Dear Mr. Education Secretary-Nominate, Mr. Duncan:

I am writing to offer you my congratulations on having been chosen to serve Mr. Obama and the American people as the Secretary of Education. I am pleased that Mr. Obama has selected for such an important position someone who is not a politician, someone who is, instead, a genuine educator, and, moreover, an educator who has already shown that he can implement strategies that change the climate of schools and ensure that more children and teachers succeed. I am dismayed, however, by the fact that so many of my colleagues (and I am a teacher of 25 years’ experience myself), people whose talents and judgments I respect, have received the news of your appointment with something more like despair than the hope for the future that I would like your appointment to represent. The discouragement I have observed among my colleagues is directly due to the fact that some of your more radical and controversial policies suggest that you might be just one more anti-teacher establishmentarian.

If you are going to be successful in any degree in solving the myriad and colossal problems that weigh upon American public education today, you need teachers on your side. Education without teachers is a ridiculous oxymoronic fantasy, though the policies of the outgoing administration have clearly been aimed at achieving just that. You need teachers to believe in you and your judgment. Your advance press suggests that you have been able to work with your teaching constituency in Chicago to implement some of those red-flag policies with their support, rather than over their objections; I would like to see you do the same on the national stage, and I would like to suggest that you would serve yourself and the country’s educational institutions well if you begin immediately by introducing yourself to your now-much-bigger constituency by publicizing your philosophy, not just your policy. I would like to suggest that you begin with the issue that has been, amongst my acquaintance, the hot-button policy, the one which, based on my observations of the teachers of my acquaintance has already begun to wither your credibility before you even have a chance to get yourself established: paying students for good grades.

There is plenty of precedent to suggest that such an idea is not only ideologically unsound, but is also logistically untenable—even harmful. For instance: my school, a mostly-urban public high school of nearly 2000 students, which teeters every year on the edge of losing accreditation, and which regularly fails to meet Annual Yearly Progress for No Child Left Behind, largely due to attendance problems, recently looked into a grant program that offers to pay students and teachers for passing grades on Advanced Placement (AP) exams. The program, from the National Math and Science Initiative, rests on the belief that teachers and students will try harder if there is money at stake, more students will sign up for AP classes and AP exams—or will be allowed to sign up for AP classes—and more students will put in the real effort required in order to pass those exams. On the surface, it sounds like an idea with some potential for exerting a positive influence on the academic profile of a school like ours: we have an open-enrollment policy for AP, so there are no barriers that might make such a program favor students who already achieve at high levels over others who do not; our AP exam scores tend to be disappointingly low, and one of the (many) reasons for that is the struggle we have every year with trying to get students to accept the reality of the amount of work required for success in such a demanding course, so offering an incentive of a cash reward at the end might help with the motivational piece, and participation in the program requires extensive vertical-team training, so that teachers beginning in grade 6 are working effectively to help prepare more students for the rigors of the AP course. Upon closer examination, however, the program as it has been conceived by those who developed it (a group of businesses, as I understand it), while it might ultimately result in a few more passing scores in some AP subjects, would at the same time create tremendous inequities and would almost certainly result in divisiveness among students and faculty that would make it vastly more difficult to achieve our other myriad educational goals.

As it turns out, the program is only available for AP courses in English, Math, and Science. In our school, that is five courses of one section each, so five of our approximately 130 teachers would get an opportunity to earn extra pay, with no opportunity for others to opt in. That might be justifiable if that were simply a feature of the role, so that any teacher who teaches an advanced course with high stakes testing got extra pay as a matter of course, but this would not be the case. We offer AP courses in five other subjects, for one thing, and those teachers would not be eligible for any extra pay. In addition, we have an International Baccalaureate (IB)Diploma Programme, and none of those students or teachers would be eligible for the bonus pay—even though many of our IB students take the AP exams in English, math and science and pass them. Finally, despite the insistence of the grant program itself on the importance of vertical team preparation for AP exams, the reward money would go directly and only to the teacher of the course from which the exam would be taken, so the work done by those teachers in that subject in the preparatory grades would go unacknowledged and unrewarded.

Given all those conditions, the most easily predictable negative outcomes of implementing this program would be:

1. The justifiable resentment of most of the faculty toward the few teachers who would benefit financially from this program. I taught 21 IB English students last year; 20 of them passed the IB exam. That would have been $2000—nearly the equivalent of my National Board Stipend. (This was unusual; most years I have a 100% pass rate; my record is 113/117 since the inception of the program--$11,300 worth of bonuses that I would not get under the pay-for-grades system, while colleagues with much lower pass rates would get bonuses.) Assuming that this program did succeed eventually in inspiring more students to take on AP, a teacher could have anywhere between 50 and 100 students pass the AP exam—on the extreme end, that would be a $10,000 bonus, just about 1/3 of a starting teacher’s salary in our county. Everybody can do that math, and those teachers who would have to sit back and watch while others took advantage of an opportunity that simply was not available to everyone would inevitably, and quite reasonably, resent it. It’s one thing to offer an opportunity—like National Board Certification—that carries a substantive financial reward that every teacher can undertake if he or she chooses, and which is attainable by anyone willing to do what it takes to develop and demonstrate the necessary skills. (In Virginia, where I teach, there has been a $5000 bonus upon earning the certificate and an additional $2500 per year for the ten-year life of the certificate; whether that survives next year’s $400 million education budget cut remains to be seen.) It is something else altogether to offer even more substantive rewards to a select few who, by virtue of their chosen subject, are privileged over those who happen to teach another subject, such as American History, or US Government, or Spanish, or Music or Computer Programming. One might, I suppose, try to make the argument that anyone could have chosen to be an English teacher or a Biology teacher or a Calculus teacher, but I don’t think anyone would be willing to defend as a serious stance the idea that what we need in the United States is an educational system in which, by offering higher financial reward for teaching select subjects, we systematically encourage everyone to become English, math, or science teachers.

2. An even more understandable resentment on the part of those teachers of students in grades 6-11 who would be required, by the terms of the program, to invest time on weekends and during the summer to implement significant changes to their teaching in order to better prepare their students for those classes in which the students and those five lucky teachers would reap the benefits of all that preparation. It does not require significant powers of prognostication to predict that getting and keeping the cooperation of those teachers who are to do the work without the reward would pose a significant challenge; thus, we can expect that the introduction of reward money for those teachers at the end of the sequence would create divisiveness where unity is needed.

3. The immediate demise of our IB program. Since our IB students are the very students who are most likely to pass our AP exams, they would be the first to benefit from the reward money, and they would be those capable of earning the greatest quantity of it. For a wide variety of reasons, which I will detail elsewhere (but which include teacher training, curricular integrity, program oversight, and assessment feedback), I am fully convinced that the education a student gets by completing the two-year IB Diploma Programme is vastly more rigorous, vastly more complex, and vastly superior to that that he or she can get from taking a battery of independently conceived, non-programmatic, AP classes. Paying students in our building to take AP exams would actually lower the quality of those students’ overall education, and this outcome is virtually certain if the money comes into play.

4. Immediate complaints from students and parents about inequities. The potential logistical problems arising from a system of reward for performance for only a few select courses are mind-boggling; I will list only a few: how do we ensure that every student has equal access to courses that offer pay-for-performance? Creating a master schedule is tricky enough as it is; many students are forced to choose between, say, AP English literature and taking a special program at the county’s technical center, because the two conflict. If we are forcing students to make that choice in an environment where potential cash is available for the AP classes, the potential for anger over having to make that choice increases dramatically. What do we do when there are 37 students requesting AP Calculus and our budget simply does not allow for two sections under 20 students each? Which students are told “no”? Does the teacher have to try to teach college-level Calculus to 37 students at once? The larger class size reduces the probability of success for everyone—especially in a building such as ours where the students tend to have significant gaps in preparation, support from home, learning strategies, and time-management skills, and so require significant individual attention from the teacher. What happens if the demand for the courses with financial rewards rises so dramatically (whether the students are sufficiently prepared or not) that the school cannot provide enough qualified teachers to teach the curriculum? Do we place teachers who lack sufficient content knowledge? Do we refuse places to large numbers of students? One of the most common fallacies about the teaching of college level courses is that anybody can do it; in fact, those courses require content knowledge far beyond the level required for high school level courses. What structures will we put in place to ensure that we have the qualified faculty we need? Entrée into the program for more teachers would presumably be a good thing, in that it could help mitigate the resentment of being shut out of the opportunity, but where those who are assigned the courses cannot produce the result for which the reward is paid, another whole range of problems will arise—including, potentially, lawsuits from parents’ whose students did not earn the money while students in other sections, with more qualified teachers, did. And so on.

I spent some time hunting around the Internet, trying to find a detailed description of your pay-for-performance programs, and while the references to those programs are legion, description, assessment, justification and analysis are completely missing. In the absence of those, America’s teachers are left to make assumptions about your motives and your practices, and, if my friends’ reactions are any indication, teachers are making those assumptions based on their past experience with ill-formed, badly-implemented programs imposed upon the teaching profession by outsiders who actually know virtually nothing about what they hubristicly propose to solve. This may not be a reasonable reaction, but it is understandable, given the recent historical pattern of blaming teachers for the ills of education. You can head off these fears and begin to build your coalition if you will make yourself a very visible presence. You could begin with an article in the nation’s major newspapers laying out your philosophical justification for pay-for-performance—tackle the problem at the sorest spot and convince the teachers you need as allies that your policies are not just another depressing indicator that you are yet another one of those administrators who thinks “these teachers” are the source of the problem and that solving the problem involves measures that reduce the effect of teachers on students down to the minimum possible degree. I would love to know your solutions to these problems. I would love to read an article in which you detail your Pay-for-Performance program and answer such questions as:

• Under what circumstances do you see Pay-for-Performance as a necessary strategy?
• What grades earn what amounts of money, and what structures do you put in place in order to ensure that the grades issued are fair and equitable?
• Are there cash rewards for all students in all subjects? For all teachers? Or only a select few?
• What support do you provide for teachers by way of setting expectations and holding to them, so that grades do not become absurdly inflated—either by way of increasing rewards or by way of avoiding parental wrath when students do not earn the cash reward?
• Once Pay-for-Performance is implemented, is it permanent for those students, so that they continue to get cash rewards through to the end of their public schooling?
• Where does the money come from? What other programs must be cut in order to fund this program?
• Do you advocate this program as a potential nation-wide change to public education?
• How fast do you anticipate implementing this program on a large scale?

These are all essentially logistical problems, of course, and if those were the only objections, one can imagine that it would be possible, situation by situation, to wrestle through them and create functional systems of cash reward that reduced the anger and resentment to a workable level. These are not, however, the main worries that cause my friends and colleagues to point to your pay-for-performance program as an indicator that you are one more anti-teacher administrator looking for ways to increase student achievement despite bad teaching. The vastly more important problem arises from not knowing what the educational philosophy is that underpins your idea of paying students for good grades. The idea that students should trained to believe that they don’t have to learn unless they get paid for it is anathema to every teacher who came to education—and there are many—out of a deeply-held belief in the ideal of education as the means by which we make ourselves free.

The justification, in the current state of our culture, for paying adults for a job and not paying students to go to school is that we don’t consider student engagement in school as a job. The benefit that accrues to the student from his or her education is that the student gains the skills and knowledge that he or she needs in order to have power over his or her life. It is education that provides an individual with the ability to choose well, and it is freedom of choice that makes a life worthwhile, in the context of the American vision, as set out by Thomas Jefferson. It is education that provides a person with the ability to shape a life as close as possible to his own terms because it is through education that one learns to think, to judge, to assess reality, to predict plausible and likely outcomes, and to recoup when a decision goes wrong.

Education is, furthermore, the place wherein we instill many of the values that we must have in order for a society to survive: generosity, caring, pride in work and accomplishment, self-direction, self-motivation, and a commitment to doing what needs to be done, whether one wants to do it or not. There is nothing more valuable to a life or to a society than an education; to suggest that children should see it in terms of cash, to suggest that teachers do nothing more than sell a product on which a price can be put is not only deeply offensive, but also deeply disturbing. A world in which we see education as nothing more than a means to an immediate financial end, the gains of which will be instantly converted to Mp3 players, cell phones, and expensive tennis shoes is a world greatly weakened by the loss of intrinsic value. A society in which children are taught that the only reason to put forth effort is for personal short-term gain is a society which has lost an important element of its humanity.

This is the fear that we need you to address in detail and as soon as possible. I make this request in part because I believe the issue itself is important, and I believe that your effort to sell the program that appears to be the most controversial of your policies amongst those who have neither personal nor professional experience of you will make a difference in the amount and kind of support you get for this and other educational programs. More importantly, though, your willingness to engage in public debate, to explain your philosophy to the nation’s teachers, would create an environment in which you could to win their support because you earned their respect as a thinker and problem-solver. We are used to policy-makers in Washington, D.C. who presume they know better than we do. We are used to policy-makers who see no need for explaining the thinking behind their decisions, because they consider teachers unworthy of time or respect. We are used to authoritarian policy-making that insults our intelligence and our professionalism, that disregards our expertise, and that dismisses our experience. I ask you to begin by speaking up about your more controversial policies because doing so will demonstrate that you do not subscribe to the idea that justification is not required for politicians’ ideas because those ideas are somehow above scrutiny. I ask you to talk to us, because in talking you will change the way educational policy is made in this country.

Sincerely yours, & etc.