Why Idaho's Veteran Teacher Pay Bill Won't Improve Education

 

Having the right tool for the job really is that important…

Last year, the legislature passed the Veteran Teacher Pay Act granting an addition of up to  $223 million dollars to school districts to help cover the cost of teacher pay. Normally, I’m never one to fight against paying teachers more until I saw the details and I realized we had a dud. The biggest problem with the Veteran Teacher Pay Act is that it contains several ‘teacher accountability’ measures that to me cause more problems than any solutions they seem to offer. Also, this act seems conflicted in its purpose: Do we want to improve teacher pay and retention? If so, release the money and drop the accountability measures. Did we put these in because we want to improve education for Idaho’s students? If so, we are measuring the wrong thing and these standards won’t improve education in even one classroom. 

Some background on the bill: Schools are funded by our state mainly in two ways. First, they get an amount per pupil, so the more students a school or district has, the more money. Second, they also get paid directly for the teachers they have, and the amount the state reimburses the school depends on the teacher’s education and experience. The Veteran Teacher Pay Act creates a few additional rungs on the state Career ladder upping the amount the state reimburses a school each year for veteran teachers from $50,000 to $63,000. This seems like a great idea since what the state reimburses schools for a beginning teacher per year is $40,000, so having a top rung to this career ladder higher than $50,000 is good because most districts already pay veteran teachers more than that anyway. 

The problem is that the act doesn’t just grant the money for veteran teachers that have more than 8 years experience, there are several hoops for teachers to jump through to get it. To be a ‘veteran’ educator, you must have 8+ years experience, your district must endorse you as a veteran, 75% or more of your students must meet some academic indicator like proficient ISAT scores or something, you must have no less than a 3-4 (on a 1-4 pt scale) score on all 22 components of your annual evaluations, you must have a 4 score on either Domain 2 (Classroom Environment) or Domain 3 (Instruction) on your evaluations, and lastly, you need to hold a leadership position within your school for the last 3 or more years. There are 4 Domains in the rubric; a Domain on the Danielson rubric has about 5 components, so a 4 score means you would have to score 4 on all five components of the Domain. The act is now law and I noticed this June that you already have to report on these items when you submit your teacher evaluations.

I wrote about this act last year and I begged lawmakers not to pass it because I feel either that few districts will apply for the money or that the law will do more harm than good. The basic problem with this law is that none of its provisions will help improve education for our students in any way and if districts do choose to apply for additional funds, the law will almost certainly cause teacher evaluations to become even less meaningful than they already are. All of these ‘teacher accountability’ measures are based on the premise that when teachers are great (as defined by whatever standards), magical things happen and education in their schools automatically improves. But does it? I have done more teacher evaluations in the last 5 years than I care to count or remember, so I know the Danielson Rubric well and know this is a myth.

Right now, the only way we define success in schools and districts is how students do on the ISAT scores that are tied to the state standards, and our first problem is that the Danielson Rubric used for evaluation isn’t tied to that exam. To be a veteran educator, you must score 4 (on a 4 pt scale) in either the classroom management or instruction domain of the 4 domain rubric. Because the rubric is standards neutral, it has everything to do with how something is being taught and nothing to do with what is being taught. The ISAT exam we use for high school covers 3 subjects: Math, English, and Science. This means that unless the teacher you evaluate teaches one of these three subjects (and only freshman and sophomore students since the test is taken in the 10th grade), even if that teacher got 4’s across the board on all 22 components of their evaluation, all their teaching skills won’t change your ISAT scores one little bit because their subjects aren’t covered on the tests. In a high school, that’s about ⅔ to ¾ of your teachers. To be clear, teacher evaluations can’t change ISAT scores because evaluations have nothing to do with the ISAT exams. 

Well, maybe we need to focus on teacher evaluation because our past evaluation scores aren’t very high? We’ve been using the Danielson Rubric for years so we actually have a lot of data on that, and it actually shows the opposite. Last year, 98.5% of our teachers earned either a 3 or 4 (1-4 pt scale) summative score on their evaluations. You can actually go back several years and find similar numbers year after year. Not too long ago, when you submitted an evaluation you had to identify how many components a teacher scored a 1 (unsatisfactory) on. Now you must identify all 2 scores as well, and my prediction is that now 2’s will disappear just like 1’s disappeared years ago. So even though for years more than 98% of our teachers have been scoring proficient or excellent in virtually all categories, apparently we needed a bill that encourages growth over that number? My guess is that now that we require nearly perfect evaluation scores for districts to be reimbursed fully for educators that they’re already paying more than $50,000/year, we’ll get those perfect evaluation scores even though they won’t really change anything in schools. When 99% of your teachers are already proficient or excellent, you really shouldn’t waste much time trying to bring that score up to 100%. 

When I grew up, my father spent a lot of time showing me how to use different tools. I still remember how he taught the importance of picking the right tool for the right job. “You can often do jobs with the wrong tool, but when you pick the right tool, it’s easier to do the job and it’s easier to do a better job.” The problem with teacher accountability measures is that they don’t fix the problems we do have and they try to fix problems we don’t have. The idea that the skill of the teacher is nearly the only thing that affects how kids are educated is a pernicious idea that’s been a cancer to education since the turn of the century, and the teacher accountability measures you see in this law reflect that spirit. My prediction is that this law will be as big a failure as the teacher portfolio law (also built on accountability measures) that came before it.