More Ravitch

There are those 'reformers' out there who lament the quality of education in America. They also, far too many of them, allege that the teachers are failing the students and that is why student test scores are so poor. If you'll remember, I've addressed the myth of test scores already. However, I digress.

These same critics go on to say that giving merit pay to teachers will make them work harder thus raising student test scores. Merit pay has been tried before and it doesn't work. It was tried in the U. S. as early as 1918 and few of the plans survived. Merit pay has been pushed in the last few years and the results are not good. The National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University has carried out the most definitive study of merit pay.

The university offered a $15,000 bonus to teachers of students who had higher math test scores. The study lasted for three years with a control group and the experimental group (who received the bonus). In 2010 the results of the study were released: there were no significant difference in the test scores of the student taught by the two groups.

Here's the deal...education is an enterprise that has many more goals than merely raising test scores. There are multiple and critical goals in the education process. Many of these goals aren't easily measured and they are not conducive to being rewarded in terms of dollars. Put another way, teaching and learning is not piece rate work and it never will be.

Quite simply, merit pay doesn't work in education. For that matter, if the critics of education were to examine merit pay in other occupations, they would find that it doesn't work in most of them.

Dick