Absolutely.
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Throw me a few more shekels and maybe I will.” The media image of lousy schools staffed by lazy teachers doesn’t match my experience teaching in the South Bronx. Indeed, offer a Faustian pact where every child would achieve, but teacher pay would be cut in half, and many teachers would sign up in a nanosecond.
Low-income children are hit the hardest. Find me a parent in Greenwich, Grosse Point, or Newport Beach who evaluates the quality of their child’s teacher based on test scores. For the children of the poor, however, reading on grade level has become the functional definition of what it means to be educated and the de facto standard of teacher quality. The danger cannot be overstated: we can’t set the finish line for other people’s children where we set the starting line for our own.
In the ideal world, the teaching profession should be treated like other professions where those who perform better earn more, but until a definition of teacher quality can be created it remains difficult to know what we’re paying them for.
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No, I am against it.
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Conversely, if an evaluator likes the teacher, then their glowing evaluations may gloss over poor teaching. How would you measure all teachers' progress using kids' test scores? A 6th-grade English teacher’s work might arguably be measurable through test scores, but what about the 6th grade health teacher or librarian? How would we evaluate the job of a kindergarten teacher whose students are not tested? Merit pay doesn't factor in how inequitable schools are. One school might have an involved parent population, thereby producing extremely high test-scores. Another school might have little parent involvement, thereby producing low scores. Retaining veteran teachers at these schools is already difficult. Merit pay would perpetuate this cycle because teachers would know that if they teach at a “high performing" school, they will be deemed successful. Finally, I worry about what merit pay would do to the teaching profession. Would the beautiful idea of "it takes a village" turn into "everyone out for him/herself?" Most important, would testing become teachers’ focus at the expense of the arts, athletics and other life lessons so vital to nourishing the whole child?
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