It Bears Repeating

"Merit pay" systems for teachers have never worked and never will work. There is almost a century worth of evidence to prove it. But that hasn't stopped the billionaire morons and corporations like Pearson to keep pushing debunked "reforms" down the throats of the American people.

It's because it corrupts the entire learning environment. Education is not a competitive but a collaborative endeavor. Market solutions are recipes for failure.

It also ignores the real power imbalance in schools. Principals have ironclad authority and with it almost ironclad job security, unlike teachers. It is principals, not teachers, who determine which students go to which class. If a principal doesn't like a particular teacher, what better way to force that teacher out than to "load" that teacher up with students who can't or won't be motivated to learn? Teachers can only present the material and help to facilitate the learning; however, they cannot force a child to learn. It is strictly up to the child's motivation and ability. Test scores will be and are misused as ways to "evaluate" teachers when they aren't indicators of anything except the student being in good enough form to test well that day and not deliberately blow off the tests (which is a common occurrence). One can just figure how a principal will railroad a teacher out of a job and career by manipulating the working environment so that a previous highly competent teacher will not be able to have a good enough evaluation if test scores are made part of it.

Those staffers who write articles for newspapers and call themselves "reporters" should not be allowed to write about education issues. They are woefully uninformed of the very real and filthy politics that goes on in schools day in and day out. "Reforms" will only worsen it.

Snip from this article from last year:

Here are some reasons to believe that the corporate reformers are wrong about merit pay.

Merit pay has been tried again and again since the 1920s. Sometimes scores go up, sometimes they don’t, but the programs never seem to make much difference and eventually disappear.

The most rigorous trial of merit pay was conducted recently in Nashville by the National Center on Performance Incentives. It offered an extraordinary bonus of $15,000 to teachers if they could get higher scores from their students. Over a three-year period, there was no difference between the scores obtained by the treatment group or the control group. The bonus didn’t matter.

Roland Fryer of Harvard University just released his study of New York City’s much-touted school-wide merit-pay program. Fryer says it made no difference in terms of student outcomes and actually depressed performance in some schools and for some groups of students.

What "merit pay" does is it pisses people off. The only fair compensation is that currently employed and is based on the civil service system.