Florida links teacher pay to student test scores
22 Mar 2006 
in mid-afternoon 
Matt Winckler
A move to link teacher bonuses and raises directly to student test scores is being adopted by several local districts in Florida. I am very much in favor of the principle behind the move. Salaries and bonuses are based on performance everywhere else; why not teaching? Opponents argue that this isn’t fair to teachers who have handicapped students in their classes, since those with disabilities won’t be able to learn as fast through no fault of the teacher, and teachers have no say in which students are assigned to their classes. While that seems like a reasonable objection to me, I see it as being a possible exception to the rule rather than throwing out the rule entirely. For that matter, since it’s the top ten percent of teachers getting bonuses and so forth, why not just keep track of “special education” teachers separately from the rest? One way or another, teacher salaries should be tied to performance.
Of course, I’m really just arguing for the sake of arguing here. If you want to know what I really think, I say that the entire government education system should be systematically dismantled in favor of a private (classical) education system, in which apprenticeships and technical internships would play a very significant factor. I seize every opportunity I can to vote against school levies. Would that a politician would come along that had the guts to be opposed to government education…but of course, doing so would be political suicide. After all, who’s against free education?
Does this only count for standardized tests? If this was for tests that I was allowed to draw up, and my pay was linked to it, you’d be sure I’d create a test that even a handicapped kid could ace.
Presumably the testing is conducted by a suitably independent third party.
However, you will kindly recall that we are talking about the government here.
while, accountablity for teachers and increased student mastery of material is desireable, linking a teacher’s pay to student performance on a standardized test isn’t the way to do it.
you’ll recall that many in the private sector have had accounting scandals because CEOs wanted to show good earning in order to earn their bonuses. Fannie Mae’s recently resigned CEO got $32 million of his $52 million from bonuses related to earnings. low and behold, Fannie Mae had to recently restate its earnings to the tune of $11 billion!! this is of course, just one of many examples. given the same incentive, teachers too will find ways to cheat, be it filling in answers, giving extra time, etc. the book Freakonomics provides a good discussion of this issue.
linking a teacher’s pay to students standardized test performance is based on 3 bad assumtions: 1) a teacher’s ability, and performance, is accurately measured by the students’ performance on the test, 2) that the students’ test scores are influenced exclusively by the teacher, and 3) that standardized tests are an accurate measure of student learning.
it would make more sense to link priest’s pay to parishiner behavior.
check out my take on the issue at: http://www.autodogmatic.com
Carlos, you indicate there are three bad assumptions being made here:
Have you a better suggestion for measuring teacher performance? GPA - based on work the teacher grades? Writing ability - based on work the teacher grades? Interviews - with whom on what subject?
Does the measure have to be influenced exclusively by the teacher? I work on teams at work. If part of my team fails, we all fail, and my performance is based on that. Welcome to the real world, where nothing lives in a vacuum. Your examples of a kid doing poorly on a test because he didn’t get enough sleep is like many statistics - it might hold for the individual case, but when you aggregate the data, such special-case deviations will disappear.
I’m open to constructive suggestions and better ideas. I already offered one. But at a more realistic minimum, I think standardized testing is a good start.
I read your diatribe, but that’s all it turned out to be - a diatribe, with no solutions. Don’t complain about something if you don’t have a better solution to offer. Or was your solution that all incentives are inherently flawed because human nature dictates that we will cheat to get them, so we should do away with incentives altogether? But it’s already been repeatedly demonstrated that Communism doesn’t work, so let’s avoid that line of reasoning.
thanks for you comment matt. why not leave a comment on my post? anyway…
while you may not like what i had to say, you still fail to refute any of my statements on the 3 bad assumptions, and in the case of the 2nd one, you help make my point.
in terms of a better alternative to a standardized test: i would suggest a writing test, as a start. when i was in high school, we had a graduation test that included writing a response to a given question. the responses weren’t graded by our teachers, but by a committee of educators at the county level. it was read by 3 teachers, none of which knew what school we went to, our names, or who our teachers were. our scores were then based on those 3 evaluations. why not use a combination of things to evaluate student performance, especially if teacher pay and evaluations are being linked to student performance? HOW DOES A STUDENT’S PEFORMANCE ON A SINGLE TEST ACCURATELY REFLECT A TEACHER’S PERFORMANCE?
on the second assumption, you make my point for me. you could be in a science class with an awful teacher, yet because you got together with peers to study, or your parents are engineers, or whatever, you did well on the test. yet, under the florida system, a teacher gets a bonus for your performance, despite the fact that they are a lousy teacher.
as far as kids performing poorly due to being sick, etc… many retake the SAT, LSAT, MCAT, and indeed high school graduation tests for these very reasons! there have been several studies done that demonstrate the influence of outside factors on student test performance.
i disagree that standardized tests are a good start. they don’t measure much more than one’s ability to take a test. the fact that kaplan and princeton review can charge from $800 to over $4000 for test prep courses in which they don’t teach any material, but rather how to game the system. theoretically, the teachers could form their own company, charge money for the courses so students can increase their scores, then also get the state bonus b/c their students demonstrated “learning.”
communism? where the hell did that come from? i’m sorry you find my take a “diatribe” just because you disagree with my take. such attacks aren’t needed in an educated discourse, unless of course, that’s not what you’re going for.
of course all incentives have a dark side, that is econ 101. i never advocated for doing away with them. there is however, a difference between a good incentive, and a bad one. the florida plan is a bad one, and this has been demonstrated (again, i refer you to freakonomics). further, by linking pay and evaluations soley to student test performance, it discourages creative teaching, and it discourages good teachers from going to poor performing schools-precisely where they are most needed.
there are many ways in which we could have accountability for teachers than to try and pass off student standardized test performance as an accurate measure of teacher performance. currently, teachers are evaluated by their own administration. why not have observations and evaluations by administrators of other schools? why not have students do writing tests? do group projects that are evaluated by more than just the teacher? why not use standardized tests as a small component, if people have such a hard on for standardized tests? why not have parents more accountable for their children’s education? why not require students to complete outside the classroom learning exercises? why not do interviews the same way colleges do? and on, and on, and on.
you see matt, there are several alternatives to using standardized tests as a gold standard.
I have QUESTIONS for you that need ANSWERING
“…1) a teacher’s ability, and performance, is accurately measured by the students’ performance on the test,”
What do we use to judge a teacher’s ability? How much fun she is? How well her students can colour inside the lines? Homework scores? Their average income after graduation?
” 2) that the students’ test scores are influenced exclusively by the teacher”
Hey, I’m tech support. If some dolt busts his computer in stupid ways, I had nothing to do with it but I’ve still got to deal with it. I see no reason why teachers shouldn’t have these unfair doublestandards.
3) that standardized tests are an accurate measure of student learning.
Again, what do we use to measure how well students learn? Average income after graduation? The attractiveness of their SO? How good they feel about themselves? Favorite soft drink? Test scores seem like a more rational standard.
It’s not that test scores aren’t rational by nature, it’s that a standardized test is a poor measure of learning.
Let me draw a parallel to what I do. I’m an accountant and my company has a profit share program. The profit share program arbitrarily allocates points to different departments based on certain manager’s opinions. Fair enough. Then, the points are further allocated out to individuals within the department by a different layer of management. That, too, is fine. The problem is that my bonus is tied to a measure I have zero control over, which is the EBITDA performance of my company. As an accountant and financial analyst, I have little control over this measure. The closest I can come to affecting our company’s performance is through lower interest rates secured through smarter financing deals. But wait, EBITDA is BEFORE INTEREST, so that doesn’t affect my bonus either. Thus, I’m not very well incentivized to do my job.
Standardized tests present the same problem for teachers. They’re using a sledgehammer to try and do the job of a rock hammer (Shawshank, baby!). As such, they will do a poor job of incentivizing teachers to teach better. Not only that, but they’ll incentivize teachers to teach to tests. You guys are smart and I’m sure you did well on your SATs (I know I did). However well I did, I’m not deluded enough to think that the SAT perfectly measured my intelligence.
Certainly you guys realize that a standardized test aren’t perfect and you can see the flaws in this system. As for a better system, I’ll have to think about it. However, saying that you shouldn’t critique a plan unless you have a better one is silly. Such reasoning is probably how these plans passed muster. Guess what? A bad idea is a bad idea. Incentivize people, yes. But don’t put into place incentives that obviously won’t work and may even have unintended consequences that do even more damage to students.
I’ve grown up with standardized tests being the be all-end all for most of my life. The Iowa Standard determined whether I’d stay homeschooled or if I’d be shipped off to a public school. So I’ve never understood why people get their hair in such a tussle about standardized tests. If it’s good enough to determine the fate of homeschooled youngins, why not others?
geoff, the ANSWERS to your QUESTIONS are in my second comment. but you still fail to answer: are students performance on standardized tests an accurate reflection of teacher performance? and what about all the perverse incentives this system creates?
i give several suggestions for measuring teacher performance, none of which involve your ridiculous hyperbole.
instead of relying soley on the students performance on a single test, i propose using a mix of things. i would rely heavily on a writing exam, which would not be graded by the teacher, but by a 3 teacher committee. there would be proper safeguards so as to ensure that no one on the committee knew who the students or teacher are. i think interviews could be used the same as colleges use interviews in admissions decisions. other tests could be used that involve short answer and essay questions, in addition to the standard multiple choice.
i think you misunderstand my second bad assumption. what i’m saying is that a student can do well on a standardized test regardless of teacher quality–but this system rewards teachers for student test performance. the teacher is not the exclusive influence on a student’s learning. their peers, parents, siblings, and personal makeup influence student learning. this being the case, why reward bad teachers who have good students? conversely, why punish good teachers who have bad students? if we are going to incentivize teachers in this way, why not hold parents responsible for their children’s learning too? tax break for children who show improvement, tax raise for students who “fail to make the grade.”
as neal says, test scores themselves may be rational, but they do not reflect a person’s intelligence, nor what they may have learned in a given class.
if we are going to pay teachers for their performance, then we should seek a system that can best reflect their performance. having students take a one day test and using the results to judge the teacher’s ability is foolish. the student test results at best provide a snapshot and at worst are meaningless. why use such a poor measure? it provides bad incentives, and is ineffective. using multiple criteria would bring us closer to an effective measure of teacher quality.
Would the written exam include testing of the proper use of capitals?
As a (secondary English) teacher, it always saddens me and makes me question my performance as a teacher when my students, after leaving my class, do not use in their everyday lives the skills I labored to teach them. Can you quantify that?
I also believe the ultimate responsibility lies solely with the parents, so it should be the free market that determines a teacher’s worth — a parent should fire a teacher who is not doing a good job with his child. I am for a totally private education system.
Taking jabs at Carlos’ use or lack of use of capitals is kinda silly, isn’t it? Capitalization use or lack thereof does not change the merit of his arguments. This is the internet, by the way.
I, too, believe that education should be privatized entirely. However, this is also not the point of this back and forth discussion.
Geoff, would your argument be expressed best as, “Since I had to jump through the hoops of standardized tests and I live in an unfair world, why shouldn’t teachers?” Maybe I misunderstand you. Is this the best argument you can make for why standardized tests are effective means to gauge successful teaching? Sounds a lot like my parents when I was a kid responding with “because I said so!”
carlos wrote:
Two reasons: firstly, I don’t care enough about this issue to bother. Secondly, why should I? If I want to talk to you, you’re right here!
Unless, of course, your comments here were designed solely to drive more traffic to your own site…in that case, I understand your pique. It’s a laudable effort, no doubt about it, but I do have a couple of tips to help you for next time: 1) pick a blog with more traffic than mine, 2) despite the overwhelming temptation, do your best to refrain from outright begging people to comment on your posts. It’s classier that way.
From your seeming allergic reaction to incentives of any sort, which you have since denied. My mistake.
HOW DO A CUBAN IMMIGRANT’S ENGLISH-AS-A-SECOND-LANGUAGE WRITING SKILLS ACCURATELY REFLECT A TEACHER’S PERFORMANCE?
Because they are subjective. Subject to bribes!
Because it’s not fair to science geniuses!
Because teams aren’t fair!
Because standardized tests aren’t fair! Oh wait, now I am confused.
eh? Hello?
carlos, carlos, come back to me! I have lost you!
I didn’t get a college interview. People get college interviews? I feel cheated! The government education system has cheated me! Or are you talking about the little 15-minute pep-talk sales pitch with the advisor?
Enough with carlos. Neal wrote:
Only if he doesn’t care about persuading anybody of the validity of his point. Poor writing is the sign of either an ignoramus or someone who doesn’t care enough to make an effort, both of which should be disregarded in any serious discussion about education. Incidentally, said discussion is not what we have here, which is why I bother replying to him.
I disagree. The reason I posted this thing in the first place is that I was amused at the government school systems stumbling upon long-established free market principles even ahead of many private schools. Whether or not government teachers’ pay is tied to performance is really a matter of little importance to me. If you truly believe that the government education system should be dismantled, then the vast majority of its affairs quickly become remarkably irrelevant. They’re only really good for the occasional chuckle or heated conversation.
Matt,
Your argument about the use of proper punctuation, though correctly punctuated, is poor. As said above, the use or lack thereof of the proper punctuation has nothing to do with the merit of the argument. Doing such is akin to dismissing a logically correct argument by discrediting the arguer. Logic stands apart from punctuation. ‘Nuff said.
To your second point, I disagree. Why do you believe the public school system should be dismantled? As a proponent of such an idea, you should be educated on the opposing views and able to explain why public school sucks on a case by case basis. That is, unless you believe the untested idea simply on theoretical grounds, which is okay, but doesn’t make for the strongest argument.
FYI, though an interesting concept, your comment format makes for incredibly slow typing if someone is uing IE to browse your site. Cheers-
Neal wrote:
Entirely possible. You’ll note that above, I indicated the problem arises in persuading anybody, regardless of the validity of the ideas in question. Good writing has everything to do with persuasive communication on a very basic level. A genius may have fabulous ideas, but a genius who cannot communicate those ideas in an educated and coherent manner will never convince anyone of their merit. Whether or not you like it (and I do), that’s reality for you.
I would be happy to outline the problems with the government schools. I’m short on time at the moment and will have to expand on this later (it probably deserves its own post), but in brief, the problems are these:
There are a bunch of smaller issues that are worth pursuing, but off the top of my head, I think they all roll into one of these two categories in a broad sense. A system that publicly denies God will inevitably teach lies, and our current system doesn’t even do that well. For more details, a good book to read is Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson.
Interesting! I’d not been aware of that; thanks for pointing it out. Now I’ll have to decide whether IE merits any time fixing the problem. :-)
Interesting, I have not encountered many proponents of leaving a public school system who argued such based on it being a God-less system. Kudos for understanding that the separation of church and state is actually beneficial to those who believe in God. I think there are much better arguments against public education that leave God out of the picture - I imagine you know these, as well, but they revolve around a free market.
Regarding the IE problem, it’s only in IE as now when I’m on Firefox, it’s very fast (real-time). That said, I made a post on Saturday that would only show up in Firefox and not show up in IE until after you posted. Weird. Good luck sorting it out.
Better arguments that leave God out of the picture? I don’t know about that. A right understanding of God is completely central to a child’s education, because it is the foundation upon which their entire worldview rests. Christians who have their children in government schools, particularly in elementary/middle school, either aren’t thinking clearly or don’t understand the ramifications of a person’s worldview.
But I know what you mean. I do fully grant that there are numerous valid arguments that don’t address the religious aspect. In my eyes, seeing the schools’ track record in academics alone ought to give Christian and atheist alike pause before putting their kids into government schools, but obviously millions of people don’t agree.
I’ll probably just get rid of the live preview thing, since it doesn’t preview Markdown syntax anyway. The post delay thing was due to Spam Karma 2 being on the aggressive side - it sent your comment into the moderation queue. There’d been some junk getting through lately, so I tweaked the settings. Obviously I need to tweak them some more.
“government school systems stumbling upon long-established free market principle”
except the florida system has little to do with the free market.
“Whether or not government teachers’ pay is tied to performance is really a matter of little importance to me.”
well, i believe we have arrived at the crux of the problem. since you don’t really care about this issue, you allow yourself to be intellectually lazy in the discussion of this issue. because this is of little import to you, i can never hope to have you look at what i say with any sort of critical thought. your responses demonstrate this well.
i do however, look forward to your post vis a vis the privatization of education. since you seem to care about that issue, perhaps that discussion will prove more fruitful. perhaps.
by the way, it’s ironic that you “don’t care enough about this issue to bother” yet posted on it yourself, and have thusfar responded with 4 additional comments. do i hear 5?
If you were riding in a car being driven by a maniac straight toward a cliff at 90 mph, would you argue with him about the last time he had his oil changed?
My dear carlos, you need not despair! I have been looking at what you say with all sorts of critical thoughts for this entire time. I guess I have not been trying hard enough. :-(
For you, my poor bitter carlos, anything. Yea, even unto a fifth comment. Yes, I did post about the topic myself. I think it’s a grand thing to tie teacher salaries to performance. I also think that, to continue the analogy, the car of government education is headed toward the cliff at 90 mph, and the issue of tying teacher salaries to performance is the equivalent of worrying about changing the oil. It’s important if you hope to maintain the vehicle, but in the big picture it’s not going to make much difference. I have no idea how long the government system will stay afloat. If I’m paying for this system anyway, then I’m all for somebody making it better (so long as it doesn’t cost me any more in taxes), but in the end, given the choice, I’d really just rather skip past all these little details and just not pay for the broken system.
As a side note, you could infer most this from the original post. I may not be passionate about debating the topic, but at least I did give you fair warning.