NC legislature experiments with teacher incentives

Pay for public school teachers in North Carolina has been a big focus for the legislature over the last two years.  After no raises for many years, pay for starting teachers received a boost last year and pay for more experienced teachers is scheduled to increase this coming year.

This coming year's budget also includes two incentive plans that I would call unique.  One would allocate $10m to give a bonus to third grade teachers whose student growth scores place in the top 25%.  Bonus plans for individuals make sense when the employee has some control over the work environment and the metrics map reasonably well with employee effort and performance.  Although well-intentioned, I cannot help but wonder why the legislature did not consider two obvious problems with their scheme:
(1) Why put all the money on third grade teachers? Don't the other grades matter at least a little?
(2) Why didn't they select a more objective measure of actual learning?  The reward goes to the top 25%, regardless of how much or how little student growth took place.

The second plan pays a $50 bonus to Advanced Placement teachers for each student who passes the AP test.  So a student passes the AP Calculus test with flying colors, but is that because the AP teacher was so great or did it have something to do with the Algebra 1 and other teachers that they had before AP?  Also, what happens in parts of the state where school systems lack the budget to offer AP courses?  And should we be focusing incentive dollars on AP students or on those who are struggling to graduate?

The big mistake that legislators are making is the decision to use individual as opposed to group incentives.  Student achievement hinges on a collective effort of teachers from K to 12.  School-based plans are likely to be more effective than individual-based plans.

However, the third grade plan will solve one problem -- principals will not have any trouble filling open third grade positions!

Teacher tenure and civil rights

A California judge ruled Tuesday that teacher tenure locked so many incompetent teachers in place in poor performing schools in distressed neighborhoods that students in those schools were being deprived of their right to an education.  Prominent economists were hired as expert witnesses in the case.  Judge Treu cited the work of Harvard economist Raj Chetty who found that a single year in a classroom with an ineffective teacher costs the students $1.4m in lost lifetime earnings.  Tom Kane, another Harvard economist, testified that one year with an incompetent teacher costs 9.5 months of learning.

California teachers go up for tenure after only 16 months on the job.  Once tenured it takes 2 to 10 years to remove an ineffective teacher at a cost of $50 to $450k, the judge noted in his ruling.  With such a daunting process and a far from certain outcome, principals choose to leave such teachers in place.

So how does this become a civil rights issue?  The judge cited testimony that inept teachers tend to be clustered in "high-poverty, low-performing" schools with large concentrations of minorities.

Of course the ruling will be appealed and the next judge may weigh the testimony differently.  Looking at the economic and management issues at stake, here are some key questions:
1) The judge cited testimony from an expert witness hired by the defendants that 1-3% of all teachers in California are ineffective.  Ineffective teaching is not an easily measurable trait such as height or weight. If the ruling holds up, how would teaching effectiveness be measured and how would one use those measures to make decisions at the individual level?  In practice performance measures are always noisy, so the consequence would be that some good teachers would be fired because of bad metrics.
2) Who replaces the fired teachers?  Would the replacements be more or less effective in the classroom?
3) Would principals use the power to fire?  Dismissal procedures are not any fun for either party.
4) If tenure is removed, this reduces the economic rewards for entering the teaching profession.  How much will salaries have to be increased to attract the same caliber of faculty?
5) There are many issues facing inner city schools and their students; if every ineffective teacher were replaced by an ideal teacher (think Mr. Chips, Sidney Poitier in Blackboard Jungle, or Robin Williams in Dead Poets) how much would the lives of the students in those schools change?  The roles of neighborhoods, parents and culture would remain more or less the same.

Should ed school accreditation standards be changed?

WSJ reports that the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation is planning to change their standards as part of a push to increasing teacher quality.  Incoming freshmen would need to have a 3.0 GPA in high school, as compared to the current 2.5.  Freshmen also would be expected to have SAT/ACT scores in the top 50% by 2017, rising to the top third by 2020.  Ed schools also would be required to track their graduates' performance in the classroom, which presumably means more emphasis on test scores. 

This all sounds very well-intentioned.  But unless teacher salaries adjust to the top third of the college graduate salary distribution, I am skeptical that ed schools will be able to meet these goals.  Also, I wonder if more attention should be paid to what actually happens in teacher ed programs, especially in terms of opportunities to get ed students classroom experience well before they graduate.