When I was graduated from high school in 1977, the Shoreline School District -- which is located immediately north of the Seattle city line -- was the only district west of the Mississippi River to have a merit pay plan for teachers in place. This fact was not well known in our community.
Since merit pay factored in one of the less sexy questions during last night's political event, I was reminded of my experiences, and thought to spend a few moments sharing.
That year I was editor of our school newspaper, and like many young journalists in that heady time, I wished to be the next Woodward or Bernstein. (And, like most, fell considerably short of that aim.) So when a teacher breathed word of this peculiar institution to me, I went about my investigative journalist's job -- with a newly minted tape recorder from Radio Shack -- to get to the bottom of what merit pay was, who was receiving it, and what it meant.
Below the fold is what I found, preceded by several disclaimers.
First, my inevitable disclaimers. I am not a teacher; my wife taught middle school in a private setting for three and a half years. My father is a retired college professor, as is my father in law. Many of our friends teach at various levels. But I do not and cannot presume to speak for that profession.
Please note, too, that I am writing this from memory. Though I am confident that somewhere in my back room in one of those boxes of clippings lurks the issue of my high school newspaper in which we printed my expose (and the inevitable corrections which followed), I have not troubled to examine it.
Finally, I am well satisfied that I received a fine education in the Shoreline School District. It was an affluent, almost entirely white and suburban district with ample funds, able to attract young and smart and motivated teachers.
That said...I was able to speak with a number of teachers, with our building principal (who gave me, off the top of his head, a list of the teachers in our high school receiving merit pay; he had five wrong, all told), and with the school superintendent.
The teachers -- particularly the teacher who tipped me off to this program -- felt that merit pay was being used by the school district to artificially and unfairly increase the average pay in the school district, to make it compare more favorably with its neighbors. They also felt -- whether recipients of the program, or not -- that it was unfairly applied. That it was inevitably going to be unfairly applied.
As I recall, merit pay required a master's degree (which is, I gather, now a fairly common requirement simply to teach), and some kind of assessment from the building principal. Perhaps some other steps as well, though memory argues students were not involved in the process. I was surprised to learn that some of my best teachers were not on the merit pay list, often because they simply refused to play the game. And some who were on the merit pay list would not have been teachers from whom I chose to take a class.
But the chief lesson of Shoreline's merit pay system came from a teacher who was new to our building, and otherwise unfamiliar to me. I regret that I cannot remember her name, but she said, very kindly, very sensibly (and many students actively disliked her because she was too hard), "Every teacher is the right teacher -- the best teacher -- for some students. For some student. Who is to decide?"
I think, now that my daughter is five and I am coming to grips with another school district and a new array of teachers, I think that she was right. In the main.
And I know that, in the next round of salary negotiations, the merit pay program was retired by the Shoreline School District. I suspect my little article may have had something to do with that, that in the cool light of a Seattle afternoon, it looked somewhat less reasonable than it had in the meeting rooms where the plan had been hatched.