When I became a teacher, I understood that the salary would be ever modest. At no point did I feel a sense of nobility and sacrifice as recompense, though. The money would be fine, enough to allow me to live in relative comfort, no yachts aside. And through my first clump of years, I was able to save. Even when I moved into higher ed, the salary had nothing to do with my decision; I loved the work, the time to go mental and wander around in ideas and the access to others equally (or not) committed to extracting human potential. Money, such that it did not leave me all achy for the juiciness of more, was always good enough. I also never minded that higher salary came with time. I granted that veteran teachers knew stuff, that practice honed something valuable, whether or not I could immediately cipher it. While there will always be extremes (does every school have an ol' Ms. Kennesque, cooking up gumbo during her math classes?), I respected the institutionally memory of the older teachers. What I was less happy about was the time-gap between the salary steps.
Perhaps I had too low esteem, never demanding my dessert? Subconsciously afraid to demand more, for I would then have to demonstrate I deserved more? Ignorant to what a market approach to my compensation could do for me? Understanding what it could?
No. The money thing just did not matter. I would make out a good life, be it ever so.
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Merit pay, or performance pay, or outcome-dependent pay - whatever; is a terrible plan. It reifies education as a temperament of acquisition, and reworks students into the means necessary for the money-laced ends of teaching. In short, it misses the reason we have schools in the first place.
1. Low riding goals. Much begins from the question "what is school for?" We can ask this in multiple ways: what are the ends of education? what are the outcomes of teaching and learning? what should be taught? what is worthy knowledge? And we do ask this, implicitly in how educators teach and expressly in how decisions are made about what to teach and how to teach it. Too often, few listen; lalalalalalalalalalaIcan'thhhhheeeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrryyyyyyyoooooooouuuuuuulalalalalalalala.
These questions get answered aspirationally or particularly. The former consists of broad, engendering goals - life-long learning, democratic participation, productive citizenship, economic competitiveness, college-prep (reductio ad absurdum). The latter of prescriptions - curricula and content standards, pedagogy and structured lessons, discipline plans, or any state/district/school wide programs targeting specific, observable and measurable products from students and their teachers. Accept this either/or with the caveat that while educators routinely believe that both are possible, at the same time, in the same act of schooling, I take that belief as unfounded by reason. This question of telos - for why do we do what we do? - does not bifurcate in fact. The conceptual must, in action, settle into some concrete actual practice toward some reachable goal. The ends of education are both, of course, and therefore any policy attempting both is false.
We can strive for both, and should; we can not base a teacher compensation on both. Here is where merit pay games the question of why school, and gets the wrong answer. Think of it this way. As a teacher, I can have the philosophy that I am preparing my students for democratic citizenship. Through this lens, the curriculum and state standards are the vehicle by which I prepare my students. Following, I can believe that mastery of these standards is the best path to democratic citizenship. Therefore, I measure my success by how well students perform on assessments of the content. In other words, their learning comes with an implicit heuristic, that performance in my class on the knowledge and skills I set out for them will result, sometime in the future, in their successful participation in our democracy. Choose any of the aspirational ends, and this holds.
Yet, I will never really know if I have succeeded. Schools adopt mission plans based on these aspirations even though these goals will never be tested out. How would we know if we reached them? Some kind of longitudinal research that follows each of my former students along their live-path would gorge up all kinds of data that may possibly, tangentially correlate to their having being one of my students; that might work (recognizing that the longer out we venture from when the student was my student, the more live experience they undergo, the more distortion interferes with whatever increasingly marginal effect I may have had). Now, the individual student might say their democratic participatory zeal comes from their time with me. Maybe. The point is that schooling is not set up for such big picture objectives.
That means success - the teachers' and students' - if measurable (and thus the basis of performance pay) is a local phenomenon. The content I teach is itself the goal; what happens afterward is not my purchase. This decouples the aspiration goals from the particular classroom goal; the big picture is external to, and non-impinging upon, what happens in my class. Again, we can strive for both, but we only can accommodate one: the chosen content goals of a course. The better a teacher does at leading her student to these goals, it would seem, the higher her success. The higher her success, as the merit pay thinking goes, the greater should be her salary. You can tie these accomplishments to growth models, or portfolio documentations, work sample arrangements, grades or raw standardized test scores. No matter: the better performing her students, the better her pay for that merit.
Merit pay would mint fractured, self-contained ethic into an institutional trait. Teachers would not be responsible for anything beyond their course. 5th grade teachers need not worry themselves about anything the 6th grade teachers wanted; 8th grade math teachers could schluff off any vertical teaming with 9th grade math teachers. Schools would be fractured into separate islands of this-is-this, without any real justification for complementary approaches (I do recognize how prevalent is this state of schools already, by default and recalcitrance; that merit pay would in essence codify such atomization is, however, a qualitatively different level of disengagement of the goals of schools with the outcomes of teaching). Perhaps that is too strong condemnation. Very well. Still, I want to point out that any collaboration towards anything outside of the realms of each teacher's course expectation would be, depending on how radically specific the merit pay plan, optional. Or rather, outside their pay. Literally; if I can, in my own classroom, reach the goals held for me (and my students), there is no incentive for me to collaborate, other than the phony ethic of team-ness. Merit pay dumps out the virtue of teaching, in favor of a blinkered aggrandizing; I, me, mine.
2. Ethics
Kantian cosmopolitanism is disputational these days, what with President Obama willing himself a citizen of the world, and 49% of the country aghast at such not-quite anti-Americanism. So much less, then, for the ethical stance Kant imposes upon us humans: treat others not as means to your ends, but as ends themselves (more or less).
Merit pay - actually, any formal system that uses student performance as a mode of evaluating the teachers and the school - obliviates the moral relationship of teacher to student. The students, and their academic performance, come to serve the economic ends of their teachers. Nothing new here; move along. Parents have been choosing schools for their children based on things such as StaNines, Iowa tests, National Merit and SAT scores plus other fine metrics for several generations (not to mention home prices, but they can not be pinned directly on the kids - I don't think). Merit pay is nastier because it seeks to attract a "stronger" crop of minds (questionable in many ways on its face) into teaching with the incentive of earning gobbles of $ through the direct use of students.
True, a teacher's pay is properly connected to student effort, at least in the sense that teachers are responsible for what students learn. It would be fairly odd to not examine into student achievement when qualifying a teacher's work. Merit pay, though, risks turning student effort into teacher value. Without being too Marxist about it, when the student effort is manipulated by the teacher for the sake of more money (which is the practical result of merit pay) and student learning is measured externally (through test scores or other empirically sticky observables), students are both used as a means for teacher ends and alienated from their subjective experience of the learning. Learning is redescribed as evident through the numbers (or portfolio), not as something internal to the student. Neither of these admits the human, moral dimension of personal efficacy.
Critical theory and ethnography work against this kind of alienating education. Students are able to account for themselves their learning, or lack of it. The density of what exactly a student does learn - deep down and lasting, not just the shallower though more easily accepted observable outcomes - makes difficult assumptions that teachers can "see" their effect through students. Paying them based on an outside effect because of the unquantifiability of the internal actuality treats them as a-sensate. Their own experience is negated in order to fashion a terminal point to accrue credit.
3. Elusive/Illusive outcomes. The bottom line is that teachers do not teach for the money. Commitment to teaching composes a person divergently; the human factor opens outward into a world of shared meaning, and dangerous possibility. I am all for drawing in quality minds. I would rather incentivize them through the rewards of teaching, not exclusively one aspect of its outcomes. After all, the outcomes are elusive: how do we really know if our students learned what we think they learned? What do we mean by 'learned' anyway? Should a teacher who receives plenty of dough, relative to others that year, because her students aced the standardized tests be required to return the money if these same students fail the same test when taken a year later; five years later; at the 25th reunion?
It insults a teacher to assume that she will try harder because more money is offered. More money is nice. Value the teacher for the full scope of what it means to work with students, for the humanity they dedicate towards others. That, is hard, wrenching even. Treating people like people is perhaps the most crimped disposition in the human condition. That is a thing itself to be learned and experienced. It insults the point of education, at least the big picture aspirations that found the purpose of schooling, to commodify the outcomes (btw - I never appreciate the posters in schools that link graduation with higher salary; wrong message, if the point of schooling is to get student to learn beyond merely graduating, since they are not the same thing). I realize that anyone who already believes that merit pay is an idea worth considering probably views education through a business/economic parable of incentives. Too bad, especially for our students.
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