It can't possibly work. For one thing, merit pay requires profit--the source of a widget manufacturer's bonus is the extra money that the company made selling widgets last year, and public schools never generate extra profits. For another thing, the premise of merit pay is that teachers have a filing cabinet full of sure-fire educating ideas that they are sitting on until the day they are motivated by extra money. Merit pay shares with many reformster ideas the notion that teachers could teach plenty harder if they were just properly motivated and/or threatened.
But merit pay appears to also offer a means to lower personnel costs, and that's always an appealing idea.
And there's a bit of appeal in the idea, because everyone remembers at least one teacher that they hated. Why should that sucky teacher get the same pay as a great one?
The root problem remains--how do we separate the teacher wheat from the educational chaff? Somebody, somehow, has to make that judgment.
When we say, "Let's pay each teacher what she's worth," that really means "Let's pay each teacher what I think she's worth," and that really means "Let's pay each teacher what I want to pay her."
"I mean," the real reasoning goes, "I'll come up with some way to justify it, maybe even use some numbers or something. But I want to pay this teacher what I want to pay her, and no more."
Sure, I can see the appeal. In fact, it's so appealing, I have a suggestion. Instead of calling it merit pay, let's call it merit pricing, in which those who are paying the bills get to decide how much the bill should be. Let's go ahead and adopt this idea of merit pricing for everything.
I have a Netflix subscription, but it's just not that great any more, and I happen to think some of the content is lacking merit, so I'm going to set the merit pricing for my subscription at around a buck a month.
My groceries have been a bit more expensive lately, and it's just plain old blah food, so when I check out next time, I'll go ahead and decide how much money to pay--based, of course, on the merit of the groceries I've selected.
Next time I buy a car, I think I'll decide how meritorious the vehicle is, and set a price accordingly. And my next medical procedure--definitely waiting to see how that turns out so I can pay accordingly. Oh--and I am super-unconvinced that there is any merit at all in the parking spaces in town, so I'll be dropping those prices big time.
Extending merit pricing to all aspects of life, not just how we pay teachers, would be liberating. Well, liberating except for everyone being paid. But they would up their game because there's no doubt that if a product was stuffed full of extra merit, people would spontaneously decide to pay more for it, just because they wanted to, without even being asked!
It's a mystery to me why there should be such a big overlap between free market believers and advocates for merit pricing, which seems to be all about thwarting the invisible hand and keeping it from setting a price for anything. But then some folks have always been awfully reluctant to let the invisible hand set prices for labor.
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