The Teacher Wars (27 page)

While Shanker selectively embraced
A Nation at Risk
, professors
of education turned out to be the report's harshest critics. Their perspective is summed up in David Berliner and Bruce Biddle's 1995 call to arms,
The Manufactured Crisis
, which argued that American education was in fine shape, contrary to the report's core assumptions, and that where it was weak, it was the fault of regressive policies, such as those that produced gaps in teacher pay between rich and poor school districts. The authors pointed out that SAT scores had declined in large part because a more diverse group of students was taking the exam, including poor children, who never would have dreamt of applying to college in the years before World War II. They acknowledged that American teachers were less academically distinguished than their counterparts abroad. But that was not because of deficiencies in the teacher certification process, they wrote, but because American teachers were paid less than other white-collar workers.
In Japan the average teacher earned as much as the average engineer; in the United States, teachers earned only 60 percent as much as engineers.

Jay Sommer had his own critiques of the new reform push. Sommer was a national “teacher of the year” who taught foreign languages at New Rochelle High School in New York, and the only working teacher on the commission that produced
A Nation at Risk
. He believed the main problem with teaching in America was that school districts invested almost nothing in improving their employees' skills. “
Basically, no teacher wants to fail,” Sommer told Fred Hechinger, the eminent education columnist at
The New York Times
. “If they are failing, it's because they get no supervision, no direction, no leadership.”

In the long term,
A Nation at Risk
prevailed over its critics. The report, quite smartly, differed from other national drives for school reform in that it focused on raising standards for all children, not just poor children. That helped it appeal to business leaders and middle-class parents, who were attracted to the dramatic portrait of educational complacency in the face of unrelenting international competition. Magazines aped the report's style and assumptions. “It's like Pearl Harbor,”
Fortune
declared. “
The Japanese have invaded and the U.S. has been caught short. Not on guns and tanks
and battleships—those are yesterday's weapons—but on mental might. In a high-tech age where nations increasingly compete on brainpower, American schools are producing an army of illiterates.”

State policy makers, especially a new generation of “education governors” such as Lamar Alexander in Tennessee, Bill Clinton in Arkansas, and, later, George W. Bush in Texas and his brother Jeb in Florida, were eager to claim they had followed the advice of
A Nation at Risk
.
Two-thirds of the states launched new student testing programs, and thirty began requiring teachers to pass pre-service exams. Twenty states created fast-track alternative pathways into the classroom, which allowed college graduates who hadn't studied education to quickly become teachers. Twenty-four states claimed to have implemented some sort of “career ladder” rewarding teachers with merit pay, but by the end of the decade, almost all of those ladders had collapsed, weighed down by low budgets and lack of teacher buy-in. Since the rhetoric and policy prescriptions of
A Nation at Risk
have proven so enduring—the very same assumptions and ideals underlie No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core, and almost every other contemporary reform effort to improve teaching—it is crucial to look at why, exactly, the first generation of accountability-driven national teacher reform failed.

By 1988, just five years after
A Nation at Risk
debuted,
The New York Times
declared: “Merit pay for teachers is beginning to look like
a flawed idea whose time has gone.… In retrospect, the rise and fall of merit pay were probably inevitable.”

Indeed. Even at the time
A Nation at Risk
was published there was already compelling evidence that merit pay plans across the country had been overhyped—evidence ignored by reformers, like Ted Bell, who were eager to propose low-cost solutions to educational underperformance. Several nationwide
studies of merit pay programs instituted between the 1930s and 1970s found that the majority failed within six years and faced similar barriers to effectiveness: excessive administrative paperwork, low funding, disagreements about how to judge good teaching, and strong opposition from teachers themselves.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, provides a powerful example of the hype-disillusionment cycle characteristic of teacher merit pay plans. In 1974, the
American School Board Journal
published a rapturous series of articles about the district's new superintendent, William Coats, who had never before worked in public school administration (he had been a college professor). Coats had proposed a merit pay system in which every teacher would be graded according to her students' standardized test scores. Her classroom practice would be observed by five to fifteen peer teachers, by her principal, and by pupils, all of whom would produce written reports on her performance. The teacher would also write a self-assessment. Administrators, too, would be evaluated by their colleagues, by the teachers who reported to them, and by students and parents.

Just a year after implementation, the
Journal
reported that this system had transformed the Kalamazoo public schools. “Student achievement is up—significantly so. Racial violence, which for years has plagued Kalamazoo's schools, has almost disappeared. Board members smile more pleasantly and more frequently, they report, confident for the first time in years that most taxpayer dollars are not wasted in city schools.”

In reality, superintendent Coats and his merit system lasted less than three years in Kalamazoo. The plan attracted immediate backlash from every corner, including from administrators exhausted by the overwhelming number of employee reports they had to write. Although test scores improved—in reality, only modestly—parents did not celebrate and instead complained about classroom time spent prepping for multiple-choice tests now that teachers were being graded according to their students' scores. As for the decrease in racial violence, it had little or nothing to do with merit pay. In 1971 the courts had ordered Kalamazoo to desegregate its schools, which put black and white children into contact with one another at the elementary school level, so that by the time they entered the city's two high schools, racial tensions were less extreme. The district renovated classrooms in formerly all-black schools, hired more black teachers, and actively recruited black children into advanced courses. Coats had been hired by a majority-white school board that opposed the court desegregation order. He claimed his mechanistic
teacher evaluation scheme had produced the district's student achievement gains. But principals disagreed. “Now the schools are free to focus on performance and academics, since desegregation has eliminated the racial conflicts and the cost of controlling those conflicts,” a Kalamazoo junior high school principal told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “In my school we need fewer crisis staff and it is now a quiet school.”

All over the country, heavy paperwork burdens turned principals into skeptics of politically imposed merit pay plans—much as the dissident principal Alexander Fichlander had complained, in New York City in 1920, that the city's complex A–D evaluation scheme sucked up time while doing little to help teachers improve.
In Texas, a 1984 guidebook advising principals on how to hold teachers accountable suggested an evaluation rubric with sixty-three categories, each requiring a rating on a scale of one to five. Some of the items contradicted one another. Were teachers ignoring “attention-grabbing” behavior from students? That was a good thing. Yet another category called for teachers to quickly “negatively reinforce” bad behavior.

There were several
merit pay plans that were popular with teachers, and they had one major feature in common: Bonuses were available to every high-performing teacher in a school district, regardless of the grade level or subject they taught. That was rarely the design of merit pay programs launched in the wake of
A Nation at Risk
, which tended to be funded at such low levels that bonuses were available only to teachers of some subjects and grades: just 15 percent of teachers in Tennessee under Governor Lamar Alexander's widely celebrated plan, and 10 percent of teachers in Florida. When so few teachers could benefit from merit pay, the bonuses were seen as divisive, undercutting morale.

Gera Summerford, today the president of the Tennessee Education Association, the state teachers union, was a first-year middle school math teacher in Nashville when
the merit pay program rolled out in 1982. “I was very idealistic,” she recalled. “I felt like it was an opportunity for me to demonstrate that I was a more effective teacher than maybe some of the ones who had been teaching for a
long time. But when I went through the process, I was very disillusioned.”

Summerford was supposed to be evaluated by three people, including a peer with experience in her subject area. But the district sent a business teacher, not a math teacher, to observe her classroom, and she found this unhelpful. The system applied to both teachers and administrators, and it created three levels of recognition, with bonuses between $1,000 and $7,000. Teachers soon noticed that almost every principal who applied for the extra pay was quickly bumped up through all three levels, while just 13 percent of teachers achieved Level 2 or 3. That created resentment. The most popular part of the system was overtime pay offered to teachers who supervised afterschool programs or provided extra tutoring. “That really did help kids,” Summerford said. But ultimately the relatively small bonuses tied to capricious classroom observations seemed almost absurd, “an insultingly small amount of money” distributed through a labor-intensive process yet in an unpredictable way. Within a decade, the system was phased out, in part because of continued NEA opposition, and in part because it had been financed by an unpopular increase in the state sales tax.

All this foment around merit pay occurred at a time when the average American teacher earned just
$23,500 per year ($47,400 in today's dollars), less than a mail carrier and half that of the average lawyer or accountant. An alternative corner of the education reform movement tried to send the message that raising base salaries—by 25 percent,
the Carnegie Foundation recommended, or to an average of $50,000, according to RAND—would do much more to increase the profession's prestige.

But influential business leaders were eager proponents of numbers-driven merit pay for teachers.
Ross Perot, for example, pushed Dallas to implement a plan to use test scores alone to evaluate teachers and distribute pay increases. So it was ironic that private industry had, by the 1980s, mostly turned away from efforts to pay white-collar workers according to strict productivity measures, finding that such
formal evaluation programs were too expensive and time-consuming to create and implement. Research showed that
companies with merit pay schemes did not perform better financially than did organizations without it, nor were their employees happier. Instead, management gurus recommended that workers be judged primarily by the holistic standards of individual supervisors.

It is important to note that in public education, teachers unions have had a long history of fighting attempts to institute subjective evaluation systems; at the most basic level, New York City teachers had gone on their massive strike in 1968 to deny an administrator, Rhody McCoy, the right to evaluate his teachers and staff his schools as he saw fit. In the 1980s both the AFT and the NEA responded to calls for merit pay by saying they would support it only when it was based on “objective” measurements, such as teachers' scores on tests of subject matter knowledge. Al Shanker said, “
I always was and still am against any merit pay notion that would be based on the idea that some principal walks into your room and gives a judgment as to who is a better teacher.” Some accountability reformers actually shared Shanker's skepticism. Chester Finn, a longtime moderate Republican education reform guru who advised Lamar Alexander on teacher career ladders, described to me the grim status quo in classroom observation: “
The principals were often former gym teachers, and had almost never been trained to be sophisticated overseers of teacher quality or performance. In the absence of quantitative data, a principal would be a perfunctory and ill-trained observer, and either liked or didn't like what he saw. It was awfully easy for the principal to then make decisions based on ‘Who do I like? Who's my cousin? Who's my girlfriend?' or a variety of other factors that don't have to do with classroom effectiveness.”

When unions brought this suspicion of principals to the negotiation table, the results in some instances were even more complex and expensive evaluation systems, like Tennessee's, in which principals' ratings were cross-checked and sometimes overruled by teams of observers from outside each school, a plan Shanker approved. In the end, nearly all the merit pay and career ladder plans of the
Nation at Risk
era—underfunded, unpopular, and overly bureaucratic—were defunct by the end of the 1980s. Supposedly more objective measures of teachers based on student test scores would emerge in the national conversation in the late 1990s, in large part because both
union leaders and some reformers had for so long refused to trust principals to evaluate their staffs.

While merit pay failed in the 1980s, in another respect the Reagan administration achieved its education goals by displacing the previous era's commitment to school desegregation.

On October 8, 1984, in the thick of his reelection campaign, President Reagan appeared in front of a majority-white audience in Charlotte, North Carolina. He claimed the city's storied busing program
“takes innocent children out of the neighborhood school and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants. And we've found out that it failed.” To Reagan's surprise, he was greeted with stony silence, not cheers.