Merit Pay Demise Essay

     High school teachers’ average salary varies across the world. The United States is said to be one of the richest countries in the world, yet our teachers are being paid one of the lowest amounts. The Education Intelligence Agency, author of the article “Ohio Teacher Overcomes Union’s Tolerance” published an International Teacher Salary Report ranking the fifty states by “how much the average salary exceeded per capita personal income.” According to the Education Intelligence Agency Ohio’s percentage rate is only fifty- five point one percent. According to the Education Intelligence Agency the lowest state percentage is in South Dakota at twenty- three point six percent and the highest state percentage is

The problem with Karmanos’ idea is that there’s no provision for merit pay in Michigan, lousy teachers and great teachers make the same as long as they have equal seniority and education. That’s a recipe for mediocrity in any industry. Teacher quality won’t significantly improve until pay is linked directly to performance.

Those who are in favor of teacher merit pay systems feel as though the use of this system can eliminate the possibility of seniority outweighing high performance. They believe that those teachers in merit pay systems would be made to perform better in the classroom and demonstrate great teaching skills. Although there is some truth to this idea, it should not be accepted in the argument of teacher merit pay. In the Christian Science Monitor Reg Weaver stated merit pay systems would warrant “an adherence to some type of evaluative standard “ This means that teacher evaluations would consists mainly of the scores from

Holding educators to student performances on standardized tests is a current trend being utilized by state and local school boards, but the standards to which teachers are being held are vague and leave teachers lost on how to improve their craft. In 2013, the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation funded a study of current teacher practices in order to identify effective strategies linked to increased student achievement. The data obtained from the study lead to discussions surrounding the current teacher evaluation process. Those discussions have led to a realization that evaluations tied to specific teacher feedback appeared to have greater impact on teacher improvement and as a result, increased student achievement (Goodwin & Hein, 2016). In the search for any artifacts involving the formalization of teacher evaluations, one article provided a guideline which state and local educational governing bodies could use when creating evaluation criteria for teachers. According to the findings cited in the article, “developing a comprehensive teacher evaluation system is far from straight forward [and] policymakers should make every effort to ensure teachers are being evaluated fairly and accurately” (Hull,

A. Current Issues: Teacher Merit Pay: States were asked by the U.S. Department of Education in their 2010 application for Race to the Top monies to include proposals for implementing teacher merit pay based on classroom performance (Woessmann, 2011). Merit pay or performance-based pay is a bonus for teachers whose students show above average growth over a set period of time measured by many different standards that are picked by local and/or state districts. The hope is that teacher merit pay would have an immediate impact on student achievement. Teacher merit pay stirs an emotional response from teachers, politicians, and parents. President Barack Obama has called for a national effort to improve student achievement in the classroom and often

Teachers have and will always have a big impact in everyone’s life and if not everyone, well, at least they did for me. They teach you everything you need to know about a subject and valuable life lessons, so why are they not paid sufficiently enough to make a decent living? Teachers salaries have always been low and I believe it is the time that changes. Being a lawyer, doctor, or engineer is great, but none of that would be possible without the insight of a teacher, I will inform you in this paper on why I believe there is a need for action. I will go over the background of teacher’s salaries, my ideas on what would be best for teachers not just in Texas, but nationwide, and pros and cons on the issues and ideas at hand.

Amazing teachers are deciding to leave their jobs everyday because of the stress and pressure to teach standards that will appear on assessments (“Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing.”). These standardized assessments are often used in order to evaluate teachers as well. This is not fair to those teachers who go above and beyond when teaching their students. If one of their students just simply does not care and therefore gets a low score, this falls back on the teacher. In the article, “Do Student Test Scores Provide Solid Bases to Evaluate Teachers”, David Plotnikoff talks about this system by arguing that, evaluations based off of test scores should not be used when making “high-stakes individual personnel decisions such as merit pay or teacher ranking” due to their unreliability. It is not fair to the great teachers of this country to be evaluated based off of students who can only be influenced so much. All of this corruption and failure found in the educational system adds to the many reasons of why America is not the greatest country in the

For some students, even though they can get high scores in exam, but that’s all they can do. They just memorize the solution and don’t try to understand and absorb the real knowledge behind the exam, for these kinds of students we can’t say that their teachers do well. Comparing with this, some students have really penetrating understanding to the knowledge, their know how to use them even though it can’t reflect on their exam scores sometimes, but their teachers still deserve higher paid. There is no doubt that we can’t tolerate keeping low-performing teachers in classrooms because it hurts everyone, but the method used to evaluate teacher performance should be sophisticated enough to consider all factors that can affect a child’s success in classroom before they can be used to as a standard to punish or award teachers. Chicago strike also evokes a debate toward salary problem. Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits, compared with the median household income in Chicago is $46,000 (BBC News: para 4). So many people couldn’t understand that teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase when most occupations are not getting and raises and many people are under unemployment. There are two reasons that CTU still raise salary debate even though teachers already get enough paid. Firstly, CTU considered the law aspect. According to Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for teachers to strike on all

This educational gap becomes obvious when standardized testing is performed. Standardized tests are issued vigorously in the United States, for test results are used to compare students, teachers, and schools (“Standardized Test” par. 1). These isolated measurements of student ability are picked apart by government officials to praise some schools and to chastise others. Scores are also used to designate which teachers receive merit pay; only teachers with the best scores are awarded the extra stipend. Many problems arise from this form of salary distribution. Merit pay is unfair for those who teach struggling students whose scores will not qualify their teachers (Ramirez par. 22). The chance to earn extra money causes conflict and distracts from the goal to educate (par. 30). Teachers are only human, and money is an excellent motivator. In this case, however, money motivates teachers to work against one another to earn higher wages. A system based on competition, disparity, and comparisons cannot properly educate the majority, which should be the goal in a large, diverse country such as the United States.

Merit pay is a compensation program also known as pay for performance that is widely used to determine the compensation given to an employee. Merit pay is based on a set of criteria or benchmarks used to give permanent pay increases for work performance. The merit pay is usually given to an employee after a review and evaluation

The debate encompassing legitimacy pay for instructors has existed for a considerable length of time in numerous nations over the globe. The level headed discussion has been especially warned in the United States. Since the 1920s, government funded schools started honoring pay generally as indicated by title, and rank as opposed to merit. Various endeavors have been made to present legitimacy pay frameworks all through this period, however it never increased broad prevalence on a national level. Presently, in any case, political pioneers, for example, Barack Obama have bolstered merit pay for instructors. This has strengthened the open deliberation, with numerous gatherings falling on either side. Merit pay clashes with the way we are to educate in today 's schools, and cannot be completely compelling. This type of inspiration, for instructors, will be difficult to be fair, and the expansive term of "merit" does little for the long term achievement of the students. Having teachers involved in the planning of incentives is one key way to success in pay for performance plans.

President Barack Obama said in a recent speech that “The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens … It is time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education” (Stout). His first point has become evident over time. The nations that best educate their children will have power in the future. He also mentions giving Americans a competitive education. This is referring to implementing a form of merit pay for teachers; paying bonuses to a teachers’ salary based on their performance, and that of their students. Some states have already started using merit pay programs. Merit pay encourages teachers to work harder at assisting their students in learning. Replacing the current public education system with a merit-based system would rid the education community of bad teachers. It would attract a higher achieving work force to teaching and encourage overall improvement in schools. This would all lead to better teachers and more student success in schools.

Should K-12 student surveys of their teachers be used to determine whether they get a boost in salary or be judged effective or ineffective? Based on surveys given to students about their teachers over the past decade, student judgments about their teachers are highly correlated with test scores. These questions measure classroom control and the degree to which teachers challenge students to work harder with academic content and skills. The New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit based in Brooklyn that recruits and trains new teachers, last school year used student surveys to evaluate 460 of its 1,006 teachers. In higher education, students have evaluated their professors’ teaching and course content for decades. Controversial or not in higher education, reform-driven policymakers and foundation officials, eager to find another metric beyond unstable end-of-year test scores that simply and inexpensively judges K-12 teacher performance, look to researchers to quantify student perceptions of how and what their teachers teach. Not, however, if student perceptions of teaching are sliced and diced to fit into little boxes that can be checked off by principals and superintendents to determine teacher effectiveness and pay.

Before delving into the advantages and disadvantages, it is important to clearly define the subject at hand. Competitive pay (also referred to as merit pay or performance pay) is exactly what it sounds like. Quite simply, teachers are evaluated in a few “easily measurable” ways, and given raises in pay based on their performance in the evaluated categories. The goal is to find teachers who are doing an exceptional job at delivering educational content to their students, and reward those teachers for their efforts. The most standard way to measure this is by measuring the performance of students on standardized tests, however, the measuring system varies between schools and districts that have implemented competitive pay. Some schools also choose to observe the teachers in classes and add this to the criteria for evaluation. This allows the administration to more closely determine the effectiveness of the teacher, ensuring that the teacher is truly contributing to an increase or decrease in student performance. Through these criteria, pay raises can be awarded to individuals or even groups that show better results.

Going back to the tenure and teacher union issues, I agree that everyone has the right to unionize in order to protect their self-interests, but the idea surrounding tenure is something that needs to be re-evaluated, and the teacher’s union needs to jump on board in order to get the education system moving in the right direction. The writers hint at a way in which tenure can be changed, and that is by offering rewards for high student grades instead of the current rule of once tenure is reached, a teacher can keep their position regardless of their efforts in the classroom. The way the movie presents this alternative method is by showing a challenge between the teachers of the school to earn the highest student grades on the state test; winner earning a bonus of $5,700. This type of evaluation based on student grades can also be taken to the opposite end of the spectrum, and teachers who have unacceptable student scores should be evaluated on their teaching methods, and if seen