Merit pay

Introduction
“If we want America to lead in the 21st century, nothing is more important than giving everyone the best education possible — from the day they start preschool to the day they start their career.” these are the word of President Barack Obama (The White House Staff). The Obama Administration created the $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund to encourage states to implement performance pay systems and other changes (The White House Staff). With that being said, almost every politician, school official, educator and citizen has developed his or her own views and strategies to improve or “fix” the education system. Despite this, there has been little data generated to support their efforts. The most consistent data points to the impact of high-quality teachers in the classroom. This along with the Race to the Top fund has opened the door again for merit pay or performance pay. Merit pay ties pay increases to school test performance, evaluation of the teacher’s in-class performance and professional efforts (Goldhaber 2008). Merit pay is a solution drawn from the business world, and is based on the belief that rewarding effective teachers and encouraging them to work harder will increase student learning (Holland 2005). Most people agree that the success of our education system and schools depend primarily on having high-quality teachers in the classroom, but some argue that the responsibilities are not the teachers along and include other outside factors (Conner 2013). Supporters of merit pay believes that it will motivate teachers to work harder, while other say that teachers can not work any harder then they currently are and that it will only lead to competiveness and manipulation of test scores.

PROS
A high-quality teacher is the most important factor in student learning and is the most important contributor to education outcomes. Continuous improvement has become a personal and communal expectation in all fields, including education (Holland 2004). High expectations are a critical element of success for schools, teachers, and students. Improvement is associated with extending the benefits of education to all, but also with enhancing the performance of both teachers and individual students (Conner 2013). At every level we need to focus on areas for improvement, the use and consequences of merit pay metrics to measure performance can influence teachers to seek out professional development and other activities to earn measurable points for salary increase (Kelly 2013). The Portland Education Association (PEA) has been operating under the Professional Learning Based Salary System (PLBSS) since 2007 (Rosales, n.d). With the belief that the best indicator of student learning is teacher learning, they have 740 members participating in professional development and other activities in order to earn salary contact hours (SCH) (Rosales, n.d). Under PLBSS, educators move horizontally across five salary lanes based on the earning of SCH for participation in professional learning activities and taking college courses (Rosales, n.d). In Helena, Montana, the Helena Education Association (HEA) introduced Professional Compensation Alternative Plan in 2004 (Rosales, n.d). They give teachers the choice to stay with the traditional salary schedule or to join the new system in which they had to agree to the career development plan, professional service commitment, and positive evaluation (Rosales, n.d). These programs eliminate teachers that are not performing from moving up the pay scale at the same rate as those that are proficient (Neal 2011). It also helps with the concern for the overall competitiveness between school districts with greater need and fewer resources to keep and recruit teachers, knowing they will be evaluated on performance and not from the existing system used by nearly every public school district in the country, where teachers get raises based on what level of education they’ve completed and their number of years teaching (Lavy 2004). They can reduce the time it takes for a teacher to reach a maximum pay rate and they are not based on test scores but professional development. These programs address the need to develop teachers’ abilities to lead and leaders ability to teach (Holland 2004).
CONS
In the USA, the average spending per pupil in K-12 education continues to grow while student performance on reading and math proficiency tests stagnates (Levy 2004). Some argue that the merit pay will only add to this deficit without any results. The impacts of merit pay have shown to have marginal gains in student achievement while others find no relationship between incentives and improved test scores (Barnett & Ritter 2008). They open the doors to questions such as, “what happens to teachers who does not teach tested subject”, “will they pit employee against employee”, leading up to competiveness within the school and classroom, and “how will teachers be evaluated fairly without any biasness”? Merit pay has shown to create inefficient allocations for the teachers’ efforts and become problematic when teachers take actions to inflate test scores or measurable achievements of students (Neal 2011). Variations in student assessments also reflect variations in teachers’ performance, student backgrounds, and aptitudes (Neal 2011). Principals would have the opportunity to play personal favorites, introducing biasness in teachers’ evaluations, by rewarding the ones they favor and punishing the ones that they feel challenge their authority or that they feel threaten by, leaving them little opportunity for advancement, never having a chance to receive bonuses (Holland 2005).
Author’s Position
Taking all the literature into consideration, merit pay can be a useful tool in minimizing the gap between school districts by making less advantage school districts more marketable to qualified and experienced teachers. It will give administrators the ability to improve the screening process used when recruiting teachers while focusing on professional development and performance. As stated by James Toop, CEO of Teaching Leaders, ‘The key to driving up standards in the most disadvantaged schools has been a relentless focus on the quality of teaching and leadership’. If merit pay has a straightforward and measurable formula, it can be used to keep good teachers in the classroom instead of losing them to administration or even worse, them leaving the education system all together for a higher quality of life with less work.

Reference
Barnett, J.H and Ritter, G.W. (2008, October). When merit pay is worth pursuing?
Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct08/vol66/num02/When-Merit-Pay-Is-Worth-Pursuing.aspx
Conner, T. (2013, Feb 20). The promise and pitfalls of merit pay, Retrieved from http://thebluereview.org/merit-pay/
Goldhaber, D., DeArmond, M., Player, D. and Choi, H. J. (2008). Why do so few public school districts use merit pay? Journal of Education Finance 33, (3) 262-289.
Holland, Robert and Don Soifer, (2004, April), Good Ideas: Six Valuable State and Local
EducationReforms, Lexington Institute.
Holland, R. (2005, October). Merit pay for teachers: Can common sense come to public education? Lexington Institute.
Kelly, J.P. (2013, June 3). Schools push merit pay for teachers, Retrieved from http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/schools-push-merit-pay-for-teachers/nX8LF/ Lavy,V. (2004). Performance pay and teachers’ effort, productivity and grading ethics,
Working paper 10622, National Bureau of Economic Research, Retrieve from http://www.nber.org/papers/w10622
Neal, D (2011, January). The design of performance pay in education,Working Paper
16710, NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Retrieve from http://www.nber.org/papers/w16710
Rosales, J (n.d.). Pay based on test scores? What educators need to know about linking teacher pay to student achievement. Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/36780.htm The White House Staff. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education