Merit pay for better student achievement - it's a growing phenomenon:
In the past year, Minnesota, Florida, Texas and the cities of Houston and Denver have established merit pay programs that partly or completely tie bonuses to student achievement. Other states, including Ohio, Iowa and Mississippi, are considering similar programs. advertisement
Merit pay for teachers has been around for decades in various forms as a way to reward instructors whose salaries are chiefly determined by years of experience and post-graduate degrees. Teachers unions have been critical of most merit pay incentives, arguing the money for such programs would be better - and more fairly - used to raise basic pay.
That's such an odd idea to me, on the face of it. I suppose that's because I've never worked in a field where the idea is to equally distribute all the money in the budget, rather than rank performance and distribute money based on rankings. For the record, however, even if merit pay is a good idea, that doesn't mean tying raises to test scores necessarily is.
Posted by kswygert at March 20, 2006 06:52 PM