Hey There, Big Fallacies: Daugaard’s Sloppy Thinking on Teacher Pay and Performance

Governor Dennis Daugaard offers the following core philosophical motivation for his merit bonus plan for South Dakota teachers:

...our staffing levels and spending levels have gone up significantly over time. A sizeable increase in our investment in education, over time, is not getting us better achievement. We are simply putting more money into the same system, and we are not getting significantly better results.

We need to change our focus. The key to obtaining high achievement in the classroom is not more spending. It is effective teachers [Gov. Dennis Daugaard, State of the State Address, Pierre, SD, 2012.01.10]

The Governor's thesis is that if we're not getting better results, spending more money is unjustified. Boy, I wish the Governor would help me make that argument to health insurance companies, to whom many of us have paid higher premiums for less coverage over the past several years.

We should be careful about analogizing schools to private insurers. The former are public institutions dedicated to the public welfare; the latter are private corporations dedicated to shareholder profits. But both entities can blow a similar hole in Governor Daugaard's sloppy argument: often we do have to pay more for the same results.

In the case of education, we are investing more because society has called on schools to do more. As economic and social pressures increase on families, schools have to teach more social skills and provide more emotional support. Schools can rely less on reinforcement of academic skills at home as more parents enter the workforce and thus not at home to help with homework. Schools have to teach skills in technology that didn't exist twenty years ago. Schools have to teach a wider range of skills to a wider range of students because high school drop-outs and students with nothing more than a high school diploma have diminishing economic viability.

In that environment, if South Dakota schools have managed to keep their ACT scores, NAEP scores, and graduation rates steady, that's cause for surprise and relief, not Governor Daugaard's finger-wagging.

Governor Daugaard also ignores the moral reason for paying all teachers more. As I've argued on this blog previously, sometimes you pay people more because you aren't paying them enough in the first place. South Dakota has been taking advantage of teachers for a generation, paying them woefully less than the value assigned to them in the marketplace in every other state in the Union. If our public education system is faltering, we could be reaping the consequences of years of immorally low salaries driving many good teachers to leave the profession or the state and driving many of those who stay to divide their energies between their classroom jobs and second jobs they need to pay the bills.

As if his fallacious indictment of the status quo isn't enough, Governor Daugaard then decides to go big on justifying his plan to change the system with no evidence that his plan will work. Confronted in Yankton with questions about the effectiveness of merit pay, the Governor responds with the following absurdity:

Some studies have shown that merit pay systems have not improved test scores implemented at schools elsewhere, but Daugaard doesn't believe those programs were as widespread and all-encompassing as his plan [Nathan Johnson, "Governor Promotes School Plan," Yankton Press & Dakotan, 2012.01.14].

The Displaced Plainsman properly assesses that logic:

Let's follow the logic here. Studies show key parts of his plan don't work on a small scale, but we are supposed to believe they will work on a large scale. I wouldn't accept that logic in a paper or debate round.

Logically, the one thing that can be all encompassing if one makes failed programs larger is failure [LK, "Daugaard Fails the Logic Test," The Displaced Plainsman, 2012.01.14].

Governor Daugaard has offered a faulty philosophical justification for his merit bonus plan. Governor Daugaard is evading the fact that South Dakota does not pay teachers enough for the good results they maintain amidst increasingly challenging conditions. And instead of providing evidence that his plan will work, Governor Daugaard wants us to believe that we just have to take a plan that has failed, on a small scale and do it on a bigger scale.

Legislators, if you have one shred of fealty to logic and evidence left in your souls, you will vote down the Governor's fallacy-riddled merit bonus plan.