One of the most heated issues in education over the past few years has been the idea of merit pay for teachers. The idea of merit pay is not a new one-businesses have used bonuses and other incentives for years to reward a job well done or to try to improve efficiency and output of their product. Discussions for teacher merit pay have been underway for at least fifteen years. The strength of the teacher union and an enormous multi-tiered governmental system that is used to the current pay structure have loudly opposed such a change.
The Cincinnati Ohio school system created a merit pay system in 1999 and found it to be so successful that the Board of Education and teachers union both formally adopted the system. Other locations such as the State of Iowa and Denver Colorado are in the process of utilizing a pilot program and/or have adopted some form of incentive pay for teachers. Interestingly, Des Moines Iowa and Denver were two of the first cities to institute a salary scale for teachers back in 1921.
Proponents of merit pay believe that offering bonuses for successful classrooms will improve the overall educational product, produce healthy competition amongst teachers for prime positions and among schools within and outside of the district. In addition the merit pay system will encourage young teachers to stay in their profession for a longer amount of time. This is extremely important, since 50% of all new teachers change careers within five years. Teaching is a terribly important job and not for the fainthearted. High performers should be compensated for their efforts.
Opponents of the merit system believe that the process is too subjective and unfair to teachers who may be excellent, but have a classroom with several challenged learners. In addition, effective teaching is a team effort throughout a student’s school career and not fully dependant upon one school year for success. Teachers unions note that there is not an effective way to measure a teacher’s success. Test scores have been determined to be an unfair measurement tool by people on both sides of the argument.
What do you think? Do you think merit bonuses are a good way to increase teacher performance and ultimately student academic achievement?