Merit pay is a zombie idea. It fails and fails and fails again, but legislators just want more of it.
This teacher explains why he doesn’t want it.
There are many reasons to oppose merit pay.
1. It doesn’t work. It failed just in the past few years in Nashville, where the bonus for higher scores was $15,000. It failed in New York City, it failed in Chicago.
2. It has never worked. It has been tried and failed repeatedly for nearly 100 years.
3. Modern social science says that it will never work, that when you pay people a bonus to do what they want to do you actually decrease their motivation.
A short reading list:
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational
Edward Deci, Why We Do What We Do
Daniel Pink, Drive
The National Research Council, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Isn’t the justification for higher pay with experience and education was that these are better teachers and aught to be paid more? Isn’t this a form of merit pay?
When you put it in those terms, all pay is merit based. You are being paid to do a job.
People who are not in education don’t understand the term “merit pay.” A better way of saying it would be “bonuses for higher standardized test scores.”
Pay differences could also arise from differing working conditions, different risks, or different outside options. A gifted music teacher, for example, may value the opportunity to teach music because there are few other jobs that would give him or her the opportunity to make music a career. A gifted chemist might find teaching to be one of many different careers that offer him or her the chance to do chemistry. We may need to pay the chemist more to teach than we need to pay the music teacher even though they are equally good at teaching.
Typically merit pay is bonuses handed out for higher test scores…
But it need not be done that way. I am a believer in peer evaluation. Salary increases are often done that way in higher education, and I think the teachers in the building know best who the strong and weak teachers are.
How do teachers know that? Is it a hunch? A guess? A rumor? The point is differentiated pay causes dissent and acrimony, regardless of whether it is based on test scores or other people’s opinions of a teacher’s effectiveness.
“You can’t put a price tag on that sort of sacrifice and dedication. Yet that’s exactly what merit pay schemes try to do. They work to shift the act of teaching from an act of the heart (what Ariely would call “social norms”) to a financial act (“market norms”).”
This is a thoughtful and reasoned post by a dedicated teacher. Merit pay is an insult. Teachers cannot be bought with a few pieces of silver distributed based on flawed test scores. Ridiculous!
The problem is that it detracts from student and parent responsibility. That is the whole problem with the reform movement. It tries to imply that teacher needs to work harder in order to improve performance. If a teacher has a bunch of students whose parents don’t do anything and students don’t complete assignments, what is merit pay going to do to change that? Nothing. It’s an insulting joke.
Yes, so true. Teachers are not all- powerful. There are variables that affect student learning that are entirely out of my control.
Thank you!!!
They want teachers to work miracles, but forgot to give us a magic wand.
I’m currently in nursing school, which is very similar to teaching. We have interventions for our patients, and if they don’t work, we try new interventions. But nurses aren’t paid based on how well the patient is when he leaves. Nurses are paid based on experience and degrees. I hope this merit pay cancer doesn’t follow me to my new profession!
The author is advocating for more than not paying teachers based in how well the students learn, he is advocating for uniformity in the pay scale regardless of specialization. The nurse educator, the orthopedic nurse, the certified nurse midwife, and all other specialties in nursing would recieve the same pay. Would that work well in nursing?
The insult is the insinuation that I COULD work harder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbkJ5MKEVEE&feature=youtube_gdata_player. This video sums up The science, but if you make your decisions on truthiness rather than facts, don’t watch.
Need more? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=youtube_gdata_player
I was listening briefly to an NPR interview and heard a female professor (I think) from Maryland claiming, “We just don’t have the evidence to know if merit pay works”. It seems pretty obvious that we do. Does anyone know if there is a bought professor from Maryland going around touting merit pay? Just curious if anyone knows the name. I know merit pay doesn’t work. I worked somewhere that used it and it had no impact on performance.
If only they would institute merit pay! Then I could finally get out the really good lessons that I’ve been holding back.
I wish there was a “like” button, because I’d like this comment a zillion times!
I’d encourage folks to read Donald Gratz’s book on this – The Perils and Promise of Performance Pay. It’s grounded in Gratz’s work in Denver and I learned a great deal about this issue from it. See – http://issuu.com/telmamorson/docs/the_peril_and_promise_of_performance_pay_maki.pdf
I was told by a fellow teacher that if they went to merit pay, he’d close his door and no one would know one thing about what he did. He isn’t keen on sharing anyway. And, our schools are good ones. But, the point is, while collaboration can be over-used and time-consuming, having no cooperation and collaboration won’t be good for all. I don’t care what this guy’s test scores were, I didn’t and don’t like his over-bearing technique. I wouldn’t have had my kids in his class (4th grade) because of his power trip attitude. I would never want to be like that. Getting the scores out of kids by frightening them isn’t my idea of good teaching. I think it is almost like Stockholm Syndrome.
(DescriptionStockholm syndrome is considered a complex reaction to a frightening situation, and experts do not agree completely on all of its characteristic features or on the factors that make some people more susceptible than others to developing it. One reason for the disagreement is that it would be unethical to test theories about the syndrome by experimenting on human beings. The data for understanding the syndrome are derived from actual hostage situations since 1973 that differ considerably from one another in terms of location, number of people involved, and time frame. Another source of disagreement concerns the extent to which the syndrome can be used to explain other historical phenomena or more commonplace types of abusive relationships. Many researchers believe that Stockholm syndrome helps to explain certain behaviors of survivors of World War II concentration camps; members of religious cults; battered wives; incest survivors; and physically or emotionally abused children as well as persons taken hostage by criminals or terrorists.
Most experts, however, agree that Stockholm syndrome has three central characteristics:
The hostages have negative feelings about the police or other authorities.
The hostages have positive feelings toward their captor(s).
The captors develop positive feelings toward the hostages.)
To me, that isn’t education, it is battery. The stress of merit pay, esp based on test scores can lead to this, IMO.
Here’s a graphic I helped develop that explores this topic from a visual perspective. Would be curious to know if you agree or disagree with the findings here. http://www.masterofartsinteaching.net/salaries/