Originally published by Education Sector with co-author Robert Rothman.
Generations of education reformers have sought to strengthen the ranks of public school teaching. And, almost always, their recommendations have included abolishing what is known as the single salary schedule, the nearly universal practice in public education of paying teachers not on the basis of performance, but strictly on the basis of the college credits they’ve amassed and the years they’ve taught.
The organizers of a 1955 White House education conference counseled in a report to President Eisenhower that, “Every effort must be made to devise ways to reward teachers according to their ability without opening the school door to unfair personnel practices.” The authors of “A Nation at Risk,” the stinging 1983 indictment of public education, had the same message: Teacher salaries needed to be “professionally competitive, market sensitive, and performance-based.”
So did the Teaching Commission, a 19-member panel of national luminaries chaired by Louis Gerstner, the former chairman of IBM. “By precluding the possibility of performance-driven compensation, we fail to attract more talented and motivated individuals to our schools,” it warned in 2004.
But though there have been many performance-pay experiments in public education since the advent of the single salary schedule back in the 1920s, most haven’t lasted more than a couple of years.
That shouldn’t be a surprise, despite performance pay’s many influential advocates. Teachers unions are partly responsible; many of them have fought performance pay aggressively sincetheir rise to power in the 1960s. But there’s another, rarely mentioned reason why performance pay has never caught on in public education: Rewarding teachers on the basis of their performance requires a credible system of measuring the quality of teachers’ work—something that the vast majority of public schools don’t have.
A host of factors—a lack of accountability for school performance, staffing practices that strip school systems of incentives to take teacher evaluation seriously, union ambivalence, and public education’s practice of using teacher credentials as a proxy for teacher quality—have resulted in teacher evaluation systems throughout public education that are superficial, capricious, and often don’t even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students’ learning.
The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring and largely neglected problem in public education, one with consequences that extend far beyond the performance pay debate. Because teacher evaluations are at the center of the educational enterprise—the quality of teaching in the nation’s classrooms—they are a potentially powerful lever of teacher and school improvement. But that potential is being squandered throughout public education, an enterprise that spends $400 billion annuallyon salaries and benefits.
The task of building better evaluation systems is as difficult as it is important. Many hurdles stand in the way of rating teachers fairly on the basis of their students’ achievement, the solution favored by many education experts today. And it’s increasingly clear that it’s not enough merely to create more-defensible systems for rewarding or removing teachers. Teacher evaluations pay much larger dividends when they also play a role in improving teaching.
This report explores the causes and consequences of the crisis in teacher evaluation. And it examines a number of national, state, and local evaluation systems that point to a way out of the evaluation morass. Together, they demonstrate that it’s possible to evaluate teachers in much more productive ways than most public schools do today.