In this morning's email from Huffington Post one of the pieces featured is by Mark Lampkin entitled NEA: Don't Squelch the Debate. In it Lampkin is complaining that the National Education Association's press release which it issued afer the Stephanopoulos-led debate is inaccurate in its presentation of how the candidates responded on the question of merit pay. While on the surface he has an accurate point to make, there are some real problems in is piece, and perhaps one needs to know who he is, who he works for, and for whom he has worked in the past to fully understand the issue.
I will attempt briefly to address all of the issues. I apologize in advance that this will not be well-thought out - I simply do not have the time. But the issues raised by this piece, especially given the visibility it will have been featured by HuffPost require some kind of response.
The NEA press statement is entitled Democrats Running for President Reject Using Test Scores To Pay Teachers. Lampkin is focusing on the question of merit pay for teachers. In his piece he writes
It was by far the most serious and substantive education question to date, and it provoked nearly nine minutes of good discussion about how to improve schools.
I have taken the time to relisten to the 8 (not 9) minutes of the clip on education, of which about 30 seconds are statements from David Yepsen who asked about "performance-based pay" and Stephanopoulos who was trying to move on and tried to summarize saying no one supported merit based pay which led to a diatribe by Gravel and a clarification by Obama. In short, there was less than 8 minutes, not all of the discussion was about how to improve schools, and there was little support for the idea of test-based performance pay.
Thus Lampkin might be correct that the NEA press statement is inaccurate when it says
The candidates also reject any plan to tie teacher pay to student test scores
because clearly Gravel implied acceptance of such an approach, and Obama is open to including gain or value-added scores as part of an overall process, and Clinton is willing to consider awards for overall performance by schools. But there was little support for the idea of paying teachers differentially based on scutend teast scores, even gain or value-added scores, and while the segment was the most extensive discussion of education so far in the debates it really did little but skim over the surface of how to address the problems of schools - people made some general statements, but there was no discussion of the kinds of specifics and costs necessary to make effective changes.
But that is not my complaint about Lampkin. For example, he offers a paragraph that says the following
That candidate was very careful on Sunday to say he is only for performance pay plans that get buy-in from teachers. But that is happening in many places across the country. Denver's teacher union led the effort to win support for a new performance-based compensation system for teachers there -- one that includes gains in student test scores as one measure. And just last week the New York Times published a story with the headline, "Teachers Say Yes to Pay Tied to Scores." Just because the national NEA opposes something doesn't mean that teachers in general -- or even their local affiliates -- do too.
That is deceptive. He writes as if he Denver affiliate INITIATED the process of a preformance-based compensation system for teachers. That is NOT correct. The process was initiated by groups that have a history of pushing such an approach, and was funded by a million dollars from the foundation of Eli Broad, who has decided in his senior years that he is going to drive the discussions about public education in this nation in the direction he wants. I will return to Broad in a few moments. The participation of the Denver Classroom teachers Association was to ameliorate the worst effects of the some of the initial proposals.
The reference to the headline of the New York Times piece (which can be read here)
certainly does not support the part of his statement about "teachers in general" - if you read the Times piece what you find is that the headline is itself deceptive. Let me illustrate:
The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers oppose linking a teacher's paycheck to how well their students do on tests. But that is not stopping Rob Weil, the AFT's deputy director of educational issues, from helping local unions hammer out contracts that include new merit-pay plans.
''We don't have a message on a board that says, 'Hey, thinking about this?''' he said. But he said the AFT feels obliged to assist chapters that have decided to go this route.
Note the explanation - this is the AFT - not the NEA, which is several times larger - and while the national body is opposed to tying teacher pay to test scores, they are willing to offer professional assistance to locals that wnat to explore the route.
Let me briefly explore two more paragraphs from Lampkin, where he writes
I also take exception to the NEA's claim that there's absolutely no research showing that performance-based compensation can improve student achievement. In a December report published by the left-leaning Center for American Progress, the Urban Institute economist Dan Goldhaber summed up, "research on the small amount of experimentation with alternatives to the single-salary schedule [...] generally suggests that teacher pay reform can be an effective way to achieve policy objectives."
Again, maybe the NEA is just being very precise in its language when it says "no scientific evidence," since the word "scientific" is sometimes used to describe experimental studies using control groups. But there's very little evidence of that kind on any issue in education. There's certainly no such experimental evidence to support the NEA's familiar nostrums like uniform pay raises or a minimum wage for teachers.
I have read the Goldhaber report, and Lampkin ignores the caution the Dan offers in the executive summary:
But there are significant obstacles facing policymakers who wish to use compensation as a tool for influencing the quality of the teacher workforce. Many aspects of teaching make it less amenable to salary differentiation, particularly in the form of merit pay, than other private sector occupations. Teachers' jobs are complex and multidimensional, and we know very little about how to objectively and accurately quantify their productivity. It is therefore necessary to exercise caution as implementing the wrong type of incentives might encourage teachers to focus on a narrow set of objectives and discourage cooperation.
Here I note that we are already seeing documented evidence of the narrowing of which Goldhaber warns. Lampkin totally ignores recent reports that paying of incentives for past improvement in scores does not lead to continued improvement of scores.
As for his snark on "no scientific evidence" he is also missing the point of that dig by NEA - it is the Bush administration's Education Department which has insisted upon scientifically based research and has attempted to eliminate any qualitative research which does not support the educational agendae upon which it bases its policies - NEA is reminding people of the old axiom of being hoist by your own petard. Lampkin is in my ind intellectually dishonest or totally ignorant of what has been happening in educational policy if he thinks his dig on this point can be made without someone pointing out why NEA uses such terminology.
I would note the acronym IOKIYAR - this kind of shifting of arguments for the occasion, pretending that your side has not previously used precisely the same argument as you are now discounting when it suited you is something very common on the political - and educational - right.
Let me also return to the issue of Eli Broad. Let me quote from the bio on Lampkin available through HuffPost:
Marc Lampkin is the Executive Director of Strong American Schools, an unprecedented national public awareness and action campaign aimed at elevating education to the top of the nation’s domestic priorities during the 2008 presidential election and beyond. The campaign is being funded with contributions of up to $60 million by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Visit www.EDin08.com to find out more.
Marc joined Quinn Gillespie & Associates in February 2001 after spending two years serving in a variety of roles with the Bush for President campaign, including Deputy Campaign Manager. He later organized and ran Americans for Better Education (ABE), a coalition educators, reform advocates, and corporations that support President Bush's education reform plan.
Lampkin has held several senior positions in the United States Congress, including Policy Director for the late U.S. Senator Paul D. Coverdell (R-GA) and General Counsel for the House Republican Conference under then-Chairman John A. Boehner (R-OH). He began his Congressional service as a professional staff member with the Republican staff of the House Education and Labor Committee.
While he did work with Akin Gump, which had a major "Democratic" as a lead partner in the late Bob Strauss, you will note that most of his work has been for Republicans. Quinn, Gillespie is one of the "bipartisan" Washington firms (Jack Quinn a Dem, Ed Gillespie a Republican) that go where the money is, and are an example of the worst of Washington.
And you see the connection with Eli Broad (and Bill Gates) - and how they are using their money to drive policy. Their ability to spend 60 million to move the debate - ostensibly in a "non-partisan" fashion (because they don't endorse candidates) gives them a megaphone bigger than the unions or teachers have. Because they have money, because they were "SUCCESSFUL" in making lots of money, somehow they are presumed to have expertise on what education should be. We hear from multiple organizations saying the same or very similar things as if they are totally independent groups coming to the same conclusion - an echo chamber if you will - even though they are interlocking in their funding (many people have written about this phenomenon, as I did in several diaries, including this, and this, and DeweyCounts showed some of the interlocking relationships among the organizations here
I really wish I had the time to do this properly. I am already running 30 minutes later than normal in leaving for school. But I felt this was important enough to take the time to put out there for those who might care.
Thinking that merit pay is a magic bullet to fix education fundamentally misunderstands the nature of teaching. And while groups of teachers may cooperate in some experiments in order to ameliorate the worst effects of some of the more egregious proposals, that does not mean that they neessarily support the concept in principle. Even value-added or gain scores are frought with difficulties that too often policy makers seem to ignore in their attempt to seem as if they are doing something that will make a difference. It may make a destructive difference, if they are not more cautious.
Peace.