Merit Pay for Teachers: How Will It Work?
Merit pay for teaching has been an unfulfilled goal of many teaching advocates for decades. There are examples that show it works in other parts of this nation.
What about the private and corporate segments of the United States? Do they use rewards to recognize exemplary performance, as well as to motivate quality? A prominent performance measure in manufacturing is worker productivity. The higher the production of a worker during a given period of time, the higher the coefficient of productivity, with the opportunity to increase profits. In retail, customer satisfaction is a crucial measure of management approach. The healthcare industry uses trial studies to achieve success in improving the quality of life of patients and extending life expectancy. As diverse as these three companies are, each remains globally competitive by reducing errors. Through research and measurement, they isolate those areas of operation where the most errors occur and initiate practices to reduce those errors, with merit rewards as the primary incentive.
Although somewhat simplistic, it could be useful to identify proven techniques that help these employment segments with error reduction.
Goal Setting – With an ongoing process to isolate error-prone activities, goals that are observable and specific are set in writing and communicated to everyone involved in reducing errors. Vague goals are easy to achieve, but useless.
Use of computer-assisted technology: Creating software and/or hardware designed to alleviate tasks of a repetitive nature generally helps reduce errors. Precision results are more likely to be produced with the use of technology than when humans perform the same tasks.
Decision making: Responsibility for problem solving is often best vested in those closest to the problem. If you see it, fix it. Don’t just call a specialist.
Merit Rewards: For that individual who achieves success above the expected level, their repeat performance at that level is more likely to occur with merit recognition.
Business Competitive Support: American ingenuity continues to be the reason for surges in unprecedented job growth at small start-ups. This American service sector continues to grow and create solutions wherever challenges exist.
CAN MERIT AWARDS WORK IN EDUCATION?
Now, let’s examine how well these techniques are, or could, benefit public education. If the private sector finds competitive success by implementing proven approaches to error reduction, could the public sector do the same? Perhaps attention to the elements that have made our American private sector the envy of the world would do the same for education.
Let’s examine them one by one:
Goal Setting: This is one of the important sections of the Federal Policy “No Child Left
behind the law Each state has the authority to write, communicate, and implement specific and measurable student learning outcomes. This state-by-state process is moving slowly and many of the already published learning targets are not measurable, therefore no one can agree on precisely whether these stated student goals have been achieved.
A practical solution to this dilemma would be to insist that all goal statements contain action verbs that define observable human behaviors. A simple but useful list of these verbs, ordered from the simplest to the most complex would be: identify; distinguish; Name; tidy; describe; contrast; establish a rule; apply a rule; show; and interpret.
Statements containing these verbs would not only be observable, but would also lead to measurability, a necessity for tracking learning progress with standardized tests.
Business Competitive Support: With the availability of goals that contain observable academic behaviors, the task of preparing test questions focused on these results becomes a task of precision. Research by qualified testing companies can match questions to targets very accurately. These companies now offer standardized achievement tests and scored test results.
But these results are of little use to teachers who need immediate feedback to diagnose areas for remediation. What would be most useful to educators would be an Internet system that could electronically provide teachers with short classroom quizzes and instant scoring.
Single tests of any length can be downloaded, based on the teacher’s subject choice of item characteristics, available from the testing company’s large database of test items.
Other support organizations may offer a way to provide the quiz based on the curriculum features chosen by the teacher, but each student in the class receives only a few questions. And each student’s questions would differ from the questions of everyone else in the class.
When graded and returned electronically, the score would cover all questions and a broader range of ideas, thus providing the teacher with immediate feedback on the achievement of specific academic goals for the entire class. This process has been well researched and documented for some 35 years by the independent National Assessment of Educational Progress.
If the teacher finds the results of these diagnostic tests unsatisfactory and wants a new approach to teaching the concept, a database of research-tested approaches, in lesson plan format, should be made available electronically. Over the years, educational research on successful teaching approaches has been supported by government grants and contracts, but remains hidden in some government file or some professor’s bio sheet. There is a business opportunity to validate and communicate these ideas; greatly helping teachers through Internet downloads.
These are just a few ideas that should be available to help teachers reduce errors when instructing uneducated American youth. The service sector is always willing, able and ready to fill this gap and achieve it competitively.
Use of Computer-Assisted Technology: With the familiarity of today’s educators using the Internet, the transition to the measurement processes of this classroom could occur with little training. In fact, the proliferation of software and hardware services could even ensure the security of test items for test manufacturers.
The service sector has a proven ability to quickly meet this need. Teachers would need login codes to enter the program, classroom printers to download and print unique quizzes for students to complete, built-in automatic grading capability to produce a score in the classroom and then destroy the paper tests, and database development to capture longer quizzes and exams. results over a semester or a year for teacher review and self-analysis.
This is just a sample of the aid that a creative society could provide to support our Nation’s teachers and result in better academic performance of students.
Decision Making: It goes without saying that individual leaders manage teachers’ classrooms. Your success in fostering student academic achievement is based on your ability, training, and support. Having immediate professional feedback is much better than waiting a long time for “standardized test” results that come too late to practice remediation.
Merit Rewards: The basis for awarding merit pay for exceptional performance is embedded in the record produced electronically with each use of the technology described in this article. Can be done. The private sector has shown the way!