Merit Pay Is A Fraud!

Here in Ohio there is a good bit of political chatter regarding teacher pay and how it is playing a significant role in the economic problems of the state.

John Kasich, the governor, along with others believe that the current system of paying teachers based on tenure is out of date and also contributing to the overall "failure" of our public schools.

There are valid points being made from this camp. Many times their concerns or ideas are logical.

How is a teacher motivated to improve themselves or work hard if they are ensured to get a raise every year or three years or whatever the steps dictate within their district's salary schedule? If their pay was based on performance, they would work more and work harder to earn more pay.

Money rules after all.

There are a number of failing schools and plenty of statistics to show our students are not performing as well as those in other countries. This does not bode well for the future.

Naturally, the blame then should fall on the people responsible for our students' education: the teachers. Teachers are the front line.

But there are good teachers out there. We all hear the stories and have had experiences with the good ones. So these teachers deserve to be paid well. It is the bad teachers that should be paid less or leave teaching all together. It is necessary to improve the public schools where it counts.

Therefore, merit pay has been introduced where teachers are not paid on experience but on some scale that is determined by their quality.

Sounds great. Sounds fair. Sounds logical.

If this was business.

The question is: how is merit determined?

The answer up to now has been: state standardized test scores.

Instead of whining and complaining and ranting on and on about how education is not business and cannot be measured the same way, I will provide an example to demonstrate my point that merit pay based on test scores is unreliable and invalid. Ultimately, it is unfair.

I have been teaching for 13 years. When I started the test scores were absolutely awful with 10%-20% of our grade levels passing.

Over the following decade, our scores increased. But they did not increase at the pace the federal government required according to No Child Left Behind. So our school was labeled as a poor school like most urban schools.

This past year I have taught at a different school with a better history of test score performance. Here 70%-80% of our students are passing the test.

My personal numbers have consistently been comparable to the school in general where I teach. So at my old school, my numbers were low. Now, my numbers are much higher.

I am the same teacher. I have taught much the same way at the new school as I have at the old school.

Obviously, you never teach the same way year to year exactly. There are always adjustments from one year to the next as you try to improve your weaknesses and teach to your strengths. Every class presents different challenges and needs and reacts in different ways. Therefore, you never teach the same way. Even within a school year you will find yourself changing how you do things.

Despite these adjustments, I am the same teacher. I am more comfortable teaching math than reading. I have more success using cooperative learning groups. I have good one one relationships with many of my students. I can relate to my students well. I use these things to my advantage every year.

But my test scores are drastically different from one school to another.

So merit pay would be determined less by what I do and how I do it and more by the location in which I teach.

There are teachers teaching in low performing schools that are just as good and working just as hard (usually harder) as teachers in high performing schools.

This is just the beginning of this argument. We also need to examine how this reality will not attract good teachers but push them away. If improving our public schools is truly our goal, than merit pay can not be part of it if test scores are the tool we use to measure this merit.

Teachers are critical components of education. I do not argue this one bit. We need to do our part to perform better. Ineffective teachers need to leave the profession or improve.

But we are not effectively attacking the public school problem by keeping the focus solely on teachers when the real reasons run much deeper and outside the walls of the schools themselves.

Merit pay is only valid if there are enough factors determining the merit because there are so many factors determining the effectiveness of a school.