Merit Pay

There is an interesting discussion of merit pay at the Education Sector's "The Quick and the ED" blog.

The blog entry highlights a couple of perspectives on merit pay:

• "money is an ineffective motivational tool" for encouraging effective teachers.
  

and, seemingly conversely, another view:

• While beginning teacher turnover can be high, rewarding effective teaching may help "to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers who are least likely to quit"

The blogger feels that these perspectives may not be inconsistent:

• "I don’t think there’s really much distance between these perspectives. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by autonomy, and by the feeling that they are part of a larger, socially important enterprise, and by working for an organization that employs other similarly-minded professionals, and by being paid well. Successful organizations put all of these pieces together, because if they don’t, someone else will and hire away all the good people."
• "To recruit and retain good teachers, schools need a lot more than merit pay–they need strong leadership, good facilities, safe working conditions, and the right kind of organizational culture. You can’t paper over the lack of those things by simply tacking on a salary bonus, even a big one, to the existing steps-and-lanes pay scale. That’s what most most “merit pay” plans have been, historically, and that’s why they haven’t worked."
  

The comments on this blog entry are interesting. On commenter indicates s/he has "served as a consultant to labor unions and a middle manager supervising unionized workers." The commenter makes the point that successful merit based systems should have bargaining unit buy-in and the the administration must be seen as an entity that will not abuse the system:

• "The Denver ProComp system has survived, despite its struggles, in part because many Denver teachers saw the school superintendent (now a U.S. Senator) as a good-faith CEO who would block abuses of a performance pay system. The union’s participation in designing ProComp gave them a comfort level in supporting it."

I agree. For a merit-based system to be effective all stakeholders must participate in the design and it must be administered in a way that is seen as fair and impartial.