Does performance pay motivate teachers? Let's ask Jason Glass

Will tying compensation to performance really motivate Iowa's teachers to greatness?

Let's ask Jason Glass.

Not Jason Glass the political appointee, but Jason Glass the scholar. After all, as the State Education Director likes to remind us, he studied this stuff in school.

Here's what he found researching his own Eagle County, Colo., school district for his education dissertation:

“Teachers are strongly motivate (sic) to help others and are particularly motivated to help their students succeed. Teachers are also motivated to earn more money, but this appears to be a secondary driver to the main motivations of altruism and public service.”

Which is nerdspeak for what teachers have been saying all along - it's not the bonuses, dummy.

“Further,” Glass writes, “the motivating influence of the behavioristic/economic paradigm seems to degrade when it comes to actual behavior changes in teachers working harder to achieve raises or bonuses.”

In fact, nearly a decade into performance pay at Eagle County Schools, where Glass was human resources director from 2007-2010, only one teacher in three said they worked harder because of the pay.

Every teacher he surveyed said “helping others” was a major motivation. Only half said the same of money. Still, the scholar Glass bafflingly concluded, teachers can be trained to respond to “the right set of compensation elements.”

Glass's research question wasn't “what motivates teachers,” but “can we motivate teachers with money?” His conclusion: Yes - we just haven't figured out how.

The question he didn't ask or answer: Why?

According to Glass, Eagle County's system was initially so contentious that a record number of teachers quit - an average of 19 percent annual turnover until the pay scheme was overhauled, following “a near clean decapitation of district leadership.”

And, he writes, while it's pretty easy for schools to test for some outputs - to track a kid's learning in, say, science or math - it's much harder to determine who to credit for student growth.

“ ... it is very difficult to specify which teachers really reach which kids,” he writes - especially in younger grades.

Which begs the question: Why aren't reformers devising a plan that uses what we know about teaching and learning, one that plays to the system's strengths?

If the challenge is to revolutionize the old assembly-line model of education, why obsess about how foremen are paid?

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net