CMS, Meet Fran Tarkenton
The former Minnesota Vikings star quarterback scores with a persuasive argument in favor of performance pay for teachers. This from The WSJ:
Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?
No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn’t get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.
Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn’t help.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers’ salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn’t rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they’ve been teaching. That’s it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you’re demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation’s children
…
The results we’re looking for are students learning, so we need to reward great teachers who show they can make that happen—and get rid of bad teachers who don’t get the job done. It’s what we do in every other profession: If you’re good, you get rewarded, and if you’re not, then you look for other work.
That’s essentially the same message CMS has been scrambling to deliver for the last year. So why the backlash and protest from teachers and parents? It’s not because district officials have botched the communications job delivering it, as CMS continues to insist, or because critics disagree with the intent and ultimate goal of performance pay.
Teachers and parents understand exactly what CMS has tried to implement, which at the core is one reason for the criticism: basing performance, in part, on a blitz of pricey new tests of questionable merit that gobble up precious classroom time and do more for creating additional layers of administrative bureaucracy than adequately gauging teacher performance or student achievement.
One of many horror stories that crossed my radar during the tsunami rollout of new summatives and formatives illustrates part of the dilemma: a parent related that his third-grade son was worried about how he performed on a particular set of tests, not because he wasn’t prepared for them or didn’t know the material, but because the person who prompted the questions could barely speak English.
Now riddle this: as a teacher, would you want the results of those tests to be used as a contributing factor to gauge your performance and, by direct extension, impact your pay? Or would you be protesting and pushing for a better plan that more effectively reflects and appropriately rewards your talents and worth?
I’m not sure if even Fran Tarkenton, despite his raw talent, dedication to the game and exacting work ethic, could’ve made the Hall of Fame if his performance had been judged on how good he threw a soccer ball.
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