I was fascinated the other day at how even a smart, reasonable journalist like the Times’ David Brooks can misunderstand the near impossibility of actually creating a fair, effective merit pay system as opposed to simply endorsing the concept.
He starts his March 13 editorial praising President Obama’s “reform vision” as articulated in his education speech the other day — especially the parts that elevated “relationships and rigor.”
Relationships, he says, are critical. People who succeed often can remember the teachers who made a difference in their lives, while few dropouts even recognize the concept.
So, one of the president’s proposals Brooks liked is the one for merit pay for good teachers, which he defines as “the ones who develop emotional bonds with students.”
And he is right. How many of us who have fond memories of teachers cherish the ones who raised our reading scores the most? No, we value the teachers who inspired us to reach higher, or instilled in us a curiosity about the world, or gave us confidence to persevere when we were convinced we’d never understand a difficult subject.
But how Brooks thinks we can identify those “good” teachers, the ones who connect to kids, so we can give them extra pay, he never tells us. Instead he goes on to talk about the importance of using data and assessments of how much teachers raise student test scores as a basis for rewarding “good” teachers with merit pay.
So which is it, Mr. Brooks? Which teachers get the merit pay? Only the ones whose influence can be traced directly to higher test scores? Or the ones who really make a difference in youngsters’ lives?
Because I know a lot of great teachers who refuse to spend hours teaching their students how to increase the odds of picking the right answers in a standardized multiple choice test. And I know a lot of mediocre teachers who accede to their principals’ demands to produce better test results and devote many precious hours of “instruction” drilling from lists of most tested vocabulary words or reviewing old exams.
Unfortunately, the latter are the ones who will earn the “merit” pay. But one has to wonder, if young Barry Obama’s teachers all had been motivated by merit pay for boosting their students’ test scores, would we be reading about his speeches in the Times today?
