Should teachers' pay be based on merit?

Steve Pepple By Steve Pepple Ann Arbor News
on August 27, 2007 at 9:07 AM, updated August 27, 2007 at 9:16 AM

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As the national debate over merit pay for teachers grows, local school districts, like most across the state, are content to sit back and watch other districts wrangle with the controversial topic.

That's OK with local teachers, many of whom like the concept of merit pay, but worry about the details of such plans.

They worry that they'll be even more tied to test scores, leading to more teaching to the test. They also worry about competing with other teachers in the district for a set pool of money, leading to less cooperation and teamwork.

That the concern of veteran high school teacher Claire Dahl.

"You can start playing favorites and teachers start playing the game of how do your kids do versus how my kids do," said Dahl, who teaches at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor. "That can lead to inequalities based on the classes teachers teach.

However, supporters of such plans are pushing them across the nation, saying they offer incentives that spur great teaching, which helps student achievement rise. They also say that if teachers are involved in some sort of peer review, such plans can work.

"This has shown itself to have the potential to be a catalyst for change, but it has to be done thoughtfully," said William Slotnik, executive director of the Community Training and Assistance Center in Boston. The center works with districts across the nation on compensation changes to link teachers' earnings to students' learning. "It's a good thing if handled properly, leading to increased achievement, but done poorly it can end up being very costly."

A growing movement

"There's tremendous pressure on districts to reform the way they pay teachers," said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. "There has to be a way to compensate exceptional teachers in the classroom."

For many people, that pressure has led to a re-examination of merit pay or pay for performance. Merit pay had surfaced in the early 1980s before dying out. People talking about it include the Democratic presidential candidates. Sen. Barack Obama supports it, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said recently she supports schoolwide incentive pay, but not necessarily incentive pay for individual teachers.

Merit pay has also been raised in the debate over the renewal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The federal government has handed out $80 million to schools and districts in grants in 19 states since November for merit pay programs. The districts getting grants include Chicago Public Schools, Houston Independent School District, Dallas Independent School District and Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

And while neither the National Education Association nor the American Federation of Teachers, the two largest teachers unions, has endorsed merit pay, the AFT is working with several districts to develop plans to implement it.

"This is about quality teaching," said Robert Weil, a deputy director in the AFT's educational issues department. "The questions that need to be asked are how is this going to support the learning by students? Just offering more money - no research shows that works. You have to make sure there's enough resources and support there as well."

One of the most influential merit programs in the country is Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers. It started in 2004, after a pilot project that ran from 1999 to 2003. Voters passed a $25 million millage to help pay for the system, which allows teachers to increase their earnings in several ways. Those include professional development, satisfactory classroom evaluations, student achievement growth and working in hard-to-serve schools or hard-to-fill positions.

"The Denver data showed us that if this is about a total systemic change, and not just financial incentives, it can increase student achievement," said Slotnik, whose group helped run the pilot project and study the plan.

Educator concerns

When Ann Arbor middle school teacher Sean McBrady thinks about merit pay, he can come up with six objections; however, most of them boil down to a single thought - he doesn't believe teachers are primarily motivated by pay.

"I do not agree with the assumption that teachers would work harder if there were a possible monetary bonus to be had," he said. "It would not increase the number of high-quality teachers entering the profession. No one I know avoided teaching as a profession because of the lack of pay and bonuses."

Naomi Zikmund-Fisher, the principal at Ann Arbor Open at Mack, said traditional merit pay plans are dependent on the individual students in a class.

"If you get a class full of students that are way behind grade level and you bring them up to grade level, you might have done a better job than someone who got a class full of students that already are at grade level and just moved them up a bit, yet on the tests it would look like the second teacher had better achieving students," Zikmund-Fisher said.

There's another downside to just basing merit pay on test scores, said Bob Galardi, Ann Arbor's deputy superintendent of administrative and human resource services.
"No one ever would want to work in a low-performing school," he said.

Backing merit pay

Parent Julie Worthington, who has an elementary-age daughter in the Ypsilanti school district, likes the idea of merit pay.

"Why wouldn't we give some extra money to those teachers who are doing a good job?" she said. "Most other businesses evaluate their employees somehow, so I think the schools can come up with a way. I think teachers are just afraid of it and of not getting it, which would say they didn't do a good job that year."

One educator who's a fan of some sort of merit pay is Scott Menzel, former superintendent of Whitmore Lake schools, and now superintendent of the Livingston County Educational Service Agency.

"In theory, it's a great idea," he said. "You want to reward top performers. How do you measure that? That's the challenge."

But Menzel isn't sure merit pay for individual teachers is the way to go.

"I'm more interested in some sort of building-level incentives," he said, "where a building would set some goals, everybody would work together towards them, and they would all get the incentive if the goals are met."
