“Failing” Schools – a Teacher’s Perspective

Background

I have delivered learning in a variety of contexts to students aged from 6 up to their 70s in areas as diverse as horse riding (at one extreme) to network design and management at the other extreme.

For the purposes of this post, I would like to focus on two groups of students. The first group were Diploma level students who were all highly intelligent and just as highly motivated: these students routinely had an achievement rate of 95% under my tutelage. The second group was a group of youth-at-risk, where an achievement rate of 20% would be considered exceptional.

“Failing” Schools

There has been a lot of news recently about a Rhode Island high school which has sacked its entire teaching staff: http://wbztv.com/local/central.falls.high.2.1528415.html. This raises the issue of performance-related pay.

The Financial Incentive

At one end of the financial incentive spectrum, there is the “piecework” rate: you don’t produce any “pieces”, you don’t get any money. At the other end of the spectrum, it does not matter how much you produce, you get paid exactly the same amount of money. Readers may have come across advertisements for sales staff who are paid on a “basic plus commission” basis, which lies somewhere between these two extremes.

Imagine then that your pay as a teacher is based on your student outcomes. For the sake of simplicity, let us assume that you get paid a certain amount if none of your students achieve anything, and that you pay is doubled if you have a 100% achievement rate. Enter the teacher who owns his house, has no debts, and has little interest in conveying knowledge. What is he going to do in class all day? You’re right: he will just sit and gossip with his students. This does not benefit the students.

Now imagine the “payment by results” scenario in a school with a mixed range of students. How many teachers would be prepared to lose up to half their pay because they had been allocated a cohort of youth-at-risk students? Even a child of 10 could answer you that question.

Suppose we change the ratio so that you get paid 80% regardless, and the final 20% on a pro-rata achievement basis. Am I going to be bothered putting in that extra effort, both in terms of class time and my own emotional commitment for that extra 20% when the penalty that I will pay (and I speak from personal experience) will be verbal abuse, physical abuse and lies by students about me behaving improperly? Of course not.

It seems to me that the whole basis of using financial incentives to improve student outcomes at the teacher level is fundamentally flawed.

A Different Approach

I start from the premise that schools in different neighbourhoods have students with different social outlooks and different expectations. This may arise from different socio-economic conditions. This is not the same as saying that they have different levels of intelligence or capabilities. What this means is that schools with a high proportion of, or even possibly exclusively, youth-at-risk type students cannot be compared with schools with mostly highly motivated students.

There appears to be very little acknowledgement from the strategic decision-makers that these issues exist. Furthermore, I understand that it is regarded as being politically “inappropriate” to acknowledge and respond accordingly to such issues; this could be seen as a reaction against the social fragmentation arising from legislation such as the Butler Education Act in the UK in 1994 (see my post on a similar issue: https://philhart.edublogs.org/2009/10/29/making-schools-relevant/). From my own experience, there are significant differences between these types of student, and those differences need to be acknowledged. If you are one of these decision makers, and you disagree with what I have written, please use the comment form below to put your side of the story!

In the absence of any information to the contrary, the Rhode Island high school case has the appearance of being a victim of being a school in a disadvantaged area. The statistics and other facts quoted in the link near the top of this post would tend support that appearance. Without doing a lot more delving into the mass firing event, it is impossible to confirm that the appearance also represents “actuality”.

The Next Step

So what would I suggest for a “next step”? If you are in a position where you are working with youth-at-risk, and being expected to have 90% achievement rates, send a link to this page to your decision makers, and get them to disagree with what I have written.

They may argue that it is disaffected teachers that cause disaffected students. I would disagree, saying that in my experience all teachers are motivated when they first enter teaching, and it is the continual emotional and psychological drain on those teachers being over-exposed to such disaffected students that is the cause of the teachers’ disaffection: such teachers need support rather than condemnation.

They may argue that there is no problem, when you can plainly see one. If that happens, then it is time to move to a more enlightened school.

You can only look after your students if you look after yourself first.

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