What If Administrator Pay Were Tied to Student Learning Outcomes

The recent negotiation in Chicago ("Performance Pay for College Faculty") of a tie between student performance and college instructor pay brought this accolade from an administrator:  it gets faculty "to take a financial stake in student success."

It got me wondering why we don't hear more about directly tying administrator pay to student success.  If we did, I'll bet the students would have a lot more success.  At least, that's what the data released to the public (and Board of Trustees) would show.  There'd be far less of a crisis in higher education.

Thought experiment. What would  happen if we were to tie administrator pay to student success -- much the way corporate CEOs have their pay packages designed -- especially administrators of large multi-campus systems.

Prediction 1.  The immediate response to the very proposal would be "oh, no, you can't do that because we do not have the same kind of authority to hire and fire and reward and punish that a corporate CEO has."  But think about this...

1. Private sector management has a lot less flexibility than those looking in from the outside think.  Almost all of the organizational impediments to simple, rational management are endemic to all organizations.
2. Leadership is not primarily about picking the members of your team. It's about what you manage to get the team you have to accomplish.
3. Educational administrators do not start the job ignorant of how these educational institutions work. It is tremendously disingenuous to say "if only I had a different set of tools."  People who do not think they can manage with the tools available and within the culture as it exists should not take these jobs in the first place.
4. This, it turns out, is what some people mean when they say that schools should be run like a business. The first impulse of unsuccessful leaders is to blame the led. The second one is to engage in organizational sector envy: "if I had the tools they have over in X industry...."  What this ignores is the obvious evidence that others DO succeed in your industry with your tools.  And plenty of leaders "over there" fail too.  It is not the tools' fault.

Prediction 2.  Learning would be redefined in terms of things produced by inputs administrators had more control over.  And resources would flow in that direction too.

Prediction 3. Administrators would get panicky when they looked at the rubrics in the assessment plans they exhort faculty to participate in and that are included in reports they have signed off on for accreditation agencies.  They'd suddenly start hearing the critics who raise questions about methodologies.  They would start to demand that smart ideas should drive the process and that computer systems should accommodate good ideas rather than being a reason for implementing bad ones.

Prediction 4. In some cases it would motivate individuals to start really thinking "will this promote real learning for students" each time they make a decision.  And they'll look carefully at all that assessment data they've had the faculty produce and mutter, "damned if I know."

Prediction 5. Someone will argue that the question is moot because administrators are already held responsible for institutional learning outcomes.   Someone else will say "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

Better Teaching Through a Financial Stake in the Outcome

In an Inside Higher Ed article this week ("Performance Pay for College Faculty") K Basu and P Fain describe how the new contract signed between City Colleges of Chicago and a union representing 459 adult education instructors links pay raises to student outcomes.

Administrators lauded the move in part because it gets faculty "to take a financial stake in student success." The details of the plan are not clear from the article, but the basic framework is to use student testing to determine annual bonus pay for groups of instructors working in various areas. That is, in this particular plan it does not sound like the incentive pay is at the level of individual instructors.

Still, should the rest of higher education be paying attention? Adult education at CCC is, after all, a markedly different beast than full time liberal arts institutions or 4 year state schools or research universities. One reason we should because it's precisely the tendency to elide institutional differences that is one of the hallmarks of the style of thought endemic among some higher education "reformers." Those who think it's a good idea for adult education institutions are likely to champion it elsewhere.

But most germane for the subject of this blog is the question of what data would inform such pay for performance decisions when they are proposed for other parts of American higher education. Likely it will be something that grows out of what we now know as learning assessment. I ask the reader: given what you have seen of assessment of learning outcomes in your college, how do you feel about having decisions about your pay check based upon it?

But, your opinion aside, there are several fundamental questions here. One is whether you become a more effective teacher by having a financial stake in the outcome. The industry where this incentive logic has been most extensively deployed is probably the financial services industry, especially investment banking.  How has that worked for society?  It would be easy to cook up scary stories of how this could distort the education process, but that's not even necessary to debunk the idea.  The amounts at play in the teacher pay realm are so small that one can barely imagine even a nudge effect on how people approach their work.

But what about the data?  Consider the prospect of assessment as we know it as input to ANY decision process, let alone personnel decisions.  Anyone who has spent any time at all looking at how assessment is implemented knows that the error bars on any datum emerging from it dwarf the underlying measurement. The conceptual framework is thrown together on the basis of dubious theoretical model of teaching and learning and forced collaboration between instructors and assessment professionals.  The process sacrifices methodological rigor in the name of pragmatism, a culture of presentation (vis a vis accreditation agencies), and the tail of design limitations of software systems that wags the dog of pedagogy and common sense.  At every step of the process information is lost and distorted. But it seems that the more Byzantine that process is, the more its champions think they have scientific fact as product.

It could well be that the arrangement agreed to in Chicago will lead to instructors talking to one another about teaching, coordinating their classroom practices, and all sorts of other things that might improve the achievements of their students.  But it will likely be a rather indirect effect via the social organization of teachers (if I understood the article, the good thing about the Chicago plan is that it rewards entire categories of instructors for the aggregate improvement).  To sell it at the level of individual incentive is silly and misleading.  And, if we think more broadly about higher education, the notion that you can take the kinds of discrimination you get from extremely fuzzy data and multiply it by tiny amounts of money to produce positive change at the level of the individual instructor is probably best called bad management 101.

College Presidents and Bonuses

A never posted draft dusted off and posted now.

While doing some research on a completely unrelated topics I came across a few articles on the question of whether college presidents should get performance bonuses.  One is from Insider Higher Ed and asks whether there should be bonuses for improved US News ratings (basically no, but with some dissenting voices) and another in Trusteeship, published by the Association for Governing Boards (also, mostly no). 

This is actually relevant to assessment since in the most general terms, assessment is about institutional accomplishment of stated mission goals.

So, let's look at how obviously corrupt it is to give college presidents performance bonuses.

Why does one give performance bonuses?  To motivate behavior that rewards the institution.  But that is just the president's job.  To counteract self-interest?  The most basic values governing a position like college president already rule this out.  Anyone who needs their self-interest balanced is corrupt to start with (in fact, the opposite is the problem for governing boards: they must be vigilant in ensuring that administrators do not use their position to feather their own career nest at the expense of furthering the institution's mission).

Or maybe a governing board would want to show its appreciation for a job well done.  But who is actually doing the job?  Any president worth her/his stuff, knows the success of an institution of higher education depends on hundreds of individuals toiling away in vocational dedication to a task.  A president who accepted a financial bonus based on increased enrollments, higher selectivity, student learning outcomes or student success would be cynical in the extreme.

This model, ported uncritically and uncreatively from the private sector, assumes far less ambiguous goals and measurements of outcomes than exist in higher education. And it assume far more command, control, and executive power than exists in the private sector. And most of all, it probably inflates the influence of presidents on important outcomes.

Supporters likely only want to go half-way. It is unlikely that they would be willing to propose cuts when performance lags or when bad decisions reduce the performance of subordinates.

There could be a satisfying, if tragic, irony when such bonuses are offered: if it becomes widely known, the resulting demoralization of faculty and staff might undo the results that won the bonus.  But alas, the lag time in such things (and the fact that boards that give performance bonuses rarely administer failure penalties) would probably mean the chief executive could take the money and run (which would, perhaps, fulfill the goal of making higher education more like business).

The only ethical and rational thing for a board motivated to give performance bonuses to actually do is to reward the entire institution (and probably in a creatively progressive manner, not with an across the board percentage of salary).

See also

• Dane, Roger and Allen E. Koenig. 1981. "A Good President Rates a Cash Bonus." AGB Reports, v23 n5 p30-32 Sep-Oct 1981
• Hall, Holly. 2010. College President Receives Controversial Fund-Raising Bonus." Chronicle of Philanthropy, January 21, 2010.
• LÓPEZ-RIVERA, Marisa. 2007. "Presidential Bonuses, Often Secret, Are Wide Open at Some Public Universities," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2007
• NACUA/ACE/NACUBO. 2009. "A Federal Income Tax Guide for College & University Presidents"
• Stripling, Jack and Andrea Fuller. 2011. "Presidents Defend Their Pay as Public Colleges Slash Budgets." Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2011.

White House College Scorecard Suggestions

The White House asked for some feedback on their proposed "scorecard" for higher education cost and value which is intended "to make it easier for students and their families to identify and choose high-quality, affordable colleges that provide good value." Below are their questions and my (quick, off the top of my head, answering-an-online-survey level of analysis) responses.


What information is absolutely critical in helping students and their families choose a college:

You shouldn't be asking this question here. It's a researchable, empirical question. First, on what basis DO people decide? Then, to what degree do they have the appropriate information to do so?

As someone who studies things like this, I don't think the info presented here as it is here presented will provide much added value or better decisions. In terms of presenting information, probably better to summarize in simpler terms: "On metric one, college X is above/at/below average for it's sector." But then don't just stop there -- we also need to global comparison because people don't get how the sectors vary.

Note that costs are in fact a distribution and presenting average after grants still leaves family very much in the dark if they've no way to know where they're likely to fall on the distribution.

Graduation rates does not suffer from this problem.

Percent of loan repayment is too crude to be useful. It's useful for a banker who may want to finance loans for a student at a given school, but very unclear how this number helps student/family shopping for a college.

Average loan amount is useful.

As important as earning potential is, it's a really stupid number here. Just do a tiny bit of due diligence and you'll see screamingly wide variations across majors, careers, and even within majors. Lawyers, for example, have a certain average starting salary, to be sure, but really big range of variation. Frankly I think putting a single number or even a distribution of incomes next to the name of a school would be nothing but phony quantification. Either that or have a really big footnote explaining statistical significance of differences in means.

What other information would be helpful:


Rather than average loan amount and discount rate what would be useful would be ratios. Tell me (1) list price cost of attendance is X; (2) distribution of discounts is ... and (3) range of debt at graduation is ...

Interesting that you don't really have any room for general comments on doing this at all. You are going to end up diverting an incredible amount of resources toward a project that will in all likelihood produce at best some only moderately useful numbers with huge error bars on them. You will feed into the illusion that choice produces improvement (can you cite any actual evidence?). And you will do absolutely nothing that actually lowers or controls costs, increases graduation rates or lowers indebtedness. In short, not a drop of innovation here. Lots of window dressing, but very little that deserves the name policy.

I'm left wondering why this administration is so confident that "better than the alternative" will continue to be a reason people like me support you.

Does the scorecard cause you to think about things you might not have otherwise considered when choosing a college:

Not in the slightest. It makes me think that whoever made it up has never actually been through the process. It reads more like it is informed by a need to respond to conservative activists who are trying to make hay about higher education. As an Obama supporter and contributor I have to admit it's really a little bit embarrassing to read this as part of the administration's policy proposal. If you can't do better than this, I wonder how bad it would really be to have a republican in the WH as well as in control of congress.


How should this version be modified for 2-year colleges:

Look, it's pretty obvious that there are two issues with two year colleges: (1) to what degree does it lead to successful and timely completion of a four year degree, OR (2) to what degree does it yield serious, usable job training.

So, a start would be to provide rate of students who seek admission to four year who actually graduate from a four year. But really easy to get garbage data on this if you don't set up the categories and the tracking really smart.

On the job side, again, gonna be really serious data quality problems that will likely as not make the information worthless (mostly because you are going to see massive variation from program to program WITHIN schools). That said, let's start with simple "how many people are working in a full-time non-temporary job in or related to the field of their AA degree within X years?"

How should comparison groups for colleges be made? What are important things to consider in grouping institutions together that serve similar students:

Catch-22 here. You are asking people to choose -- if you separate it out too well, the really important thing gets lost: we want people to better understand what the different "rungs" represent. One of the big crimes in higher education is that crappy institutions with minimal value added get to promise people a college degree. And if you only compare within groups each one gets to, in a sense, set the standards. What you need is a tool that more clearly lets people see the payoff differences between the tiers (to the degree there are some).

A most important thing that you'll probably leave out is the effect of what you bring to college on the college outcomes. Huge naivete in college assessment world that the college output has only to do with what the college did. Gigantic effects of origins still at work in higher education. Just be sure your new tool doesn't simply do more to perpetuate the myth.

What search and comparison features would you like the online tool to have:

Something that shows schools in context and behind that groups in context (where does this school sit within its group and where does its group sit in the larger picture).

What should we call this tool? Would a different name better explain the service being provided:

One name would be "Republican Higher Education Policy as Adopted by Obama Administration."

Rubrics, Disenchantment, and Analysis I

There is a tendency, in certain precincts in, and around, higher education, to fethishize rubrics.  One gets the impression at conferences and from consultants that arranging something in rows and columns with a few numbers around the edges will call forth the spirit of rational measurement, science even, to descend upon the task at hand.  That said, one can acknowledge the heuristic value of rubrics without succumbing to a belief in their magic.  Indeed, the critical examination of almost any of the higher education rubrics in current circulation will quickly disenchant, but one need not abandon all hope: if assessment is "here to stay," as some say, it need not be the intellectual train wreck its regional and national champions sometimes seem inclined to produce.

Consider this single item from a rubric used to assess a general education goal in gender:

As is typical of rubric cell content, each of these is "multi-barrelled" -- that is, the description in each cell is asking more than one question at a time. It's not unlike a survey in which respondents are asked, "Are you conservative and in favor of ending welfare?"  It's a methodological no-no, and, in general, it defeats the very idea of dis-aggregation (i.e., "what makes up an A?") that a rubric is meant to provide.

In addition, rubrics when they are presented like this are notoriously hard to read. That's not just an aesthetic issue -- failure to communicate effectively leads to misuse of the rubrik (measurement error) and reduces the likelihood of effective constructive critique.

Here is the same information presented in a manner that's more methodologically sound and more intellectually legible:

At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, there IS a serious problem when these rank ordered categories are used as scores that can be added up and averaged, but we'll save that for another discussion.  Too, there is the issue of operationalization -- what does "deep" mean, after all, and how do you distinguish it from not so deep?  But this too is for another day.

Let's, for the sake of argument, assume that each of these judgments can be made reliably by competent judges. All told, 4 separate judgments are to be made and each has 3 values. If these knowledges and skills are, in fact, independent (if not, a whole different can of worms), then there are 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 81 combinations of ratings possible. Each of these 81 possible assessments is eventually mapped on to1 of 4 ratings. Four combinations are specified, but the other 77 possibilities are not:

Now let us make an (probably invalid) assumption: that each of THESE scores is worth 1, 2 or 3 "points" and then let's calculate the distance between each of the four scores. We use standard Euclidean distance – r=sqrt(x2 + y2) with the categories being: Mastery = 3 3 3 3, Practiced = 2 2 2 3, Introduced = 2 2 2 2, Benchmark = 1 1 1 1

So, how do these categories spread out along the dimension we are measuring here? Mastery, Introduced, and Benchmark are nicely spaced, 2 units apart (and M to B at 4 units). But then we try to fit P in. It's 1.7 units from Mastery and 2.2 from Benchmark, but it's also 1 unit from Introduced. To represent these distances we have to locate it off to the side.

This little exercise suggests that this line of the rubrik is measuring two dimensions.

This should provoke us into thinking about what dimensions of learning are being mixed together in this measurement operation.

It is conventional in this sort of exercise to try to characterize the dimensions in which the items are spread out. Looking back at how we defined the categories we speculate that one dimension might have to do with skill (analysis) and the other knowledge. But Mastery and Practiced were on the same level on analysis. What do we do?

It turns out that the orientation of a diagram like this is arbitrary -- all it is showing us is relative distance. And so we can rotate it like this to show how our assessment categories for this goal relate to one another.

Now you may ask what was the point of this exercise?  First, if the point of assessment is to get teachers to think about teaching and learning, and to do so in a manner that applies the same sort of critical thinking skills that we think are important for students to acquire then a careful critique of our assessment methods is absolutely necessary.

Second, this little bit of quick and dirty analysis of a single rubric might actually help people design better rubrics AND to assess the quality of existing rubrics (there's lots more to worry about on these issues, but that's for another time).  Maybe, for example, we might conceptualize "introduce" to include knowledge but not skill or vice versa?  Maybe we'd think about whether the skill (analysis) is something that should cross GE categories and be expressed in common language.  And so on.

Third, this is a first step toward showing why it makes very little sense to take the scores produced by using rubrics like this and then adding them up and averaging them out in order to assess learning.  That will be the focus of a subsequent post.

What Will "Assessment 2.0" Look Like? A Proposal

The most serious flaw in assessment as now practiced is the premise that it is something that teachers are not interested in, do not want to do, have not been doing, etc.  A word that comes up a lot in connection with assessment is "accountability," but most folks who use the word don't take the time to be explicit about just who is supposed to be accountable to whom for what.  When someone does get beyond just parroting the word, the most common interpretation seems to be "we need to hold teachers accountable."

We have some news for those who have discovered assessment.  Teachers -- lecturers, instructors, professors -- have long been interested in what works and what doesn't in the classroom.  Those who would appoint themselves guardians of learning have a nasty habit of trotting out stereotypes of the worst professor ever and, in a classic example of question begging, concluding that such figures dominate the academy and represent a threat to the future of higher education.

But rather than argue about that, here's a proposal for what the next stage in assessment might look like.

Given that most professors and most departments are actually interested in student learning and in how to maximize it -- this is, after all, the vocation these folks have chosen -- the resources that have been pumped into assessment projects should be put at the service of the faculty.  Throughout Assessment 1.0 the dominant pattern is for an office of assessment to be in the driver's seat, more or less dictating to faculty (generally relaying what had been dictated to them by accreditation agencies) how and when assessment would happen.  Many faculty found the methods wanting and the tasks tedious and pointless, but most went along -- at some institutions more willingly and at some less.  The interaction between faculty and assessment offices generally came down to the latter making work for the former without the former seeing much in the way of benefits.

That's unfortunate because there are lots of potential benefits for us as instructors.  But to realize them, we need to turn the tables.  The basic premise of Assessment 2.0 should be (1) that it be faculty driven and (2) that assessment offices work for the faculty, rather than the other way round.  Assessment offices should think of themselves as a support service for the academic program rather than a support service for a regulatory body that oversees the academic program from the outside.  The main job of assessment offices should be to make a part of the job that faculty do, as professionals practicing their craft, easier.  A part of what professionals do is self monitor and mutually monitor outcomes.  As faculty, we need to think about what information will help us to make micro-, meso-, and macro-adjustments in our practice that will improve the outcomes we are collectively trying to achieve.

And the services of our assessment offices should be available to us to obtain it.  We need to put the focus back on this side of the operation and shift away from the idea that the primary motivation behind assessment is to prove something to outsiders.  Even the rhetoric from the accreditation agencies, if you slow the tape down and listen, resonates with this: they demand evidence that assessment is happening, that program adjustments happen in response to it, and so on.  Where they are wrong is in their ignorant insistence that such things were not already happening.

The assessment industry did not invent assessment -- they simply codified it and figured out how to make a living off of doing it instead of being involved directly in educating.

Too Bad Higher Education "Experts" and Vendors aren't Graded

I was inspired by a TeachSoc post from Kathe Lowney today to have a look at two articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education on computer essay grading.

The articles are "Professors Cede Grading Power to Outsiders—Even Computers" and "Can Software Make the Grade?"

My Review: A typical Chronicle hack job to my mind.  Articles like this remind me of National Enquirer.  Author makes little attempt to critically assess comments from his sources and gives little weight  to contrary information (failing to infer, for example, anything from reported fact that in six years of marketing, almost no one has bought into the computer grading product mentioned).  He jumps on grade inflation bandwagon instead of offering an analytic take on it.  In typical COHE fashion he sets up false dichotomies and debates between advocates and defenders as if there is a big divide down the middle of higher education.  In effect, articles like this are just product placement -- hopefully without kickbacks -- and "if someone says it then it's a usable quote" journalism.  As with many COHE articles, it reflects journalism that's more in touch with the higher education industry than with higher education.   It's mediocre work such as  this that makes me let my subscription lapse every year or so.  It's interesting how COHE  seems to have no qualms at all about trashing educators and educational institutions but only ever so rarely do they seem to take an even gentle critical look at education vendors.

On the accompanying "compare yourself to the computer" article : I think I'd fire a TA who graded like that -- the words "capitalism" and "rationality" showing up constitute "concepts related to him" and an answer on Marx where "expelled for advocating revolution" = "significance for social science"?  I scored them 4 and 2 and that was generous.   I'd be mighty disappointed if I were the makers of that software and this is how my product placement in COHE turned out -- would anyone buy it based on this portrayal?! 

See also http://gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf