Without Merit - merit pay will not lead to reform

Reason, Oct, 2000 by Nick Gillespie

Why merit pay won't reform public education.

Forget about what students did on their summer vacations. Their teachers were up to something far more interesting, and something that signals as surely as the final class bell of the day the inevitable end of the public school monopoly.

At its annual convention in July, the National Education Association--the country's largest teachers union, with about 2.5 million members--flirted promiscuously with the idea of endorsing "merit pay," the whacked-out notion that wages should be in any way linked to job performance (an idea which, for reasons the union has yet to grasp fully, is the rule in every profession except for teaching). Over the past few years merit pay has emerged as one of the leading proposals to reform public schools.

The NEA, famous for refusing even to consider what it routinely disparages as "arbitrary, top-down merit pay systems," actually passed a resolution that the national organization will give "technical assistance" to the growing number of local chapters that have such inhumane systems foisted on them by school boards or state legislatures. Additionally, the union was open-minded enough to include this comment on its Web page devoted to the "Best New Idea Heard" at the convention. "Pay for performance," wrote one attendee, lamenting, "I guess we're just not ready for it yet."

In a similar vein, Sandra Feldman, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second-largest teachers union, has granted that "great teaching" should be "rewarded financially" and that such rewards can in fact "be handed out in a fair and rational way."

To be sure, such crumbs don't make for much of a mid-morning snack for kindergartners, much less a hot lunch for high schoolers. And it's true that the NEA rank-and-file roundly voted to condemn what union head Bob Chase castigated as "merit pay based upon subjective criteria," a term the NEA defines expansively enough to include both evaluations by school administrators and student performance on standardized tests. But the simple fact that teachers unions are even opening the topic to discussion underscores that the education establishment is being destabilized. The only reason they are taking up the issue is because they're trying to preserve whatever credibility they have left with taxpayers.

In most contexts, of course, minor concessions to common sense are hardly noteworthy. When it comes to education, such acknowledgments, however laughably grudging, are the equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in the old Soviet Union: They're a clear, if low-key, indicator that the system is gloriously close to utter collapse.

The teachers unions' passive-aggressive stance toward "performance-based pay initiatives shouldn't cause too much worry for those concerned about education reform," writes Andrew Rotterham, the director of the 21st Century Schools Project at the Democratic Leadership Council's Progressive Policy Institute. "The public's appetite for reform, coupled with growing attention to these issues from policymakers, means change is coming."

Rotterham is right, of course, that change is coming. In fact, it's already here, as evidenced by the rise and acceptance of charter schools (over 1,700 have opened nationwide over the past decade) and the proliferation of private and public voucher initiatives (even those that fail at the ballot box strike a blow against the empire). To again compare the education establishment with the Soviet Union, an easy and all-too-apt comparison, given each system's bureaucratic inefficiency and unresponsiveness: It is simply a matter of when, and not if, the fall will take place. The process can be sped up or slowed down, but not stopped.

However, reform advocates are wrong to assume that merit pay is a particularly useful way to effect educational change. Given the way the issue is likely to play out, it will simply shift attention from the bedrock concern--securing a quality education for kids--and redirect it toward what is properly an internal management issue. As important, it is precisely the sort of "reform" that teachers can easily coopt and turn to their own financial advantage while staving off far more fundamental challenges to the status quo.

Debates over merit pay, and salary concerns more generally, draw education consumers and taxpayers so close to the inner workings of public schools that such issues risk obscuring more important, big-picture reforms, especially implementing choice in the broadest terms possible. As with the ability of teachers to insulate pay from performance for so many years, it is testament to the generally bizarre and obfuscating discourse surrounding education that we are so routinely treated to detailed discussions of the ins and outs of public-school teacher compensation.

Do we particularly care about, much less know the gritty details, of how workers are paid and incentivized in other lines of work (even in the public sector)? When we walk into a Wal-Mart, say, or a doctor's office, we don't overly concern ourselves with whether employees draw a salary, work on commission, or get paid by the hour. For the most part, we let businesses sort out those issues themselves.