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The merit pay system is part of a packet of education laws to be funded in part by the $4.35 billion "Race To The Top" federal grants supported by President Barack Obama advocating individual teacher compensation tied to his or her students' test scores.
However, merit pay will result in a pressured learning environment and the neglect of many students in need of a quality education.
This system will supposedly improve the ideal of standard teaching quality by giving teachers extra compensation. Each qualifying state will reportedly receive anywhere from $20 million to $700 million in an effort to support common standards in education, according to the funding status of the RTTT online site (www.ed.gov). Merit pay can be awarded based on the teacher's ability to lead their students to an increase in test scores, mainly focused on mathematics and English language. Unsurprisingly, this reward system, being rushed into place as a ticket for RTTT grants, is controversial, raising critical points from both opponents and proponents.
Many are concerned that teachers who receive pay bonuses based on the test scores will pressure their students, not out of a passion for teaching, but for their desire for a higher salary. This is highly unfair to students because their hard work will be solely accredited to teachers. Therefore, many students may perform to a strong work ethic, but only teachers will be rewarded, and only if their students show a clear improvement in test scores due to being "test-ready."
This leads to a second concern, that teachers will be tempted to "teach to the test," turning curriculum to "drill-and-kill."
"Even in good schools, a system driven by testing and accountability incentivizes teaching to the test, neglecting other important and interesting ways to engage and educate students," a researcher at the Hoover Institution, David Davenport, stated in a" San Francisco Chronicle article from Nov. 29.
Although the merit pay system was designed to encourage effective teaching in the school system, it has already sparked outrage in California's school districts. Special education teacher from Madera, California and president of the Madera Unified Teachers Association Babette Jaire protested in the November 2009 issue of the California Educator, "Using test scores as the sole basis to pay or evaluate teachers devalues education and pits everyone against each other."
Americans value hard work and for incentives, many teachers may work harder and produce better results. But merit pay raises may produce very uneven results, as not every teacher will be attracted by the raise. For schools that are not effective due to a poor administration or for hard-working schools that are struggling to lift less-skilled students up the ladder, teachers will be tempted to pursue their career elsewhere at high-achieving schools where resources will be fully supplied and students will have a better chance to achieve higher test results. "If schools evaluate and pay teachers based on their students' test scores, it will hurt rather than help low-income schools," Nystrom Elementary School teacher from Richmond Melanie Perkins said in another California Educator article, from November 2009. "Why on earth would somebody volunteer to teach the most challenging students when they could teach in wealthy communities where students score higher?"
Instead of these counter productive results from the merit pay system, the federal government should increase the pay scale, resources and professional development offerings for all teachers because of the hard effort teaching naturally calls for. And we as student citizens and prospective voters should do everything we can to reject the thoughtless philosophy behind merit pay.
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