Economist Miller's proposal to reward good teaching

Economist James D. Miller proposes that colleges give "each graduating senior $1,000 to distribute [anonymously] among their faculty" to reward good teaching.

The proposal has some merits as Miller ably explains, but unfortunately, it also has one big weakness, a weakness Miller doesn't address: currently, student evaluations of teaching significantly help inflate college grades and dumb-down college courses. Both these developments, I would argue, are not socially desirable. Evaluation with $1000 checks attached would worsen matters.

Comments

[Acad Ronin]

What Miller's proposal would do is trigger an even greater search by faculty for correlates of higher teaching evaluations. Unfortunately, the research I am aware of has not found any correlation between teacher ratings and amount learned, suggesting that the proposal would result in harm, not just be useless.

Weinberg, Bruce A., Belton M. Fleisher, Masanori Hashimoto (2007) "Evaluating Methods for Evaluating Instruction: The Case of Higher Education" NBER WP 12844.

Merritt, Deborah J. (2007) "Bias, The Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching". St. John's Law Review 81 (Forthcoming Nov).

Johnson, Valen E. (2002) "Teacher COurse Evaluations and Student Grades: An Academic Tango" Chance 15 (3), 9-16.

[JorgXMcKie]

Hey, at least under this program *I* would get something for handing out undeserved A's.

[brent]

Maybe wait until 2 years after students graduate to ask them which professors deserve checks.

I can't remember any of the professors from many of my cake-walk classes. However, I learned a ton in my international finance class, and it still serves me to this day.

[david foster]

Student evaluations may be useful, but need to be taken with truckloads of salt. A fairly direct analogy would be asking customers (in a business-to-business sales environment) to evaluate their sales reps.

If the customer likes Janet because she understands the product well and is always there when they need her, that's a good thing. But if the customer like Kate because she gives them lots of unnecessary discounts, that's a bad thing.

[Jeffrey Horn]

The claim that teacher evaluations, or student-awarded merit pay, increases undeserved inflation relies, in part, on the assumption that higher grades are given after the policy implementation, all else equal: this means the staff makeup must remain the same, the policy must be a stand-alone implementation and must not be a part of a menu of policy changes designed at increasing teacher accountability.

Even if one tracks grade information for each individual teacher and controls for turnover (an implied desired effect of the policy), what is it that distinguishes grade inflation from teachers actually performing better in the classroom?

I guess its all muddled because the only way to monitor teacher performance is student performance. It would be interesting as a paper topic, though I'm sure its already been done.