Letter From The Teacher #3: The Merits of Merit Pay

Anytown High School, Any State, USA

To: Ms. Rodriguez
From: Mr. English Teacher
Re: Answers to Your Questions

Dear Ms. Rodriguez:

Thanks for your e-mail. Alex is doing just fine. After we worked on the rough draft of his research paper last week, his final draft was much improved and his final score was 96%. Alex is a great kid, but he could stand to spend a little more time on his writing.

I was also intrigued by your question about merit pay. I don’t believe our district is currently considering it, but it does come up from time to time, so I’ll take this opportunity to explain it. Please let me know if you need any additional information.

A recurring issue in education is that teacher pay is determined primarily by two factors: longevity and formal education (degrees). For instance, in our state, one cannot be a teacher without at least a bachelor’s degree, and pay scales are based on that minimum level of education. If I have a master’s degree, in our school district, I earn only an additional $1500 per year. That’s an extra $125.00 per month before taxes. If I have a doctorate, I make $3000.00 more per year than a teacher with the same number of years of service and a bachelor’s degree. That’s an extra $250.00 per month before taxes.

That amount of money sounds pretty good, and $250.00 is certainly quite a bit of money for me, but the problem is that graduate credits are very expensive. Earning a master’s commonly takes two years, and a doctorate, at least another two. Tuition costs for a master’s can easily run $20,000.00, and at least that much for a doctorate. With a master’s degree or a doctorate, it would take me more than 13 years to break even on tuition costs, and I’m not including all of the incidental costs of college in time, fuel, computers, books, etc. Economically, at least, any teacher would be far better off with a part-time business or with working during the summer when possible. If a teacher earned a master’s or doctorate after working for five or more years, they’d probably never break even.

Something that many people don’t realize is that few teachers have three months off in the summer. Not only that, they’re not actually paid for 12 months of work, but only for the part of the year that they actually work. Their paychecks are spread out over the entire year, just like normal people. For example, I’m not done with school until the second week of June, and I have to be back the third week of August. All teachers have continuing education requirements. They must continually go to school and be able to document it in order to periodically renew their teaching credentials. Much, if not all, of that continuing education must be done on their own time and with their own money. That leaves the summer. It’s a rare year that I don’t spend at least two weeks of my ever-shortening summer in classes.

Many teachers are like me; they enjoy learning new things and like to further their educations so that they can be more effective teachers. I have nearly enough credits for a master’s degree, and I suppose I’ll get around to finishing one some day, but there is really no financial incentive for me to do that.

In fact, the only way to really make any money in education is to go into administration. Principals commonly make double the salary of well-paid teachers and superintendents can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The problem is that really good teachers usually don’t want to be administrators—they want to teach—so there is no way for them to make more money in education except for their yearly step increases and whatever raises their school boards are able to provide, which these days, will likely be few and far between.

Many well-meaning people—and some not-so-well-meaning people—would like to see merit pay for teachers. I’m not reflexively opposed to this concept, but the devil is very much in the details. Those who mean well recognize that the finest, hardest working teachers are paid no better than the teachers who do only enough to meet basic standards of performance. As one of those hard-working teachers, I’m certainly sympathetic to that concept, and if my evaluations are to be believed--if my supervisors aren't incompetent or playing some sort of ironic joke--I’m a very good teacher too (that, accompanied by a dollar, will buy coffee at any McDonald’s in the nation). On the other hand, some want merit pay as a means of promoting even more reliance on big government in the form of mandatory, high stakes tests (MHSTs). They want merit pay to be mostly, or entirely, tied to MHST scores. Let’s examine the second group first.

Once a government bureaucracy is established, it tends to do everything possible to increase its size and power so that it will become politically difficult, even impossible, for it to ever be shut down. Ronald Reagan said that the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see is a government bureaucracy, and he was right. The bureaucracy that supports MHSTs is very large and powerful and many billions of dollars are involved.

It you’re part of a MHST bureaucracy, you would certainly want teacher’s pay to be based on how well their students scored on your MHSTs. This is so because:

(1) It would force teachers to spend most, if not all, of their time teaching to that test to maximize their income.

(2) It would create an enormous, additional market for supplementary materials to help kids pass the tests, greatly benefiting the manufacturers of the tests, whose campaign contributions will help to keep in office the politicians who make your bureaucracy eternal.

(3) If they’re spending all of their time scrabbling for dollars, teachers, school administrators and school boards won’t be coming after you for your poorly written tests, and questionable policies and decisions, and they’ll tend to be on your side in any battles with parents.

(4) All of this maximizes your power because you’ll have near-total control over the schools and everyone associated with them.

(5) Your attempts to raise your own salaries will meet with little or no opposition from below.

On the school level, the problems are even worse. Let’s put aside the fact that schools would become nothing more than test-prep and test-taking factories with athletic teams, and look at some of the real problems involved. How do we evaluate teachers who teach subjects that aren’t tested? At the moment, most states test only math, English, social studies and science. Educrats would “solve” that problem by mandating tests for everything imaginable, thus spending even more money. Is that really most, or all, of what we want schooling to be: preparing for and taking MHSTs?

The biggest problem is that test results don’t accurately reflect a teacher’s work. They simply can’t. You see, the only thing any teacher can do, the only thing the best teacher in the world can do, is to provide an opportunity for learning. It is up to the students, and their parents, to take advantage of that opportunity. Many kids don’t take full advantage of that opportunity. Some more or less ignore it.

I’m always amazed when teachers are outraged and offended because teenagers behave like teenagers. Didn’t anyone tell them that was likely to happen? I expect and delight in it—it’s part of the great fun of teaching high school kids—but my basic rule—you don’t get to behave rudely or stupidly—stands. The point is that some teenagers simply aren’t going to recognize the value of taking advantage of their educational opportunities. They’re not going to do reading assignments. They’re not going to complete and hand in their work. Homework? You must be kidding! Most will do just enough of any kind of schoolwork necessary to avoid failure. Some won’t do even that much, and their parents won’t make them.

The problem is not that contemporary kids are stupid—they’re certainly not. Many people would be amazed at the kinds of things, and their difficulty, kids are expected to learn. I grew up in a world without computers. Merely grasping that technology and all it entails puts today’s kids far beyond past generations in significant ways. Yet, school is about far more than the accumulation of mere knowledge as evidenced by the ability to regurgitate it in specific ways on specific tests.

I live by a simple aphorism: never underestimate their intelligence, but don’t overestimate their information. Teenagers are very inexperienced in many ways. Despite having at their fingertips access to a body of knowledge unprecedented in history, they simply don’t know what educated adults know. Many know that The Beatles were a band, but beyond that know nothing of their significance. They know that man has walked on the Moon, but many think the first man to set foot on the Moon was Lance Armstrong. In other words, teenagers are simply teenagers. If it hasn’t happened in the last two years it may as well have happened two thousand years ago. Kids tend to live in the moment. Many don’t know the definitions of common words, and most can’t tell you the difference between Conservative and Liberal political philosophy, or have any real idea why they should care.

But we must hold teachers accountable! Sure, and I’m absolutely accountable. If I don’t show up on time often enough, I’m in big trouble. If I don’t prepare, if I don’t teach properly, if I fail in any one of a hundred ways, I have no doubt that someone else will be glad to take my place and will be given that opportunity. This is an understanding I share with my principal. What I cannot do is guarantee that any given student will produce a given score on a MHST. Yes, I can be reasonably certain of the scores of most of my kids, but every year, truly exceptional students do poorly and truly poor students do exceptionally. I’d like to take credit for that sort of thing—I think—but it’s irrational to think that I can or should. Please understand, the MHST scores of my students are so consistently high that I’d likely benefit if my pay was mostly or wholly based on that criteria, but I’m still ambivalent about it.

Here’s a true story: A number of years ago, my school handed out “Teacher of the Quarter” awards. Periodically, one teacher would be given a nice little trophy as the teacher of the quarter. I noticed that none of those receiving the “honor” were being rewarded for actual teaching, but only for high profile things like organizing a prom, a dance, some extra-curricular event or something similar. It was with considerable amazement that I was, out of the blue, given one of the awards. I spoke with an assistant principal and asked why I was so honored. I was surprised to learn that he recommended me for good teaching, and they had never before thought to give the award for good teaching! Don’t get me wrong, these were all good administrators in a good school, but it had never occurred to them to actually reward exceptional teaching with a “Teacher of the Quarter” award! Not long thereafter, they stopped giving them out altogether. It seems that people were getting too jealous and nasty about it when they didn’t get one and the principals were tired of taking the flak.

Do you base merit pay on the number of students who pass a teacher’s classes? If so, won’t you be ensuring that kids who should not pass, pass? Do you base it on teacher evaluations? If so, won’t you be encouraging cronyism and favoritism by principals who will tend to want to reward those who make their jobs easier rather than those who actually excel and are, as a result, more demanding? Will a teacher’s pay change from year to year based on whatever criteria are involved? If so, it might take only one bad group of kids—and believe me, teachers get those from time to time—to cause many a teacher to default on their mortgage.

I’m sure you know people in your line of work who are ruthless, unprincipled self-promoters. We have them in education too, and those are exactly the kinds of people who mediocre administrators tend to support and praise. When you reward the wrong people, the right people notice and tend to do less. When you reward those who truly deserve it, good administrators can use that example to motivate others. But all too often, human nature interferes with the best intentions, and people who don’t deserve it end up with the benefits.

So as I said, I’m not absolutely against merit pay, but it must be based in reality, a solid understanding of human nature, and not designed to build bureaucracies. Sadly, I’ve never seen a merit pay system that meets these simple criteria. If I cannot directly earn such benefits through my own efforts, what good is it? If, under such a system, I can work harder than anyone else, and my excellence is reflected in year after year of evaluations, yet I earn not a penny more, what—other than self-motivation--is my incentive to keep producing at that level? By the same token, if a mediocre teacher is rewarded for their level of effort, what’s their incentive to improve? Will they even be capable of recognizing that they’re anything but mediocre?

Well, I’ve rattled on long enough. I hope I’ve at least raised some of the most pertinent issues. As always, please let me know if there is anything else I can do to be helpful.

Yours,

Mr. English Teacher