by John Devera

Created on: August 07, 2008

Merit base pay is a wonderful idea that is just simply unworkable. The idea is that somehow we offer monetary bonuses to teachers who produce the best results. Here are the possible ways of patting merit pay into practice, and the various problems associated with them.

The best way of instituting merit pay is to offer bonuses to successful and experienced teachers to teach at under-performing schools as determined by a single national test. The problem with this is that the pay for teachers is already so low that anyone who goes into teaching does not do it for the money. Add an incentive to work at a school where teachers are routinely attacked, where the commute is over an hour to a suburb where the constant gang violence will not threaten your family, where the respect shown teachers has devolved into outright threats against ones life, where the teacher is very likely to lose the monetary value of the merit pay in actual thefts of personal property, you can see why very few experienced and successful teachers wish to move to those schools no matter what the merit pay may be.

Another way of instituting merit pay is to pay teachers a bonus according to performance reviews. This has the inherent problem of administrator bias. If your principal likes you, you're set. If he has something against you, you're dead. I know of one man who was given consistently negative reviews by administrators at one school. He changed schools. Suddenly his administrative reviews were exceptional. Go figure. Must have been something in the water.

One kind of merit pay would tie a teacher's advancement on a salary scale to that teacher's students' performance on standardized tests. Of course, this rewards teachers who have been given classes filled with motivated, charming and intelligent students. If you're a new teacher and you have classes with the unmotivated, or with academically and mentally challenged students, you don't get any bonuses. My experience in teaching for a quarter of a century has demonstrated to me again and again, even a lousy teacher can get good results from a class of intellectually gifted and motivated students. On the other hand, the best teacher in the world will have very limited successes with improving test scores of the chronically absent, drug-addled and economically disadvantaged.

The sad truth of it is that merit pay is a dysfunctional idea. It's implementation, just as the implementation of standardized testing, is geared to showing dysfunction and

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