Randy Richardson is a former educator and retired associate executive director of the Iowa State Education Association. Bruce Lear taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring.
Every few years politicians recycle bad ideas that would make teaching even harder. Often, those ideas are long on rhetoric and short on common sense.
Historically, these stale ideas originate from an appointed task force, so politicians don’t have their fingerprints on the ideas if they backfire with the public.
It’s happening again.
Governor Kim Reynolds’s DOGE Task Force met on August 6 and released a set of 45 recommendations that supposedly would make Iowa’s government more efficient. One of the proposals would establish “merit pay” for teachers.
Task force member Terry Lutz, Chairman of McClure Engineering, said Iowa has increased spending on K-12 education over time, but the state’s national rankings in math, reading and science have slipped to the middle of the pack. He said the current education funding model isn’t working.
Lutz pointed out that the current pay system for teachers is based on years of experience and education level. The Return on Investment Working Group, which Lutz chairs, instead recommended a “merit pay” system where teachers are paid based upon student achievement.
While it sounds logical to measure teachers based upon their students’ accomplishments, it’s actually not that easy. In most elementary settings a student spends the majority of the day with one teacher, but what about the “special” teachers in music, PE, and art? Do they get additional pay if all fifth graders improve? Do they lose that extra pay if their fourth-grade students drop? As a high school teacher, Randy saw some students multiple times per day, others once per day and some never. How would his contribution be measured?
That brings up another question. How will you measure student performance? Most merit pay schemes use standardized test scores. If students score at a certain level or they improve from test to test, the teacher must be doing a good job.
But at best, standardized tests measure how well a student takes tests on a given day. It’s a snapshot and it’s often blurry. Some subjects taught in school are never tested. In addition, a student’s environment is out of a teacher’s control. Did they have a good breakfast, get enough sleep, and have a calm trip to school? Do they take tests seriously, and how are they feeling?
Teachers learn more from one another than they do from the best staff development program. Merit pay will cause teachers to compete instead of cooperating. If the goal is to save money on salaries, there will be a limit on how many teachers can be awarded merit pay.
If Lutz and his work group had done a tiny bit of research, they would have found that merit pay has been tried multiple times in Iowa without success.
Prior to the passage of public sector collective bargaining in 1974, in many Iowa schools the teacher with the most “merit” was the winning head football coach. Women were paid less than men, because they weren’t considered head of the household. Pay was subjective and arbitrary; if there was any consistency, it was because the school board allowed “collective begging.”
In the late 1980s, then Governor Terry Branstad was able to convince the legislature to pass the Educational Excellence Act. One segment of that plan allowed school districts to work with their local unions to create a merit pay plan that tied teacher performance to salary increases. The Iowa State Education Association even helped develop some basic guidelines to aid in the development of such a plan.
Randy is personally familiar with this process, because he was the chief negotiator for the local teacher’s union when this became law. The district had a small design team that included local union leaders, the superintendent and representatives from the school board. We spent hours contacting other schools around the country about plans they had in place and reading what little research we could find on the topic.
After a great deal of work, we developed a plan that tied a pay increase to teacher performance. The plan required multiple observations and evaluations by administrators and training for administrators that allowed them to hone their observation skills. The plan went through several trial runs before we felt that it was ready for prime time.
After being in place for a year the team went back and reviewed the data to see if pay increases correlated to teacher performance. What we discovered was that once evaluations were tied to pay, administrators didn’t find a wide variation in the performance of teachers. Instead of a normal distribution along a Bell Curve, we found that evaluation scores tended to cluster much closer to the middle with very few, if any, teachers at the extremes. In other words, there wasn’t enough of variation in scores and the corresponding pay increase to make the plan worthwhile. After a couple of years teachers and administrators felt the additional work didn’t get the results they wanted, and the plan went away.
In 2001, Iowa established the Student Achievement and Teacher Quality program, which initiated a statewide pay-for-performance system to link teacher pay with student achievement, introduce a four-step career ladder, and provide mentoring for new teachers. Due to budget reductions, the plan was never funded and eventually eliminated.
Legislation passed in 2007 established a pilot project to develop a performance pay plan. Three districts participated, but no statewide plan was adopted.
The final incarnation of merit pay appeared in 2011. Then Iowa Department of Education director Jason Glass proposed a merit pay plan based upon a plan used in Denver, Colorado. That plan attempted to identify the traits that made teachers successful and the tie pay to those traits. The plan was delayed for a year while the state agency worked with representatives from the Iowa State Education Association to find a plan that would work for everyone. While it may have eventually been used in a handful of districts, the proposal never went anywhere.
It’s important to note that all the above plans were attempted when Iowa’s public employees had full collective bargaining rights. That gave teachers some input into the process. But in 2017, Republicans stripped public sector workers of most of those rights. Any plan proposed by the DOGE group and approved by the legislature and governor could be imposed on teachers without their input.
Other ideas from the DOGE task force could also worsen Iowa’s teacher shortage. Converting the state’s main public pension system into a 401(k) plan and making health care benefits for public employees comparable to the private sector may prompt veteran educators to leave the profession. These ideas surface every time business types decide education should run like business.
But they’re wrong. Public education isn’t a business where profit is the motive. Lon Watters from Madera Community College said it best: “School is a building which has four walls with tomorrow inside.” Teachers are there to help students realize their tomorrow.
Unlike business, teachers and administrators don’t control the raw product. Public schools accept everyone knocking at the door. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, “You never know what you’re gonna get.” That’s both the joy and heartbreak of teaching. School buildings are filled with different problems and personalities. We don’t pay the local policeman or firefighter per successful arrest or how quickly they put out a fire. We know that’s absurd.
The Iowa DOGE Task Force will vote on its recommendations at its next meeting in late September. The final report will be released by September 29. Let’s send the message that we don’t want “subjective pay” forced on our professional teachers. They have a hard enough job already.
Top image is by AciiiDsgn, available via Shutterstock.