A decade ago, there were headlines all across the country about merit pay for teachers. The president of the United States and the secretary of education were pushing for the idea. So were governors and legislatures and school boards, and a number of merit pay plans were put through. We haven't heard about merit pay for a long time until a couple of weeks ago when the Fairfax County, Virginia, school board voted to terminate its merit pay plan. There are some lessons to be learned from the Fairfax story.
When the Fairfax superintendent and school board proposed a merit pay plan several years ago, teachers opposed it for some pretty good reasons. They wondered how fair the evaluations were likely to be--wouldn't the system encourage cronyism and give administrators a chance to reward their favorites? Wouldn't the scheme pit teachers against each other, instead of encouraging cooperation and teamwork? However, despite these reservations, most Fairfax teachers eventually accepted the plan.
What happened? Many teachers signed up for the tough series of evaluations, and they started doing what they needed to in order to qualify for merit pay. The plan was working the way it was designed to. But before it was fully underway, the school board ran into financial problems and started reneging on its promises.
Merit pay awards were originally supposed to be IO percent salary increases, which would be added to base pay and counted toward retirement. When it came time to award the first merit increases, the board unilaterally reduced the promised IO percent to 9 percent and, instead of a pensionable salary increase, turned the award into a nonpensionable bonus.
Last year, faced with a budget shortfall, the school board suspended merit pay. This year, the board decided that merit pay was simply too expensive and threw it out altogether. The result is a lot of disappointed and demoralized teachers who took the scheme seriously and did their part. Now that the school district is short of money, they find that merit pay is one of the first things to be sacrificed. This isn't an isolated story. In Texas, where the state legislature passed a merit pay law in 1984, teachers were told they'd be evaluated, and those who got a certain score would be awarded merit pay. The legislators must have underestimated the merit of their teachers because they were horrified when 100,000 teachers qualified. So they changed the rules--retroactively--and reduced the list by nearly a third. The teachers who were knocked off it had to try again under the new rules.
I have always had reservations about merit pay for teachers. If you want to improve school performance, you should encourage people in a school to work together, not compete with each other, and you can do this by rewarding the teachers in an entire school for its success. But the Fairfax and Texas stories illustrate another big problem with merit pay. The people who vote for it are committed to it only until it starts costing money.
When merit pay is first proposed, supporters don't know how many teachers will qualify. What they do know is that many taxpayers consider it a tough, fair strategy for improving education. In other words, merit pay looks like a cheap way of satisfying the public and making headlines. But when teachers start qualifying and merit pay gets expensive, you don't hear parents or other taxpayers applauding any more. And when a budget squeeze comes and people have to figure out what to get rid of, merit pay turns out to be a prime candidate for the axe.
Basically, what you get from merit pay is a lot of serious morale problems. Some teachers are opposed to it from start to finish. Others are afraid when merit pay is first put in, and many are resentful because they feel they deserve merit pay and don't get it. Then, there is a buildup to great satisfaction as many teachers work hard to get merit pay and either succeed or believe that they will in the near future.
When merit pay becomes too expensive and it is either killed or the program is gutted, you get a second wave of resentment--this time b cause something that was promised, and that people have been working hard to get, has been taken away.
What about the big claims we heard when merit pay first came in? If any of them had come to pass, you can be sure we'd be hearing about it from Texas or Florida or Lamar Alexander's Tennessee. Since nobody is telling stories about all the wonderful things merit pay has accomplished, it's safe to assume that merit pay is another one of these educational experiments that was doomed to succeed and is now quietly dying.