Merit Pay

Merit pay is the simple notion that teachers should be paid in whole or in part on their performance in the classroom. Although there are records that teachers' salaries were determined in part on their students'examination scores in England in 1710, the first recorded attempt to install a merit pay plan in a school system in the United States was in 1908 in Newton, Massachusetts. Since then, about 183 school systems have tried and abandoned the idea. The latest attempt at merit pay was the Denver, Colorado, performance pay pilot. Early evidence has been that it did not work. The major drawbacks with merit pay are administrative problems, personnel problems, collective bargaining restrictions, financial problems, and adverse publicity.

Salary is not one of the reasons persons typically enter teaching. Therefore, persons entering teaching are not primarily motivated by money. Furthermore, the bulk of the teaching force is female. A female-oriented profession has been highly sensitive to forms of socialization and to matters of rank and differentiation. Females prefer to be in an egalitarian workforce. Working relations with others is a very important factor in such a workforce. Salary differentiations based on subjective factors other than seniority have not been widely accepted.

Alternative forms of pay that have a higher rate of acceptance are job enlargement (where increased pay is related to increased workload) and/or an extended contract year (where increased pay is related to spending more time on the job). Both of these approaches are more acceptable to teachers as forms of increasing their base pay than separation based on measures of performance. Another approach has been the creation of a career ladder related to differentiated staffing, that is, teachers are paid for different roles instead of on measures of pure classroom performance.

Other approaches to pay differentials involve such areas as market-sensitive pay. From this perspective, a science teacher might be paid more than a physical education teacher because fully qualified and certified science teachers are much scarcer than physical education teachers. Salary becomes a measure of scarcity, a factor that is already utilized extensively in higher education hiring and compensation practices. Some forms of market-sensitive pay are already utilized in some school districts where ESL teachers are paid a bonus or teachers who represent areas that require training beyond those otherwise employed, for example, in special education. However, market-sensitive pay is not a form of merit pay.

The major problems with merit pay have been identified as (1) the nonavailability of state funds to use in salary incentives, (2) the nonavailability of local funds for similar purposes, and (3) the potential threat of lowered teacher morale. From a teacher acceptance perspective, most merit pay plans are based on an assumption that only a few teachers can ever qualify for merit and that the amounts will not be very large. From this vantage point, the appeal of merit pay to the largest segment of the teaching force does not have enough critical mass to be an important leverage point to install a merit pay plan.

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