Cash Ain't Carrots, and I Ain't A Donkey

Disclaimer: The "ain't" in the title is a clear indication I'm approaching 15 years in the Ozarks (and I wouldn't trade one of them).

In my last post of this series on public education, I touched on the issues I have with public education being run like any other business.  The focus in that post (found here) was on the idea that while teachers need, and should desire, accountability, arbitrarily firing and replacing teachers based solely on yearly high-stakes testing, which is inadequate/incomplete/ill-executed/misleading at best, is a poor way to hold educators responsible.  Teachers simply cannot be evaluated as one would evaluate managerial staff in the corporate, profit-driven world of business.

However, the current push for a more business-minded approach to public schooling does not stop at the simplistic idea of hiring and firing based on one-off test results.

Currently, many policy makers are pushing for merit pay, or as I call it, behaviorism for teachers. Behaviorism, largely based on the work of B.F. Skinner, supposes that our behaviors are primarily the results of outside forces; that to examine our own actions, we must look not inward, but to the external forces which cause us to think as we think, feel as we feel, and ultimately do as we do.

In some cases, Skinner's ideas make complete sense.

When I worked at McDonald's during my high school years, behavioral operant conditioning was a large part of the way management encouraged me to do my job with excellence. As an example, when I did well or went above and beyond the call of duty, I received some arbitrary "McDonald's Money" which I could trade in for gift cards, trinkets, or other incentives.  Additionally, when I exceeded expectations, I could reasonably expect to receive at least a modest raise during my scheduled employee review.

And hey, I won't lie to you; these and other positive reinforcements did what they were designed to do.  I do consider myself someone who wants to work hard, please people, and make a good name for myself, but let's be honest; I didn't work hard because I believed in the mission of McDonald's.  I didn't try to uphold the sanctity of the Big Mac.  I certainly wasn't busting my tail because I knew in the depths of my soul that selling people a Double Quarter-Pounder was my calling in life.  I did it because I wanted the rewards of hard work, not because the work itself had any meaning.

Now, here I am as an adult, a professional educator, with people proposing to me that I be treated like I'm back at McDonald's.

The idea of merit pay goes something like this.  Teachers who produce results (of the standardized test variety) should not only be assured of employment, they should also have the chance at bonuses commiserate with the level of his or her student's scores.

For the moment, I'll put aside such minor contentions as:

• merit pay pits teachers against one another (why would teachers share great teaching secrets when there's only so much merit money to go around?)
• merit pay would only apply to teachers in specific content areas, primarily math and science (sorry art teachers, you're apparently not  all that important)
• merit pay would do nothing to bring good teachers to low-income or inner city schools (sorry, inner-city Chicago, everybody seems to want to teach in middle-class suburbia all of a sudden...)

Here, instead, is my main contention.  I find merit pay insulting.  

If someone thinks that I'm going to, all of a sudden, start "really teaching" my students because lawmakers dangle a few extra Ben Franklins at me, they've grossly misinterpreted why I do what I do.  If a person thinks that I've had these really great teaching methods locked away in a vault and that I've been holding back on using them until the feds offered me a bonus, we probably don't hang out very often.  

Pardon me if I'm a bit uncomfortable with my government treating me like a donkey who'll follow after a cash carrot dangled two feet in front of my nose, but I'd rather just know that someone in Jefferson City or Washington, D.C. has enough faith in me to think that I might already be doing my best simply because I consider it a moral imperative, not because I can't afford a new TV.

But this debate shouldn't be about me and my thin skin, should it?  Ultimately, this debate must center around the needs of those being educated.  Merit pay, like any educational movement must address this question: "What is best for kids?" 

And to that end, merit pay appears to fail. Need proof? I won't recount the whole study, but this brief piece from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution does give the essential findings of a study done to see if merit pay actually does its job, which is not to reward people like me, but rather to best serve the needs of students (Merit Pay and Student Achievement).  

As I all but admitted the other day in my first post of this series (found here), there are certainly some teachers out there who actually are in this business for the wrong reasons.  Sadly, there are some who are more concerned with their wallets than their students. However, while the media may try to sell you the idea that such a characterization describes many of us, I assure you that is a gross and insulting misrepresentation of fact. Such people are the extremely rare cancers, aberrations that serve mainly to provide the media with just the chink in my profession's armor necessary to sell a gloom and doom narrative.

But, you know me, right?