When Bee Brings Gifts, Look for the Stinger

by David Safier

Mike has been gently nudging me to write about a topic I’ve been avoiding – Tim Bee’s bill to allow all school districts in Arizona to participate in, and get the extra dollars for, the state’s “Career Ladder” teacher pay program.

I’ve ducked and dodged until now, and not because I don’t want to heap praise on Bee. I just don’t think this bill is really about equalizing funding or giving more money to more teachers. It’s about institutionalizing merit pay statewide, and I have serious problems with merit pay.

Here’s the idea behind the bill. Right now, a limited number of school districts get extra money from the Career Ladder program, which gives some teachers a salary bump for outstanding work. This has been going on since 1984, and only a select group of districts participate. Bee’s bill would extend the program to all districts.

That sounds fair, and it means more money for teachers, so I should be happy.

But so far as I can tell, “Career Ladder” is another way of saying “Merit Pay.” And I am very, very ambivalent about merit pay.

Let me ask a bunch of questions here, in no particular order, that express some of my concerns about merit pay.

1. Can an art teacher get a merit pay boost as easily as a math teacher?
2. Are test scores used to determine which teachers are outstanding, and if so, is that a valid measure of excellence?
3. Are there set criteria for the salary boost, so a principal can’t award the winning football coach a pay increase and deny one to the teacher who points out problems the principal should be paying more attention to?
4. Will we soon find ourselves in a revenue-neutral situation where the salary schedules are flattened, and the lower compensation for the majority of teachers will pay for the increased salaries of the “outstanding” ones?

I could go on, but these questions express some of my general concerns. If anyone knows more than I, or wants to show that my concerns aren’t valid, please chime in.

I would happily shower Bee with praise if he managed to find money to raise all teachers’ salaries (I am, after all, a Tax-And-Spend Liberal). But I suspect this is a backdoor bill to institutionalize merit pay. Does no one else see this?

Either everyone else thinks the idea of merit pay is terrific, or they’re blind to what’s going on here. I said in an earlier post that I don’t know how to play three dimensional political chess, but this looks more like a simple game of checkers to me. Bee just scooted his checker past everyone’s guard and said, “King me!”

Note: Thoughts a Day Later. It looks like the Career Ladder ship has already sailed. I went through newspaper articles dating back to 1991, and I could not find a discouraging word about the Career Ladder/Merit Pay concept. I also looked at the websites of a few Districts with the program and found they have elaborate, district-wide career ladder processes that involve training, mentoring, research and evaluation. The Districts that have received state funds have apparently taken this seriously, and they deserve credit for that.

I’m speculating here, but I think the reason the Career Ladder program has been greeted with such universal acclaim is because schools are starved for any money that promotes teacher training and improved educational practices. If your belly is grumbling, you’ll grab the food someone hands you without thinking too much about the strings attached. If Arizona funded its schools more generously, the pros and cons of merit pay might have been discussed more heatedly. I still maintain that merit pay is, at best, a way to approach educational reform on the cheap — let’s see if giving a few bucks to a few teachers will improve our schools — when we need a generous infusion of well-spent educational dollars. Long term, it can actually end up keeping teacher compensation low by rewarding some teachers with reasonable pay raises and covering the raises by keeping other teachers’ salaries unacceptably low.