There is no question that merit pay is necessary for teachers. The problem is that the school system is essentially socialized, so there are no larger incentives for schools or districts that would lead them to figure out how to determine merit.
You know, if software companies were all run by the government, and everyone earned fixed salaries based on union contracts, and someone decided that merit pay is necessary to attract better programmers, can you hear the arguments?
“How are you going to measure it? If you just go by lines of code, the programmers who write tight code will be punished! There will just be an incentive to pad code.”
“What about the programmers who are assigned really hard problems? They won’t produce as much code as someone who gets the easy tasks, will they?”
“If you grade them on bug count, there will be an incentive to avoid volunteering for the really complex jobs that tend to be more buggy.”
And you could go on and on. And yet, we pay pogrammers on merit today, and don’t really have difficulty doing so. How come? Because the competitive forces of the market have forced us into figuring it out. Merit isn’t any one thing. It’s not a single measure. It could be everything from attitude with co-workers to willingness to take on tough tasks, to being on time with promises, to being creative and punctual, or whatever. In different shops it may mean different things. It may even mean different things from person to person. And yet, we figure it out.
We do so because the manager of the project is held responsible for quality and budget. And his manager is also held accountable. Ultimately, the ones who are good at figuring out merit wind up with the better teams, and rise in power where they have more of an effect. They teach their skills to their replacements when they get promoted. And so it goes. It becomes yet another job skill that people learn.
The best way to figure out teacher merit is to put the principal on the hook for the performance of his school, and then to let him figure out what teachers he wants to reward in order to meet his goals. And the best way to do that is to turn parents and students into customers. To do that, you need competition. So make the public schools compete on an even footing with private schools.
A big problem in education is also parental disengagement. And that happens because there is no incentive for them to engage. We’ve turned education into a state-operated entitlement, and the parents dump their kids with the state for a few hours a day and expect them to be educated. We have to break that pattern. And to do that, you need a reward/punishment system.
Perhaps with more school choice, with educators free to kick kids out of the school if they don’t measure up, we could create a system were if your kid gets kicked out of the top tier schools, the next tier down requires the parents to volunteer for a couple of hours of week as a condition of enrollment. There are many other ways to do this. If the kid is disruptive, the school could charge a premium for the added attention needed - said premium being paid for by parents, either in cash or volunteer time. On the other hand, there might be a discount over the voucher amount for a kid who improves a GPA by a certain amount, with the parents getting to keep the difference.
These are not specific proposals, so don’t bother trying to nitpick them. I can already spot flaws in these specific ideas. But the broader point is that if we really want to improve education, we need to find ways to bring in the equivalent of market forces to modify the behavior of schools, teachers, children, and their parents. And we need to do this while making sure that disadvantaged kids get the opportunities they need and that everyone who desires an education can get one.
