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Merit pay for teachers is problematic, says former deputy minister of education

Charles Ungerleider believes Kevin Falcon deserves credit for caring about the province’s education system by suggesting a merit pay system for teachers, even if the former deputy minister of education thinks the plan will never work.

“He doesn’t know a lot about how the education system works,” Ungerleider told The Tyee.

“He doesn’t study educational measurements, he doesn’t study instruction, and he hasn’t had the benefit of that study to inform his decision, so he’s latched onto something that seems on the surface superficially plausible.”

Falcon is proposing to create a Master Teacher Incentive Program, which would increase teacher pay on the basis of performance, not seniority, should he win the Liberal leadership race on February 26.

“BC has a great education system powered by thousands of very dedicated professional teachers and administrators. But every parent and student knows who the exceptional, innovative educators are,” says Falcon in a press release on his website.

“Government needs to recognize and reward those teachers, and encourage them to share their expertise and methods with their peers.”

Ungerleider, currently a professor of the sociology of education at the University of British Columbia, is not alone in criticizing the plan: it’s been panned by both the BC Teachers Federation and fellow Liberal leadership candidate, and former minister of education, George Abbott.

Ungerleider’s main issue with the idea is that only 30 per cent of the variance in student outcomes can be attributed to schools, and only 15 per cent of that to identifiable factors like teachers. The other 70 per cent is attributed to outside influences such as poverty, parent education, how often the student switches schools, whether English is the first language, and more. In addition, he says blaming a teacher who taught a student for one year is problematic.

“Any performance of a youngster at any given point in his or her career as a learner is the product of all their previous experiences. So how do you say ‘yes, it’s this teacher, this year,’ and then reward or fail to reward that teacher?” he says.

“Good teaching is very, very, complicated in a sense of what a teacher does interacts with a lot of other variables to produce the outcomes that are realized. It’s not like a recipe that somebody can follow. It requires judgement, fine tuning of one’s practice.”

Falcon has not provided specifics as to how teachers would be measured, saying he would work with parents, educators, and community groups. But Ungerleider believes Falcon got the idea from the United States, where some states assess teachers by students’ standardized test results, and he maintains that in the long run it fails to improve educational outcomes.

“It comes from the school of thought ‘If you reward people for good behaviour, they’ll repeat that behaviour and apply effort.’ It turns out that actually the magnitude of behaviour change is inverse with the size of the reward. So you actually get bigger behaviour changes with small rewards than you get with big rewards,” he told The Tyee.

“But the whole issue of incentives is very, very complex, and teaching is a lot more complicated than pecking at a button to get fed like a pigeon.”

Katie Hyslop reports on education for The Tyee.

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