In a speech Tuesday, President Barack Obama endorsed merit pay for U.S. teachers, which would mean evaluating teachers’ performances – and subsequently determining their pay – based on their students’ performances. National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said Obama’s statement wouldn’t necessarily mean giving teachers raises or bonuses simply based on student scores, though administration officials said they foresee higher pay based on student achievement.
While we certainly appreciate any effort or creative suggestions to improve the quality of our public schools and universities, merit pay is a proposal fraught with the potential for unintended consequences. The proposal, in short, is an effort to incentivize better performance by teachers by pegging their salaries to their level of “merit.”
On the surface, this sounds like an excellent idea: It seems reasonable to reward better teachers for doing better and to encourage those who perform poorly to improve. Polls suggest this is backed by significant support from the public, so it might be a political win for the president.
Yet the main problem with attaching teacher pay to their level of merit revolves around what we feel is a fairly obvious question: How will merit be defined?
While the proposal might have some practical application if it is more carefully thought out, this question remains to be answered. Currently, proposals tend to focus on an approach that links teacher pay with assessed levels of student achievement, such as graduation rates, standardized test scores or longitudinal improvement. Even if multiple metrics are used, all of these approaches have the potential to create dangerous incentives.
If the metric for teacher merit is graduation or dropout rates, teachers might be incentivized to avoid taking on students who, for reasons beyond the teachers’ control, might be disadvantaged toward dropping out. Severe inequities exist in American education in terms of student access to educational resources. This could easily mean that the best teachers would be discouraged from working with the students who need their help most, accomplishing almost the opposite of what might is intended by school reform: improving the educational results of the public school system.
Similarly, it is difficult to determine how much of an individual student’s performance is a result of teacher merit. Education is often a comprehensive process, and the impacts of one poor teacher could easily drive down the merit assessment of another teacher. Worse yet, assessing teacher merit based on standardized testing could further encourage teachers to “teach to the test,” especially if doing so will directly impact their pay. It is hard to say whether an increased focus on student test performance will really result in the improvement we’re seeking.
One of the better measures that might exist for teacher performance are those that rely on “longitudinal assessment,” or the impact teachers have on student improvement over time. But even this relatively strong methodology is not without problems. Even if student improvement is a metric, similar problems with graduation rates and standardized test scores as discussed earlier might arise when trying to accurately assess student improvement. And still, it would be difficult to break down which teachers are specifically to credit for an improvement in the performance of an individual student over time.
Finally, merit pay might encourage teachers to compete. While intuitively this might seem like a good idea, as competition should presumably encourage teachers to work harder and get ahead, in reality it makes the task of improving education more difficult. Successful teaching is unique from other industries in that it often relies on collaboration and the sharing of creative solutions. Introducing divisive competition and the propensity for teacher “trade secrets” at best, might only mean gains for some students at the expense of others, and at worst, might stifle the ability of teachers to creatively develop improvements to their work.
This is not to say that merit-based pay schemes have no place in public education at all. We also don’t mean to suggest that every attempt at merit pay for teachers is doomed to failure. Teacher merit pay might have the potential for some successes, if pursued carefully. But it is important that before Obama or other education policymakers jump headfirst into attaching teacher salaries to “merit,” they should be wary of the problems with this approach that lie beneath its surface.
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