CURMUDGUCATION: Merit Pay Fallacies

CURMUDGUCATION: Merit Pay Fallacies:

Merit Pay Fallacies

Cynthia Tucker Haynes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who has hooked up with Campbell Brown's reformster-pushing website. She has done much distinguished work throughout her career, but last week she demonstrated that she doesn't understand teaching and especially not teacher merit pay.

The title of the piece pretty well gives us the whole picture: "Excellent Teachers, Like My Mom, Deserve Better Pay. No Matter What Their Unions Say." Yes, grammar police, the title is a punctuation abomination (suggesting, among other things, that her mother is not actually a teacher), but we're going to skip past that.

Haynes follows the standard template for this sort of piece, opening with an anecdote about a Really Awesome Teacher (who is, in this case, the writer's mom). In her opinion, her mom should have gotten bonus pay for being more awesome than other teachers, but the school district didn't offer it. And now Haynes lays out a mistaken and self-destroying argument.

Indeed, few public school districts do because the concept remains so controversial among teachers’ organizations. 

Not the whole truth. In fact, lots of school districts like the traditional teacher pay ladder because it makes budgeting for personnel costs so much easier. With a merit pay system, school districts have only two approaches available to budgeting (a process that begins over a year ahead of time in my neck of the woods).

#1) We don't know how much merit pay we'll be giving out next year yet, so we'll just leave the budget unfinished. The state should love that.

#2) We will budget a finite merit pay pool, which the teachers will then have to fight over in a zero sum teacher thunderdome. That should be great for school morale.

Haynes notes that merit-based pay systems require a means of linking teacher pay to student CURMUDGUCATION: Merit Pay Fallacies: