If teachers are evaluated and rewarded on the performance of their individual students, what incentive do they have to be good team players? Why prize the overall performance of their students and school over how kids perform in the teachers’ own class? This essential question was brilliantly posed by Matthew Ladner at Jay Greene’s blog last week.
The impetus for the question was a New York Times magazine piece by Michael Lewis on Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets, who is “widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars,” according to Lewis. ”And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”
In basketball, gaudy personal statistics earn you megabucks and create incentives to pad you stats regardless of whether it helps your team win. Battier, however, is a white space employee. “The term refers to the space between boxes on an organizational chart,” Ladner explains. ”A white space employee is someone who does whatever it takes to achieve organizational goals and makes the organization work much better as a whole.” What does this have to do with teaching? Plenty.
As we move into the era of value-added analysis for teacher merit pay, this article provides much food for thought. School leaders must consider carefully what they will reward, and give some consideration to how white space behavior is rewarded. Rewards should not just be based on individual learning gains- reaching school wide goals should also be strongly rewarded. Otherwise my incentive as a math teacher will be to assign six hours of math homework a night- and to hell with everyone else (see Iverson, Allen).
“There’s no reward for being a white space player OR a superstar in the current system of teacher compensation,” Ladner concludes. “Just an old player.” The unintended consequences have been the undoing of many a school reform effort. If Ladner’s right about this — and I think he is — the consequences may be unintended, but they will not have been unforeseen.
