The Canadian education blogs were buzzing last month about Erin Anderssen’s commentary on merit pay for teachers, published in The Globe and Mail. Too often merit pay generates polarized rhetoric rather than thoughtful discussion. To Anderssen’s credit, she introduces some of the research and contextual issues that frame the debate about this reform strategy.
Anderssen notes, for instance, that merit pay, which rewards individual teachers for higher levels of performance, is not particularly popular with teacher unions. Unions have long argued that individual incentive plans force teachers to compete, rather than cooperate, creating a disincentive for teachers to share information and teaching techniques (National Education Association, undated). Frank Bruseker, president of the Alberta Teachers Association, also has argued that compensation for student achievement will remove the incentive for teachers to work with struggling students (Mendleson, 2009).
The unions have some evidence on their side, since research on individual compensation pay plans is mixed. In an Israeli study reported in 2002, Lavy did find a correlation between an individual incentive program and student performance on standardized tests. He evaluated a particular incentive program experiment, in which teachers were rewarded with cash bonuses for improvements in their students’ performance on high school matriculation exams. His analysis supported the hypothesis that teachers’ monetary performance incentives had a significant effect on students’ achievement in English and math. However, other studies have not been as complimentary to merit pay schemes. Eberts, Hollenbeck, and Stone (2002), for instance, presented case study evidence from a U.S. county where one high school had piloted a pay for performance system to reward student retention. Comparing this high school with another in the same county that used a traditional compensation system, the researchers found that individual incentive programs for teachers were associated with a significant fall in drop-out rates, but were also associated with no apparent effect on students’ grade point averages, reduced average daily attendance, and an increased percentage of students who failed.
Teachers generally favor school- or group-based performance award programs, in which performance is measured and rewarded at the school or group level (National Governors Association, undated), since this approach is more consistent with the social norms of equality and collegiality in the teaching profession. Group goals are established, especially in the areas of student achievement (level or growth), and graduation and attendance rates, and bonuses are paid to teachers and other staff according to the degree of goal attainment. Typically, the single salary structure remains intact (Heneman, Milanowski & Kimball, 2007).
There are some applied research findings that appear to offer support for use of group-based compensation plans to improve student achievement. Lavy (2002b) matched Israeli schools eligible for a school-based incentive program with schools in similar communities. The study’s empirical results suggest that group monetary incentives contributed to significant gains in many dimensions of students' outcomes (Lavy, 2002b). Glewwe, Ilias and Kremer (2003) studied the effects of a school-based teacher incentive experiment in rural Kenya, where every teacher in grades 4 to 8 in a winning school got the same bonus. The authors demonstrated that students in treatment schools had higher test scores. However, there was little evidence that students in treatment schools retained these gains after the end of the program, consistent with the authors’ hypothesis that teachers seeking performance bonuses focused on manipulating short-run scores.
Knowledge- and skill-based compensation plans reward individual teacher behaviors or competencies thought to be linked to high-quality teacher performance (Heneman, Milanowski & Kimball, 2007). Teachers receive bonuses or increases in base salary for the acquisition of new competencies, classroom performance mastery, and/or certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). Often, changes are made to the single salary structure when this approach is utilized. For example, the number of steps in the salary structure may be reduced (Heneman, Milanowski & Kimball, 2007).
Knowledge- and skill-based pay plans are often based on the premise that teacher knowledge and competencies are positively correlated to student achievement. However, research on this relationship has produced mixed results. National Board certification, for example, has recently come under research scrutiny. A study of more than 300 fifth-grade teachers in North Carolina found that the distinction of being a National Board Certified Teacher does not necessarily translate into greater student success in the classroom. McColskey, Stronge, and colleagues (2006), for instance, found no significant relationship between National Board certification status and student achievement gains in the classroom. Another study, also conducted in North Carolina, produced quite different results. Using more than 600,000 student records from North Carolina schools, Goldhaber and Anthony (2004) demonstrated that students of National Board Certified Teachers improved on elementary math and reading tests more than pupils whose teachers did not achieve National Board Certification. The effects of NBCTs on students who were younger or low-income were even greater.
The success of a merit pay plan depends, in large part, on a reliable and valid system for measuring performance. Knowledge-based incentive systems require the simplest measurement system; in most cases, all that is required is documentation that the teacher has completed a professional development activity or achieved certification. Individual- and group-based compensation systems require a more complex measurement system that assesses teachers’ classroom performance, such as a standards-based evaluation system, and to varying degrees, correlates teacher performance to student achievement. This type of system typically utilizes a comprehensive set of standards and rubrics with the intention of enhancing instruction and strengthening educational accountability (Danielson, 1996).
A related measurement issue not frequently discussed within our borders is the efficient tracking of data related to teacher performance and student achievement. Many states south of the border, including Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, have already taken steps to add teacher data to existing student unit record systems, making it simpler to track this information on a state- or school board-level. These systems also make it possible to identify which students and which courses are being taught by teachers with different levels and types of preparation, certification, professional development, and seniority and how these experience levels are related to the academic growth of the students. The federal government in the U.S. is making substantial investments in these enhanced data systems, seeing them as the foundation from which states and school boards can make data-driven decisions to improve student learning, as well as to facilitate research to increase student achievement.
Too many commentators glibly push (or decry) merit pay for teachers as the best (or the worst) thing to improve education. Anderssen, to her credit, takes the higher road and attempts to sketch the complexity of the issue—the range of merit pay strategies and the interrelated issues of measurement and data systems. It is time to open a richer discussion on merit pay, drawing upon international experience in merit pay to inform a new-generation Canadian experiment in rewarding teacher performance.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
On the Bottom Rung: Canada’s Early Care and Learning
Early care and learning should be one of Canada’s most significant educational policy issues in this new decade. Why? Because we are so very bad at providing high-quality early learning environments for our youngest citizens and the rest of the world knows it. It was less than two years ago when UNICEF issued a report card in 2008 that compared government policy and results for young children and their families in 25 developed countries. Canada ranked in last place, achieving only one benchmark out of ten (for staff training in child care programs) while missing benchmarks for measurements of child poverty, parental leave, access to essential child health services, and quality early childhood education and care programs. Similarly, the OECD’s 2006 international study of early childhood education, Starting Strong II, also ranked Canada’s approach to child care last among the over 20 countries included in its study, noting that our nation had the lowest public investment, the lowest access rates, and among the highest parent fees in the world.
Responsibility for early care and learning, like its primary and secondary education counterparts, is primarily a provincial responsibility. There have been many attempts, dating back to the late 1980s through the present, to develop a national approach to early care and learning, but the abolishment of the Canada Assistance Program in 1996 and the establishment of the Canada Health and Social Transfer block fund asserted the provinces’ primacy in this policy area. With the exception of Quebec, which expanded its early learning and child care programs beginning in 1997 to ensure better access to families, child care in the majority of the Canadian provinces is primarily a fee-paying service with many families not able to access services due to costs. While fee subsidies are available in all jurisdictions, limitations on subsidies exclude some eligible parents or the subsidy itself is insufficient to cover the child care fee. It is not unusual for middle class or modest income families to fail to qualify for a fee subsidy. Quebec alone offers a flat fee for child care at an impressively low $7/day.
These policy strategies ignore the human capital arguments that support government investments in early care and learning. Human capital theory suggests that a well-educated population is able to innovate and more readily adapt to technological changes, contributing to the society’s capability to produce wealth. The educational process happens over multiple time periods, and the stock of skills generated in one period depends critically on the stock of skills that served as a foundation in the previous period. Therefore, investments in human capital early in a child’s life cycle are likely to be more efficient than investments made at older ages.
Economic arguments citing positive social outcomes of early childhood education also support the idea of government investments. Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, and Shonkoff (2006) cited evidence of positive economic, neurobiological, and behavioral outcomes to support their argument that providing early child education to disadvantaged children was the most efficient strategy for strengthening the future workforce and improving its quality of life. Karoly, Kilburn, and Cannon (2005) presented a similar range of outcomes, including increased high school graduation, college attendance, and labor force and participation, and decreases in socially negative behaviors such as crime, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy.
Cost-benefit analysis in particular has been applied to provide evidence that investments in early care and learning have the potential to generate government savings and produce returns to society that outpace most public and private investments. The best-known early care and education cost-benefit analysis was the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project study in the United States. Utilizing random assignment of its 123 low-income, African-American participants to control and intervention groups with virtually no attrition during the almost 40 year-period under study, this study showed a consistent pattern of causes and effects from preschool to adulthood. In summary, this study provided solid evidence that children living in poverty who attend good preschool programs experience a series of positive effects that stretches from improvements in early childhood intellectual performance and disposition towards learning, to reduced need for placement in special education classes in later childhood, to higher school achievement and commitment in early adolescence, to lower rates of high school dropout, arrests, and welfare assistance and higher earnings and wealth in later adolescence and early adulthood. Significantly, most of the outcome gains accruing to program participants were maintained over the longer term—even as late as age 40.
Other economic studies of early care and learning programs reached similar conclusions to the Perry Preschool study. A random-assignment study of the Abecedarian program, conducted in North Carolina in the 1970s, focused on African-American children at risk of social and cognitive problems. The program delivered full-day high quality child care services from infancy to 5 years of age. By the time children had reached the age of 21, the total public benefits were calculated as $2.69 for each public dollar invested. A benefit-cost study conducted in Canada by Cleveland and Krashinsky in 1998 found that the incremental benefits of a universal high-quality early care and learning program for two to five year old children across the nation would be twice as high as the costs.
Given evidence from these studies, it is not unreasonable to presume that cost savings for provincial governments could be large enough to not only repay the initial costs of investments in early care and learning, but also to generate savings to the provinces as a whole several times greater than the costs. These findings move early care and learning policy from being strictly a social-service policy and philanthropic endeavor to help children from low-income families to also being considered an economic development strategy.
There are encouraging signs across the country that more provinces recognize the benefits of investing in early care and learning. Starting in September of this year, Ontario will provide a full day of learning to four- and five-year-olds as part of the province's plan to build a stronger school system and a well-educated workforce. British Columbia, guided by its Early Learning Framework, will make full day kindergarten available to up to half of its eligible five year olds this September, with access to all eligible children by September 2011. And Manitoba’s five-year policy agenda, Family Choices, commits Manitoba to maintaining the second lowest child care fees in Canada, after Québec, among many other innovative policy strategies.
Still, the lack of federal leadership on early care and learning is a hindrance to major policy improvements. In 2006, the authors of the OECD international report on early childhood education noted that almost all governments in Canada recognize that the lack of coherent early learning policies across the country was problematic and that collaborative action was needed. While there have been several sputtering attempts at the federal level during the past three decades to develop a national approach to early care and learning, nearly all have failed to gain traction. The previous Liberal government, under Prime Minister Paul Martin, had made the most successful effort, having negotiated bi-lateral agreements with all ten provincial governments. While there was some variation in the provinces’ agreements, all provinces committed to developing detailed Action Plans based on the four principles of Quality, Universality, Accessibility and Developmental [programming] that formed the basis of the Liberals’ national early learning and child care framework. All agreements also included provincial commitment to collaborative infrastructural work in areas such as a national quality framework and data systems. This was all cancelled by the minority Harper government, which opted to replace this commitment in favour of a $1,200 annual allowance to parents with children under six years of age and a capital funding initiative to support the creation of child care spaces by employers and communities through tax credits. The latter initiative has yet to meet its goal of creating 250,000 new child care spaces. Instead, federal funding cuts threaten to close more subsidized spaces, with child care advocates in Ontario stating that as many as 15,000 spaces are at risk when federal funding runs out in 2010.
Early care and learning in Canada has progressed little since the UNICEF report card and OECD report were issued, guaranteeing us a bottom rung position on this critical quality of life indicator should these studies be repeated in the near future. Given our current understanding of the positive societal benefits of investments in early care and learning, we cannot turn a blind eye toward this policy issue any longer. Our federal leaders need to work with the provinces and territories to create a nationally coordinated, publicly funded early learning and care system that ensures that Canadian families have universal access to quality child care.
Responsibility for early care and learning, like its primary and secondary education counterparts, is primarily a provincial responsibility. There have been many attempts, dating back to the late 1980s through the present, to develop a national approach to early care and learning, but the abolishment of the Canada Assistance Program in 1996 and the establishment of the Canada Health and Social Transfer block fund asserted the provinces’ primacy in this policy area. With the exception of Quebec, which expanded its early learning and child care programs beginning in 1997 to ensure better access to families, child care in the majority of the Canadian provinces is primarily a fee-paying service with many families not able to access services due to costs. While fee subsidies are available in all jurisdictions, limitations on subsidies exclude some eligible parents or the subsidy itself is insufficient to cover the child care fee. It is not unusual for middle class or modest income families to fail to qualify for a fee subsidy. Quebec alone offers a flat fee for child care at an impressively low $7/day.
These policy strategies ignore the human capital arguments that support government investments in early care and learning. Human capital theory suggests that a well-educated population is able to innovate and more readily adapt to technological changes, contributing to the society’s capability to produce wealth. The educational process happens over multiple time periods, and the stock of skills generated in one period depends critically on the stock of skills that served as a foundation in the previous period. Therefore, investments in human capital early in a child’s life cycle are likely to be more efficient than investments made at older ages.
Economic arguments citing positive social outcomes of early childhood education also support the idea of government investments. Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, and Shonkoff (2006) cited evidence of positive economic, neurobiological, and behavioral outcomes to support their argument that providing early child education to disadvantaged children was the most efficient strategy for strengthening the future workforce and improving its quality of life. Karoly, Kilburn, and Cannon (2005) presented a similar range of outcomes, including increased high school graduation, college attendance, and labor force and participation, and decreases in socially negative behaviors such as crime, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy.
Cost-benefit analysis in particular has been applied to provide evidence that investments in early care and learning have the potential to generate government savings and produce returns to society that outpace most public and private investments. The best-known early care and education cost-benefit analysis was the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project study in the United States. Utilizing random assignment of its 123 low-income, African-American participants to control and intervention groups with virtually no attrition during the almost 40 year-period under study, this study showed a consistent pattern of causes and effects from preschool to adulthood. In summary, this study provided solid evidence that children living in poverty who attend good preschool programs experience a series of positive effects that stretches from improvements in early childhood intellectual performance and disposition towards learning, to reduced need for placement in special education classes in later childhood, to higher school achievement and commitment in early adolescence, to lower rates of high school dropout, arrests, and welfare assistance and higher earnings and wealth in later adolescence and early adulthood. Significantly, most of the outcome gains accruing to program participants were maintained over the longer term—even as late as age 40.
Other economic studies of early care and learning programs reached similar conclusions to the Perry Preschool study. A random-assignment study of the Abecedarian program, conducted in North Carolina in the 1970s, focused on African-American children at risk of social and cognitive problems. The program delivered full-day high quality child care services from infancy to 5 years of age. By the time children had reached the age of 21, the total public benefits were calculated as $2.69 for each public dollar invested. A benefit-cost study conducted in Canada by Cleveland and Krashinsky in 1998 found that the incremental benefits of a universal high-quality early care and learning program for two to five year old children across the nation would be twice as high as the costs.
Given evidence from these studies, it is not unreasonable to presume that cost savings for provincial governments could be large enough to not only repay the initial costs of investments in early care and learning, but also to generate savings to the provinces as a whole several times greater than the costs. These findings move early care and learning policy from being strictly a social-service policy and philanthropic endeavor to help children from low-income families to also being considered an economic development strategy.
There are encouraging signs across the country that more provinces recognize the benefits of investing in early care and learning. Starting in September of this year, Ontario will provide a full day of learning to four- and five-year-olds as part of the province's plan to build a stronger school system and a well-educated workforce. British Columbia, guided by its Early Learning Framework, will make full day kindergarten available to up to half of its eligible five year olds this September, with access to all eligible children by September 2011. And Manitoba’s five-year policy agenda, Family Choices, commits Manitoba to maintaining the second lowest child care fees in Canada, after Québec, among many other innovative policy strategies.
Still, the lack of federal leadership on early care and learning is a hindrance to major policy improvements. In 2006, the authors of the OECD international report on early childhood education noted that almost all governments in Canada recognize that the lack of coherent early learning policies across the country was problematic and that collaborative action was needed. While there have been several sputtering attempts at the federal level during the past three decades to develop a national approach to early care and learning, nearly all have failed to gain traction. The previous Liberal government, under Prime Minister Paul Martin, had made the most successful effort, having negotiated bi-lateral agreements with all ten provincial governments. While there was some variation in the provinces’ agreements, all provinces committed to developing detailed Action Plans based on the four principles of Quality, Universality, Accessibility and Developmental [programming] that formed the basis of the Liberals’ national early learning and child care framework. All agreements also included provincial commitment to collaborative infrastructural work in areas such as a national quality framework and data systems. This was all cancelled by the minority Harper government, which opted to replace this commitment in favour of a $1,200 annual allowance to parents with children under six years of age and a capital funding initiative to support the creation of child care spaces by employers and communities through tax credits. The latter initiative has yet to meet its goal of creating 250,000 new child care spaces. Instead, federal funding cuts threaten to close more subsidized spaces, with child care advocates in Ontario stating that as many as 15,000 spaces are at risk when federal funding runs out in 2010.
Early care and learning in Canada has progressed little since the UNICEF report card and OECD report were issued, guaranteeing us a bottom rung position on this critical quality of life indicator should these studies be repeated in the near future. Given our current understanding of the positive societal benefits of investments in early care and learning, we cannot turn a blind eye toward this policy issue any longer. Our federal leaders need to work with the provinces and territories to create a nationally coordinated, publicly funded early learning and care system that ensures that Canadian families have universal access to quality child care.
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