TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie’s plan to separate educators who deserve raises from those who deserve pink slips using student achievement data will not improve test scores and could force effective teachers out of the profession, according to education experts and two recent reports.
Christie formally announced his proposals for merit pay and tenure reform at a town hall meeting in Old Bridge Tuesday. Just before the event began, Christie signed an executive order creating a task force on teacher effectiveness. Its nine members will design a statewide system that counts student test data for at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, a requirement that worries some lawmakers and scholars alike.
But Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick Diegnan said merit pay will limit cooperation among teaching staffs. Diegnan, a Democratic assemblyman from Middlesex County, also said tenure reform that discredits experience in the classroom or advanced degree attainment, an idea Christie supports, is counter-intuitive.
"Merit pay sounds great, it’s a great headline, but teaching kids is different than making cars. There is no production manager pointing out loose hubcaps," Diegnan said. "Those performing the greatest miracles in the classroom are often dealing with kids whose successes are the most difficult to gauge."
Diegnan’s concerns about the Republican governor’s proposals — which will require legislative action from a statehouse controlled by Democrats — are reflected in research published in the past five weeks by Vanderbilt University and the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Virginia Beach.
In the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay, Vanderbilt scholars offered between $5,000 and $15,000 to Nashville math teachers whose students scored higher than expected on a statewide exam.
But the incentive was a bust, they found. Except for some temporary gains during the three years studied, students did not progress any faster in classrooms where teachers were offered bonuses.
"The experiment was intended to test the notion that rewarding teachers for improved scores would cause scores to rise," the report says. "By and large, results did not confirm this hypothesis."
Citing the Vanderbilt study, education historian and New York University professor Diane Ravitch said merit pay is a "pointless waste of money" that "will not improve student performance" and "will destroy collaboration among teachers."
"One of the signature issues of businesspeople and conservative Republicans for the past 30 years has been merit pay," Ravitch said on her blog. "They believe in competition, and they believe that financial rewards can be used to incentivize better performance, so it seems natural for them to conclude that merit pay or performance pay would incentivize teachers to produce better results."
A report published by the Economic Policy Institute and authored by a slew of education reform heavyweights says Christie’s proposal to rely on student test score data for at least 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation is "unwise."
"There is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high stakes personnel decisions," the paper says.
Though Christie has not specified how he wants student test data to influence teacher evaluations, he will likely follow states like Colorado, Louisiana and Tennessee that support value-added measurement (VAM), a complicated statistical formula that’s supposed to equalize teacher performance when student test scores are used.
Because students are not randomly assigned to classrooms, test scores are a poor measure of teachers’ performance, said Jesse Rothstein, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s common for principals to assign a group of unruly students to one teacher and a group of highly intelligent students to another.
"VAMs are capturing which students you get, not just how effective you are at teaching them," Rothstein said. "With this type of evaluation, people will get merit pay because they get the right set of students."