Teacher Merit Pay

Should teachers be paid based on merit?

The common counter-argument I hear from teachers on pay-for-performance is that they shouldn’t be held responsible for the bad apples, or that this will do nothing more than encourage them to ‘teach-to-the-test’.

On the first note, so long as the performance is measured by relative achievement, i.e., improvement per student over the year compared to some baseline, rather than absolute achievement, then yes, a teacher should be held responsible for a bad apple. If someone comes in dumb and leaves dumber, that’s the teacher’s fault for not reaching the child.

On the second, I agree, this will encourage ‘teach-to-the-test’ however, what’s the alternative? Keep in mind, the status quote that’s being upheld as some sort of golden standard is seniority based pay and seniority based promotions. Why on earth does simply being alive longer mean you’re a better teacher? This system does not encourage experimentation or innovation but instead rewards compliance and not rocking the boat. We can do better for our kids.

So we’ll start ‘teaching-to-the-test’. At least then we’ll have a single standard we know we’re teaching to. We’ve shrunk and changed the problem – the test has become a verifiable, concrete goal we can measure performance on and teacher’s jobs are now not quite so fuzzy and arbitrary. This simply means that we need to keep up efforts to ensure that what we’re testing is realistic, practical and useful – things that should be a part of any education – and prepare our kids for jobs in the public and private sectors, academia and elsewhere.