Pros And Cons Of Merit Pay

Merit Pay: Good or Bad

According to an article from The Washington Post, “Merit pay has been tried again and again since the 1920s. Sometimes scores go up, sometimes they don’t, but the programs never seem to make much difference and eventually disappear.” There are many reasons why these programs don’t make much of a difference and eventually disappear. As The Washington Post says that merit pay doesn’t make much of a difference so teachers shouldn’t get paid by merit pay. Teachers should not get paid based on their students standardized test scores because the states might not have enough money to pay teachers individually, teachers will compete with one another, and there are kids who don’t test or learn well.

One reason that teachers

To explain, The Economist says, “And teachers unions almost unanimously oppose merit pay, fearing that it is unfair, encourages competition among teachers and eats into the extra pay that could be distributed to everyone” (Greene). This quote is important because it states how teachers compete against one another. It says how merit pay encourages teachers to compete against each other to get extra pay that could be distributed evenly to each other. This way everyone is thinking about there students getting higher test scores and not focusing on helping them with what they need individually. Also, teachers need to work together and be a team but with merit pay they will be competing against one another instead of working together. For instance, Al Ramirez states that, “Merit pay introduces competition among staff members and destroys the sense of community so important to adults and students” (Ramirez). In this quotation Ramirez is stating that merit pay causes competition and destroys the community between the staff and students. To explain, if the teachers are competing to get more money then they aren’t going to have as good of a relationship with their students. They will focus more on what is on the test instead of helping the students learn other things that aren 't on the test but they still need to know. This causes the bond between students and teachers to be broken and the respect to be

Finally, some people might say that teachers will make a lot of more money with merit pay but some students might not learn or test well due to reasons the teacher can’t help with. To emphasize, Bernie Froese Germain, a researcher at the Canadian Teachers Federation says that, “Tests that assess what students have learned are not intended to be, nor are they, measures of teacher quality. It is easier for teachers to get higher test scores if they teach advantaged students. If they teach children who are poor or children who are English language learners, or homeless children, or children with disabilities, they will not get big score gains. So, the result of this approach—judging teachers by the score gains of their students—will incentivize teachers to avoid students with the greatest needs. This is just plain stupid as a matter of policy” (Germain). This quote is important because it relates to students not learning well because of issues at home or medical reasons. To explain, it talks about children with disabilities or who are homeless or something along those lines aren’t going to learn as well as other students. If teachers have these students in their class then they aren’t going to get paid very much from them. They can try to teach them a little differently or give them extra help but there test scores still aren’t going to be as high as the other students. This wouldn’t be fair to the teacher when there isn’t very much that they can do for the student to