Merit Pay

Yesterday I wrote about some of the things that merit pay shouldn't be- pay for special certification or a type of incentive "combat pay" to entice teachers into low-income schools. The next challenge is to figure out how to determine who gets it.

The objective way would be for pay to go to teachers who successfully raise test scores. Opponents of merit pay often make the specious argument that this won't work because a teacher shouldn't be faulted (ie denied merit pay) based on being assigned difficult students for a given year. This argument is nonsense, because merit pay systems (and current evaluations) look at the level of students when they come into a class, and the level that they're at when they leave the class. That way, a 6th grade teacher who's incoming class has on average a 2nd grade reading level, but has them reading at a 4th grade level by the time they leave is more "meritorious" than another teacher whose kids enter at a 5th grade level but leave at a 6th.

There are a number of snags with basing excellence only on test scores. It doesn't work terribly well in secondary school, because you have teachers teaching biology or world religions where either there's no standardized test at the end of the year, or no good assessment to tell you what a student's baseline knowledge is coming into the class. It's even worse for art and music teachers- how do you determine how many levels of tromboning a kid has gone up?

The other option is to use a more subjective definition of merit/excellence, using teacher evaluations (perhaps in combination with test scores). Having been a teacher, and raised in a family of teachers, I realize that there is a genuine worry that this system won't work fairly. School systems are often rife with petty politics and favoritism, and it would be all too easy for pay intended to go to excellent teachers to be funnelled to cronies of the administrators. That said, many other industries award merit-based bonuses to employees based on a combination of objective and subjective factors without the bonuses devolving into a slush fund for conniving bosses to reward their pets. The key is probably to have a scoring system laid out (tests are worth 40%, attendance 10%, administrator classroom evaluations 30% etc.) and have the decisions made by a committee so that one unscrupulous administrator can't have total control. At any school, the teachers, students and administrators all have a good idea of who the good teachers are- the key is to figure out a rubric that effectively channels merit pay to these folks, and to other teachers who begin to emulate them once merit pay goes into effect.