Keys to Productive Dialogue

Words Matter: How to Talk Productively About Alternatives in Teacher Compensation

This conversation will evoke strong feelings. Many past conversations on these subjects have ended badly. How can your dialogue be substantive and productive? There are three basic principles:

1. Respect Multiple Perspectives

Where dialogue has been successful, a common thread is openness and participation. This may seem obvious, but in an issue this complex there is no single magic answer. No one can claim to know for certain which approach is best, because there simply isn’t enough clear data to know. The point is to work together to build a plan that has a broad base of support. Without broad support from both the teachers and the community, nothing important can be done well.

2. Fact-based orientation

>There are real examples of alternative systems. It is important to take a level-headed view of the available examples in order to have appropriate expectations of both the value and the risk of changes.

3. Words Matter! Avoid Words that Lead to Misunderstanding

Written materials about alternative teacher compensation use many harmful terms. Do not make the mistake of adopting these terms for your own dialogue!

• Not "merit pay": Among educators, "merit pay" is a dangerous epithet. These words have come to represent everything bad about past failed initiatives related to teacher pay, such as: subjectivity; zero-sum competition among colleagues; on-again-off-again implementation; unpredictability; and bias against poor children. The California Teachers Association encourages local dialogue about alternative compensation options, but its policy requires it to oppose "merit pay." For this dialogue we have chosen the neutral term "alternative compensation." Another popular alternative is "professional compensation."
• Not "good teachers" or "bad teachers" or even "teacher quality": These expressions, common in discussions of education policy, are unhelpful. A more productive expression is "teacher effectiveness." "Effectiveness" evaluates the quality of the result, not the worth of the person.
• Not "combat pay": It almost goes without saying, but this is an unhelpful expression. If your plan involves incentives to attract teachers to specific schools, just say so.
• Not "value added": In today's alternative compensation systems, teachers are not evaluated on the absolute level of their students' test scores (which would create incentives to "pick and choose" kids). Instead, standardized tests are used to quantify growth in individual student learning from one year to the next. The inventors of this approach gave it the unfortunate name "value added." At best, this term is dry and abstract. At worst, it brings to mind taxes and widgets. A better way to talk about the whole subject is to emphasize the change from a focus on abstract benchmarks to a more productive attention to individual learning growth.
• Not "performance pay" or "rewards." Intelligent people disagree about whether "pay for performance" is a harmful expression; the California Teachers Association itself has used this term in a neutral fashion. Nevertheless, the available evidence suggests that teachers and communities respond more favorably to "incentives" for "results" than they do to "rewards" for "performance." The former expression evokes professionalism; the latter evokes dog biscuits.