WHY DON'T TEACHERS LIKE MERIT PAY?

Florida wants to throw a huge amount of money into the teacher salary picture -- with one condition.  The state wants teachers to figure out a way to create a merit-pay plan.  The state wants teachers' pay related to students' performance.

Why isn't that fairly simple to institute?

You need to first understand how teachers are currently paid in most school districts.  They are paid according to a salary schedule that specifies the base pay for every teacher in the system based on years of service.  Every first year teacher gets a certain amount, a second year teacher gets that plus an increment, a third year teacher an increment, and so on.  If you have been in the school system for 20 years, you get the same base pay as every other teacher who has been in the system for 20 years.

I underlined the base pay part of the second sentence in the previous paragraph to draw your attention to the fact that teachers are normally paid extra for additional, i.e., out-of-classroom, activities or services.  Coaches get paid extra.  Sponsor the yearbook and you get paid extra.  Chaperon a fans bus to an away game and you get paid extra.  Part-time department chairpersons get paid extra.  Teachers hired to write curriculum are paid extra.  Extra responsibilities not part of your daily classroom responsibility earn you extra money in your paycheck.  Most teacher contracts also call for teachers to receive a bump up in salary for additional college hours and earned degrees.  Hence, not all teachers on the same salary step earn exactly the same amount.

For some reason, the present system doesn't bother most teachers.  They prefer knowing that they will get a raise next year come what may.  The salary increments (percentage increases) are generally negotiated, and teachers like looking at the salary schedule and knowing that next year or three years hence they will be making X dollars.

It does not bother them that an ineffective teacher gets paid the same as an effective teacher.  (Well, it does bother some but not enough to want to change the system.)  They don't seem to mind that a teacher who shows up at school every morning just as the bell rings gets paid the same as the teacher who comes in early and meets with her students who need extra help.  They know who the hard working teachers are and they know who the lazy, ineffective teachers are.  They know they don't want their own children in the classes of the ineffective teachers -- but they apparently don't mind that those teachers may be getting the same salary as the better teachers.

That last part bothers parents, school board members and state-level politicians though.  It probably bothers administrators but they are generally powerless to change the salary system.  Their job is to administer the teacher-school board contract, not change it as they may see fit.  I know that their input is sought during contract negotiations, but only as advisers.  After all, in many school systems administrators are paid on a separate but similar salary schedule.

One fly in the pay-for-performance ointment is the difficulty of defining performance.  Teachers know that it takes a different level of teacher effectiveness to raise student performance in, say, a physics class than it does to raise performance in an art class.  And how do you rate the performance of the two?

Teachers also know that even between two teachers of the same subject there can be a big difference in the students they have and, hence, any observable performance difference.  Teachers do not get to choose their students; they have to take those assigned to them.  Students can ask for a transfer (and usually get it) to a less demanding teacher but teachers cannot ask to have difficult, disruptive or "slower" students transferred from their class.  The presence or absence of such students can, however, affect the overall performance of the entire class.

There is still another class of teachers for which student performance in almost impossible to determine.  I speak of special education teachers, remedial teachers, guidance counselors, student assistance coordinators, or any other person on the faculty who is paid according to his/her place on the salary schedule but does not have a regular classroom assignment and/or meet with mainstream students on a daily basis.  How, for example, do you measure the effectiveness of a remedial math teacher?  If she starts the year with a lad who is working one or more years below grade level and she brings him along a full year in achievement (an exceptional accomplishment when it happens), the child is still a year or more behind his peers at the end of the year because they have also advanced a year in achievement.

And what about music teachers, physical education teachers and school librarians?  How do you measure student performance for purposes of merit pay for these teachers?

A second concern for teachers is the evaluation process.  An administrator or supervision who may or may not be familiar with your subject or appropriate classroom techniques observes you for several periods and then writes you evaluation.  How is that supposed to equate with the subject matter content your students learned or other skills you develop that may be important to their personal or educational growth and development?

Finally, there is the matter of a limited pool of money each year from which to award merit pay increases.  The size of the money pool available for merit pay increases is always limited, sometimes very limited.  That means that only a few teachers each year can get merit pay increases.  If you got a merit pay award last year you can bet that you will not be in the running for one this year.  In short, teachers know that the pot is small and not every deserving teacher will get a merit pay increase every year, regardless of their students' performance.  Kind of defeats the purpose of the merit pay notion, doesn't it?

I don't have a solution.  I just thought you should know some of the problems that continue to thwart the good intentions of those who want desperately to see good teachers paid more than poor teachers.  A workable system might improve education by encouraging poor teachers to seek employment in another field but few merit plans have servived beyond the first half-dozen years, so we don't know.

What do you think?