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Published on Mon, Jan. 24, 2005
Merit Pay the Right Way
PRIVATE SECTOR GOES BEYOND INCENTIVES TO IMPROVE
By Merrill Vargo
Last week when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled his plan to tie teachers' pay to merit rather than seniority, he undoubtedly struck a chord with many Californians who earn their salaries under a merit system. Do an excellent job, reap the rewards. Do just an adequate job? Don't expect a raise.
The governor rightly connects the dots between student achievement and teacher performance. But without the right support for teachers, the game is rigged from the start.
Let's go back to the private sector model. Improvement and innovation bloom in any industry when the people doing the work -- that means both managers and line workers -- benefit from four crucial ingredients:
• Incentive to do better.
• Access to the best ideas about what successful competitors are doing.
• Real-time data about current performance.
• The flexibility to make needed changes.
Incomplete focus
The problem with the governor's proposal -- as with the proposals of the two administrations before him -- is that they focus only on the first ingredient: incentives. But do we honestly believe the problem with schools today is that teachers aren't trying hard enough?
If the governor truly wants to apply private-sector standards to improving schools, let's talk about the three other elements that make merit-based pay a fair proposition. First, access to the best ideas. The private sector calls this benchmarking. Business leaders take for granted that if you want to improve something, you start by looking at what your peers are doing. Pepsi studies Coca-Cola; Burger King scrutinizes McDonald's. But people who work in schools rarely get this privilege. Most teachers work all day in their classrooms without the benefit of peer feedback or advice from experts in their field.
In the private sector, leading companies routinely invest in professional development. But in public education, professional development is the first thing on the chopping block when budgets get tight.
Next up: Provide teachers with real-time data about how their kids are doing. Again, no business would expect to increase quality without a system to measure daily and weekly progress. But we don't do that in education.
What we do have is the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program -- tests that happen only once a year and that deliver results after students have moved on to the next grade. Instead, teachers need to have quickly administered diagnostic assessments at their disposal that yield easy-to-read results. The good news is these tools are out there, but without funding earmarked to purchase them, most schools go without.
Finally: Give educators the flexibility to make necessary change. So far, none of the much-vaunted flexibility to innovate enjoyed by charter schools has rubbed off on the rest of the school system. Today the infamously long ``Education Code'' -- the comprehensive set of regulations that govern schools -- is as long as ever.
One-way street
The current state of public education is such that there is plenty of pressure to improve, but scant investment in the tools educators need to make it happen. Switching to a merit-based pay system for teachers may feel like the right thing to do. But the best and brightest ideas only work if they're backed by the practical steps necessary to realize them.
If we want our teachers to strive for excellence, we must grant them the opportunity to grow professionally.
In this way, teachers are like any other group of professionals in their field. You can count on the stars to go above and beyond, just as you can rely on the clock-punchers to put in the bare minimum. But the majority, who are eager to do better for California's kids and for themselves, welcome the chance to raise the level of their performance -- if only they had the resources to do so.
MERRILL VARGO, a former English teacher, is the executive director of the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), a non-profit education reform organization. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.
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