Don't backtrack on school reform

by John Hood, John Locke Foundation and NC SPIN panelist, April 4, 2014.

Liberal politicians, left-wing activists, and the teacher union* may not like it, but the North Carolina General Assembly is not about to abandon its reforms of teacher hiring, firing, and compensation. That’s because the lawmakers who enacted them are familiar with the empirical research about what makes schools successful.

Here some of the major reforms and why legislators enacted them:

• Replaced teacher tenure with fixed-term contracts.

While tenure in higher education is a stronger form of job protection, so-called “career status” in North Carolina elementary and secondary schools makes it difficult for principals and superintendents to fire ineffective or uncooperative teachers who aren’t new to the profession.

Defenders of North Carolina’s old system argue that the official termination rate doesn’t reflect the full spectrum of options that principals have to “encourage” low-performing teachers to move or leave the profession. As the son of a longtime school principal, I am well aware of the work-arounds that school administrations use to manage their workforces. But why should they have to work around the system? Why not make the system itself more workable? There are good reasonsfor concluding that a less-rigid, performance-based model for hiring and retaining teachers is likely to result in higher teacher quality and student achievement.

• Instituted performance-based bonus pay as part of the transition to teacher contracts.

For decades, NCAE and other denizens of the education establishment have resisted efforts to treat teachers in a truly professional manner — by evaluating their performance and compensating them accordingly. While there is no perfect system of employee evaluation, it is nevertheless commonplace in other fields and professions. Moreover, there is convincing empirical support for the following propositions: 1) teacher quality is highly correlated with gains in studentperformance and later life outcomes, 2) teacher quality is not highly correlated withteacher characteristics such as education level, and 3) educational systems that take performance into account when compensating teachers have higher student performance, everything else being equal, than systems with more rigid pay scales. That doesn’t mean, however, that every local use of merit pay hasproduced positive results. Some have produced mixed or statistically insignificantresults, typically because the performance bonuses were both too small and too easy to earn. In Denver, for example, a much-touted “performance pay” program ended up paying larger bonuses for getting graduate degrees than for demonstrating performance in the classroom.

• Gave schools and school districts flexibility in hiring, retaining, and compensating teachers based on performance.

So while fixed-term contracts and merit pay are valuable concepts, they need not be implemented in exactly the same fashion in every jurisdiction. Some may want to use value-added testing assessments to identify high-performing teachers. Others may want to use reviews by principals and supervisors, or even student surveys. There may indeed be good reasons to combine multiple approaches. Local leaders may also want to try out alternative compensation systems.

Letting schools and districts design and implement various approaches will be a good way to explore these issues in real-world settings. Not surprisingly, there isempirical support for the idea that when schools and local districts enjoy greaterautonomy, student performance rises.

• Eliminated salary increases for teachers acquiring graduate degrees.

North Carolina has long paid teachers extra money for acquiring graduate degrees, usually in education. While boosting enrollment, tuition revenue, and state subsidies for universities, the policy did little to identify, retain, and reward excellent teaching. Although lawmakers may want to provide a pay bump for teachers with graduate degrees in challenging, high-demand subjects such asmath and science, they should not and will not simply return to the old, bad policy of creating artificial demand for graduate degrees in education.

The willingness to apply empirical data to education reform is certainly not limited to the new Republican-led legislature. To give credit where it’s due, Democratic State Superintendent June Atkinson and the previous, Democratic-appointed state board of education instituted a new testing policy in 2011 that administers the ACT and related standardized tests to North Carolina students in 8th, 10th, and 11th grades.

The state’s previous efforts to fashion and administer end-of-course tests had not yielded reliable information or nationwide comparisons. The ACT family of tests was a good solution for older students, a solution that now needs replication in the lower grades. Regular, reliable, and independent assessment of student performance is common in the world’s highest-performing educational systems.

North Carolina is headed in the right direction on education reform. The reform strategy emphasizes teacher quality, performance incentives, parental choice,diverse and competing providers, and valid assessment. There’s a lot of work left to do. And there’s no good reason to backtrack.

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