Stack Ranking and Merit Pay: Poor Models for Teacher Evaluation
By Vincent Marsala.
Many people think that applying business principles and making educators compete via stack ranking and merit pay will make education better. Even former National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said it might work, “The first thing you have to decide on is what you differentiate the pay on? Is it skills and knowledge? Is it responsibility? And as soon as you decide that answer, you have to say: How will I measure it?”
But Margaret Raymond, the founding director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, has a different opinion, “I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work.”
Raymond is correct. Merit pay and stack ranking teachers as Accomplished, Skilled, Developing, or Ineffective will fail, and Microsoft has already proven it. In Kurt Eichenwald’s August 2012 Vanity Fair article titled, “Microsoft’s Lost Decade,” he said each Microsoft unit had to rank its employees on a bell curve with top, good, average, below average, and poor performers. The rankings led to in-fighting for promotions, bonuses, and/or survival because as a former software developer said, “You walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review.” As toxic as it was at Microsoft, stack ranking may be worse within schools.
First, teachers will be forced to compete against each other based on student test scores. Eventually, teachers may resent having a special needs/low performing child in class because a student’s inability to do well on tests will reflect poorly on a teacher. Adding the idea of merit pay based on test scores/evaluations, and teachers may resent these students even more. Next, when teachers work together, kids win, but teachers, just like the workers at Microsoft, are human, too. Teachers competing for the highest test score Stack Ranking and Merit Pay: Poor Models for Teacher Evaluation - Living in Dialogue:
