MERIT PAY,NO WAY

MERIT PAY, NO WAY (or MERIT PAY, DEMERIT PAY)



Just about all adults remember an inspiring teacher who truly transformed their lives. Rewarding such a teacher - merit pay - seems fair and logical. Merit pay has a great ring to it. The idea has been around education and political circles for years, and its advocates see it as the solution to almost every problem in public education. They assume that it is possible to evaluate teacher performance objectively and fairly. But teaching is not done by robots addressing robots, and descriptions of those memorable teachers would display widely - even wildly - different characteristics. How, then, can the awardees of merit pay be chosen?
Currently, assessment of education success tends to rely upon test scores - the teacher whose students score high is successful; the teacher whose students rate lower on tests is inadequate or mediocre. Unfortunately, test scores won’t tell you how well a teacher taught, because there is no way that classrooms can be equal. Even when a school tries to group students according to academic ability, there are other factors which influence test scores: attendance, for example, or the number of English learners. And how to compare English and math classes, or chemistry and physical education? If a teacher is assigned low performance students, how compare his/her teaching skills with those of the teacher assigned to honors classes? And finally - and most important- the validity of standardized tests themselves is open to serious question.
If not test scores, then what? The usual method suggested is for the principal to evaluate the teacher. S/he is the school leader, the one who presumably knows the abilities of the faculty. But can even the best-intentioned principal visit every teacher often enough to know what happens regularly in a classroom? Moreover, if the principal actually does have that knowledge, how can s/he avoid subjective assessment? Unfortunately, every teacher has at some time been in a school where administrative evaluation was unfair, where a principal punished teachers for union activity, for voicing opinions unacceptable to the principal, for speaking up in meetings, for personal qualities that ran contrary to the principal’s values. Principals have power to change assignments; for example, we know a school where a 20 year kindergarten teacher was abruptly transferred to a sixth grade class. Sometimes, too, a principal simply overlooks the work of a teacher who does not attract administrative attention. Even where the principal tries to be fair, personal judgment would be open to question on every level. And under a principal with a little Caesar complex, merit pay would become patronage and favoritism, with teachers reduced to competition for favorable attention. The merit in merit pay would vanish; in its place would be a loss of morale and education standards.
Merit pay is clearly a practical impossibility, even if it were a desirable concept. Every teacher knows that teaching is not a science; no matter how carefully the teacher follows the rules laid down by education departments in college, adjustments must be made in the real classroom. If anything, teaching is an art more than a science, and teaching is one of the hardest of all jobs. All teachers have five years or more of college under their belts, but they seldom are allowed professional discretion in their classrooms, and it is a truism that everywhere they are seldom paid what society admits their work is worth. We have one of the best educated, most dedicated workforce in America, and it would be an insult to this national treasure to introduce a flawed system whereby a “few” good teachers are rewarded with extra money while the rest of this talented group of overworked women and men would suffer the indignity of being labeled not good enough, not deserving of merit pay.
Maybe in some ideal world merit pay would work; in ours it has no merit