Does Performance-Based Pay Have Any Merit?

Background

Florida is a pioneer in the effort to base teacher salaries on student performance and give those teachers with the best results the highest raises, and a bill creating a sweeping new merit pay system was the first legislation Gov. Rick Scott signed into law in March.

Merit pay is a reform pillar of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the Foundation for Excellence in Education he founded. Bush pushed for the idea while in Florida and is now touting the benefits of performance-based pay nationwide. the idea is to reward teachers who get the best results or most improvement from their students — just as the private sector would pay for performance.

The concept has district-level support too, such as Hillsborough County Public Schools superintendent MaryEllen Elia, herself a former teacher. Elia believes testing students’ knowledge before and after a course will reveal how effective a teacher is.

Data-based analysis of teacher performance is here to stay. Hillsborough County is using a $100 million Gates Foundation grant to design a new system to evaluate and train teachers. Florida won a $700 million federal Race To The Top grant to design a similar statewide evaluation system — which lawmakers now require.

Teachers and their unions object to basing teacher pay on the results of standardized exams designed to test something else entirely, but many teacher unions signed on to the Race to The Top grant.

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May 30, 2012

Merit Pay At The Top Of Florida Teachers’ Concerns

What if you threw a party, but no one who was invited appreciated your hospitality? That’s what happened with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which recently sponsored a teacher town hall meeting as part of the American Graduate project. A group of Hillsborough County teachers boarded a bus to Jacksonville for the event. The […]

Challenge To Teacher Merit Pay Rule Underway In Tallahassee

A judge in Tallahassee is hearing a legal challenge to a state rule regarding teacher evaluations and merit pay. The Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 736 last year, known as the “Student Success Act.” It sets standards for teacher evaluations and pay based on performance. Once the law went into effect last summer, state education […]

May 8, 2012

After Further Review, UMass Education Students Object To New Evaluation

Teachers-in-training at the University of Massachusetts are leading a protest against a pilot national teacher evaluation program being developed by testing giant Pearson and Stanford University, the New York Times reports. The students and their instructor are worried that turning over two 10-minute videos and a 40-page test to a faceless evaluator will not produce […]

April 16, 2012

New FCAT Brings New Complaints

Students across the state are beginning the annual Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test season this week, and critics of the high-stakes test have some new complaints this year. The Florida Department of Education has raised minimum requirements for the reading portion of the test. The goal is to improve performance long-term, but state officials admit that […]

February 24, 2012

Feedback Loop: Bill Gates And Florida’s Teacher Evaluations

Last week’s story on Florida’s teacher evaluation formula drew some thoughtful responses, including a deeper at the issues look over on the Shanker Blog. Many of the comments here expressed disbelief that Florida’s formula could measure what was promised. Floridagadfly says teaching can not be boiled down to a statistical model because students are not […]

February 23, 2012

Focus On Poverty Ignores Broader Issues, Researcher Says

Asking whether poverty is included in the Florida formula to evaluate teachers is posing the wrong question, according to Matthew DiCarlo at The Shanker Blog. DiCarlo is referring to a recent story where some educators questioned the lack of a poverty factor in the state teacher evaluation formula. State officials argue poverty is irrelevant because […]

Bill Gates: Don’t Use Evaluations To Shame

The leading advocate for modern, complex teacher evaluation formulas argues they should not be used for their most basic purpose — comparing one teacher’s score to another. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Microsoft founder Bill Gates argues individual teacher scores should not be a tool to publicly shame low-rated teachers. To do […]

February 22, 2012

Feedback Loop: Read Florida’s Teacher Evaluation Formula

A listener heard our recent story about Florida’s teacher evaluation formula, and asked us to post it on the StateImpact Florida Facebook page. “You’ve made so much of its complexity,” Chris Harris wrote. “It seems the best way to demonstrate that is to publish it in its entirety.” We agree, so here it is with […]

February 17, 2012

Why Poverty Is Not Included in the Mathematical Equation for Teacher Merit Pay

Florida teachers will soon be judged on how much they improve student scores on a standardized test. Part of their pay is going to be based on a new formula created by the state. But the formula doesn’t take into account what researchers say is one of the strongest indicators of student success: poverty. The […]

Feedback Loop: Florida’s Teacher Formula Only As Good As Its Assumptions

Reader Scubus has a detailed response to yesterday’s story about Florida’s teacher evaluation formula: You know how hurricane models vary in their predictions, and are not often in agreement or 100% accurate? That is a similar mathematical model. They are only as good as the underlying assumptions. In addition, study after study shows that children […]