This is absolutely true. A merit-based systen is a disaster. The reality is that all kids do not come equal no matter how much we want them to. Some kids simply have advantages, whether it be intelligence or wealth or more involved parents. Now if we could just stop wasting money on testing and spend it on actual resources....

Sent by Stephanie Lurz | 1:21 PM ET | 07-12-2007

You know why the average western European is better educated and more knowledgeable about the world than the average American? They pay their teachers better. Way better. Teaching in Germany, for example, is considered a profession on par with being a lawyer or an engineer. Of course, for that money they demand performance. But merit pay is the typical American habit of putting the cart before the horse. Make being a public school teacher a profession that promises better than a lower-middle class existence and you'll get better quality people. Gee, you get what you pay for, what a concept huh? But it doesn't stop there. Parental involvement is also important. Too many parents treat school as a dumping ground for their kids and don't bother to help with the homework. When their kids don't do so well they blame the teachers to avoid blaming themselves. Both of my parents were teachers because they really loved teaching. I can make so much more money doing other things, there's no way I would put up with the garbage that administrators and parents put them through for that kind of money. My mother recently retired from teaching. When she met another retired teacher, the woman asked her if she could do it over again would she choose something else. My mother hesitated to answer and the woman said "probably not, huh?" My mother didn't disagree.

Sent by John R. Otten | 2:10 PM ET | 07-12-2007

A merit pay system based on what merit? I, having come out of the public school system of Oakland California, am not at all convinced that an authority would be able to establish a working universal standard of merit.

What would be basing merit on? test scores? grades? Those are both complete bullhockey, having little or nothing to do with the actual intellectual improvement of the student. I for one got what I could out of our broken school system, but I never got good grades, and my most meritorious teachers gave me the worst grades.

Finally I'll add that having better teachers and better paid teachers would be a great benefit, but the entire school experience needs to be completely overhauled in order to best serve the student.

Sent by Jody Sol | 2:28 PM ET | 07-12-2007

I was a social studies teacher until three weeks ago. In my three years as a teacher I was recognized for my skills at the state, county, and local levels with awards and displays of gratitude. I enjoyed my job very much and I can say that one of the greatest deterents for the continuation of my career was the involvement of non-educators in the realm of education policy.
Education is unlike any other "business." It doesn't follow rules of convention and the notion of predictability in education is laughable. I can tell you that a merit based system is totally absurd and almost all teachers of any generation I think you would find in agreement with my sentiments.
The reason are simple- measuring performance is incredibley difficult. Test scores can be manipulated. Test scores can also be totally unrepresentative of a teacher and totally representative of the warmth education recieves in the students' household. If a student didn't grow up with a single book on his shelf, than how can you grade a teacher's performance on instructing that boy Hamlet at age 16. In any class you can have students that will be inspired by your message and content. You can also have students who prefer to make design patterns of bubble testing sheets. It is up to the kid.
If you want to improve education, here's how: pay your teachers more! Many people with the talent and itch to teach stray from the profession because they can't even decenlty raise a family on the salaries. To quote the old adage ladies and gentlement, "You pay for what you get." You want your teachers to be professionals, treat them as such.
In the meantime, let's allow those in education to guide education policy. I certainly wouldn't propose policy changes to an industry I knew nothing about. Indeed such arrogance is often taken by teachers as basic stupidity that should've been erradicated in primary school. If you have no idea what you're talking about, don't talk.

Sent by P. Cody Canning | 2:42 PM ET | 07-12-2007

Interesting that the teachers commenting here all think that the solution is to pay teachers more.

Sent by Mark | 12:21 PM ET | 07-13-2007

Hey Mark, I'm not a teacher and I said the same thing, so, maybe it's really a case of people who actually know what they are talking about pointing out the obvious.

Sent by John R. Otten | 2:02 PM ET | 07-13-2007

The only place in the economy where there is a true merit pay is in sales. Sales people get a commission, so the more you sell the more money you make. In every other profession an employee's true value to the company cannot be accurately measured, so it comes down to how the supervisor feels. I've seen plenty of times where lousy employees are well-networked with the boss and get good reviews and raises -- but do no work.

Sent by eric | 6:07 PM ET | 07-13-2007

I am a teacher at a non-unionized school. The issue of merit pay comes up every few years, but the faculty reject the idea as detrimental to our wonderful collegiality. We see our job descriptions as not only being classroom teachers, but also being mentors, role models, and active parts of the life of the school. Each teacher has areas of strength, but coming up with a formula that gives weights to different areas, saying that one type of contribution is worth $100 more than another, would be destructive.

I see merit pay as the faculty version of high-stakes testing, where the focus of school becomes gaming the system, not really doing anything important. I subscribe to the independent-school ethos that not all aspects of education can be measured, and some that can, shouldn't.

Sent by Brad Burkman | 6:21 PM ET | 07-13-2007

I have been a public school teacher for over twenty years. I have definately worked with a colleague or two who I would not want my child to have as a teacher and who should probably be sacked. However, I have worked for far more principals and assistant principals who should be sacked. Honestly, they show no leadership skills and are just waiting out the system to collect their retirement pay. I've had principals who just sit in their office with the computer and no one ever sees. I've had principals who are bullies. This happens way more than anyone talks about, especially in elementary schools. I've also worked for superintentdents who were little more than used car salesmen. So, I'd suggest starting with the top and work down re: merit pay. Leadership is everything.

Sent by joan leonard | 8:37 PM ET | 07-13-2007

In physics, as in most sciences, it is not the absolute value of a quantity that is of importance. It is in measuring the differences, or gradients, of a quantity over time where one finds the most useful information.

Sent by Jason Blind | 9:30 PM ET | 07-13-2007

I think that a merit-pay system is quite possible, however we as teachers must be proactive in the planning system. There should be different criteria to determine what constitutes merit-pay, not just state scores. I agree that a merit-pay system in this current system has a very poor chance of succeeding

Sent by Al Reyes | 12:48 PM ET | 07-14-2007

I am not a school teacher, but I am from a family of many school teachers and I have managed industrial training and done a fair amount of high level industrial training for supervisors and engineers myself. It is very true that there is a wide variation of performance among school teachers, just like most other human beings who work for a living. The union approach of paying uniformly without regard to performance does not serve the students well. The observation that evaluation of teacher performance is difficult is quite true, but that is a foolish reason to give up on doing what it takes to effectively evaluate teacher performance. An across-the-board pay raise for teachers will certainly help retain out best teachers. It will also help retain the worst teachers.

What is needed is effective administrators who are able and empowered to do the difficult job of accurately assessing teachers' performance and appropriately rewarding the ones who do a great job and appropriately dealing with the ones who don't. An effective administrator will be the target of much more dissatisfaction from poorly rated teachers than an administrator who chooses not to be responsible for real performance from their teachers. The key to successful and effective schools is administrators with ability and integrity to do what needs to be done to reward high performance teachers and assist low performance teachers to either gain the skills needed or be dismissed.

Performance evaluation of teachers is hard work and cannot be replaced by easy-to-measure numbers. Test scores from student testing may be part of the picture, but the core essential requirement is a skillful and effective administrator who knows the job being evaluated and knows what he/she is doing as a supervisor. At many levels, there is political nonsense that directly interferes with accurate evaluations and appropriate salary adjustments and other needed actions. For effective management of teacher performance to happen, school boards will need to be committed to real excellence and stand behind administrators who will do what is needed rather than the more common practice of "not making waves".

Sent by Gary Thomas | 3:37 PM ET | 07-14-2007

As someone who took a $20K paycut to teach high school, I say let's pay teachers more. And as for the summers off thing, well, believe me, we're working. We're just not in the classroom.

Colleges attempt to compete with the professional world with salary adjustments--what's wrong with expecting those who teach our kids HOW TO READ to earn a competitive wage?

Sent by Tracey | 6:53 PM ET | 07-14-2007

For 30 years I taught prospective teachers at the University level. To improve education, education training programs must be improved, or even better, totally eliminated. Too many weak students can graduate from these programs and get jobs. Teaching jobs need to be opened up to anyone who has obtained a college degree in some type of subject matter (i.e., history, math, etc.). Education courses do not prepare people to be teachers. Virtually everyone is aware of this problem, yet nothing is done about it. Make the jobs more competitive, make them available for students who have earned a legitimate college degree in a subject matter, and break the hold that state departments of education have over college and universities.

Sent by Dan Graybill | 8:57 PM ET | 07-14-2007

There are many problems with education that prevent the kid who are at the bottom of the performance curve from moving up. There are many great teachers who know how to work with these kids and create classroom learning environments that work. I would gladly pay teachers more if they and their unions would make it possible to remove the incompetent teachers from classrooms immediately. In any system I have come across it is nearly impossible to remove an incompetent teacher in a reasonable amount of time to protect the students in that room from the consequences of a poor teacher. For tenured teachers the process takes years. This would be a major change to the system that would be worth paying the great teachers an extra 10K a year right now.

Sent by Bob Sutton | 11:26 PM ET | 07-15-2007

YES YES YES, The cold hard facts are that we cannot pay all of our teachers high wages. There are too many of them and it would break the taxpayer. However, our best teachers deserve much more and the job of our teachers is to determine how to identify them. It is not all about test scores but about many other habits and things that can be shown on an efficency report for several years. The cream will rise to the top. The first thing can be the "needs of the system". In other words, math and science teachers get additional points. Education, national teacher's test scores, professionalism, and most of all peer review as well as review by supervisors and principals. I would guess you could come up as many as fifty things to judge a teacher. After about five to ten years, it would be evident who are the best.

Sent by BSS | 9:37 AM ET | 07-16-2007

commision sales is profit sharing. There is no profit to share in public education. Unions are not opposed to merit pay, the teachers who support the unions are opposed. Why, Vanderbilt university has a study. Here is an excerpt from the abstract.
In the absence of well-tested means for measuring and rewarding teacher and administrator performance, informal systems have emerged. Many of these systems are lacking in fairness to teachers and administrators, have little by way of scientific evidence for their effectiveness in elevating student achievement, and are often counter productive.

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/lsi/ncpi.html

Sent by Steve | 11:36 AM ET | 08-01-2007

Bob, in Florida all the union can do is insure the agreement between teachers and school boards is followed. If a "so called" bad teacher remains in the classroom it is because the administrators who are the ones responsible for evaluating teachers did not do their job.

Sent by Steve | 11:40 AM ET | 08-01-2007

I don't understand why any one would not want a merit pay system. I don't understand what the cons to having a system like this would be. Would salaries be lowered for all teachers if we had a merit pay system? I am a teacher and I hate the fact that a fellow teacher could be really bad at her job, and I am really good but she gets paid as much as me. Who has anything to lose here? Ok so maybe someone will get screwed and won't get a bonus that year, it happens and obviously everything in life is not fair. I do agree it is tough to judge who is "good" and who is "bad" on a universal scale but it can definately be done. Not all teachers are equal and we need to get out of this socialist mind set. Please someone tell me a legitimate con to the merit based system. I do a good job at what I do so I am not scared of the merit pay.

Sent by Amanda Nicole | 8:36 PM ET | 10-04-2007

I am a math teacher in a large county in Virginia. A merit pay scares me in the sence that we would start to teach exclusivly to a test. As a math teacher I could get a student to improve based just on how to use a calculator corect. This does nothing for the studnet in the ability to problem solve. We need to be more concerned with the overall education and not how to use a calulator or recite facts and dates. Education should not be based on the peformance on a test. It should be based on ones ability to think and react. Lets teach our students to be thinkers not good on a calculator or memorizing dates. It is more important to recall why something happened then the date it happened, and how to avoid it happening again. We always preace we learn from history, yet we say that history repeats itself. Might want to look at why. I just do not feel that any one teacher can be rated on the preformance of any one student. there are so many more contributing factors to one's education than the teacher. Starting with the student. We all know the saying "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink".

Sent by Richard Peterson | 12:12 PM ET | 01-17-2008

Burkman?
That name sounds familiar...
I heard that you liked triangles...Is this true? I can do euler's line...is that good enough? Can you derive the pythagorean theorum for me? Please...

Sent by p. hartley | 4:22 AM ET | 01-27-2008