On Being a Teacher, or Why Merit Pay Stinks.

I'm taking a course on organizational theory right now and the readings have caused me to reflect on an issue that is getting a fair deal of play in education right now - merit pay for teachers. There are many specific arguments that can be made as to why merit pay is a bad idea and doesn't work, but I am a fan of looking at things from first principles. My readings on organizational theory have helped me to consider the first principles that are at play for the people who argue in favour of merit pay.

Those who tend to argue merit pay also argue for school choice, competition, rankings and the implementation of all sorts of market reforms in the education system. Ultimately these arguments are based on a fundamental vision of education that is drastically different from mine and that of most people close to schools. The market reformers view education in terms of a factory, where the inputs are young students with little knowledge and the outputs are graduates with a vast array of knowledge. Somewhere in between there is a transformation process where teachers install knowledge into pupils. The vision is of little boys and girls sitting on an assembly line, moving forward from teacher to teacher as the workers open flap A, insert knowledge component X and apply a diagnostic scanner to ensure the component is working properly. Next station!

Scientific Management guides this style of production and requires managers to "develop precise, standard procedures for doing each job; select workers with appropriate abilities; train workers in the standard procedures; carefully plan work; and provide wage incentives to increase output" (Daft and Armstrong, 2009, p. 24). The approach was pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor and worked well when implemented in the Bethlehem Steel Plant in 1898 to ensure that more employees unloaded more iron and loaded more steel onto rail cars.

Forgive me for being condescending, but students are not chunks of iron and plates of steel. Nor are they intricately wired and extensively engineered automobiles being pieced together on an assembly line.

(Interestingly, the Hawthorne Studies of the late 1920s and early 30s showed that performance incentives actually had a demotivating effect, even for factory work, and that improvements to productivity were actually made through the positive treatment of employees and by listening to employees concerns and ideas. But I digress.)

My argument is this, students are not products moving along an assembly line and teachers are not factory installers. The work of education and of teachers is complex, variable and highly skilled. As was once described to me by a speaker whose name I forget, pilots fly a finite number of models of planes and if they don't know something about the plane there is a manual they can pull out to find the answer - students don't come with manuals. Students do however come with an infinite number of contextual variables: family, prior education, economic status, emotional aptitudes, intellectual variables, medical conditions, behaviour disorders, talents, passions, fears, hopes and dreams.

The important work of teachers, done well, requires sorting through those variables to assess the needs of individual students, designing educational plans that meet those needs, implementing the plans and adapting as required, while observing multiple data sources to determine whether the outcomes are being met and what further steps need to be taken.

This type of work can not be boiled down into standard procedures and cannot be appropriately measured using standardized tests. Increasing teacher effectiveness is achieved not by tying a carrot to the end of a stick, but by providing teachers with the time, resources and professional freedom that is required to get the work done well. Those people who are looking for accountability should look to professional models like those in place for doctors and lawyers where the professionals are required to maintain ongoing professional development (prescribed by the individual practitioners) and the profession is given the authority to police the competency of its peers and determine whether they are fit to practice. (Interestingly, in Alberta, we are almost there.)

The best thing that can be done for education and our students is to provide the conditions necessary to allow teachers to do their important work.



References

Daft R. L., & Armstrong A. (2009). Organization theory and design. Toronto, ON: Nelson Education.

Fraser Institute is Flat Wrong

Earlier this year, I wrote about the Manning Centre for Democracy’s conference on Alberta’s future. What I didn’t discuss in that post was how I spent an hour in the afternoon in the foyer outside the conference room talking about education with Fraser Institute economist Peter Cowley. Cowley is the author of the Fraser report cards on education and is trotted about as their educational expert, although he has no credentials in the field. The useless and over-normalised ranking of Alberta's high schools appeared in the Calgary Herald last weekend. Along with an exceptionally well-written and referenced (especially given the rotten assignment) article from Sarah McGinnis, the feature included a fallacious and ignorant editorial from Cowley.
Most of the fallacies in his argument can be accounted by the fact that he is an economist from BC and not an educator in Alberta. What is most reprehensible is that I pointed out these fallacies to him in January and he chose to ignore them and propogate the myths.

Fallacy Number One: "there is no provision for the routine expansion of successful operations." For 10 years, educational partners in Alberta have been engaged in a process specifically designed to expand successful operations called the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement. It is a highly successful model that is based on collaboration between a number of stakeholder organisations, including the ATA. It is the exact opposite of competition and it is having profound impacts on learning in Alberta that would not be possible under Fraser's preferred models for education.

Fallacy Two: "professional autonomy in the classroom inhibits the adoption of more effective teaching practice." Once again, this is completely opposite from the truth. As a teacher I had many strategies for delivering curriculum. Some of them were safe, tried and true. Others were innovative, off-the-wall and risky. Some of the practices I tried worked and others did not, but it was because of professional autonomy that I felt I could try them out, evaluate their effectiveness and adjust my practice accordingly. Without autonomy, I would have continued to deliver the safe, tried and true methods day-in and day-out.

Fallacy Three: "professional autonomy limits the principal's role as head teacher and mentor, making classroom level improvements more difficult to establish." Autonomy means that I, as an educated professional, can choose which practices I will use in my classroom. If my principal wants me to use a different strategy he would need to make the case for it. He needs to convince me of its merits and we would have to engage in academic discourse over its pedagogical value. As a result of this collegial environment, we have better educational outcomes for students. The alternative is that the principal comes in and dictates practice without discussion and without debate over what is best for the individual students in the individual classrooms (this is mentorship?).

Fallacy Number Four: "limitations on hours of work make it difficult for individual schools to extend the school timetable." Interestingly, in Alberta, the school jurisdictions with the most flexible timetables are the same jurisdictions that have hours of work clauses in their collective agreements. These agreements simply mean that the boards must achieve such changes in consultation with teachers. In many cases, the flexibility that allows for these innovations is because of these clauses. By spelling out the number of hours of assignable and instructional time for a teacher, it becomes easier to allocate those hours outside of the traditional teaching day.

Fallacy Number Five: there is "no evidence that any BC teacher had ever lost his right to teach due to incompetence." I don't have expertise in the BC education system and so will not comment on that aspect, but this is not the case in Alberta. Until last year teacher competency was enforced by the Council on Alberta Teaching Standards, who have removed certificates from teachers deemed to be not competent. Alberta's teachers are committed to upholding the honour and integrity of the profession, they have enforced professional conduct for decades and last year took over the role of policing competency as well.

Simply put, Cowley is an economist from British Columbia who has made no significant efforts to truly understand the education system in Alberta. He is advocating a tired mantra of privatisation and using falsehoods and data manipulation to advance his cause. I'm less dissapointed in him than I am in the Calgary Herald for publishing the tripe.