Why Chase New York’s Failures?

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate, July 26, 2011 at 11:00 am

Just as Minnesota requires value-added performance measures as part of its teacher evaluation process, New York City is abandoning its multi-year performance pay experiment on the grounds that, unsurprisingly, the program did not impact teacher performance. Just as fashion and music trends drift towards the middle of the country, it looks like we may have jumped on the latest fad only to find out it's no longer the “cool” (or “effective,” or “right”) thing to do.

The writing has been accumulating on the wall for New York's perfomance evaluation system for some time now. A report by Prof. Roland Fryer at Harvard University dinged the program's performance, and the RAND corporation recently issued a comprehensive breakdown of the program's ineffectiveness.  In light of this overwhelming evidence, it's no surprise that New York's policymakers did the responsible thing and dropped the failed policy.

We could see this coming, of course. Performance pay, like many other current education policy fads, is based on an economic myth about why schools and teachers do what they do. It flies in the face of research on motivation, it creates distorted incentives for schools and teachers, and it is founded in disparaging assumptions about the dedicated, professional teachers who make education happen every day.

Minnesota's incorporation of flawed performance standards for teacher evaluation is not nearly as brutal as the NYC system was. It is, instead, the first drop of acid applied to our state's school system. We have a chance to neutralize it to contain the damage, but if we don't, we risk letting this sort of insidious, insulting policy dissolve our schools' effectiveness.

Posted in Education | Related Topics: K-12 education  Q-Comp  Teacher Assessment