Merit pay for teachers is, for obvious reasons, a controversial idea. When you get into the gritty details, many concerns bubble to the surface, like test scores. As a state we test for math and English, history and communications, science and reading. But what about Spanish, art and higher level maths and sciences? What about the arbitrary nature of test scores?
It looks as if this legislation (detailed in the last post), as well as other legislation that has been proposed in other states in recent years are taking those concerns into account. As we look at measures that reward positive teaching, we have the luxury to control a lot of those variables. If a good teacher, for instance, has students that need more attention or tutoring, perhaps a merit pay system will make the administration even more responsive to those situations.
What is sure is that simply having a teacher pay schedule, as Missouri has now, does little to promote good teaching. It rewards teachers for longevity, and while I believe a commitment to teaching as a career is laudable and should be rewarding, it seems like there should be a complimentary system that promotes what works. Even the Missouri School Board Association says this is an idea worth pursuing. It will take into account student improvement, and while, as Columbia BOE President Karla DeSpain notes, all children are different, it is he responsibility of the school administration to ensure a teacher has the capacity and resources to help his or her students make those improvements. I especially like the idea of looking at student improvement, because that seems to suggest that students are learning how to learn, not simply acquiring new facts.
Jan Mees, a Columbia school board member quoted in the article, breaks one of the cardinal rules of debate by using a slippery slope argument. Her statement doesn’t make too much sense. If a teacher is rewarded for the improvement of all the students she teaches, then it seems her financial benefit would be greatest by spending whatever time was appropriate to keep all her students improving—and that having one child exceed especially well (since we are talking about improvement and not test scores per say) wouldn’t matter so much if the rest of her class was not making progress. It seems that dedicated teachers already spend more time with those kids who need an additional explanation and that this would reward a teacher for that extra two or three minutes after class.
But as this conversation continues, I think we need to be inclusive of those kinds of concerns in order to come up with a merit pay system that cuts out inconsistencies and rewards teachers for teaching students no matter how long they’ve been in the classroom. If the devil is in the details, let’s run him out of town.
Lastly, the New York Times has an article that looks at some truly creative merit pay systems across the country. Very interesting!
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