We Tried Merit Pay for Teachers. Here’s What Actually Worked.

Originally published in the Columbus Dispatch, this is a slightly expanded version that goes into more detail. I truly appreciate the Dispatch for their willingness to include contrarian voices and headlines that help to sell newspapers.

Governor DeWine recently traveled to Washington DC to witness the signing of President Trump’s executive order to return education policy-making to the states. Several weeks earlier, Vivek Ramaswamy made education one of his most important priorities when he announced his bid to replace term-limited DeWine as our next governor.  

While it’s good to see a greater focus on centering education locally, questions remain about how Ohio’s newfound academic autonomy will actually benefit students.

No one should mourn the planned demise of the federal Department of Education. Established by Congress in 1979, ostensibly to better manage all of the federal education-related activities, the U.S. lags most of our peer nations in student academic outcomes. There is hardly a better example than this of a failed bureaucracy and misuse of trillions of taxpayer dollars.

To be sure, there are important programs and financial support from the Education Department to help schools serve students with special needs and assure compliance with federal non-discrimination laws. The executive order makes it clear those programs will continue.

Most of the department’s spending, however, is in the form of student loans for higher education. Not only do these loans saddle students with debt that can hobble them for decades, the easy money has arguably been a significant factor in the dramatic increase in college tuition costs. A study by the New York Federal Reserve found that as much as 60 percent of tuition increases can be attributed to student loans.

The first rule of holes is that when you’re in one, stop digging. Ending the taxpayer guarantee of student loans, particularly for degrees with limited earnings potential, will help solve both the student debt and unaffordable college tuition problems. 

Mr. Ramaswamy’s focus is on K-12 education, with special emphasis on attracting the best teachers to Ohio by implementing individual merit pay policies. Common in the private sector, these compensation plans pay individual employees more or less based on their individual achievements. While individual merit pay sounds good, it’s questionable whether it has actual merit in a public school environment. 

I was first elected to my local school board in part because of my private sector business experience and campaign promise to help resolve our district’s financial difficulties and raise academic achievement. Like Mr. Ramaswamy, I believed individual merit pay for teachers would be part of the solution. It wasn’t.

As I prepared for our board’s contract offer and negotiations with our teacher’s union, I did a deep dive into the evidence for individual teacher merit pay policies. The concept has been a topic of debate for decades so I was confident of finding a successful public school model we could adapt for our district. I was wrong. There weren’t any.

Not only weren’t there any in Ohio or elsewhere in the U.S., there also weren’t any in other developed nations either. I loved the idea of our district being the first success story but it was more important to understand why it hadn’t worked elsewhere. The most common theme was that K-12 teachers see themselves as part of a team.

The star high school math teacher has the benefit of working with students who were helped to success by their kindergarten, elementary, and middle school teachers. Paying that high school math teacher more is antithetical to such a culture and there was no evidence to support breaking it.

Music and the arts are valuable components of childhood education and active participation in those subjects has a positive correlation to overall academic achievement. Judgments about teacher quality in those fields is inherently subjective and therefore not readily amenable to otherwise objective merit pay plans.

There was also no evidence that teachers are significantly motivated by money. If they were, they’d have probably chosen a different profession. People choose teaching because they actually want the job and want kids to learn.

Working from that knowledge, our board established a merit pay system based on the entire district’s achievement of objective academic goals. If we hit our target, everyone earned a bonus. If we missed, no one did. Not just teachers but every employee of the district, including bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, administrators, the superintendent, and even board members had money at risk.

It wasn’t much — about two percent of pay for teachers and most other employees — but it mattered because everyone was on the same team. For administrators and leadership personnel, achievement of our academic goal was much higher percentage of total compensation. Board members were paid about $700 annually, and we put all of it at risk if we failed.

It worked. In our first three years with the new strategy, we increased academic achievement from 63rd to 17th in Ohio out of 608 districts and spent less per student doing so.

But district-wide merit pay was only a small part of the success. We started the process by replacing the verbosely meaningless mission and vision statements with a simple and concise statement of purpose “to create a culture of accountability that achieves the best academic and developmental outcomes for each student.” We defined each of the key words so there’d be no ambiguity about what we meant. 

We hired a superintendent with the necessary skills and commitment to our purpose and then the whole team went to work to make it happen.

Teachers are neither the enemy nor the savior for most of what ails public education. Instead, the solution is a laser-like focus on effective curriculum to the exclusion of nearly everything else coupled with supportive rather than punitive accountability measures. While administrators get a bad rap as merely useless overhead cost, good school administrators, like good management in any organization, are actually essential for team success.

Of course there’s more to this story but the key elements work in almost every organization: clarity of purpose, rejecting distractions, objective goals and measurements, alignment of interests, and rewards only for successful outcomes.  

That’s where Ohio’s next governor should focus our newfound educational autonomy.