Merit Pay

Merit pay for teachers is a perennial issue in public education. It is introduced every 20 or 30 years as a solution to what ails the schools. This is despite the fact that researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that merit pay programs do not provide effective incentives for teachers. Examples of failed merit pay programs have been carefully documented in Great Britain during the 1880s and in the United States in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s. Yet despite these specific examples of the failure of merit pay to provide effective incentive for teachers, the issue of merit pay continues to be proposed by reformers. In the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, each of the four main presidential contenders, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Senator John McCain, expressed support for one or another form of merit pay and of implementing merit pay as a means of reforming teacher education.

This ongoing interest in merit pay as a means of educational reform can be explained as part of an attempt to apply business principles to education. It is something that seems to be common sense. The logic of these programs is simple. In much the same way that a good sales person is rewarded for selling more, teachers should be rewarded for [Page 557]producing academic achievement in students. Higher levels of achievement should bring higher levels of compensation. President Ronald Reagan articulated the model during the last national call for merit pay in a speech at Seton Hall University in May 1983, when he declared, “Teachers should be paid and promoted on the basis of their merit and competence. Hard-earned tax dollars should encourage the best. They have no business rewarding incompetence and mediocrity.”

Yet evidence from the research literature clearly suggests that individual-level merit pay is an inappropriate method of providing incentives for teachers. Rewards and incentives that function well for people in business settings do not necessarily work effectively for teachers.

In research conducted for the National Institute of Education on the implementation of two state-funded merit pay programs for teachers in Florida, during the mid-1980s by Provenzo, Cohn, Kottkamp, McCloskey, and Proller (the Florida Meritorious Teacher Program and the Quality Instruction Incentives Program), it was found that rather than financial rewards and incentives, the primary motivators for teachers in their work involved helping them reach students and make meaning for them. In a survey of 40% of the public school teachers in Miami-Dade County that yielded a 64% response rate (N = 2,718), only 14.2% reported that “the salary I earn in my profession” was the motivating factor for teaching. This was nearly identical to the 14.3% response rate received by Dan Lortie in 1964 when he asked the same question of teachers in Miami-Dade County as part of the research for his book 1964 Schoolteacher. What seemed to be the primary extrinsic reward for teachers was not salary, but reaching out and making a difference in the lives of students. Lortie found that this desire took the greatest precedence for the overwhelming majority of teachers. In his 1964 research in Miami-Dade County, Lortie found, for example, that 86.2% reported that the most satisfying aspect of their work involved the times “I have reached my students and I knew they had learned.” Kottkamp reports that when this question was asked of a nearly identical group of teachers 20 years later, the figure was 86.7%.

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