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Elementary school teachers do not make enough money to compensate them for the critical task they've taken on, but using merit pay to supplement their income is not the answer. It may seem like a good idea, encouraging teachers to adhere to a higher standard and rewarding the most successful individuals, but unfortunately in order to access "merit" it will be necessary to use some kind of standardized test. Not only are such tests fairly poor at predicting students' preparation for future learning, but it introduces a monetary incentive for the teachers to "teach to the test," that is, preparing the students for specific types of multiple choice questions rather than teaching them to think in a more general context. This would be extremely detrimental to our educational system.

Instead, we need to develop some way to better compensate all public school teachers. Currently, college graduates in technical fields such as math, economics, engineering and the sciences can easily make four times as much as school teachers if they elect instead to go into industry or academia. Even graduates in traditionally less "employable" fields can usually do better financially if they opt for jobs other than elementary education. Of course the decision to become a school teacher is not usually made solely on the basis of salary, but the current situation is so poor that many talented people who might enjoy teaching cannot afford to make that choice, and some teaching spots wind up going to much less talented individuals who cannot find jobs elsewhere and do it more or less as a last resort. The fact that teachers are in short supply is telling... make the job more financially viable and the quality of the students' educations will dramatically improve by attracting a more talented pool of teachers.

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