Obama and the NEA

Barack Obama went before the National Education Association and told them that he favored merit pay. This is supposed to be a sign of his willingness to stand up to a powerful interest group by supporting something that they oppose. They like for all teachers to be paid on the same scale because they hate the idea of any teacher being judged to be better than any other. But Obama assured them that he would support basing merit pay on testing results and he just has confidence that they can come up with a way of figuring out who should get the merit pay.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama today endorsed the idea of merit pay for teachers before an audience hostile to the idea, the giant National Education Association, but he softened the blow by telling the union's national assembly that he would not use "arbitrary tests" to link pay to performance.

"I think there should be ways for us to work with the NEA, with teachers' unions, to figure out a way to measure success," Obama told a crowd of about 9,000 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. "I want to work with teachers. I'm not going to do it too you, I'm going to do it with you."

It was a measure of Democrat Obama's rock-star appeal that he did not draw any hisses with the pronouncement, and even got scattered applause. Obama's endorsement of merit pay for teachers was the first note deviating from the promise-anything tenor of visits by several presidential candidates to the union this week.

Well, pardon me before I start applauding Obama for having a Sister Souljah moment. Merit pay can be very touchy since it's so difficult to find a fair way to judge which teachers are deserving of more money. Tying it to testing performance of the students at least has the benefit of being objective. A test at the beginning of the year and the end would reveal a measure of improvement. Reward the teachers who add the most value to their students' store of knowledge. However, teachers hate having anything affecting them tied to student tests. They'll whine forever about having to teach to the test. That never bothered me if the test was any good. The problem is that most of these tests are terribly done. In North Carolina we've had such tests for years and they're a joke. Smart kids could probably ace the tests with just a few weeks of teaching. And weak students have a terrible time with them. Almost every year there's some story about one of the tests and the problems they're having norming the test as they fiddle around to get the right passing rate.

And you'll introduce a lot of animosity into a school if only the teachers who teach a subject that is tested are eligible for raises. In middle school in North Carolina there were only reading, writing, and math tests. Science and social studies teachers were supposed to work on strengthening those skills, but that wasn't our primary function. Should merit pay exclude those teachers? What about the foreign language, computer, or PE teachers? Another reason for the unions to hate tying pay to testing.

So if you're not going to use testing results how do you determine who the good teachers are? It should be easy; everyone knows or thinks they know who the good teachers are in a school. If you surveyed the parents, students, and other teachers about who the strongest and weakest teachers are in a school, I bet there would be a good consensus. But there would always be the teacher who gets low marks because he or she is strict, humorless, ugly, or just plain difficult. Especially with more immature students, it's hard for them to distinguish between a tough but good teacher and a tough and rotten teacher. Most adolescents think that a teacher hates them or is picking on them if the teacher gets strict with them. How many of you have heard kids whining that a teacher "hates me" and all that really happened was that the teacher told the kid to be quiet in class? And, conversely, kids may like a teacher who is young and good-looking or easy or sweet to them. They might not even notice that they're not learning much in class. I've had kids tell me that their definition of a good teacher is one who occasionally gives them candy. Literally, all it took to win their approbation was a single Hershey's Kiss every 5 or 6 weeks.

And, of course, the parents' opinions of the teachers might all be based on what grades their kid gets or if the kid seems to like the teacher. The parents may have no way to know if their kids are actually being taught anything. And too many parents these days resent if their kid is given a lot of homework. They want their child to be learning, but still to have time for all the soccer games, dancing lessons, and family errands or that part-time job. Or, conversely, they may think a student is learning a lot because he's always working on homework, but most of that homework could be mindless busy work.

So, if asking parents and students doesn't work for judging merit, how about using the administrator's opinion. After all, the principal is supposed to be trained to know what is and isn't good teaching. Have the principal fill out evaluations and those with high scores get the merit pay. People in the business world get evaluated by their superiors all the time; why should teachers be any different? However, in the business world, you most likely have quantifiable standards to base an evaluation on. Obama is rejecting such from the start.

Having taught for 17 years, I've had my share of evaluations. I've even served as an evaluator for a while when the district went through a period of using peer evaluations. And it's not as clear-cut as you might think. First of all, the form often uses a whole lot of standardized criteria that some edu-crats decided a while back made up the basis of a good lesson plan with stated objectives, introduction, imparting the actual knowledge component of the lesson, guided practice, independent practice, and conclusion. If you could hit all of that in one period during an observation and the kids behaved themselves, you were golden. Well, maybe that fits every twentieth lesson you actually teach. If you did something different like having the kids conduct a debate that lasted all period, the principal then had to get fancy and figure out how to fill out his form. I remember one year when I was teaching French and my kids had written a play and performed it. Just the kind of hands-on active learning that everyone likes these days. But the principal still had to figure out how to shoehorn all this into that standardized form. He knew it was a joke and basically was asking me to make up ways to tell him he'd observed something like guided practice that hadn't happened just so he could sign off on the form.

And I maintain that any relatively intelligent teacher can fake a good lesson when they're being observed. Most times the observation is announced so you have time to put together one you know the principal would like. And I've known horrible teachers who kept a plan in reserve in case a principal walked in unannounced. As soon as the door opened he could launch into his perfectly designed lesson. Forget the stupid worksheets his students filled out the rest of the year while he talked on his phone.

So, that's why I'm not impressed with Barack Obama's seemingly brave stand in front of the NEA. Since he's ruling out using testing results for evaluating teacher merit from the get go, he is just saying something that sounds good because it's so popular to say that you support the idea of paying good teachers more money. But there is no generally accepted way to do what he is talking about. My daughter looked at the problems with awarding merit pay a couple of years ago and nothing has changed. She concluded that an imperfect system might be better than the present system, but I don't see that as making a stirring campaign slogan.

Never mind that it shouldn't be a president's role to determine merit pay in the first place. If it is so worthwhile to do, let the states work on it. Let several states try different methods and then we can compare the methods and judge which is better. But that wouldn't make a good campaign slogan either: vote for me and I'm going to respect our federal system enough to let the states be the laboratories of democracy to figure out the best way to reward good teachers.