Merit Pay: A Bad Idea Back Then, An Even Worse Idea Now

Kendallville, Indiana, 1968. This city and year are significant because of their association with the concept of merit pay for teachers. 1968? Yes really! Kendallville had a National Demonstration School, East Noble High School. In 1968, the high school was testing two new ideas: flexible modular programming and merit pay! People came from all over the world to study this school.

During my college days, I attended Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Some of you may recognize this as the university that David Letterman, the famous late-night talk show, attended. The university is named for the Ball family, who made their fortune making Ball mason jars (like Mason jars, but east of the Mississippi River). Now you may be more familiar with Ball Aeronautics. What an amazing example of adapting to change!

Before gaining university status, my school was called Ball State Teacher’s College and was the #2 teacher preparation school in the United States. In one of my education classes, we took a field trip, yes, a college field trip, to see this National Demonstration School. I don’t remember anything about flexible scheduling, but the merit pay experiment struck me and I’ve never forgotten it.

At East Noble HS, each teacher had a small box on the wall by the door of their classroom. This was when the teachers actually had the same classroom all day. The students received 3 tokens each. (I have no idea why the number chosen was three.) The students would place these tokens in the boxes of the teachers they deemed worthy of merit.

On that field trip, my first question was “What prevents students from moving the tiles?” The answer was “Nothing”. My second question was “What prevents students from giving the tokens to the popular young teachers instead of the best teachers?” Once again, the answer was “Nothing”. That day, I realized that there was absolutely no merit for merit pay; and there never would be. There’s just no way to make it fair. Indeed, basing it on student evaluation left a lot to be desired! This Kendallville experiment failed like all other attempts to establish merit pay for teachers. It’s not hard to understand why these fail.

Now, fast forward more than 40 years. Merit pay in business seems at least a little more effective because it is generally designed so that ALL workers are striving for a common goal of company success, and everyone will benefit if the company meets its goal. Everyone has a “buy in” for success. If a similar approach could be used in schools, merit pay could have value. But schools cannot function like businesses.

Merit pay for businesses would fail miserably if company workers were told that only the ______ department (media, custodial, staff, etc.) was going to be evaluated and only THEY could get merit raises. The company would see an almost instant decrease in productivity in the other departments, since nothing they could do would be of any benefit to anyone, including themselves. Similarly, if company workers were told their jobs were at risk solely because of the performance of that department, the company would experience mass resignations. Not having control over one’s financial life does not make employees happy and efficient. This is a very simple concept that business people understand. Why don’t the general public and “education experts” just get it?

The most recent version of merit pay for teachers is to tie pay to No Child Left Behind results. Please note that only 9th and 10th grade students take math and reading/writing tests and, in some places, 10th grade students take a science test. Therefore, only teachers of these subjects in these grades have the possibility of receiving any merit pay. There are no junior or senior teachers, no history, art, foreign language, physical education, etc. will qualify. For them, no matter how hard they work or how far their students advance, there will be no merit pay. In addition, teachers of lower level classes and special education will also be out of the race.

Given that most teachers in school cannot have any impact or control over test results, the government, whether local, state, or federal, has added yet another insult to injury. The students themselves have NO personal responsibility for their results. You as a teacher have your entire livelihood tied up with students who just DON’T CARE how they perform because their results will have no impact on them.

The following four items are taken from an article on the PROS of this new approach to merit pay. I suspect you’ll be able to see the flaws in each:

(1) This new approach will “motivate” all teachers in a school to work harder. (EVERYBODY?)

(2) This new approach will “recruit the nation’s brightest minds” for the educational field. (This one just makes me laugh! What “brighter mind” would enter the teaching field now?)

(3) This new approach “will address the injustice of underpaid teachers.” (Can any “expert” say this with a straight face?)

(4) This new approach will “solve the teacher shortage” by encouraging people to enter the field of education. (See my reaction to #2.)

As a retired teacher who loved what she did, if someone asked my opinion about entering the field of education now, I would have to say “run as fast as you can in every other direction” until education returns to sanity (assuming that ever do). ).

Merit Pay is a humorless joke. There is nothing in it that can improve education. It didn’t work in 1968 and it still doesn’t. Why do we keep looking for money down the drain?