This letter by Diane Ravitch wants to say that merit pay is a failure, but it seems only to be a failure under the terms she’s hell-bent on clinging to. You can say that this chocolate cake sucks at washing your car, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad…
Merit pay purely based on student test scores=bad. This is frequently how the idea of performance-based pay is interpreted by schools, unfortunately.
Merit pay which takes into account value-added data, anecdotal parent satisfaction, employee adherence to professional values, as well as any other number of teaching performance skills, as evaluated by systematic administrative observations and developed through intense school-provided professional development (all things my school does)=good.
I have taught in both a heavily unionized system and in a performance-based charter network, and I will say that when the pay model takes the latter form, it can be an inspiring thing. Whereas my public school staff in the School District of Philadelphia included a 75k-salaried employee who felt so beholden to the grave responsibilities of his job that he would duck out of the building for hours at a time (when he wasn’t reading the newspaper in front of a classroom of rowdy children), my current organization’s biggest focus is trying to get teachers to work less. Are some of those teachers primarily concerned with questioning techniques, objective alignment, rigor, etc. because they know it could mean whether or not they get a raise? Sure. But it’s a heck of a lot better than a teacher who falls asleep at his desk while a student stabs another in the thigh with a pen (this also happened at my previous school). Why wouldn’t it be so? If you ever read about Kohlberg’s Levels of Moral Development, you’ll know that people make choices due to (in order least to most developed) avoidance of punishment, anticipation of reward, and so on until the person is able to act out of intrinsic motivation for doing the right thing. The current model of public education is reactive—teachers do the bare minimum (show up for work) lest they get punished (receive a write-up in their school mailbox or a notice in their permanent file). Performance-based pay at least steps it up a notch. Everyone needs a carrot to get them somewhere. It helps if administrators clearly articulate to their staff what excellence in teaching looks like, and then take steps to develop their faculty in that direction—because how can we begin to teach students if we can’t even teach our teachers?
Here’s another Psych 101 blast from the past. If you are at all familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you’ll know that an individual needs to make sure his or her basic needs are met before they can even consider more cerebral activities. Do we really think a teacher is going to be able to reflect very purposefully on his or her practice when they concerned with earning enough to feed their large family? Or when they’re physically exhausted from having to give up their prep period every day to cover for a rowdy class whose teacher has quit mid-year? If we are going to hold teachers to such a high standard, then the support networks need to model this themselves by providing teachers with as much as possible in order to make such results feasible.
