Reply #33: The problems with merit pay ...

[kwassa]

It is hard to measure merit in teaching accurately. Many of the assessments of teacher performance are either very subjective, or no measures currently exist to measure them at all, outside of administrator observations.

Teachers rightly fear that they will be held accountable for factors over which they have no control, such as lack of parental support for education in the home, and the impact of poverty and instability in the student's life. Any teacher has a student for only a small part of the day, relative to the parent's potential time with the child. The responsibility for overseeing the total education of the child lies with the parents. Teachers assist in that, but they can never take over that responsibility.

A teacher may have a great impact on the student's life, but that influence may not be seen for a long time after the student leaves that particular teacher, and wouldn't show up in any measure.

The false reform movement in education now is the attempt to apply business models to a non-business environment. Businesses can fire workers for not performing; a teacher can't fire a student for the same thing, and therefore doesn't have the type of control over the worker output that a business would. Most of the money in the so-called reform movement comes from rich business owners such as Bill Gates and Eli Broad, who mistakenly believe that a business model can be used.

What will finally make a difference is identifying and utilizing best practices in teaching, and that knowledge comes from educators, the vast majority who are completely excluded from this "reform" movement. I would point out that the reformers themselves have no actual educational ideas about HOW to reform education; they simply want to make the teachers figure that out for them by offering them higher pay for doing so. Figuring out how to do it in a high-poverty environment on a cost-acceptable basis has defied almost everyone.