Dana Goldstein, a merit pay skeptic, says:
Forty years of psychological research demonstrates that when someone is faced with a complex, creative task — like teaching — money is an ineffective motivational tool, and may even delay progress. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by autonomy, and by the feeling that they are part of a larger, socially important enterprise.
Matt Yglesias responds:
That seems plausible to me. But I think it mistakes the purpose of offering higher salaries to more effective teachers. I don’t think the idea is that ineffective teachers are going to suddenly will themselves into becoming great teachers in order to grab some incentive pay. The point is that if you’re employing a bunch of teachers, any of whom might depart in favor of employment elsewhere, you want to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers who are least likely to quit. And one way to do that is to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers—rather than simply your longest-serving ones—who are getting paid the most money.
I don’t think there’s really much distance between these perspectives. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by autonomy, and by the feeling that they are part of a larger, socially important enterprise, and by working for an organization that employs other similarly-minded professionals, and by being paid well. Successful organizations put all of these pieces together, because if they don’t, someone else will and hire away all the good people .
To recruit and retain good teachers, schools need a lot more than merit pay–they need strong leadership, good facilities, safe working conditions, and the right kind of organizational culture. You can’t paper over the lack of those things by simply tacking on a salary bonus, even a big one, to the existing steps-and-lanes pay scale. That’s what most most “merit pay” plans have been, historically, and that’s why they haven’t worked.
Instead, we need to scrap the steps-and-lanes pay scale altogether, along with near-automatic tenure, absurd job protections and the like, and let districts and schools pay their employees the way all successful organizations that rely on professionals involved in creative work pay their employees: through a combination of subjective managerial judgement and hard data, including standardized test scores. We can’t bribe or force-march great people into hard-to-staff schools, we need to build schools great people want to teach in, and that means fully recognizing their value in all ways, including pay. It also means ensuring that the other teachers in the school, along with the principal and larger management, see things the same way.
The great schools of the future will be professional meritocracies in a way today’s public schools are not, but not by adding test scores to the mechanistic logic of an industrial-age salary scale. Rather, they’ll spend a great deal of energy on getting the conditions and culture right, and then negotiate substantially higher and substantially more variable salaries with individual teachers. It will be an expensive, time-consuming, imperfect process with an unavoidable element of subjectivity. It will also be much, much better than what most schools use today.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.
[...] Kevin Carey at The Quick And The Ed: To recruit and retain good teachers, schools need a lot more than merit pay–they need strong leadership, good facilities, safe working conditions, and the right kind of organizational culture. You can’t paper over the lack of those things by simply tacking on a salary bonus, even a big one, to the existing steps-and-lanes pay scale. That’s what most most “merit pay” plans have been, historically, and that’s why they haven’t worked. [...]
As a union rep who just left a meeting with several teachers (and other staff) who are trying to figure out how to deal with a bully for a Principal, it’s very clear to me that the core premise that good “subjective managerial judgement” is universally available is erroneous. I simply do not trust many principals I know to do a good, fair job evaluating teachers.
[...] need much more than merit pay to recruit and retain good teachers, argues Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed. “They need strong leadership, good facilities, safe working conditions, and the right kind [...]
We will not be able to tackle seniority until we tackle pensions. The huge payoff teachers receive for staying in the system make the costs of moving away from seniority, particularly when there is a RIF, too costly to huge numbers of teachers.
Kevin,
I agreed with everything you wrote, and then I agree with your commenters. I just don’t understand why you don’t see Klein and Rhee as examples of bad faith negotiators. Repudiate their excesses and there are plenty of improvements that we can make together.
And regarding your link, the last 1/3rd had no relationship with reality. We can’t replace one bad system with a worst one. The VAMs described by the New Yorker would cause an exodus of quality teachers from tough schools. To understand why, read the commenters above.
I don’t want to speak for TFT. But having served as a consultant to labor unions and a middle manager supervising unionized workers, I feel strongly about my own ambivalence on this issue. And I do think I get where TFT is coming from.
It really comes down to the due process provisions. If you assume that workers can freely represent their interests through collective bargaining, a contract negotiation can safely include merit pay. But no union leader can assume that. The person who wields power over termination, promotion and assignment really determines whether a union can protect its members from management favoritism and punitive retaliation. So labor advocates will tend to see any form of subjective due process as “union busting,” because it means that the manager holds power that can be abused.
The Denver ProComp system has survived, despite its struggles, in part because many Denver teachers saw the school superintendent (now a U.S. Senator) as a good-faith CEO who would block abuses of a performance pay system. The union’s participation in designing ProComp gave them a comfort level in supporting it. And even that wasn’t quite enough. Why should teachers give this potent authority to, say, the Washington DC superintendent, who seems less trustworthy?
That being said, I don’t like seniority-based systems. They don’t serve customers well in any industry. It’s just more obvious in education, where the customers are right there in the same room with the workers. But you have to take one of two strategies: break the union and impose it by force (a bad idea in my opinion) or demonstrate good faith to the teachers you want to work with and develop a system they can trust.
TFT-
Why does this automatically equal union busting? Couldn’t a union negotiate minimum starting salaries, total compensation, health and pension benefits, non-insane due process provisions, and still be a union?
Of course, they’re both right. Merit pay is designed to encourage better performance and to retain high-achieving teachers — as well as to create a “fairer” pay system that rewards high-performance.
TFT’s comment is expressed in a defensive, circle-the-wagons way, but it gets at a real issue, which is the complex tension between meritocracy and seniority.
Of course subjective evaluation (along with data analysis) can lead to better salary and assignment decisions. But it can also be used to elevate cronies, punish reformers, and push out union activists – thereby destroying teachers’ ability to negotiate contracts and speak with a collective voice.
Decisionmaking based on seniority can damage the responsiveness of a large organization, e.g., a school system. But subjective evaluation can eliminate workers’ autonomy, e.g., bust their union. Obviously you don’t endorse this, and there are merit pay programs that seem to be threading the needle. But we have to recognize that the ideal system you describe has opponents with legitimate concerns that should be addressed.
I agree that we can’t attract good teachers with dismal conditions. But how does union busting fix dismal conditions? You seem to imply that one begets the other. I guess this is what happens when you try to make actual circumstances fit your faulty paradigm.