Tag Archives: Teacher Compensation

Douglas County Colorado experiments with variable teacher pay

11 Jun

 

Moi wrote in Study: Teacher merit pay works in some situations:

 

Teacher compensation is a hot education topic. The role of evaluations in compensation, merit pay, pay based upon credentials and higher pay for specialty areas are all hot topics and hot button issues. The Center for American Progress has a report by Frank Adamson and Linda Darling Hammond. In the report, Speaking of Salaries: What It Will Take to Get Qualified, Effective Teachers In All Communities  Adamson and Darling- Hammond write:

 

As Education Trust President Kati Haycock has noted, the usual statistics about teacher credentials, as shocking as they are, actually understate the degree of the problem in the most impacted schools:

 

The fact that only 25% of the teachers in a school are uncertified doesn’t mean that the other 75% are fine. More often, they are either brand new, assigned to teach out of field, or low-performers on the licensure exam … there are, in other words, significant numbers of schools that are essentially dumping grounds for unqualified teachers – just as they are dumping grounds for the children they serve….

 

Download this report (pdf)

 

Download the executive summary (pdf)

 

Melanie Smollin has an excellent post at Take Part, Five Reasons Why Teacher Turnover Is On The Rise Marguerite Roza and Sarah Yatsko from the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Education have an interesting February 2010 policy brief.

 

Stephanie Simon of Reuters writes in the article, Valuing Physics Over P.E., Colorado Schools Test Novel Pay Scale:

 

A wealthy school district in Colorado is launching a radical experiment that sets a different pay scale for each category of educator, ensuring that even the best third-grade teacher would never earn as much as a veteran high-school math teacher.

The new system, which takes effect next month for all 3,300 educators in suburban Douglas County, Colorado, has sparked fury and resentment among some teachers and some parents. But it has also drawn interest from superintendents around the nation.

“It’s quite novel,” said Eric Hanushek, an education economist at Stanford University.

School districts across the United States have traditionally treated all teachers the same; no matter what grade or subject they taught, they started at the same base salary and received the same raises for experience and advanced degrees.

In recent years, districts have tried to differentiate a bit by offering merit pay to their most effective educators, signing bonuses for teachers in high-poverty schools, and pay bumps for those in hard-to-staff fields, such as special education. But Douglas County’s system goes much further.

The district’s chief human relations officer, Brian Cesare, said he asked school administrators, “Which jobs keep you up at night because they are so difficult to fill?” Using the answers as a gauge of supply and demand, he divided teaching jobs into five salary bands.

Most elementary, art and physical education teachers are in the lowest bracket; their annual salary tops out at $61,000. Middle-and high-school English teachers can earn up to $72,000. High-school science and math teachers draw upper salaries of $82,000. At the very top: Special education therapists, who max out at $94,000.

QUIRKS IN SYSTEM

The broad categories contain some quirks: The district is more selective about kindergarten and first grade teachers than other elementary teachers, Cesare said, so they fall in a higher bracket. Middle school social studies teachers are considered easy to hire, so they’re in the lowest bracket.

The goal, Cesare said, is to “pay the top more… the bottom less.”

No teacher currently employed by Douglas County will have to take a pay cut, but if they’re earning more than their market value, their merit bonuses will be smaller, Cesare said.

A sprawling swath of suburbia between Denver and Colorado Springs, Douglas County is one of the wealthiest in the nation, with a well-regarded school system. A slate of conservative Republicans took control of the school board in 2009 and has pushed through a series of controversial policies, including expanding the number of charter schools and providing vouchers to help students pay tuition at private and religious schools. The voucher system is being challenged in court.

The board abolished traditional tenure protections for teachers in 2010 and said last year it would no longer recognize the teachers’ union after contract negotiations hit an impasse.

With no contract to set guidelines on salaries, performance evaluations or working conditions, the board is free to impose systems like the new market-based pay rate.

“We no longer exist,” said Brenda Smith, the president of the local union, who has mustered protests against the new system but cannot block it.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/douglas-county-teacher-pay_n_3417079.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

 

 

What the various studies seem to point out is there is no one remedy which works in all situations and that there must be a menu of education options.

 

Resources:

 

A Lively Debate Over Teacher Salaries                         http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/05/a-lively-debate-over-teacher-salaries/

 

Are Teachers Overpaid?                                                http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/02/are-teachers-overpaid/

 

Some Teachers Skeptical of Merit Pay                   http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/13/some-teachers-skeptical-of-merit-pay/

 

Related:

 

Washington D.C. rolls out merit pay                                https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/washington-d-c-rolls-out-merit-pay/

 

Report from The Compensation Technical Working Group: Teacher compensation in Washington                                      https://drwilda.wordpress.com/tag/teacher-recruitment/

 

Fordham Institute report: Teacher pensions squeezing states https://drwilda.com/2013/06/07/fordham-institute-report-teacher-pensions-squeezing-states/

 

Where information leads to Hope. ©  Dr. Wilda.com

 

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

 

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

 

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART©                           http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

 

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©                                                http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

 

Dr. Wilda ©                                                                                      https://drwilda.com/

 

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Fordham Institute report: Teacher pensions squeezing states

7 Jun

 

Moi has posted about teacher compensation, but she has never posted about teacher pensions. In Study: Teacher merit pay works in some situations, moi wrote:

 

Teacher compensation is a hot education topic. The role of evaluations in compensation, merit pay, pay based upon credentials and higher pay for specialty areas are all hot topics and hot button issues. The Center for American Progress has a report by Frank Adamson and Linda Darling Hammond. In the report, Speaking of Salaries: What It Will Take to Get Qualified, Effective Teachers In All Communities  Adamson and Darling- Hammond write:

 

As Education Trust President Kati Haycock has noted, the usual statistics about teacher credentials, as shocking as they are, actually understate the degree of the problem in the most impacted schools:

 

The fact that only 25% of the teachers in a school are uncertified doesn’t mean that the other 75% are fine. More often, they are either brand new, assigned to teach out of field, or low-performers on the licensure exam … there are, in other words, significant numbers of schools that are essentially dumping grounds for unqualified teachers – just as they are dumping grounds for the children they serve….

 

Download this report (pdf)

 

Download the executive summary (pdf)

 

Dave Eggers and NÍnive Clements Calegari have a provocative article in the New York Times, The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

 

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible… https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/is-it-true-that-the-dumbest-become-teachers/

 

More researchers are looking at teacher salaries as an element of attracting and retaining quality teachers. States and local governments are looking at a key element of the compensation package which is the pension benefit.

 

https://drwilda.com/2012/07/27/study-teacher-merit-pay-works-in-some-situations/

 

Joy Resmovits writes in the Huffington Post article, Teacher Pension Funds Hit District Budgets, Fordham Report Says:

 

 

The report takes a deep look at three school districts — Milwaukee, Cleveland and Philadelphia — and the impact of pension costs. On average, pensions are costing these districts $943 per student, the report says.

 

“It puts it in a metric that education people can understand: how many thousands of dollars per pupil are going to retirement costs,” said Bob Costrell, one of the study’s analysts. “In many states you’ve got retirement costs that are already taking up a few thousand dollars per pupil, which could rise much more if action isn’t taken.” In Philadelphia, Costrell found, the school district now spends $438 per student on retiree costs, but that may soar to about $2,361 per pupil by 2020.

 

“Playing out what this means in dollars and cents at the district level is scary,” said Sandi Jacobs, the vice president for policy at the National Center for Teacher Quality, a group that advocates tougher teacher evaluations and defined-benefit pensions.

The pension problem is creeping up on school districts across the country. Because pension funding accrues during teachers’ working lifetimes, a crush of retiring baby boomers causes more money to flow out of the funds than in. From 2009 to 2012, pension liability shortfalls swelled in 43 states. Some estimates put teacher pension unfunded liability at $390 billion to $1 trillion.

 

The possibility of fixing the problem is limited, Fordham’s Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli note in an introduction. Existing pension plans are “constitutionally protected,” burdening young teachers with changes but leaving retirees unaffected, the authors argue. “We’re saddled with a bona fide fiscal calamity,” they write, “and no consensus about how to rectify the situation.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/teacher-pension-funds-fordham_n_3393697.html?utm_hp_ref=@education123

 

Chester E. Finn and Michael J. Petrilli comment about the Fordham Institute report about teacher pensions.

 

 

Here is the Finn and Petrilli summary:

 

The big squeeze

 

Chester E. Finn, Jr. , Michael J. Petrilli / June 6, 2013

 

There’s no shortage of bad news in education these days, nor any dearth of stasis, but at least education reform is a lively, forward-looking enterprise that gets positive juices flowing in many people and that is leading to promising changes across many parts of the K–12 system. We are focused on making things better—via stronger standards (Common Core), greater parental choice (vouchers, charters, and more), more effective teachers (upgrading preparation programs, devising new evaluation regimens) and lots else.

 

When it comes to pension reform in the education realm, however, it’s hard to stay positive. Here, we’re saddled with a bona fide fiscal calamity (up to a trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities by some counts) and no consensus about how to rectify the situation. No matter how one slices and dices this problem, somebody ends up paying in ways they won’t like and perhaps shouldn’t have to bear. All we can say is that some options are less bad than others.

 

Today’s new Fordham study examines how three cities (and their states) are apportioning the misery—or failing to do so. This analysis pulls no cheery rabbits out of a dark hat, but it definitely illustrates the nature and scale of the pension-funding problem and describes a couple of painful yet, in their ways, promising solutions (or partial solutions) to it. As you will see in the summary report (by Fordham’s Dara Zeehandelaar and Amber Winkler) and several technical papers to follow, economist and pension expert Robert Costrell and education-finance expert Larry Maloney parsed the budgets of the Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Philadelphia school districts to estimate just how big an impact their pension and retiree-health-care obligations will have on their bottom line in coming years. (The Philadelphia paper is also now available on our website.)

 

This is hardly an academic exercise. As our title indicates, these obligations are putting “a big squeeze” on district budgets. In Philadelphia—today the most threatened of the three districts—our analysts estimate that the school system could find itself spending as much as $2,361 per pupil by 2020 on retiree costs alone. That represents a staggering increase ($1,923) from its current level, a huge price tag that can only mean fewer resources for teacher salaries, individualized instruction, new instructional technologies—and pretty much everything else that schools need and do.

 

Yet it’s not a foregone conclusion. Since we launched this study almost three years ago, both Wisconsin and Ohio passed pension-reform legislation that significantly brightened the economic outlook for the public school systems of Milwaukee and Cleveland. (Pennsylvania is battling over pensions as we write.) These reforms lowered the projections for 2020 retiree spending from $3,512 (without Wisconsin’s Act 10) to $1,924 per pupil in Milwaukee. Act 10 will thus save the district an estimated $1,588 per pupil in retirement costs in 2020 alone. Ohio’s SB 341 and SB 342 could save Cleveland $1,219 per pupil in 2020; not only do they lower projections from $2,476 to $1,257, but in 2020 the district will actually be spending less on retirement than it did in 2011.

 

Numbers like those are good for district budgets, but they exact a price. Yes, much of the debt burden was taken off the shoulders of school districts (and students), but it was placed instead on the shoulders of new, current, and retired teachers, as well as state taxpayers. This is especially vivid in Ohio, where cuts to pension benefits for new teachers may significantly reduce the desirability of a Buckeye teaching job.

 

Some might call this approach “eating our young,” making teaching notably less alluring for bright-eyed young instructors (and possible future teachers) while maintaining relatively generous benefits for veteran teachers and current retirees—some of whom will spend more years in retirement than they did in the classroom. Yet because of a legal environment that typically considers all public-sector pension promises, once made, to be “constitutionally protected,” policymakers have few other choices. (The exception is retiree health care, a benefit that in many states does not enjoy the same protections and thus could be a candidate for belt-tightening.) Never mind that yesterday’s “pension giveaway” becomes today’s “constitutionally protected obligation.” This is another example of how lawmakers in one year can tie the hands of their successors for decades to come.

 

It seems to us inevitable that, one day, public-sector employees across the United States—including but definitely not limited to educators—will find their pensions and other retirement benefits fundamentally transformed into something more like what’s now commonplace in the private sector: 401(k)-style plans that provide some assistance from employers but put much of the retirement-savings onus on employees themselves. At the very least, we’ll see a transition to cash-balance plans, which keep the government on the hook for a guaranteed payout but allow teachers to “cash out” at any time without losing their pension wealth. (Such plans also allow for greater portability than traditional state-managed retirement systems.)

 

But for now we’re stuck with the consequences and costs of a giant Ponzi scheme: Lawmakers have promised teachers retirement benefits that the system cannot afford, because the promises were based on short-term political considerations and willfully bad (or thoroughly incompetent) math. (For instance, assumptions about market returns that were wildly optimistic and assumptions about longevity that were overly pessimistic.) The bill is coming due and someone’s going to get soaked.

 

To repeat, no solution spares everybody. The best option is probably to share the pain: among retirees, current teachers, new teachers, school districts, and taxpayers.

 

Regarding the first two groups, without running afoul of constitutional protections, states can curtail retiree health care, as Wisconsin and Ohio did, which frees up some resources to apply to immutable pension obligations. In some states and districts (no one knows how many), governments have been picking up the tab for retirees’ health insurance between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five (when Medicare kicks in). This benefit is practically nonexistent in the private sector, and for good reason: People in that age range are generally quite capable of paying for their own health insurance. Most are still working and participate in group plans operated by their employers.

 

As for filling the hole of unfunded liabilities, there’s little choice but to raise contribution rates for teachers, to increase districts’ contribution rates (which decreases funds for students) or to seek bailouts from states or the federal government (otherwise known as the “charge-it-to-taxpayers” gambit). But this is akin to putting water in a leaky bucket. Raising more revenue is necessary, but unless you attend to the leak (also known as currently accruing costs!), you’re going to have to put more and more water in. Perhaps the plug is reducing benefits, increasing age and years-of-service requirements, or decreasing retirement income via lower salary multipliers—all reasonable fixes.

 

A better idea? Buy a new bucket.

 

The unions, naturally, will scream bloody murder. It’s their job to try to hold all of their members harmless, including both current teachers and retirees. So this won’t be an easy fight.

 

But what should be clear from our new study is that doing nothing is not an option. Without immediate action, the problem will grow worse and districts will eventually get crushed—meaning tomorrow’s children will pay the price for yesterday’s adult irresponsibility. State lawmakers need to step up to the plate. Wisconsin and Ohio, in their ways, have at least begun to move.

 

Related Articles

 

40 reasons to call Harkin’s claim of flexibility laughable

The ESEA-reauthorization bill released by Senate HELP committee Chairman Tom Harkin could have left much more policy to the states

By the Company It Keeps: Robin Lake

Andy Smarick’s latest interview is with Robin Lake, director of the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)

Authorizer of, not in, the district

D.C. takes two steps forward, one step back

 

Category: Governance / School Finance

 

Citation:

 

The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School-District Budgets

 

By Dara Zeehandelaar, Ph.D. , Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. / June 6, 2013

 

Foreword by Chester E. Finn, Jr. , Michael J. Petrilli

 

When it comes to pension reform in the education realm, it’s hard to stay positive. Here, we’re saddled with a bona fide fiscal calamity (up to a trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities by some counts), and no consensus about how to rectify the situation. No matter how one slices and dices this problem, somebody ends up paying in ways they won’t like and perhaps shouldn’t have to bear. All we can say is that some options are less bad than others.n The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School-District Budgets, we analyze and project how big an impact the pension and retiree health care obligations will have on the budgets of three school districts: Milwaukee Public Schools, Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and the School District of Pennsylvania.

 

The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School-District Budgets is a summary report by Dara Zeehandelaar and Amber M. Winkler, based on three technical analyses conducted by Robert Costrell and Larry Maloney to be released by the end of Summer 2013.

 

See:

 

M-RCBG Faculty Working Paper No. 2012-08

 

Underfunded Public Pensions in the United States: The Size of the Problem, the Obstacles to Reform and the Path Forward

Thomas J. Healey, Carl Hess, and Kevin Nicholson

 

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/publications/fwp/2012-08

 

It’s overwhelming: State and municipal defined benefit pension plans doomed by fundamental flaws

 

http://www.statebudgetsolutions.org/publications/detail/its-overwhelming-state-and-municipal-defined-benefit-pension-plans-doomed-by-fundamental-flaws#ixzz2VVkrsDC2

 

 

The pension liability of states and local districts is the elephant in the room/

 

Resources:

 

A Lively Debate Over Teacher Salaries                             http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/05/a-lively-debate-over-teacher-salaries/

 

Are Teachers Overpaid?                                                      http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/02/are-teachers-overpaid/

 

 

Where information leads to Hope. ©  Dr. Wilda.com

 

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

 

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

 

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART©                           http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

 

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©                                                http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

 

Dr. Wilda ©                                                                                      https://drwilda.com/

 

 

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Study: Teacher merit pay works in some situations

27 Jul

Teacher compensation is a hot education topic. The role of evaluations in compensation, merit pay, pay based upon credentials and higher pay for specialty areas are all hot topics and hot button issues. The Center for American Progress has a report by Frank Adamson and Linda Darling Hammond. In the report, Speaking of Salaries: What It Will Take to Get Qualified, Effective Teachers In All Communities  Adamson and Darling- Hammond write:

As Education Trust President Kati Haycock has noted, the usual statistics about teacher credentials, as shocking as they are, actually understate the degree of the problem in the most impacted schools:

The fact that only 25% of the teachers in a school are uncertified doesn’t mean that the other 75% are fine. More often, they are either brand new, assigned to teach out of field, or low-performers on the licensure exam … there are, in other words, significant numbers of schools that are essentially dumping grounds for unqualified teachers – just as they are dumping grounds for the children they serve….

Download this report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Melanie Smollin has an excellent post at Take Part, Five Reasons Why Teacher Turnover Is On The Rise Marguerite Roza and Sarah Yatsko from the University of Washington’s Centeron Reinventing Education have an interesting February 2010 policy brief.

In Beyond Teacher Reassignments: Better Ways School Districts Can Remedy Salary Inequities Across Schools Districts Roza and Yatsko report:

This brief addresses this concern by demonstrating that districts would NOT need to mandatorily reassign teachers. It shows that there are other ways to restructure allocations that do not systematically shortchange the neediest schools. Discussed here are four options that districts could pursue to remedy school spending inequities created by uneven salaries:

  • Option 1: Apply teacher salary bonuses to some schools to balance salaries

  • Option 2: Vary class size across schools to level spending

  • Option 3: Concentrate specialist and support staff in schools with lower-salaried teachers

  • Option 4: Equalize per-pupil dollar allocations

Download Full Report (PDF: 736 K)

Of all the issues about teacher compensation, one of the hottest is “merit pay.”

Dylan Matthews writes in the Washington Post article, Does teacher merit pay work? A new study says yes:

There’s very good evidence that teacher quality matters a lot in terms of student performance in school and success later on in life. The economist Raj Chetty of Harvard, for example, has found that students randomly placed with more experienced kindergarten teachers not only perform better on tests but earn more and save more for retirement as adults, are likelier to go to college, and go to better colleges than their peers with less experienced teachers. Eric Hanushek of Stanford estimates that a good teacher – defined as at the 84th percentile, or one standard deviation above the mean for you stats nerds – provides students with test scores associated with an increase of between $22,000 and $46,000 in lifetime earnings.

Findings like these lead some to favor “merit pay” regimes that include student test scores as a determinant of teachers’ salaries. This has met opposition from teachers’ unions and testing skeptics, who argue that it would result in teaching-to-the-test at the expense of actual learning. For a long time, the data has been mixed on merit pay. Two studies from Mathematica Policy Research in 2010 that found little benefit, while a study in Nashville found mild benefits for fifth graders but none for other students.

That has changed with the publication of a new paper (pdf) by Harvard’s Roland Fryer, the University of Chicago’s Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and John List, and UC San Diego’s Sally Sadoff. The authors went into nine K-8 schools in Chicago Heights, a city 30 miles south of Chicago, and randomly selected teachers (who had to consent, which 93.75 percent did) to take part in a merit pay scheme. The students affected were overwhelmingly low-income, with 98 percent receiving free or subsidized lunches. Teachers in the experiment were offered $80 per percentile improvement in student test scores, for a maximum reward of $8,000, compared to a typical teacher salary of $50,000.

The authors split teachers in the study into a control group, who were not offered any rewards, a “gain” group, which was promised rewards of up to $8,000 at the end of the school year, and a “loss” group, which was given $4,000 upfront and asked to pay back any rewards they did not earn. The idea behind the latter group was that loss aversion should motivate teachers to perform better than they would if they only stood to gain more money. Additionally, the gain and loss groups were split, with a “team” group being rewarded on the basis of theirs and fellow teachers’ test scores, and the “individual” group being reward only on the basis of their own scores. The conclusion: it worked, and it worked almost twice as well when the money was given at the start and then taken away…. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/23/does-teacher-merit-pay-work-a-new-study-says-yes/

One might ask why “merit pay’ seemed to work in the situation studied?

Jordan Weissmann writes a provocative analysis of the study in the Atlantic article, A Very Mean (But Maybe Brilliant) Way to Pay Teachers:

But Levitt, Fryer and Co. argue that there’s a serious problem with merit pay. So far, they say, there’s been scant evidence that it actually works. Studies of teacher incentive programs in Tennessee and New York City failed to find any signs that they improved student learning. In the New York experiment, which Harvard’s Fryer conducted, the impact may have even been detrimental. 

Enter loss aversion. The authors theorized that instead of offering a lump-sum bonus to teachers come summertime, it might be more effective to give instructors money upfront, then warn them that they would have to pay it back if their students didn’t hit the proper benchmarks. Rather than tap into teachers’ ambition, they’d tap into their anxiety.

To test their idea, the authors designed an experiment for the 2010-2011 school year involving 150 K-8 teachers from Chicago Heights, a low-income community in Illinois. The instructors were randomly assigned to a control group or one of two main bunches, which I’ll shorthand as the “winners” and the “losers.” The winners agreed to work under a traditional year-end bonus structure, where they could make up to $8,000 extra based on their students’ standardized test scores. The losers were given $4,000 off the bat and informed that if their students’ turned in below-average results, they’d have to pay a portion of it back commensurate with just how poor their scores were. On the flip side, an above-average performance could earn them additional bonus money, up to the full $8,000. 

The authors then divided the winners and losers again so that some teachers would be rewarded based on their results as a group, and others would be rewarded based on their results as individuals. 

Come vacation time, the losers had won. In math, paying teachers a year-end bonus had no statistically significant effect. When teachers had money to lose, though, their students over performed. The impact was large — the equivalent of improving a teacher’s skills by one full standard deviation — and the pattern held whether teachers were compensated as a group or as individuals. The authors’ data on reading scores turned out to be shakier, since most students ultimately had more than one instructor working with them on language skills, but it indicated a similar trend. 

In short, they found that merit pay can work. You just have to be tricky, and a little bit mean, with how you implement it…. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/a-very-mean-but-maybe-brilliant-way-to-pay-teachers/260234/#.UBHCJts3U6I.email

Citation:

Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment*

Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

Harvard University

Steven D. Levitt

The University of Chicago

John List

The University of Chicago

Sally Sadoff

University of California San Diego

Abstract

Domestic attempts to use financial incentives for teachers to increase student achievement have been ineffective. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the power of loss aversion—teachers are paid in advance and asked to give back the money if their students do not improve sufficiently—increases math test scores between 0.201 (0.076) and 0.398 (0.129) standard deviations. This is equivalent to increasing teacher

quality by more than one standard deviation. A second treatment arm, identical to the loss aversion treatment but implemented in the standard fashion, yields smaller and statistically insignificant results. This suggests it is loss aversion, rather than other features of the design or population sampled, that leads to the stark differences between our findings and past research. 

What the various studies seem to point out is there is no one remedy which works in all situations and that there must be a menu of education options.

Resources:

A Lively Debate Over Teacher Salaries                         http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/05/a-lively-debate-over-teacher-salaries/

Are Teachers Overpaid?                                                http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/02/are-teachers-overpaid/

Some Teachers Skeptical of Merit Pay                   http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/13/some-teachers-skeptical-of-merit-pay/

Related:

Washington D.C. rolls out merit pay                  https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/washington-d-c-rolls-out-merit-pay/

Report from The Compensation Technical Working Group: Teacher compensation in Washington                   https://drwilda.wordpress.com/tag/teacher-recruitment/

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

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The teacher master’s degree and student achievement

23 Jul

In Education Trust report: Retaining teachers in high-poverty areas, moi said:

Every population of kids is different and they arrive at school at various points on the ready to learn continuum. Schools and teachers must be accountable, but there should be various measures of judging teacher effectiveness for a particular population of children. Perhaps, more time and effort should be spent in developing a strong principal corps and giving principals the training and assistance in evaluation and mentoring techniques.

The Ed Trust report, entitled “Building and Sustaining Talent: Creating Conditions in High-Poverty Schools That Support Effective Teaching and Learning,” examines how several districts have handled the issue of teacher retention:

Specifically, districts should take the following steps:

• Recruit talented school leaders to their highest need schools, an get them to stay. In addition to the districts spotlighted earlier, the District of Columbia Public Schools has taken a rigorous approach to principal recruitment. The district scours student achievement data from school districts around the country (especially those close to D.C.) and then actively recruits principals of top-performing schools.

• Put in place teacher and school-leader evaluation systems that differentiate educator effectiveness in order to identify top performing teachers and leaders. Using these systems in conjunction with data on working conditions and attrition, districts can study which teachers are more and less satisfied, as well as which ones are staying and leaving — and why.

• Provide teachers in the highest need schools with meaningful professional growth and career ladders as well as opportunities to collaborate with other teachers, as Ascension Parish and Boston Public Schools have done.

• Avoid isolating their most effective teachers and, instead, build teams of highly effective teachers in the district’s most challenging schools, as both Boston Public Schools and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools have done.

• Concentrate not just on recruiting new school leaders and teachers to high-need schools, but on developing the skills and instructional abilities of existing employees, as have Fresno and Ascension Parish.

• Implement a tool to measure teacher perceptions of their teaching environment, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ working conditions survey, and then use data from the tool to identify target schools and determine primary issues that need to be addressed. For example, Pittsburgh Public Schools works with the New Teacher Center to implement a district-wide survey on working conditions. The district requires all schools to use the data to identify a plan of action and pays special attention to the plans of schools with the poorest survey results to ensure that the planned interventions align with the identified areas of need.

• Once better evaluations are in place, districts should make working conditions data part of school and district-leader evaluations. North Carolina requires that survey data on working conditions are factored into school-leader evaluations, which encourages leaders to take the survey results seriously and to act on areas identified as needing improvement.

CONCLUSION

To date, the conditions that shape teachers’ daily professional lives have not been given the attention they deserve. Too often, a lack of attention to these factors in our highest poverty and lowest performing schools results in environments in which few educators would choose to stay. For too long, the high levels of staff dissatisfaction and turnover that characterize these schools have been erroneously attributed to their students. But research continues to demonstrate that students are not the problem. What matters most are the conditions for teaching and learning. Districts and states have an obligation to examine and act on these conditions. Otherwise, we will never make the progress that we must make to ensure all low-income students and students of color have access to great teachers.                                                                                                                                http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/Building_and_Sustaining_Talent.pdf

Melanie Smollin has an excellent post at Take Part, Five Reasons Why Teacher Turnover Is On The Rise See, Report: Make Improving Teacher Working Conditions a Priority http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2012/06/report_make_improving_teacher_working_conditions_a_priority.html

https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/education-trust-report-retaining-teachers-in-high-poverty-areas/

The Center for American Progress has released the report, The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement: De-emphasizing the Role of Master’s Degrees in Teacher Compensation written by Raegen Miller and Marguerite Roza.

Miller and Roza write in the issue brief:

All teachers in Finland have a master’s degree, and they get extraordinary results from their students. If we want be(er results in U.S. schools, then, we should require teachers to have a master’s degree, so the argument goes.

But this argument has two fatal flaws. First, teachers in Finland hail from the top 10 percent of their graduating class.25 “is selectivity is woven into a set of policies that Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford University, has astutely described as a “teaching and learning system.”26 “e Finnish system could scarcely be more diferent than our domestic grab bag of policies arising from approximately 15,000 separate school districts carrying out their responsibility to provide public education, variously conceived by the diverse states of a country with an unmatched tolerance, at least among wealthy industrialized nations, for inequity in school funding and facilities.

Secondly, Finnish teachers hold master’s degrees that augment their knowledge and skills in a way that’s deliberately connected to their instructional challenges. Secondary teachers earn a master’s in the subject of instruction, and the master’s degree required of elementary teachers equips them with specialized knowledge and skills often found only among special education teachers and school psychologists in U.S. schools. “us, holding master’s degrees means Finnish teachers either have a serious grasp on academic content or are well equipped to problem solve around the individual learning needs of their students.

“The typical master’s degree held by a U.S. teacher and the associated skills a(ached pale in comparison. Moreover, it’s unlikely to move in this direction barring a tectonic shift in the higher-education landscape. Institutions of higher education, of course, won’t be at the vanguard of efforts to repeal legislation that inflates demand for one of their most lucrative products, master’s degrees in education. In addition, it bears mentioning, for example, that Connecticut’s requirement that teachers seeking a professional license hold a master’s degree was unscathed by recent reform-conscious legislation in that state. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/07/pdf/miller_masters.pdf

In Is it true that the dumbest become teachers? Moi said:

There is a quote attributed to H.L. Mencken:

Those who can — do. Those who can’t — teach.

People often assume that if a person could do anything else, they probably wouldn’t teach. Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. has an interesting article in the Washington Post.

In Do teachers really come from the ‘bottom third’ of college graduates? Di Carlo writes:

The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers “come from the bottom third” of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates…

Overall, then, the blanket assertion that teachers are coming from the “bottom third” of graduates is, at best, an incomplete picture. It’s certainly true that, when the terciles are defined in terms of SAT/ACT scores, there is consistent evidence that new teachers are disproportionately represented in this group (see here and here for examples from the academic literature).

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/do-teachers-really-come-from-the-bottom-third-of-college-graduates/2011/12/07/gIQAg8HPdO_blog.html

https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/is-it-true-that-the-dumbest-become-teachers/

There isn’t really a definitive answer. Miller and Roza’s analysis of the importance of the masters degree in Finland means that more training might be useful in student education achievement.

Related:

Urban teacher residencies                                        https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/urban-teacher-residencies/

Study: When teachers overcompensate for prejudice https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/study-when-teachers-overcompensate-for-prejudice/

The teaching profession needs more males and teachers of color https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/the-teaching-profession-needs-more-males-and-teachers-of-color/

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

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Report from The Compensation Technical Working Group: Teacher compensation in Washington

9 Jul

In Is it true that the dumbest become teachers? Moi wrote:

Dave Eggers and NÍnive Clements Calegari have a provocative article in the New York Times, The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible… https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/is-it-true-that-the-dumbest-become-teachers/

More researchers are looking at teacher salaries as an element of attracting and retaining quality teachers.

The Compensation Technical Working Group began researching teacher compensation in Washington:

Compensation Technical Work Group

Beginning in July 2011, as outlined in RCW 28A.400.201, the Compensation Working Group* began the process of developing an enhanced, collaboratively designed salary allocation model.

The new salary allocation model should align educator development and certification with compensation. It must also:

  • Attract and retain the highest quality educators
  • Reduce the number of tiers within the existing salary allocation model
  • Account for regions of the state where it may be difficult to recruit and retain teachers
  • Determine the role and types of bonuses available
  • Provide a solution to accomplish salary equalization over a set number of years
  • Include cost estimates, including a recognition that staff on the existing salary schedule have an option to be grandfathered permanently to the existing salary schedule
  • Conduct a comparative labor market analysis of school employee salaries and other compensation
  • Provide a concurrent implementation schedule

On June 30, 2012, the working group submitted its report to the Legislature:

Compensation Technical Working Group Report (Full Report, 178 pages)

Or download by section:

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The Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession summarized the report as follows:

After a year of study and work, the State’s Compensation Technical Work Group has released their recommendations to revamp the way the State pays educators and other staff in K-12 education.

Some of the highlights of their recommendations include:

  • Increasing the starting salary of teachers and educational staff associates to $48,687, which is about $15,000 more.   
  • Aligning the salary allocation model to the career continuum for educators, which would recognize a teacher’s movement from a residency certificate to a professional certificate, etc.  
  • Investing in 10 professional development days.  
  • Allocating mentors and instructional coaches in the Basic Education Funding Formula    

CSTP gathered survey responses from over 400 NBCTs about their feelings towards the draft recommendations. Their responses were presented to their Work Group in June. Click the NBCT Survey Summary. 

Next stop for these recommendations? The Quality Education Council who is made up of legislators, agency heads and educators. These recommendations can not be implemented without legislative action. To read the Work Group report, click here.  

Teacher compensation is subject to a lot of political wrangling.

Peter Callaghan of the News Tribune has written an incisive analysis of the report in the article, Teacher pay report has a lot to shock, and to like:

Under a law adopted in 1981, all teacher pay for delivering basic education must come from the state and is not subject to bargaining. In amendments approved in 1983, teachers can bargain to tap levy dollars but only for extra duties.

That additional pay can be granted only through supplemental contracts defining the extra time and responsibilities to be delivered or for “implementing specific measurable innovative activities.” This has become known as TRI pay (Time, Responsibility and Incentive.”)

But the task force’s group of education “stakeholders” – superintendents, board members, principals, finance officers and teacher union representatives – admitted it doesn’t work that way.

“… after reviewing collective bargaining agreements and sharing professional experiences with TRI contracts, the (working group) overwhelmingly concluded that TRI contracts are most often used to increase the salary allocations of staff performing basic education functions,” the final report states.

There are many reasons for this violation of law, but the working group lands on just one – the districts and their teachers had to do it to make up for shortcomings in allocations for basic teacher pay by the state Legislature.

Another reason for the gradual erosion of the rules is that unions bargained hard for it, school boards gave in and the state looked the other way. Blaming the Legislature alone means the working group members didn’t have to point fingers at one another.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/07/08/2208161/teacher-pay-report-has-a-lot-to.html#storylink=cpy

The answer to why there are not more quality teachers is not simple.

Related:

Teachers unions are losing members                         https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/teachers-unions-are-losing-members/

Education Trust report: Retaining teachers in high-poverty areas                                               https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/education-trust-report-retaining-teachers-in-high-poverty-areas/

Teachers running schools                                     https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/teachers-running-schools/

Report: Measuring teacher effectiveness https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/report-measuring-teacher-effectiveness/

Urban teacher residencies                           https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/urban-teacher-residencies/

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

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Washington D.C. rolls out merit pay

2 Jan

All politics is local.

Thomas P. O’Neill

Moi would like to modify that quote a bit to all education is local and occurs at the neighborhood school. We really should not be imposing a straight jacket on education by using a one-size-fits-all approach. Every school, in fact, every classroom is its own little microclimate. We should be looking at strategies which work with a given population of children.

A Healthy Child In A Healthy Family Who Attends A Healthy School In A Healthy Neighborhood. ©

Teachers and schools have been made TOTALLY responsible for the education outcome of the children, many of whom come to school not ready to learn and who reside in families that for a variety of reasons cannot support their education. All children are capable of learning, but a one-size-fits-all approach does not serve all children well. Different populations of children will require different strategies and some children will require remedial help, early intervention, and family support to achieve their education goals. There should also be different strategies about teacher compensation. Washington D.C. is trying out a merit pay system.

Sam Dillion reports in the New York Times article, In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay:

During her first six years of teaching in this city’s struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.

That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated “highly effective” two years in a row under Washington’s new teacher evaluation system. Those ratings also netted her back-to-back bonuses totaling $30,000.

“Lots of teachers leave the profession, but this has kept me invested to stay,” said Ms. Johnson, 29, who is a special-education teacher at the Ron H. Brown Middle School in Northeast Washington. “I know they value me.”

That is exactly the idea behind what admirers consider the nation’s most advanced merit pay system for public school teachers. This fall, the District of Columbia Public Schools gave sizable bonuses to 476 of its 3,600 educators, with 235 of them getting unusually large pay raises.

“We want to make great teachers rich,” said Jason Kamras, the district’s chief of human capital….

“The most important role for incentives is in shaping who enters the teaching profession and who stays,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “Washington’s incentive system will attract talented teachers, and it’ll help keep the best ones.”

Under the system, known as Impact Plus, teachers rated “highly effective” earn bonuses ranging from $2,400 to $25,000. Teachers who get that rating two years in a row are eligible for a large permanent pay increase to make their salary equivalent to that of a colleague with five more years of experience and a more advanced degree.

Those rewards come with risk: to receive the bonuses and raises, teachers must sign away some job security provisions outlined in their union contract. About 20 percent of the teachers eligible for the raises this year and 30 percent of those eligible for bonuses turned them down rather than give up those protections.

One persistent critic of the system is Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, who argues that the evaluations do not adequately take into account the difficulties of working in poor neighborhoods. He also says that performance pay inappropriately singles out stars.

“This boutique program discourages teachers from working together,” Mr. Saunders said. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/education/big-pay-days-in-washington-dc-schools-merit-system.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

It is interesting that some eligible teachers decided not to participate in the program.

Dave Eggers and NÍnive Clements Calegari have a provocative article in the New York Times, The High Cost of Low Teacher SalariesThe Center for American Progress has a report by Frank Adamson and Linda Darling Hammond which discusses the importance of teacher pay.

In the report, Speaking of Salaries: What It Will Take to Get Qualified, Effective Teachers In All Communities Adamson and Darling- Hammond write:

As Education Trust President Kati Haycock has noted, the usual statistics about teacher credentials, as shocking as they are, actually understate the degree of the problem in the most impacted schools:

The fact that only 25% of the teachers in a school are uncertified doesn’t mean that the other 75% are fine. More often, they are either brand new, assigned to teach out of field, or low-performers on the licensure exam … there are, in other words, significant numbers of schools that are essentially dumping grounds for unqualified teachers – just as they are dumping grounds for the children they serve….

Download this report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Teacher compensation is important to retaining quality teachers.

Melanie Smollin has an excellent post at Take Part, Five Reasons Why Teacher Turnover Is On The Rise

With approximately 1.6 million teachers set to retire in the next decade, replenishing America’s teaching force should be a top priority. But filling classrooms with new teachers is only half the battle. Retaining them is equally important.

Numerous studies show that teachers perform best after being in the classroom for at least five years. According to a McKinsey study, 14 percent of American teachers leave after only one year, and 46 percent quit before their fifth year. In countries with the highest results on international tests, teacher turnover rates are much lower—around 3 percent.

This constant cycling in and out of new teachers is a costly phenomena. Students miss being taught by experienced educators, and schools and districts nationwide spend about $2.2 billion per year recruiting and training replacements.

Why are so many new teachers fleeing the profession after so few years in the classroom? Here are the top five reasons teacher turnover is an ongoing challenge:

5. BURNOUT: A recent U.C. Berkeley study of Los Angeles charter schools found unusually high rates of teacher turnover. At the 163 charter schools studied, teacher turnover hovered around 40 percent, compared to 15 percent at traditional public schools.

Since demands on charter school educators are seemingly boundless, including extended hours, researchers theorized, burnout is a viable explanation for the teacher exodus. “We have seen earlier results showing that working conditions are tough and challenging in charter schools,” explained U.C. Berkeley’s Bruce Fuller. “Charter teachers wear many hats and have many duties and are teaching urban kids, challenging urban kids, but we were surprised by the magnitude of this effect.”

4.THREAT OF LAYOFFS: In response to annual budget shortfalls, districts nationwide have sent pink slips to tens of thousands of teachers each spring for the past four years. In 2011, California sent out 30,000.

Retired teacher and author Jaime O’Neill believes this ongoing threat to job security has a destabilizing effect. As a new teacher, he wrote, you can expect your job “threatened each and every year when the annual state budget reveals once more that big cuts to education are coming, that you’ve been pink slipped until or unless there’s a last-minute reprieve. That yearly panic will cause you to wonder why you ever went into teaching in the first place, and you will surely make plans to seek other employment with each mention of just how precarious your employment is.”

3. LOW WAGES: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently said that teachers should earn between $60,000 and $150,000 per year. That’s a far cry from the current national average starting salary for teachers, which is $35,139.

Linda DeRegnaucourt, an accomplished high school math teacher, told CNN that after working for five years without a raise, and taking home an annual salary of $38,000, she simply cannot afford to continue doing the job she loves. DeRegnaucourt, like many other teachers, will leave the profession to pursue a more lucrative career.

2. TESTING PRESSURE: Since the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced in 2001, standardized test scores in math and reading have become the most important accountability measure used to evaluate schools.

Studies show that pressure to raise student test scores causes teachers to experience more stress and less job satisfaction. Many educators resent narrowing curriculum and stifling creativity in favor of teaching to the test.

On the National Center for Education Information’s “Profile of Teachers in the U.S. 2011,” the majority of comments submitted by survey respondents were “expressions of strong opposition to the current emphasis on student testing.”

As states increasingly rely on standardized test scores to evaluate individual educators, determine teacher pay and make lay-off decisions, testing pressure will only increase.

1. POOR WORKING CONDITIONS: When the Gates foundation polled 40,000 teachers about job satisfaction, the majority agreed that supportive leadership, time for collaboration, access to high quality curriculum and resources, clean and safe buildings, and relevant professional development were even more important than higher salaries.

But working conditions in many public schools remain far from this ideal—especially for beginning teachers, who are most likely to be assigned to the highest-need schools. Despite the added challenges they face, these teachers are often given few resources and little professional support.

Marguerite Roza and Sarah Yatsko from the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Education have an interesting February 2010 policy brief.

In Beyond Teacher Reassignments: Better Ways School Districts Can Remedy Salary Inequities Across Schools Districts Roza and Yatsko report:

Inside nearly all large school districts, the most experienced and highly paid teachers congregate in the more affluent schools. The opposite takes place in the poorer schools, where teachers tend to be more junior and lower paid, and teacher turnover is higher. Financially, this maldistribution means that a larger share of the district’s salary dollars are spent on the more affluent schools, and conversely, the poorer schools with lower salaries draw down less funds per pupil. The problem, of course, is that the resulting dollar allocation patterns work to reinforce achievement gaps, not address them….

This brief addresses this concern by demonstrating that districts would NOT need to mandatorily reassign teachers. It shows that there are other ways to restructure allocations that do not systematically shortchange the neediest schools. Discussed here are four options that districts could pursue to remedy school spending inequities created by uneven salaries:

  • Option 1: Apply teacher salary bonuses to some schools to balance salaries

  • Option 2: Vary class size across schools to level spending

  • Option 3: Concentrate specialist and support staff in schools with lower-salaried teachers

  • Option 4: Equalize per-pupil dollar allocations

Download Full Report (PDF: 736 K)

The goal of putting a quality teacher in every classroom depends upon preserving the ranks of quality teachers during times of tight budgets.

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

 

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