{"id":842,"date":"2007-01-14T10:40:40","date_gmt":"2007-01-14T14:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=842"},"modified":"2007-01-14T10:40:40","modified_gmt":"2007-01-14T14:40:40","slug":"figlio-and-kenny-paper-on-merit-pay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=842","title":{"rendered":"Figlio and Kenny paper on merit pay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>David Figlio and Lawrence Kenny&#8217;s paper <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w12627\">Individual Teacher Incentives and Student Performance<\/a> (NBER, restricted) has been reported by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edweek.org\/ew\/articles\/2007\/01\/10\/18merit.h26.html?qs=figlio\">Ed Week<\/a> and discussed by <a href=\"http:\/\/joannejacobs.com\/2007\/01\/07\/merit-pay-boosts-scores\/\">Joanne Jacobs<\/a> and at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.letsgetitright.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/do_teachers_really_love_to_gam.html\">NCLBlog.<\/a> Howard at AFT (F. Howard Nelson?) lists a number of caveats.&nbsp; Some more information (thanks to David Figlio for permission to crib from our e-mail correspondence):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Because the measure is from 12th grade, a logical question is about selection effects from differential dropping out. Figlio and Kenny <em>did<\/em> check for sensitivity to graduation.<\/li>\n<li>The questions on merit pay were worded carefully to exclude bonuses for AP teachers, etc. (something that would otherwise make merit pay measures a proxy for the proportion of teachers who teach AP or do other service).<\/li>\n<li>Something I brought to David Figlio&#8217;s attention was something they hadn&#8217;t considered: distribution of teachers <em>within<\/em> a school. Some administrators spend some effort to recruit teachers who work well with 9th grades. Others distribute teachers&#8217; assignments evenly. Others assign the teachers perceived to be most skilled in their content areas to 12th grade (and advanced) classes. The result is that we don&#8217;t know if 12th grade teachers are selected for certain qualities, and those qualities (especially if they&#8217;re seen as high-academic content specialists) may make them more responsive to individual pay incentives. (Howard at AFT noted that the measure may be a long-term indicator, but it may also reflect short-term changes. We just don&#8217;t know.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Because David Figlio is on sabbatical in England, he didn&#8217;t have immediate access to the data to answer my most important question: what&#8217;s the distribution of schools&#8217; mean test scores? Without that information (which isn&#8217;t in the NBER working-paper version), we don&#8217;t know the effect size.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll repeat <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/000790.html\">what I&#8217;ve said before<\/a>: discussions of compensation systems often (mis)portray the issue as a dichotomy: either incentives or no incentives. That&#8217;s a oversimplification, and despite the data limitations that led to Figlio and Kenny&#8217;s approach, it&#8217;s a serious problem with generalizing from the research (which I&#8217;m sure people will do in abusing the Figlio and Kenny article). Again, I&#8217;m not an&nbsp;industrial-organizational psychologist, and if key people who are talking about merit pay know less than I do about the relevant research, there&#8217;s a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Figlio and Lawrence Kenny&#8217;s paper Individual Teacher Incentives and Student Performance (NBER, restricted) has been reported by Ed Week and discussed by Joanne Jacobs and at NCLBlog. Howard at AFT (F. Howard Nelson?) lists a number of caveats.&nbsp; Some more information (thanks to David Figlio for permission to crib from our e-mail correspondence): Because [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-dA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}