Merit pay is the idea that never works and never dies. It has been tried in the schools for nearly a century and has never made a difference, other than to demoralize teachers and destroy collaboration.
This reader uses an analogy to show why merit pay always fails:
Can you imagine offering a surgeon a bonus if he does his absolute best on your surgery?
How about offering your airline pilot a bonus for landing safely?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perfect analogies. Merit pay advocates do not seem to understand the concept of meaningful work as an end in itself.
This assumes that what is called merit pay is actually based on merit. The director at my last job could give 1% to everyone or 2% to about half or any combination. He ended up giving everyone, including those even he agreed were the worst performers something. He was looking at retention of underpaid people because what was the likelihood of replacing them with better people for the low salary?
A partial reason I left was he did not give me a 2% merit raise based on my getting a 6% raise due to a classification change. Instead I went somewhere else and got a 90% raise.
In 1960 I worked under merit pay teaching grade 1. Each principal in the district handled it differently. It was mostly based on “style”. Michael Scriven said that the teacher’s vocabulary will correlate with student achievement scores; beyond that there is style… ( I am quoting him from classes in the 1970s and he may be saying more today; he worked on professional and civil service evaluation systems as well as his work with public schools.) In my building the principal pretty much took the funds he was allotted and divided them up equally among the grades/teachers. One school principal actually said the man deserved more pay than the women because he had a family. Another principal just liked teachers who were applying for jobs like former republican Scott Brown did in his photographs. There was no way to measure “merit” at that time and I don’t think it has improved much since then. If you know more about Scriven’s work I would like to hear of it; I don’t think my former relative who was a military general would have accepted remuneration of merit based on the test score his “students” achieved. I don’t want to disrespect him as he was a financial “wiz”… and a fine person of integrity; he would not be voting for these policies if he were here today on a school committee. I never voted for Ralph Nader but he did tackle some of these issues at the college staffing level ( think I saved one of his articles).
Never?
Yes, never. Any teacher who needs such a bonus to “do his best” is not teaching authentically, from the heart and with students’ best interests in mind, and does not belong in the classroom.
Differential pay need not be about doing your best, it could be used to keep some teachers from having to choose between doing right for their family and teaching.
Teachers should not be having to make that choice. Let’s help teachers so that they can do both things!
Everyone with options is always making that choice, or one like that. Every job is a bundle of characteristics, and taking one job means that you can not take a different job with different characteristics.
Take a high school music teacher. He or she might have the opportunity to take other higher paying jobs, but those jobs are unlikely to involve having music as the focus of the job. The teacher must make a choice between the different characteristics of the two jobs as a whole. For some, the choice is easy, for some it is a difficult choice. Increasing salaries for teachers will tip the scale a little further in the direction of teaching for some that are on the fence. It might be worthwhile to identify those teachers and tip the scales, but too expensive to give those that view the opportunity to spend a life in music as priceless the extra weight on that side.
But that’s exactly what I’m trying to say! Why aren’t we increasing salaries for teachers across the board BEFORE we begin discussing merit pay? Why are teachers supposed to labor for low wages and then make them compete for paltry “merit” pay?
Presumably because “merit pay” is cheaper than increasing salaries across the board, because nobody wants to pay higher taxes, and because states and cities cannot print money and are starting to run out of ways to cook their books or borrow money cheaply.
I think that school wages have been overly influenced by the occupational segregation that women suffered from. There was no need to pay anyone a competitive wage because there were few other options for a capable women. That is beginning to change.
This ^^.
When teachers pay is comparable to surgeons and airline pilots, the analogy would make sense. Let’s raise admission requirements and levels of training for teachers then expect more from them and pay them better.
Teaching is collaborative. Merit pay implies competition ie. I earned more than you because I’m better than you.
Why would I share my excellent practices with the teacher next door, if my income is based on my “outperforming” you (and your students)
Different pay does not seem to interfere with collaboration in higher education.
I beg to differ. Our college just did a strategic planning retreat in which differential pay was brought up as a deterrent to collaboration and to faculty morale overall.
Because they are two separate entities, my friend.
And besides, the same can be said for any elementary or secondary school teacher. A four-year teacher making, say 35k, works in effective collaboration as a twenty-year teacher with a National Board Certification, making nearly twice as much. That’s not the point.
The point is, if there is a 5k “carrot” floating around out there, and it will be based on student scores, then suddenly the game changes and the nature of humanity kicks in (known as greed – sin). The incentive now is to do whatever it takes to get that money. Just look at Atlanta as an example. This model undermines the basic good in education, and that is to do the best you can with what you have.
So pay differential does not interfere with collaboration at the K-12 level? Good to know.
The interesting thing in higher education is that the faculty generally understand that differences in pay across fields does not mean that the higher paid person is “better than” the lower paid person. Many economists, for example, would argue that mathematicians are more intellectually gifted and teach a more fundamentally important subject than economics, yet mathematicians are generally paid less well than economists.
As I posted below, differential pay can be used as a way to keep very strong teachers teaching rather than leaving the profession.
I can’t wait for merit pay! Then I would finally have a reason unlock the secret cabinet containing all of my greatest lessons which I never have felt motivated to use, and I can stop using my crappy ones – woohoo!
What rubbish. Those who promote merit pay reveal a lot more about their motivations than they do about anything else.
An article I wrote a few years ago in Education Week was titled “Merit Pay: An Agreeable Fantasy” debunked merit pay. It’s behind a pay wall so I’ll highlight the three points I made: we already have merit pay— affluent districts pay more and get more; performance is not linked to revenue in public education— a “down cycle” in the economy has no relationship to how well a school or teacher is performing; and finally— and most importantly— teacher’s don’t want it. Given the choice, teachers will accept decent pay and good working conditions over extraordinary pay and a stressful workplace. Public school teachers want to work where they have a sense that they are making a difference in students’ lives, where they are respected and valued in the community, and where they can earn enough to live comfortably in the community where they work. The concluding paragraph began with this sentence: Finally, here’s the most disagreeable truth about our current funding for public education: only a sizeable and sustained infusion of money can offset the existing pay and workplace disparities that make a mockery of the ideal of equal opportunity in public schools. I don’t think much has changed for the better since March 2010 when this was published.
the presumption of Merit pay for teachers is that the impact of the teacher can in some fashion be immediately measured, usually by utilizing scores on the atrocious tests upon which we rely way too much. I would remind people of the statement by Henry Adam in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams,
As a teacher, I think a far better indicator of my effectiveness as a teacher is the number of students who stay in touch with me, perhaps through social media like Facebook (the last time I checked I had something over 400 of my former students, and the number goes up every week), or reaching out to me via email. This week I am having lunch with two young men who are now on to their professional lives – I taught them as 10th graders, and they asked me to get together.
Or perhaps since my last decade I taught primarily sophomores, those students who return to me to ask me to write their recommendations for college and scholarship applications, even if they plan on going on in STEM related fields and I taught them government, because they feel I understand them, or they grew so much in my class, or they trust me.
Here I think back well over a decade. A young man had transferred into our school, and not having had government previously, even though it was then a 9th grade course, I taught him when he was a junior. When he was a senior, he asked me to write his recommendation for an application for the most prestigious scholarship at his college of choice, Liberty University. Now my politics are probably as far to the left as those of the late Jerry Falwell were to the right. I did not have a high opinion of Falwell. Reid knew that. But he also knew that I trusted my students, could provide an accurate description of them. In that letter I specifically talked about the political differences and what it said of Reid as a person that he trusted me, out of all his teachers, to write that recommendation. He got the scholarship.
I recount that story because I think it is far greater indicator of my quality as a teacher than any test scores.
Were I asked about other indicator, I would talk about the now more than 3 dozen of my former students who are themselves teachers or upon graduation from college this year are becoming teachers. I might refer to a student like Monica, who was originally going to be a pediatric oncologist, but after first taking government from me as a 9th grade was in my Comparative Religion class as an 11th grader, and instead decided to go to a small catholic college and work on theology and social justice. Her mother was very angry with me, but Monica felt empowered.
By the way, for what it is worth, my students tended to do very well on external tests, but that is of far less importance than the personal growth they experienced, the willingness to explore, to take risks and learn from them. I challenged them to think more deeply, consider a wider range of points of view.
I learned from them, which made me both a more effective teacher and a better human being.
Should I have been paid more by some statistical analysis of the impact I had on their lives other than their test scores? Don’t be ridiculous.
I should be paid an adequate amount for the work I did.
Whatever part I played in their subsequent success does not warrant giving me more money. The greatest compensation was their thanks.
So let me conclude this with tales of two very different students. One was an 8th grader in foster care who was angry, getting in fights, not doing well. I insisted on him coming to me for extra help by himself, and talked with him, pointing out that if he went around with a scowl on his face if he accidentally bumped into someone he would be in yet another fight. Around the end of February he began to blossom, and the same classmates with whom he used to fight selected him to be their commencement speaker. One of my most treasured possessions is the handwritten note he gave me thanking me for not giving up on him. When I last saw him, when he was a senior in high school and we ran into one another, he came over and gave me a huge bear hug.
The other occurred last year. She was brilliant. When I taught her AP government as a sophomore, I told her she seemed satisfied with getting good grades, and was not really challenging herself. She got angry at me, because she was getting 94s and 95s in my class. For most of the rest of her high school career she was cool to me. She was one of our most outstanding students, went to a prestigious university, interned at a prestigious high tech company for whom she was hired to begin work as soon as she graduated. In the spring of her senior year of college, she sent me an email, reminding me of those remarks and her response, and telling me it took her until her junior year of college to realize I was right, and thanking me. In our electronic conversations i mentioned that I was retiring, and she flew back to Maryland earlier than she had planned in order to come to my small scale retirement celebration.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. I did not need merit pay to tell me when I was doing a good job. The students would let me know.
Well said!
Great post, Ken.
Too often merit pay in business goes to those least deserving – relatives, croonies, etc. People find a way to game the system. Early in the software industry, the idea was to increase productivity by paying programmers bonuses per lines of code. The result was a large increase in the size of programs plus increase complexity leading to more bugs and more money spent on quality testing and customer service. Just look at the havoc poorly designed incentive programs wrecked on our economy.
A better analogy would be to pay doctors based on the size of patient waistlines, or politicians based on the stability of foreign governments.
Let me ask you this:
Will you enjoy seeing teachers and administrators who do very little to nothing, keep moving up in the system because of connections and not because of their educational expertise? In many professions, those who innovate and reap the benefits of the end result of their innovations, earn a meritorious raise. I’m sick of anti-merit pay nay-sayers because it destroys the system. The system is full of dead weight to begin with. Put a fire under the feet and they will move. If there were more merit-based incentives, many of us would be in command of our destinies.
Don’t bet on it. The answer to what you say can be seen in Atlanta and DC, where the process got corrupted and people got rewarded for cheating.
Cheating is not a choice of a whole district unless individuals cheat first. If cheating is going to be the end result of fair innovation and competition, then it’s time we all threw in the towel and wreak havoc upon the next generation. The answer above is a give-up to the inevitable end of society. There are many of us who don’t cheat.
no doubt. But there is absolutely no evidence that merit pay improves education and it has been studied for well over 100 years going back to the 19th century in Britain through recent studies in the US. The idea of pitting teachers against one another is supposed to improve education how? Please show me where it has ever worked? Two great experts on performance in business, Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker, both opposed its use there. We have seen on Wall Street, in Enron, in many cases, where it tends to lead not to better performance but rather to corruption.
oh and one more thing – were bonuses awarded on the basis of my students’ test scores, either scores by themselves or improvement during the year, I would have made out like a bandit, and I still oppose it.
Have you ever worked in a school with merit pay? You wouldn’t believe what an absolute joke it is. It is based on two lessons recorded on a “Lucy” camera. The lessons are sent away to be critiqued and then the money is given out according to the critique. Teachers spend time trying to frill up these lessons. It is a joke and is in no way creating any improvement in teaching nor rewarding effective education. You are living in a fantasy world.
@Stern Advice: “Put a fire under their feet and they will move.”
I heard the tone of frustration in your post. However, it is disturbing to me why anyone believes that inflicting punishment was ever an incentive to get people moving. As far as merit pay, corruption follows. It may very well be a useful tool to implement in the business world, but education is not a business, and that, I believe, is where the problem lies. Students are not an assembly line, and quality control varies with each student. Forcing them to take tests that do not effectively measure their different intellectual abilities is abuse, and tying test scores to teacher evaluations insults the integrity of the profession, and finally, merit pay would divide the ranks and create all of those negative side effects and effectively ends collaboration. Think of educators as an open source, freely exchanging ideas to improve learning. Enter merit pay, and it becomes every shark in the sea competing for the 10 fish available. Merit pay does not increase productivity overall, especially in a teaching/learning environment. I don’t need a bonus to motivate me to do any better. Rather, my students do. Please, I don’t need a fire started at my feet. It won’t make me move any faster than the learning pace of every student in my class. With that said, “may the odds be ever in (our) favor,” as we all, as professional educators, strive to do what we do best…teach.
Well, I think it’s quite obvious “stern advice” has never taught a day in her life. I’m sick of pro-merit pay idealists who have never spent a day in the classroom. Their only experience lies in the fact that they attended school at some point in their lives, so they think they know how to fix the problems in schools. Hey Stern, I drive a car. Quite well, actually. That doesn’t make me a mechanic.
Does she honestly think the corporate world isn’t full of dead weight? Stay in your little cut-throat, corporate bubble.
There is dead weight everywhere. Plenty of jobs are kept by people because of who they know or who their boss is. I get so tired of people in private business actually believing the merit pay joke in education. It has been proven not to work. Please, someone, put this lame idea on the shelf. It doesn’t even recognize that the student and family are the biggest solution to education issues.