Merit Pay

A reader e-mailed me last week to say she liked what I had to say about the good teachers being the ones who leave first when contracts fail. Then she added something like ‘what about the mediocre or poor teachers? How do we get rid of them?’

Hoo boy. Ask me an easy one.

Merit pay is common in the business world. I heard of a corporation where managers were required to divide their staffs into three groups: high achievers, who got big raises; middling achievers, who got no raises; and low achievers, who got fired. It resulted in backstabbing worse than you’ve ever seen on ‘The Apprentice.’ You may remember the company -- it was called Enron.

When I was a manager at Yankee, I had a pool of bonus money that I was supposed to give out based on performance. My problem was that the editorial team really was a team. We all had fingers in each other’s pies, and when one of us won some award in a magazine contest, for example, we knew the judges were reacting to the whole pastry: writing, research, editing, photography, design, proofreading, fact-checking production and, oh yeah, the assistant editors who did the drudge work so that the writer had time to write, Linda at the front desk who answered the phone, and Big Mike who picked up the mail and plowed the parking lot.

So I split the bonus pool evenly, which defeats the purpose of merit pay. On the other hand, it kept the team together.

It’s not so different at the high school. The success or failure of any student depends on everyone who works here -- teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, co-curricular advisors, custodians, nurses, bus drivers -- everyone. One of my journalism students recently suggested we invite one of the main office secretaries to a press conference, because ‘she listens to kids!’

(We interrupt this column for a special announcement: This is how far I got after 25 minutes, which is the time allotted for students taking the essay section of the new SAT. Had this been an actual SAT test, I’d be putting down my #2 pencil and moving on to the next section with a sinking heart. We now return to your regularly scheduled column.)

That’s one problem I have with merit pay -- it pits educators against each other. Another is that I don’t know how we would measure a teacher’s merit. Testing? Students aren’t widgets. Getting a kid with a lot of problems to graduate may be more meritorious than getting an honors student into a fancy college. That’s one thing wrong with the No Child Left Behind testing, which assumes that any group of sophomores is just like the group that took the test last year.

The ConVal district is trying a different test, which measures the improvement, if any, in each particular student’s performance over the course of a year. That makes more sense, but it still leaves out a lot of imponderables. What else happened in that kid’s life over the last year? Did her parents split up? Did he get dumped by his girlfriend the day before the test? Did somebody introduce her to the dubious pleasures of drugs or alcohol? Did his still-developing frontal lobe go into overdrive?

Any teacher can tell you about promising students who flamed out for mysterious reasons. And we’ve all had kids who, just as suddenly, caught fire. We like to think it’s because of us, but who knows?

And if we go to merit pay, who decides? Some say we ought to run schools like a business, and the market -- the sum of all the customers -- will pick the winners and losers. But who are the customers for public education? We have to answer to students, parents, taxpayers and now, the federal government -- and what each of them wants is different, often contradictory.

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I know this. If you want to find out who the good teachers are, scrimp on their salaries and benefits, distract them with more paperwork and flavor-of-the-month ‘reforms,’ cram as many students in their classrooms as can fit, and say nasty things about them in the newspapers. They’ll be the ones who leave.