Macroergonomics of Education Reform: A Framework for Transforming Merit-Based Educator Compensation Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a macroergonomic approach to education reform with a specific focus on programs and policies around merit-based educator compensation. There has been some research on specific human factors issues in education learning environments, but there has not been a focus on the programmatic and system-wide issues related to education systems at various levels (i.e., district-, school-, grade-, and classroom-levels). We present a Macroergonomic Framework for Education Reform whose intent is to identify and describe the various characteristics of an education sociotechnical system: the social, organizational, technical, and external environment subsystems. Specific examples are provided from work conducted with the Center for Education Compensation Reform and grantees implementing differentiated merit-based educator compensation systems.