Pay-for-performance models and arts education

Answers by Ms. Nancy Flanagan

How do you view proposals to reward teachers based on performance?

With caution—but also optimism.  I believe we are at a critical juncture on this issue. It’s clear that the single salary scale has outlived its usefulness, but teachers are thoroughly comfortable with it and defend it automatically.  Teachers also acknowledge—when pressed—that some teachers are more effective or skilled than others, and should be rewarded for those competencies.  So the key to taking advantage of this “window for change” is to structure pay-for-performance models that actually leverage the kinds of teacher performance that improve student learning. 

There are some interesting pay-for-performance models in existence.  Some have been hammered out collaboratively, around a site-based vision of what’s important.  Others are imposed by policy-makers with a more limited vision of student achievement. If your sole target is raising test scores, pay for performance will be severely skewed toward certain teachers and subjects, and concentrated on proven methods for ratcheting up scores on standardized tests.  You might get higher test scores—but you will change teaching practice and student learning in some unhealthy ways.

How might pay-for-performance change the teaching profession?

A good pay-for-performance system uses existing resources in new ways, to pursue clear goals.  The first great thing that might come out of a pay-for-performance system is the very useful exercise of sitting down to determine what is most valued and important for students, in a particular school or system.  If your primary goal is full literacy, for example—a very worthy aim—then you might be willing to pay effective early childhood and reading teachers a bonus, even if their students do not take standardized tests. 

Pay for performance could eventually have an entrepreneurial effect on the teaching profession, as districts and divisions re-order their priorities and begin hiring and compensating teachers based on these priorities.  In a single salary system, teachers are rewarded for simple accrual—more graduate hours, more years on the job. When a school has a clear picture of the skills and knowledge it needs and desires, teachers can re-shape their own skills and knowledge to match.  Pursuit of new teacher competencies becomes focused on current needs, rather than matching existing staff to “jobs”. Smart districts will willingly pay more to keep accomplished teachers. 

How can teachers influence educational policies like pay-for-performance?

This is the critical question.  Teachers are my favorite people on the planet, but do not always see themselves as having a voice in the essential decisions that shape their own work.  Teachers must become fully professional—endorsing high standards for professional practice, becoming fully informed about educational issues and accepting responsibility for the outcomes of their practice.  We’re not there yet—but a movement toward teacher leadership is growing and evolving.  I’m optimistic.

Please describe your ideal panel of experts drawn together to study a pressing educational reform issue. Who would be on the panel, and what role would each person play?

Lots of teachers, of course!  I have been the “token teacher” on any number of panels, and it is difficult to assert the viewpoint of the classroom practitioner, when the voices of research, administration, economics and policy creation dominate the table.  Teachers are the foot soldiers in the ongoing battle to improve education and maintain the ideal of a high-quality school for every child in America.  When we create policy minus the perspective of those who will implement it, we can’t expect stellar results.  To be fair—teachers must step up to the plate with an articulate vision of what exemplary schooling looks like and how it can be realized.  They must also accept the fact that responsibility for education rests in many hands, beginning with parents and communities, and the strongest and most workable solutions to thorny issues will be informed by research and made sustainable by input from economic and political experts.

You are a 30-year music teacher. It seems like the arts have undergone a rough transition period in the last several decades, as seen in popular media such as “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” Can you detail this change for our readers?

Like all trends and changes in education, the decline in arts education is very context-dependent.  There are many places where strong music and art programs thrive, despite tight resources—almost always because of a Mr. Holland, someone with a deep understanding of the importance of human expression.  Teacher leadership in the arts helps preserve these programs.  There are significant statistical declines in the number of arts teachers and monetary support for programs in the past few decades, to be sure, but a renaissance in arts education will be predicated on a new vision of what arts programs can do to enhance student learning, not winning a battle for funding.

What should the future role of arts in public education in America be? If you had to predict the future of arts education, what would your prediction be?

Music, art, drama and dance are irresistible.  They are embedded in human nature—the arts are how we understand ourselves and make meaning of our world.  All modern communication is sound and image based.  We make sense of the world through movies, songs, videos, photographs—all of which are now immediately available. To limit education to text-based symbolic manipulation is short-sighted and perhaps even dangerous in a liberal democracy.  I believe that the most important tools we can give our children in the 21st century are those of media literacy—and true literacy means understanding the very real power of the arts to shape thinking.  Education policy hasn’t caught up to real educational needs yet.  I’d bet on a resurgence of the humanities in the curriculum, but what I’m hoping for is new ways to teach and study the arts. 

What can teachers do to ensure that their students continue to receive a well-rounded education in the arts?

First, teachers can stop fighting meaningless disciplinary turf battles, wherein one subject is elevated above another. It’s useful to study curriculum development over the past century, and realize that what goes around comes around, when it comes to determining “what children need”—good and useful curriculum will change with the times. We are also prone to thinking of our work in tidy boxes—an hour for math, 90 minutes for reading, 25 minutes to sing, when human knowledge is much messier and far more interconnected.  The very organization of schools is based on this hierarchal, linear idea of controlled student learning.  Perhaps a first step would be to encourage all teachers to see student production of the arts as natural and vital in the study of any subject, and stop waiting for an arts specialist and dedicated time and space.  Give students and their parents some art and music, and they will demand more.