If you were the boss and 40% of your employees said they were more interested in non-monetary rewards and felt that evaluating them on a single factor for jobs that required multiple skills were unfair would you proceed anyway with merit pay based on a single factor and expect it to be a good motivator?

That is the basic question in the drive for merit performance for teachers.

A March survey of teachers provided an inside look at their thoughts.

Teachers don’t want to see their students judged on the results of one test and they also want their own performances graded on multiple measures.

Most value non-monetary rewards, such as time to collaborate with other teachers and a supportive school leadership, over higher salaries. Only 28 percent felt performance pay would have a strong impact and 30 percent felt performance pay would have no impact at all.

Of course, worker input won’t slow management’s moving forward (rarely has, rarely will)

The biggest problems with merit pay is defining and applying valid measurement of success.

For example, only 6 percent of teachers surveyed said graduating all students with a high school diploma was one of the most important goals of schools and teaching, while 71 percent said one of the most important goals was to prepare all students for careers in the 21st century.

Whereas standardized test are the holy grail of school administrators.

Merit pay has a checkered background whether you are looking for proof that it works or proof that it doesn’t.

The problem isn’t the money, it’s the structure put together to award it.

Keeping it fair means keeping it free from political pull and other forms of favoritism. It means acknowledging that teachers can’t control what is happening to the kids in their classes and finding a way to account for that.

“Your mother and father just got a divorce, your grandfather died, your boyfriend broke up with you: those kinds of life-altering events have an effect on how you do in class that day, through no fault of the teacher whatsoever.” –Debra Gunter, middle school math teacher in Cobb County, Ga.

One survey result was surprising because it actually creates more work for teachers, but it was held by the majority.

A majority of teachers surveyed said they would like to see tougher academic standards and have them be the same in every state, despite the extra work common academic standards could create for them.

This definitely makes sense, especially given the mobility of the US population, but it’s unlikely to ever pass muster with state and local school administrators. It would also be interesting to see how it flies helicopter parents, considering it’s their complaining that has fostered termination of “tough” teachers.

Money has always been the quick fix, used by managers and parents alike, to achieve their desired ends, even though there is no proof that it is effective or sustainable. And there is no reason to think that teachers are any different.

I think that if the structure and standards aren’t improved along with embracing merit pay then success is unlikely.

What do you think?

Image credit: JadeGordon on flickr

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 1:10 am and is filed under Leadership's Future, Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: merit, teach
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