Traversing the Merit-Pay Thicket

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Teachers at one Jackson elementary school are part of a new experiment in paying based on performance.

by Ward Schaefer
December 8, 2010

Over the next five years, Oak Forest Elementary School will be on the vanguard of a nationwide experiment in school reform. The south Jackson school is one of 10 in Mississippi chosen to participate in a pilot program that will change the way the teachers are paid.

The Mississippi Department of Education is starting the program, called New Direction, with a $10.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund. The grant is part of a larger federal effort to spur innovation in school systems, including in the rigid pay scales that most states and districts use.

In Mississippi, as in most states, teachers’ salaries are based on two things: their years of experience and their advanced degrees or certifications.

New Direction will change that system for 10 schools, creating a “performance-based compensation system” based in part on student test scores. MDE has two stated goals for the program: First, it hopes to improve student achievement. Its second, related goal is to attract and retain effective teachers. The department has until July 1 of next year to develop the new pay and evaluation system.

Deputy State Superintendent Daphne Buckley said that the system will rely on the regular evaluations teachers already receive along with the state’s assessment system for students and schools, which tracks growth in test scores from year to year.

In addition to individual bonuses, the performance-pay system may give incentives to administrators, groups of teachers and even entire schools, Buckley said. Participating schools may be able to allocate their incentives in different ways. “We’ll encourage them to use the same model, but there may be some flexibility within it,” Buckley said.

Proponents of performance or “merit” pay argue that, by offering much higher earnings, merit pay would raise the social status of the teaching profession. This, in turn, would attract more of the highly qualified candidates that currently flock to law, medicine and business instead of education.

They also argue that merit pay would better align teacher incentives: Instead of the incentives encouraging teachers to stick around, pay scales would reward teachers whose students perform better.

Critics of merit pay argue that paying teachers for higher standardized test scores—the most commonly used yardstick for teacher effectiveness—only rewards teachers for putting more effort into test preparation.

“(Merit pay) will create an incentive for teachers to teach only what is on the tests of reading and math,” education historian Diane Ravitch wrote in a 2009 blog post on the Education Week Web site. “This will narrow the curriculum to only the subjects tested.”

Paying teacher more for higher test scores would encourage “teaching to the test,” “gaming the system,” and even “outright cheating,” Ravitch argued.

So far, education research has not convincingly borne out the claims on either side. In a widely publicized Vanderbilt University study released in September, the Project on Incentives in Teaching, or POINT, found that merit pay alone did not make teachers more effective. Tracking 300 Nashville middle-school math teachers from 2007 to 2009, the researchers found that the prospect of teacher bonuses had no significant effect on student test scores.

The POINT study did not address a central claim of merit-pay proponents, however—that the prospect of higher pay would attract and retain high-quality teachers. That possibility will be a focus of Mississippi’s initiative. While the opportunity to compete for higher pay will ideally draw teachers to New Direction schools, teachers already at those schools will receive training and professional development meant to make them better.

“We want to increase the quality of the teacher who’s currently working in the district as well as recruit new teachers into the districts,” Buckley said.

Mississippi Education Association President Kevin Gilbert noted the POINT study’s implication that merit pay alone wouldn’t improve test scores but said that he was open to MDE’s experiment. He added that he hoped to see the state involve teachers in the development of its performance-pay system.

“If you bring us teachers in on the front end, the receptiveness to what happens is a lot smoother,” Gilbert said.

Even if New Direction proves a success, it is unclear whether MDE could afford to expand its experiment statewide. The pilot program takes advantage of federal funds to supplement teacher salaries. A permanent, universal change to the state’s pay scale for teachers would require more money—from private or government sources—or a reorganization of the pay scale that gives less to the lowest-performing. Base teacher pay in the state is currently $30,900 for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no experience.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article erroneously referred to the Jackson elementary school participating in New Direction as "Oak Park Elementary." The school's correct name is Oak Forest Elementary.

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