Students and their parents are accustomed merit based rewards. They and their children live in a world where increased performance at a given task delivers corresponding greater rewards. This could be at work, or at school. These systems are there to incentivise high performance in order to increase overall performance. It assumed these systems are fair albiet imperfect. A students may have a lousy teacher, and a parent might have a incompetent boss or employer. This does not remove the burden of performance from the individual. It is assumed regardless of the circumstances they must prevail. We laud the dedication of such acheivers who overcome adversity in order to achieve.
Our public educators have operated in a self assesing meritocracy. This is the equivelent of having the other students grade your papers. Peer review is not inherently corrupt, but it is subject to the same group think most peer groups tend to form. The standard whatever it may be is full of the prejudices and preferences within that group. If the group decides something is too difficult or impossible, then they discount it's relavence in the evaluation.
Here is an example of subjective evaluation from the University of Tennesse:
The Performance Review Summary Form is designed to record the results of the employee's annual evaluation. During the performance review meeting with the employee, use the Performance Review Summary Form to record an overall evaluation in:
accomplishments
service and relationships
dependability
adaptability and flexibility
and decision making or problem solving.
What is an accomplishment? What is good service and relationships? How do you compare adaptability? How do you evaluate decision making and problem solving? These questions have answers, the problem is there are a lot of right answers for the same question. The culture of a given institution is going to determine which right answer is chosen along with the preconceptions in the individual evaluator.
We have all dealt with these vague evaluations which can easily be reduced to popularity contest. The greatest innovator is not always recognized because people simply did not witness the creation or effectiveness of the new method. Flexibility is extremely vague because all assigned task don't require you to substantially change your strategy to achieve goals. More importantly, who will be there to witness these changes and compare them to others fairly. The rewards go to the person that toots their own horn instead of the one that did the best job.
For this reason, many performance ratings move to objective measures of performance. Such objective measures are inherently flawed themselves because they can not account for all possible variables that might be relevant in performance comparison like the ones mentioned above. Never the less , we accept these flawed systems as apart of life. Students are tested on whether or not they give the answer the test creator wants, not the relative accuracy of their particular reasoning for a given answer. Employees are rated by, sales, work output, customers served, units manufactured, hours put in, or profits produced. These measures are not fair, but at least they know the comparison will not deviate based on popularity or the subjective opinion of the evaluator. Whatever they achieve they own, and no one can take it away.
The battle for Merit pay has gone on for a very long time. There was a time when I accepted the arguments made by teachers against it, but that was short lived. As a student I was subjected to endless test whether I thought they were fair or not. I was graded by my understanding and not the effectiveness of the person who taught me. Perhaps with a better teacher I could have gotten a higher grade as often was the case, but there was no adjustment for that in my test grade. I accepted this cold hard reality, and committed myself to achieving results by objective measures regardless of the fairness in the system. My feelings about it were irrelevant and did more to hinder my performance than increase it.
Teachers are now being asked to accept payment based on these results. They complain the learning potential of students varies greatly from one class to another. They feel the variables outside of the control makes the system inherently unfair.
Having variables outside of your control is apart of life. We are not all born rich, or to successful parents. We don't always know the right connection to get that dream job. Nonetheless, we compare each others relative success in life often without compensating for background. A achiever is an achiever, and a failure is a failure. If we allowed every conceivable excuse in the evaluation, the incentives for achievement would be reduced to material reward. The fact is incentives to do the impossible or unlikely regardless of the circumstances are reinforced by our quick, cold, and unforgiving evaluations.
Teachers do not want to be judged on test because they feel the world is unfair, but we tell our students life is not fair and they better get used to it. It is time for us to tell our teachers the same thing we tell our students. The hypocrisy has to end. I don't feel teachers trying to avoid evaluation are credible because of the inherent hypocrisy in their arguments. These are individuals who rightly look out for their self interest. While it is in the interest of those not subject to these new rules to have them enforced for our collective interest. Nobody wants people to make their job harder.
Nobody wants to be forced to make hard changes which may deeply undermine the stability in their life. I don't feel they are bad people for wanting a predictable life with a steady salary and good benefits. We all want such things, but when compared with the interest in having students taught by people who depend on their performance to sustain a quality of life, the negatives for the teachers are outweighed by the potential benefit for the students.
Teaching is a hard job, and I feel over time Merit Pay just might find the solutions to challenging classroom problems. It is a risk worth taking in a failing system. When teachers simply give up on under performing students, society ends up paying for it. The teachers good intentions are insufficient. Objective performance measures must be introduced that pays teachers based on the objective performance of their students.