Wall Street, schools and merit pay

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by David Safier

A Seattle Times columnist has an interesting thought piece on teacher merit pay, comparing it to bonuses paid to Wall Street execs. If pay for performance is such a good idea, how did Wall Street's bonus babies get us into such a mess?

It's a good question, and part of a larger debate raging in education over the topic of privatization.

Should education be privatized by using government money as vouchers to pay for private schools? These days, when we're seeing the results of private sector abuse, it's strange to suggest we should adopt that model for publicly funded schooling — giving money to private, minimally regulated schools and expecting them to act in the public interest.

Should public schools adopt the private enterprise model of rewarding teachers for "performance"?

For Wall Street bankers, the gauge was profits or stock prices. For classroom teachers, it's usually student test scores. Those who get higher profits or test scores earn more cash. Those who don't are left behind, and eventually weeded out.

Simple, efficient, Darwinian.

Except on Wall Street it was a disaster.

[snip]

I realize teacher merit pay would be different — nobody would get rich, for starters. But the idea is similar. It's to tie some pay not to experience or skills but to a short-term result — how students do on yearly tests.

Traders, banks and loan officers obsessed over immediate profits rather than the long term effects of their actions. Would teachers and administrators obsess over test scores (even more than they do now) at the expense of the non-testable aspects of the entire educational curriculum, and the non-testable aspects of being human?

The idea of merit pay is a minefield filled with hidden dangers and unintended consequences. It needs to be approached with utmost caution.

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