Merit Pay Debate

The University of Florida just released a new study on the benefits of merit pay. It concluded that merit pay is associated with higher performance on standardized tests.

While I find some flaws in the design of the research, my concern in this post is on the overall debate of merit pay. The article demonstrates nicely how people are constantly responding to the idea of merit pay by highlighting its short comings-

"We have to be wary of simplistic approaches to evaluating teacher effectiveness. Merely comparing test scores does not capture the whole picture"

or "There is more to educating a child than can be seen on a score from a standardized test."

Or personal stories of accomplishment within teaching that teacher merit pay could never capture-

"When I was a teacher, I worked closely with a couple of high school students who wanted to drop out of school. I put in long hours and gave them individual attention. They stayed in school and graduated," Tuttle said. "This was the major achievement of my teaching career, but you won't see this on any test score or learning gain."

I think this argument is flawed. While I agree strongly with every statement above, I do not believe it needs to be part of the merit pay debate. Teachers in Florida will continue to get paid their base salary. Incentive pay is a means of rewarding teachers who show significant gains in test scores with their students. Whether one believes in the importance of test scores or not, it is the assessment tool that we currently use to evaluate students. Merit pay does not assess the teacher as a whole, it does not reward them for success as a role model, it does not capture every aspect of their job. However, it does allow the state to create an incentive model for one aspect of every teacher's job- increasing test scores. This is what the state wants to measure, and it has a tool for rewarding teachers who acheive the desired outcome.

In education, we often fall into the trap of seeing every issue from every angle and highlighting every problem. This often results in never moving past the debate and onto possible solutions. Merit pay does have some drawbacks and some real concerns in terms of long term sustainability of growth, but I do not believe that its inability to measure the effect of the "whole teacher" is a reasonable argument against its implementation.