As Teachers Struggle with Obama’s Reform Agenda, ‘Merit Pay’ Gets a Demerit - Working In These Times

As Teachers Struggle with Obama’s Reform Agenda, ‘Merit Pay’ Gets a Demerit - Working In These Times

As Teachers Struggle with Obama’s Reform Agenda, ‘Merit Pay’ Gets a Demerit

Friday
June 11
11:16 am

By Michelle Chen

Chicago public school students protest looming cuts to the city's school system in April 2010. (Photo by Pepe Lozano/People's World)

More input=more output. Pay more, get a better product. Unfortunately, the rules of the market economy don't translate well in a classroom, where the input may be an overworked, underpaid teacher, and the output springs from an unpredictable mix of fickle young minds, multiple cultures and languages, and the pressure of standardized tests, tattered books and not enough chairs.

Could that exhausted teacher do a better job if she got extra pay? For years, schools and policymakers have experimented with controversial “merit pay” schemes that tie salaries to students' test scores and other measures of