, I believe that a student with more self-confidence in themselves may be willing to put a different amount of effort into taking a test that one lacking self-esteem.

A teachers attitude toward testing can begin to develop into the area of building relationships. What is the nature of the feedback a teacher gives a students after a test. On our state mandated “NCLB” test, we don’t get a chance to give them feedback. However, that is only one test of many that we give throughout the year. The test prep, drill and kill mentality can be alleviated by deconstructing a test, walking students through their thought process so they not only understand their mistakes and why the made them, but also the opportunity to learn the skills and knowledge to not make that error again. Students gain confidence in their problem solving skills and self-confidence increases.

Testing is only one avenue for providing substance for these types of discussions, but if we know they are going to have to perform on a specific format of test, why not include that format. Project based learning is great and also provides students opportunities to think about how they learn, but until a project based assessment is accepted as a valid measure of how students learn we’ve got to deal with the bubble sheets, so let’s make the best of what we’ve got.