Merit Pay

Teachers I’ve discussed the issue with are generally willing to grant that in an ideal world, teachers who contribute more ought to be paid more, but they tend to oppose merit pay because of grave concerns for fairness. Education is a unique profession, they say, in that there is no way to accurately make an unbiased assessment of an individual teacher’s worth relative to other teachers in a given educational institution. I will argue that such teachers are right to oppose merit pay, but they are doing it for the wrong reason. Teachers tend to grant that merit pay is good in principle but ultimately bad in practice, but they should be arguing that merit pay would be bad in practice because it is bad in principle. 

In his 2012 State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined a plan for improving education in part by expanding an experimental program using merit pay to reward the best teachers. Though the leaders of the teacher unions aren’t fooled by the framing of the issue as one-sided rewards and recognize that paying one teacher more money also cashes out to paying other teachers less, they have reversed the unions’ historical position in opposing merit pay and have come out in support of Obama’s proposal with the caveat that there is a concern for fairness in implementation. Education is not at all unique with regard to the difficulty of accurately determining the value of an individual employee in an unbiased manner as many teachers often say. Employers in many other fields who are struggling to give a fair and accurate evaluation of their employees as well as employees dissatisfied with their employers’ appraisals of their work will tell you assessing employee performance is not at all clear-cut outside of education, either.

Ultimately, the union leaders’ concern for fairness to teachers is appropriate and laudable but mostly beside the point. If certain individual teachers are paid somewhat more or less than they should be because of a flawed system of assessing teacher performance (as all such systems necessarily are flawed to at least some extent), there may be good cause to try to improve the system in that regard, but the final test for the success of the program is not the degree to which it is fair to teachers. It is the degree to which it yields gains in teacher performance that result in gains for student education. I think we teachers have to admit that that is how such a system of educational reform should be judged. If merit pay is better for our students but the trade-off is that some teachers are unfairly paid a small percentage more or a less than they would otherwise be paid, then that is a trade-off we ought to be willing to accept. The salient issue is not fairness. We should oppose merit pay because there is much reason to think that merit pay will have a negative impact on teaching and learning.

In a recent speech, President Obama said, "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom." On the contrary, what the research on motivation shows (I am referring to the research cited in Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) is that external reward systems quite often have the unintended consequence of destroying internal motivation. The President may be right that merit pay will make a difference, but not in the way he intends. To illustrate why, consider that the first time you pay your son to empty the dishwasher is probably the last time he will do it for free. Any internal motivation he may have had previously rooted in a sense of responsibility to participate in and contribute to the family of which he is a part has been undermined by the offer of an external reward. Merit pay is bad in principle because the principle on which it is based is an outdated model for how people are motivated to do their jobs well. 


Teaching is not like packing boxes on an assembly line or other such jobs where quotas, direct and continued oversight by management, and bonuses for faster work may be effective ways to incentivize employees, but merit pay is nevertheless based on the principle of incentives that was designed for such situations. Under this principle it is believed that for employees to be motivated to do their job, work must be tied to specific financial incentives. Otherwise, there would be no reason why employees wouldn’t slack off. The underlying assumption is that the work is not meaningful in itself.
 
For certain sorts of jobs that is an appropriate model of motivation, but that model fails miserably for work which is creative, collaborative, intellectually fulfilling, and intrinsically motivating--for work that is meaningful. In the business of packing boxes, employers need not worry about destroying intrinsic motivation by tying increased productivity to external rewards since there is nothing intrinsically motivating about packing boxes. There is no internal motivation to destroy; therefore, for such employment it is reasonable to apply the principle of motivation underlying merit pay.

But teaching is intrinsically motivating work. Intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic monetary rewards is what drives the best teachers to do their best work. That is not to say that teachers will work for free. They won’t. Teachers work for annual salaries rather than hourly wages, commission, per unit pay, or other forms of compensation as do people in other fields who do intellectual work. The point of paying employees salaries in certain domains of business and for teachers in education is in large part to take money off the table. The idea is to settle on a fair salary and then for everyone to forget about pay and get to work. The idea is to avoid putting employees in the position to be constantly  calculating the financial benefits for individual tasks and hours put in. A salary lets salaried employees focus on doing high quality work rather than thinking about money for such creative employment where the distinction between high and low quality work is not determined by units produced or hours spent.

Are there teachers who are slackers and not fulfilled or otherwise intrinsically motivated? Sure. But, not only will merit pay destroy the internal motivation of the vast majority of teachers who find teaching intrinsically motivating, but it also will do nothing to improve the teaching of those unmotivated teachers. Note that unmotivated teachers will not be incentivized to become exemplary teachers by offering cash bonuses, and under the proposed merit pay program, they won’t be sufficiently punished by not getting additional merit pay for them to leave the profession. What needs to be done with such unmotivated teachers is to try to avoid hiring them in the first place, and failing that, get rid of them.

It is likely that there is some small minority of teachers who would work a little harder for a chance at a bonus, but any positive benefit for the education of students from such teachers would be far outweighed by the unintended negative consequences of merit pay. For example, proponents of merit pay fail to understand the nature of an educational institution where collaboration rather than competition is the norm. If we are to think that monetary incentives are what motivates teachers to perform as merit pay proponents implicitly hold, then where is the incentive for teachers to share their knowledge of best practices and the educational materials they create with other teachers? Where is the incentive for the perpetuation of the profession in experienced teachers training the next generation of student teachers? 


The problem is not merely that there would be no incentive to do such important work. The problem is that the incentives would be in the wrong direction. Under a system of merit pay, teachers will be transformed from collaborators to competitors. Rather than share what works with other teachers, educators would be incentivized under merit pay to protect best practices as though they were trade secrets.

Also, consider that we are only seeing the beginning with regard to cheating on standardized tests by teachers and administrators if a merit pay system is to be expanded. Just as businesses are learning more and more and with serious consequences how offering financial incentives to show short term success too often has the effect of producing such gains only at the expense of the long-term as well as the overall system. It is more than probable that we will likewise see all sorts of bad behavior that is unintentionally encouraged by a merit pay system. 


We teachers should repudiate merit pay for the same reasons that many businesses are moving away from the use of such incentives for certain types of work and not because it isn’t fair. (It is unlikely that we will find much sympathy in our concerns for fairness anyway.) We should repudiate merit pay because it won’t improve performance for creative work such as ours--in fact, it will destroy internal motivation and is therefore likely to decrease performance--and because it is likely to unintentionally encourage bad behavior.