There are only so many slices.
It seems like common sense—give the teachers who are doing a good job more pay. And yet the idea is doomed to failure.
There are two critical issues. One is the issue of evaluation; exactly how do we settle the question of which teachers are most deserving of the extra pay? Ideas about what constitutes good teaching vary wildly. You may be able to come up with an example from your own youth of a teacher was absolutely and inarguably wonderful; I guarantee you that somewhere out there are people who believe that same teacher was awful.
Policy makers settled on using a Big Standardized Test as a measure of teacher quality; that has turned out to be a terrible idea for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is that the test only looks at reading and math, leaving a host of teachers without even this poor source of evaluation.
But even if we could somehow solve the problem of determining which teachers deserve some merit bonus money, such a system still wouldn’t work.
In the private sector, the idea of merit bonuses is simple. Our business took in an extra large pile of money this year, so let’s divide the extra money among the folks who helped us take it in.
But schools never take in extra money, and it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see a school board announcing, “Because so many teachers have done such excellent work this year, we’ll be raising taxes to fund an extra-large batch of merit bonuses.”
What seems more likely is a pre-set pile of money budgeted for merit bonuses, creating a zero-sum contest among the teaching staff. This is closer to simple merit-based pay in which staff are ranked by whatever measurement you’re using. Sometimes known as stack ranking, this is a system that has been tried and abandoned in private industry.
Schools depend on teamwork. Teachers share materials, insight, information. How does teamwork survive if giving assistance to a fellow teacher means potentially taking a pay cut for yourself. How does mentoring thrive in a teacher thunder dome? Who will collaborate when they might pay an actual financial price for it?
Versions of teacher merit pay have been tried in various locations around the U.S. as education reformers have tried to sell it as a useful idea. Yet to date there is not any evidence of such a system actually working. Teacher merit pay is a policy dead end, an idea whose time is never, ever coming.
