Enviado por Gregory Elacqua
El estudio experimental más rigoroso hasta la fecha en EEUU (POINT) que
examina el efecto de programas de pago por merito de docentes en el
rendimiento escolar de sus alumnos demuestra que casi no tienen un
efecto. Como señala Helen Ladd, profesor de economía y políticas
públicas de la Universidad de Duke, “A lot of the discussion about
performance pay is based on a faulty assumption that the reason we don’t
have higher test scores is that teachers are shirking their
responsibilities.” Este estudio derriba esta creencia.
Algunos expertos han criticado el estudio porque no explora el impacto
del pago por merito en otros resultados. Por ejemplo, Eric Hanushek,
economista de Stanford mantiene que "the biggest role of incentives has
to do with selection of who enters and who stays in teaching—how
incentives change the teaching corps through entrance and exits.” Este
estudio no dice nada sobre este punto.
Gregory
http://www.cpce.cl/educar/
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Education Week
September 21, 2010
By Stephen Sawchuk
The most rigorous study of performance-based teacher compensation ever
conducted in the United States shows that a nationally watched bonus-pay
system had no overall impact on student achievement—results released
today that are certain to set off a firestorm of debate.
Nearly 300 middle school mathematics teachers in Nashville, Tenn.,
voluntarily took part in the Project on Incentives in Teaching, a
three-year randomized experiment conducted by researchers affiliated
with the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt
University. It was designed to study the hypothesis that a large
monetary incentive would cause teachers to seek ways to be more
effective and boost student scores as a result.
But it yielded only two small positive findings, limited to 5th graders
in the second and third year of the experiment. No effects were seen for
students in grades 6-8 in any year of study.
At the same time, however, participating teachers did not report finding
the pay program’s goals for students out of reach or its impact on
school culture damaging, two concerns that have been among those voiced
by opponents of performance pay.
Bonus Awards
SOURCE: National Center on Performance Incentives
The implementation of the pay program “did not set off significant
negative reactions of the kind that have attended the introduction of
merit pay elsewhere,” the study’s authors write. “But neither did it
yield consistent and lasting gains in test scores. It simply did not do
much of anything.”
The findings arrive in a highly charged teacher-quality policy
environment, in which many states and districts, with support from the
Obama administration, are overhauling current practices for preparing,
evaluating, and compensating teachers.
And they come at a particularly inopportune time for the U.S. Department
of Education, which is scheduled to announce a fresh slate of grantees
this month under a federal program designed to seed merit-pay programs
for teachers and principals.
Union Cooperation
The study, known as POINT for the Project on Incentives in Teaching, was
designed by the researchers, with the input of the 76,000-student school
district and the support of the local teachers’ union affiliate and the
Tennessee Education Association. Matthew G. Springer, the director of
the Nashville-based center, cited the unions’ cooperation as a crucial
factor in the study’s successful implementation.
The executive director of the Tennessee Education Association said the
reputation of the researchers played an important role in the union’s
decision to sign on. “We thought it was a chance to work with
researchers whose processes and reputation we trust, and they were
coming at this question with no particular ideology,” said Al Mance. “We
said, ‘OK, this is something we really want to know. We won’t have a
better opportunity than this.’ ”
The program was instituted in Nashville between 2006-07 and 2008-09 and
covered 296 middle school math teachers in grades 5-8.
Participating teachers, all volunteers, were assigned to either a
treatment group eligible to receive significant pay bonuses or a control
group earning normal wages. Those in the treatment group were rewarded
with bonuses between $5,000 and $15,000 based on whether their students’
achievement rose by a specified amount over the course of a year. The
gains were calculated using a value-added methodology designed to filter
out other aspects that could have influenced the scores.
The teachers were also randomized in clusters, so that there was at
least one treatment and one control teacher in every middle school. And
the program contained no quotas, so all teachers whose students
performed at the specified targets earned the additional pay.
Over the course of the study, attrition reduced the number of
participating teachers to only 148, and researchers carefully tracked
that pattern over time to make sure it did not change the equivalence of
the two groups in such a way as to skew the results. Only one teacher
withdrew from the study; most of the attrition occurred because teachers
were reassigned or left the district.
On average, students taught by the teachers taking part in the program
did not make larger academic gains than those taught by teachers in the
normal wage group.The sole exception was in grade 5 in the second and
third years of study.
Hele
In those years, the incentive pay was linked to statistically
significant increases in student scores—an increase, the report states,
equal to between a third and a half year of learning. But the effect did
not appear to persist.
“By the end of 6th grade,” the study states, “it does not matter whether
a student had a treatment teacher in grade 5.”
The researchers performed a number of tests to try to make sense of the
grade 5 findings, including to see whether there was evidence of a
reallocation of time from other subjects to math, or cheating on the
exams. But none of them turned up any firm explanation.
“It really is puzzling,” said Mr. Springer. “It just raises questions
about what’s different about 5th grade and what factors played a role.
Was it student development? The curriculum? Teaching or classroom
structures?”
A Sparse Field
In interviews, scholars who study performance-based pay and teacher
incentives and who were familiar with the POINT findings but not
involved in the experiment, widely praised its rigorous design.
“It’s a really well-designed study, and it’s really important because a
lot of the debate about performance pay has been evidence-free,” said
Steven N. Glazerman, a principal researcher at Mathematica Policy
Research, a Princeton, N.J.-based evaluation firm.
The existing empirical research literature on incentive pay has been
limited in scope, size, and relevance. Much of the experimental research
concerns programs in other countries.
What’s more, many of the existing performance-pay programs studied in
the United States award far smaller bonuses, and scholars have
questioned whether those amounts were enough to affect a change in
teacher behavior. ("Merit-Pay Model Pushed by Duncan Shows No
Achievement Edge," June 9, 2010.)
But the POINT findings, said some researchers and advocates, appear to
put to rest the idea that incentive pay in and of itself is enough to
spur better teacher performance.
“A lot of the discussion about performance pay is based on a faulty
assumption that the reason we don’t have higher test scores is that
teachers are shirking their responsibilities,” said Helen F. Ladd, a
professor of public policy and economics at Duke University in Durham,
N.C., about the findings.
Ms. Ladd added, however, that she was “a little surprised” that the
findings were not more mixed. She anticipated that teachers might work
even harder over the short term to win bonuses. But that supposition was
not borne out by the study.
Mr. Mance of the Tennessee Education Association said the study confirms
what many teachers and unions have long believed: that teachers are
already hardworking. For this study to show positive results, he said,
“you’d have to have teachers who were saving their best strategies for
an opportunity to get paid for them, and that is an absurd proposition.”
Researchers cautioned, however, that the Nashville experiment does not
provide answers to many other questions about incentive pay. For
instance, it wasn’t designed to test the hypotheses that pay incentives
might serve as a draw to a different population of teacher-candidates or
as an incentive for other candidates to stay in the profession—thus
potentially changing the quality of the teacher workforce.
“I personally believe that the biggest role of incentives has to do with
selection of who enters and who stays in teaching—how incentives change
the teaching corps through entrance and exits,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a
professor of economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
“The study has nothing to say about this.”
And because the study looks at an incentive program strictly as pay, it
remains unclear how far the findings can be extrapolated to incentives
with more features, such as professional development, differentiated
roles, or a new teacher-evaluation system.Many well-known incentive-pay
models, including Denver’s ProComp system and the popular Teacher
Advancement Program, sponsored by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based
National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, contain such elements.
("Denver Voters Approve Tax Hike to Underwrite Incentive-Based Teacher
Pay ," Nov. 11, 2005, and "TAP: More Than Performance Pay," April 1, 2009.)
One finding suggests that the debate over the use of test scores as a
measure of student learning and teacher effectiveness remains a top
concern for teachers. Surveys of participants for POINT found that a
majority generally supported higher pay for teachers whose students made
achievement gains. Yet in 2009, about 85 percent said they felt the
test-based criteria for determining effectiveness were too narrow.
That lack of buy-in, the study’s authors postulated, might have
contributed to the finding of no differences in how the control and
treatment groups affected instruction.
Inopportune Moment
From a policy perspective, performance pay has experienced a type of
renaissance over the past six years, following the introduction in 2004
of the ProComp and in 2006 of the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, or
TIF, a program established under the administration of President George
W. Bush to seed performance-pay systems.
Since 2008, the Obama administration has embraced TIF and has put its
own stamp on performance pay through the Race to the Top competition,
which encouraged states to institute new systems for evaluating teachers
and for using the results of those evaluations to inform pay decisions.
“While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of
whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder,” a spokeswoman for
the U.S. Department of Education said in an e-mail. “What we are trying
to do is change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the
feedback they need to get better while rewarding and incentivizing the
best to teach in high need schools and hard-to-staff subjects.”
The effects of the report on that policy agenda are not clear, but in
the short run at least, proponents of merit pay are likely to steer
clear of replicating the features of the Nashville program.
“Anyone about to implement a performance-based pay system will want to
pay very close attention to this study, to learn from the POINT
program’s successes, but especially its shortcomings,” said Mr.
Glazerman of Mathematica. “These groups bear a heavy burden to figure
out how their own programs can demonstrate a greater impact than what
we’ve seen so far.”
“I think most people today agree that the existing compensation
structure for teachers is broken, but we don’t know what a better way
is,” added Mr. Springer of the Vanderbilt center. “This experiment is
one step in the right direction in terms of building our knowledge base,
but we need to continue to build that base and test other program designs.”
Vol. 30, Issue 05
-
Gregory Elacqua
--
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales
Ejército 260
Santiago, Chile
56-2-676-2800
56-09-6-206-5993
gregory.elacqua@udp.cl
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