Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Merit Pay for Teachers


So the private sector thinks we should adopt this merit pay model for teachers?  Pay us extra for good test scores and whatnot?  Forget the craziness of treating teaching like a business,  forget that teaching is a team effort, and forget that test scores are more closely correlated to socio-economic status than with teacher quality.  How about the fact that Merit Pay is  just a bad idea, even in business? 

A friend recently loaned me Jim Collins' "Good to Great" and I just recently read the tidbit in which he found no correlation between compensation packaging and effective management.  His summary, "Structure your compensation such that you attract great people and you keep them - but, beyond that, incentive payments to change behavior simply do not work."

Hmmm....

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