Newsgroup: it.istruzione.scuola
Titolo: Un po' d'America? (lungo lungo... e in inglese)

E basta con l'Australia!
Che ne dite di un po' di America (Stati Uniti, per l'esattezza), così si
ripassa l'inglese e si riflette un po' su quello che sta succedendo là sulla
valutazione degli insegnanti?
Roberto Malanca.
P.S.: chi risponde, non quoti tutto, per favore...
http://www.asbj.com/schoolspending/rothstein.html
Merit Pay Won't Work
Why pay for performance is a bad way to compensate teachers
by Richard Rothstein
Merit pay for teachers is being explored in districts around the nation,
from New York City to Denver to Los Angeles. A group of 24 governors
endorsed the idea at the National Education Summit last October, and
business groups promote it. "The private sector encourages ... high
standards through the ... rewards of competition," says the National
Alliance of Business. "But in public schools, educators ... have faced few
consequences for their failures and even fewer awards for their successes."
This is a compelling argument. After all, if the private sector can evoke
higher performance with merit pay plans, the public sector should be hard
pressed to defend its refusal to do so, especially when interest is so high
in promoting higher student achievement.
But despite the oft-repeated notion that "merit pay" contributes to
corporate success, it is hard to find private sector examples for such
proposals.
A survey of business compensation experts reveals that, when quality of work
is important, corporations do not generally evaluate professional employees
by quantifiable goals, such as test scores. And private sector
pay-for-performance plans more frequently use team incentives, not
individual ones.
Brian Hall, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, notes
that for most professional jobs, it is hard to isolate the contribution of
any single employee. Quantitative criteria alone are rare, even for group
goals. Consider management consulting. You might think consultants' pay
could simply be tied to growth in the equity value of companies they had
assisted. But this won't work, Hall says. "If you were evaluating employees
who advised Cisco Systems and tried to measure their effectiveness by
Cisco's stock price," he says, "every consultant in the last five years
would look great, yet some may have given bad advice."
So for professionals, Hall explains, decisions on merit pay are mostly
subjective. Firms typically do a "360-degree evaluation--they go all around
an individual, asking advice from supervisors above, co-workers to the left
and right, and subordinates below."
Bain & Company, a Boston consulting firm, tells clients that measured
results (usually not defined numerically) should always focus on long-term,
not short-term goals. David Bechhofer, a Bain director, says it is unfair to
reward employees for results they cannot fully control.
Data-based measures of output can often be manipulated, Bechhofer adds. "If,
in evaluating engineers, you say the more requests for design changes you
have, the more money you make, I guarantee you'll have many change orders,
but not necessarily a quality product," Bechhofer says. "I could take one
change order and make it into 10, just by rewriting it."
No simple measure
Management consulting and engineering could not be more different from
retailing. But when it comes to merit pay, the practices of Wal-Mart are
similar to those of consulting and engineering firms. Wal-Mart requires each
employee to negotiate an annual career development plan with a supervisor as
the basis for its merit pay system.
Consider the example of Elise Garner, a corporate recruiter last year at the
company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. Garner had participated in a
team of five in which each member worked with nine community organizations
to generate job applicants. But no recruiter was evaluated by how many
applications actually arrived, because Wal-Mart management recognized that
even excellent outreach work might not generate applicants due to factors
beyond the recruiter's control. When Garner met with her supervisor for her
annual review, her merit raise was based on the supervisor's qualitative
judgment about her integrity, how she related to customers and coworkers,
and whether her work with community organizations was "results driven,"
meaning whether she kept focused on making the applicant pool grow.
Garner has no idea how her raise compares with others in her group. Wal-Mart
expects these qualitatively based merit pay evaluations to be kept secret
because, Garner says, speaking about them "could cause adversity in the
workplace." The policy avoids internal dissension, both because some
employees might be envious of others who got higher raises, but also because
the subjective evaluations upon which the raises are based are difficult to
defend with objective data. Public discussion of these raises would be
unending.
Such confidentiality, necessary to permit a qualitative evaluation-based
merit pay system to function, would be difficult, if not impossible, to
maintain in public institutions like schools, where teacher pay is a matter
of public record.
If professional employees are not paid for quantifiably measured performance
in for-profit corporations, what about private schools? Surely, if such pay
systems make sense in education, it would be reasonable to expect private
schools, not constrained by teacher unions or salary schedules, to try them.
Yet merit pay based on student achievement in private schools is also
virtually nonexistent. Private school compensation systems do not resemble
the pay-for-test-scores ideas advocated by governors and business leaders
for public education. Certainly, elite academies do not use test data to
calculate teacher pay. Nor, typically, do private schools for the less
privileged.
Catholic schools don't typically use merit pay. For example, parishes in New
York's Brooklyn-Queens archdiocese operate 158 schools. Teachers are not
unionized, so each pastor could legally vary teacher pay based on merit.
Nonetheless, schools superintendent Guy Puglisi issues a single salary
schedule for all schools to follow. "I don't think merit pay is that great
an idea," Puglisi says, because "what motivates teachers is the opportunity
to do challenging work, and then being told how much they are appreciated."
Under no circumstances, he says, would a teacher's contribution be assessed
simply by test scores. "We have many schools where test scores are low. But
if the teachers are working hard, the scores are not that much of an
indication of anything," Puglisi says. "The teachers might be working doubly
hard, but the scores are low because of the social conditions they face."
A team effort
The most prominent for-profit company to enter the school market has been
the Edison Project. Its president, John Chubb, also has contempt for merit
pay plans that try to reward individual teachers for test score gains.
Nonunion Edison schools, where the company has the greatest flexibility to
design compensation plans, give annual bonuses. But, says Chubb, "we never
look at individual teachers when we think about rewarding effective
performance," because everyone in a school contributes to academic gains.
And in addition to test scores in several subjects, Edison also considers
"customer satisfaction" (the feelings of parents), and qualitative
evaluations of the school's program (in areas like music, for example) in
deciding whether to award a schoolwide bonus.
Edison also makes small adjustments to individual teacher salaries, based on
performance. But, says Chubb, test scores are never considered for this
purpose. Teacher salary adjustments are based on principals' evaluations,
including observations of classroom practice, how well a teacher works in
teams to plan instruction, how well the teacher relates to parents. Edison
teachers also put together student work portfolios that are considered in
awarding small raises. Such increases average only about 1 percent of pay.
With such a small portion of compensation subject to such evaluations,
Edison is likely to avoid employee dissension, even if raises became public.
Such small amounts also are unlikely to provide much incentive for teachers
to improve performance. Edison expects leadership and dedication, not pay
differentials, to inspire higher performance. Token "merit raises" are only
a small way for the company to say "thank you" to teachers.
There is another reason why merit pay cannot soon be implemented in public
education, even if it were based on qualitative evaluations, not test
scores. Bechhofer says that, at Bain, managers devote about 100 hours a year
to evaluating five employees. "When I try to imagine a school principal
doing 30 reviews, I have trouble," he notes.
The evaluations needed to support a merit pay system in education are
inconceivable with schools' currently weak administrative structures. Of
course, many politicians and business leaders who advocate merit pay for
education also denounce what they regard as schools' excessive
administrative spending. Yet the reality is that teachers are the most
undersupervised professionals in the nation. A recent law school graduate,
hired as an "associate," typically works for seven years preparing briefs,
meeting with clients, even trying cases under the tutelage of senior
partners. Partners rarely (except in some New York mega-firms) oversee more
than one associate at a time, and they might spend 25 percent of their time
on this mentoring. Similar relationships characterize accounting,
architecture, and medicine. Few corporate managers have more than four or
five "direct reports" (the junior executives under their supervision).
But school supervisory ratios are more typically 1:20. A principal might
supervise 20 teachers or more, evaluating each by making rare and brief
classroom visits. In larger, better funded schools, assistant principals
might help, but ratios remain much the same. Training and evaluation compete
for administrators' time with disciplinary crises, parent meetings, and
administrative tasks. Teachers who claim they're not "treated like
professionals" are right. No junior lawyer would ever handle 25 important
client cases, behind closed doors, with only twice yearly peeks by
supervising attorneys.
An expensive option
Increasingly, school systems are considering adoption of mentor teacher
systems to supplement the supervisory support teachers get from principals.
Because collective bargaining and public employee laws require clear
distinctions to be maintained between supervisors and employees, mentor
systems require an agreement that mentors will not evaluate teachers or be
responsible for recommending pay increases or termination of low performers.
Yet what if this legal roadblock could be overcome? Could mentors recommend
raises for classroom teachers, based on the kind of "360 degree" evaluation
common in the private sector? Such a system would be far more expensive than
merit pay advocates recognize.
Each mentor, if functioning full-time, might simultaneously supervise five
teachers, demonstrating model lessons, observing teachers at work, jointly
diagnosing student needs, recommending and discussing professional
literature. Mentor teachers could then make recommendations about pay
increases, based on teachers' progress in improving their performance. This
1:5 ratio is comparable to ratios in private management and other
professions, but would quadruple the out-of-classroom administrative costs
in schools.
Some states and school districts are now exploring pay plans that reward
teachers, not for actual performance, but for their acquisition of skills
that predict higher student achievement. The best example of this is rewards
for teachers who are certified by the National Board for Professional
Teaching Standards (NBPTS).
But there is an important difference between such pay-for-skill plans and
merit pay, even those that reject simplistic test-score measures envisioned
by mayors and governors. Pay-for-skill plans evaluate teachers periodically
(NBPTS certifications can last for 10 years) when they have achieved new
levels of proficiency. So while pay-for-skill plans require more intensive
(and expensive) supervision of teachers than traditional salary schedule
compensation rules, pay for skill is not nearly as expensive as a merit pay
plan that would require annual (or even biannual) evaluations, as in the
private sector.
Opponents of merit pay rightly argue that teacher compensation cannot rest
significantly on students' test scores, because teachers have only partial
influence over how well students perform on standardized tests, and because
individual merit pay plans defeat the teacher collaboration that education
reform aims to encourage. But few critics of merit pay realize that the
private sector long ago discovered similar lessons. Some private firms use
group rewards, but here, too, they are rarely based primarily on
quantifiable measures. In the private sector, merit pay for professional
employees typically requires qualitative evaluations supported by a
supervisory structure far more intense than public schools can afford.
Keeping these distinctions in mind would help considerably to advance
discussion of alternative ways to pay teachers and to enhance student
achievement.
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Richard Rothstein is a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute,
the education columnist for The New York Times, and a senior correspondent
for The American Prospect magazine. Portions of this article have previously
appeared in The New York Times and The American Prospect.

 reform aims to encourage.
Eh gia': che peso si darebbe al lavoro collegiale?
Michele
P.S.
Il problema della valutazione dei docenti non e' insolubile.


 Se non è insolubile, poco ci manca.
 Hai già letto la sezione 'La professione docente' sul sito
http://www.ilpartitoperlascuola.it/index.html
 ?
 Enrico Bettini