Thank you for this well-done piece, Marcel Harmon. Merit pay was up for discussion in the House Education Committee recently.
“Falling back on another trite saying, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” With such a long, unproductive and repeated history, it would seem that teacher merit pay is its own special brand of insanity. The evidence suggests that if you want to positively impact student success, across a wide range of measures, start by providing teachers and staff with a competitive base pay and benefits package, with starting salaries and raises based on education and experience.
“If additional incentives are then added, they should contextually be applied per the success stories provided in Ravitch (2013). Tying merit pay to indicators of student success doesn’t work. There are too many contextual variables impacting the various measures of student success, that vary in importance by district. Nor do we all agree on what those success indicators should be or how they should be measured. If these hurdles could be addressed, perhaps some type of merit based system could be implemented based on such indicators. However, I’m skeptical because of the other negative impacts that will potentially remain, on everything from collaboration to the ability to meet all student needs.
“The evidence is fairly clear on where to go from here. The question is whether or not Kansas’s governor and ultra-conservative legislators will accept it, recognize the limitations of teacher merit pay tied to student success indicators, and drop it as part of the new funding formula. Or will they continue pushing forward with the idea because they’re driven by an ideological view of small government and/or a view that privatization should play a much bigger role in preK-12 education? Whichever they choose, Kansans should demand they be honest about what their motivations are.”
Read more here: http://culturalcommentary.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-unique-insanity-of-teacher-merit-pay.html