Merit pay and the teaching profession

Performance-based pay and advancement are routine in most industries. In the armed forces, you don't become a sergeant or a captain based simply on how much time you have in or how many lectures you attend. Superior officers carefully document actual performance.

Salesmen on commission -- even cocktail waitresses vying for tips -- can tell from a quick glance at their take-home pay whether their work is pleasing their customers and thus their employers.

But teachers have long contended they're different.

"They're looking at this as if we're manufacturing automobiles," says Tennessee high school teacher Sandy Hughes, referring to those who would subject teachers to the kind of evaluation necessary to award raises and promotions based on merit.

"With children, you're working with unique individuals, all of whom have unique qualities. Our variables are so extensive," Ms. Hughes told The Associated Press at this week's convention of the National Education Association in Philadelphia.

In the past, kids and parents could tell you whether they "liked" an individual teacher. But the taxpayers are not funding a contest of popularity and charm.

The question was whether you could control for differences in student ability and background to determine how far children advanced while in the charge of a single teacher.

With modern computer tracking of standardized tests, the answer is yes.

But rather than embrace this form of measurement, Nevada's teachers unions have fought tooth and nail in Carson City to bar this digital trail of student achievement from being used to backtrack and measure the relative impact of individual teachers.

It's not that way everywhere.

"It is expected that the No Child Left Behind law will be changed to require school systems to monitor the performance of individual students over time," The AP notes. "Right now, the law requires students in certain grades to be tested and then compares their scores to students in that grade the year before. Teachers say they would prefer a system that tracks individual students."

But once you measure that, "You can't ignore which teachers are moving their students along well," says Ross Wiener, who oversees policy issues at Education Trust, a Washington-based group that advocates for poor and minority children.

"You have to be able to look at growth measures at the classroom level, so principals and other administrators understand which classrooms are accelerating student learning and which ones aren't," Mr. Wiener explains.

There's one group of teachers at the Philadelphia convention who not only support merit pay, but have helped put it in place, The AP reports. They teach in the Denver school system, which just fully implemented a district-wide merit pay system.

Kim Ursetta is president of the Denver local of the NEA, and she reports the system works in Denver because it's based on student test scores and several other factors, such as teachers' annual reviews.

She said in addition to relying on the reading and math scores used under No Child Left Behind, the merit pay system also measures whether students met other goals set out by teachers and administrators.

That's led to greater collaboration and more of a focus on raising student achievement, Ms. Ursetta says.

In the end, the real solution is competition. If parents have the option of moving their children to schools that are producing better results, administrators not anxious to retire to the rocking chair will embrace performance measurements that enable them to upgrade their product, fast.