In light of the recent elections, perhaps it is time to start wondering about what changes will come along with a new president soon to take office. Parents and aspiring parents and teachers will be directly affected by decisions made in the realm of education, particularly where the issue of merit pay is concerned.
President-elect Obama supports higher wages for teachers as well as merit pay, although merit pay seems to be more of a double-edged sword.
On one hand, increasing pay for teachers largely based on their performance in the classroom and on the performance of their students encourages higher standards and harder work on both parts.
After all, by putting forth a greater effort where their students are concerned, teachers can help their students improve and push them a little closer toward higher education and higher levels of knowledge. At the same time, if teachers are being paid more, parents and students are going to expect more from them and so a positive relationship develops between parents, students and teachers.
On the other hand, merit pay encourages competition between teachers, perhaps for the worst. After all, teachers can only be held accountable for so much where their students are concerned. If the students are not willing to put in the same effort that the teacher does, and if parents likewise do not make an effort to be involved in their children’s education, the cycle can easily be broken at the expense of the teacher involved.
Many outside factors are involved as well in how this cycle works. For instance, parents and students in low-income areas or perhaps even in single parent households do not have nearly the same opportunities as students from higher-income areas or students with both parents to step in.
Not only that, but there is the potential for favoritism to influence who receives merit pay, particularly when administrators are the ones doling it out. Marie Gryphon of the Cato Institute also offers up the concern that teachers might feel pressured to bend the rules, maybe going so far as to change students’ wrong answers on standardized tests to the correct ones both to make more money and to avoid their school being labeled as “needing improvement.”
With so much riding on student performance, it becomes difficult to place blame when scores come back as less than satisfactory, and teachers, students, schools and school systems suffer as a result.
So, is merit pay the best approach when wanting to reward teachers for a job well done? Perhaps with the right safeguards in place, merit pay could reward teachers who have put forth their best effort, but what safeguards will solve the problem? The main concern, though, stems from whether or not the right side of the double-edged sword will win out in the end.
President-elect Obama has good intentions with his desire to reform the nation’s education systems and to increase teachers’ salaries, but there is a lot that needs to be fixed where the nation’s education systems are concerned, and merit pay for teachers may or may not be one of the ways to do so.
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