In the recent teachers' strike in Chicago, teachers assertively expressed their dispositions against merit pay. According to the Chicago Tribune, the federal government gave Chicago a $34 million grant to implement a merit pay pilot program. Here’s a quote from the article:
It [a merit pay system] will mark progress if the new Chicago contract scales back the automatic step and lane pay increases that have been received in the past largely for hanging around another year. But public education has to move to real financial incentives based on improving student performance.
The author makes a valid point about the pay increases as they exist now; however, the financial stability of a merit pay system isn’t discussed in the article.
Consider a business that produces televisions. The owner of the company decides he wants increase profits. He tells his employees that he will give everyone a bonus based on how many functional televisions they can produce and sell to retailers. In this scenario, merit pay works well because the owner can make a larger profit for the more functional products he sells as long as he gives out fewer bonuses than the additional revenue. Applying this to a school would assume that teachers are creating a tangible product that can be sold. Herein lays the complex. Test scores are not a product that can be sold for profit. So if teachers are on merit pay, how will be money produced for a merit pay system to be sustainable?
Clearly there is a monetary issue that arises when there is more money going out of the system than is coming to the system. Would school systems have to borrow money to maintain a merit pay system? Would this cause financial hardship? Would this cause taxes that support public education (i.e. property tax) to increase?
As we can see in Chicago’s example, their merit pay system was going to be funded through the federal government. According to the Chicago Tribune, “more than 300 districts across the country are spending $1.2 billion in federal money on merit pay programs.” With the federal debt at $16 trillion, this is a system that will fail if depended on federal funding.
This brings me to the most important point. Are increased standardized tests scores the larger goal of public education? We know from our own experiences how easy it is to forget knowledge you learned at an accelerated rate. So then we know that retaining information to take a test doesn’t mean students will retain the same information afterwards. As an educator I haves seen this for the last 8 years. Considering this, there is a chance that merit pay will create as system that prepares students for standardized tests, but does not prepare them for college. This all goes back to the question I raised in a previous blog, What is the Purpose of Education.
Nevertheless, there is a need to develop a solution to the academic decline in this country, but merit pay is not the answer to our worries. I am a support of the National Student Bill of Rights movement. I believe that the solution should be center on student rights.
Do you think merit pay is the key to academic growth?