[EPI welcomes
reader
feedback.]
Merit Pay Can't Provide The Incentives For
Improvement
Media treatment of the NEA Representative Assembly held
in Chicago earlier this month typically emphasized the NEA's
negative attitude toward pay for performance, "merit pay" as
it is usually labeled. By a substantial margin, the
Representative Assembly voted to help local associations
that face the imposition of merit pay; if, however, a local
takes the initiative to negotiate it, the local will not
receive assistance from the NEA. It may, however, get help
from its state association if the latter wishes to provide
it.
It is extremely important to establish stronger teacher
incentives to improve their work, but the convention defeat
of merit pay is unimportant. As the resolution itself
implies, locals are still free to negotiate a merit pay plan
if they wish to do so. Had merit pay been approved, there
would not be any significant change in teacher attitudes or
willingness to accept merit pay. Most teachers don't want
it, and neither do most school administrators. The teacher
unions have magnified the negative aspects and ignored the
positive aspects of merit pay, but most school
administrators as well as most teachers and teacher unions
are opposed to the idea, albeit for different reasons.
The teacher unions are opposed to merit pay because it
places the union in an untenable position. For every teacher
awarded merit pay, ten others will want the union to file a
grievance alleging that they deserved merit pay more than
the teachers who received it. In short, merit pay is
extremely divisive within the union, and a union must avoid
internal controversy as much as possible. However, from a
public relations standpoint, the union cannot say that it
opposes merit pay because it would be bad for the union.
Consequently, the teacher unions allege other reasons for
their opposition: merit pay is too subjective, it is used to
reward bootlickers and intimidate critics of the
administration, and so on.
School administrators are generally opposed to merit pay
for different reasons. The main one is that administrative
evaluations will inevitably be scrutinized carefully by
teachers who do not receive merit pay. This is not something
administrators look forward to, especially since it's always
possible to criticize the criteria or the applications of
the criteria for merit pay. However, to avoid criticism,
most administrators blame the teacher unions for the absence
of merit pay. Their hypocrisy is easily observed; check the
last time your school administration proposed merit pay in
negotiations on the union contract.
Even if teachers, teacher unions, and school management
agreed that merit pay was a good idea in principle, the
problems of implementing the idea would be difficult to
resolve. To cite just one problem, how can we compare merit
among teachers of different subjects and grade levels? With
the best will in the world, different interests will lead to
differences of opinion on this issue.
Conservatives often exaggerate the extent to which merit
pay is the practice in our labor force. In dozens of
industries, merit pay seldom applies to employees below the
supervisory level. In fact, merit pay does not affect
airline pilots and several other occupations in the public
and private sectors. Superior performance often leads to
promotions to positions in which merit pay is operative, but
this is true in education as well.
It appears also that other countries reputed to have
excellent educational systems, such as Japan, do not have
merit pay. It should also be noted that the problems of
scale frequently mitigate against merit pay; small school
districts do not have the resources to formulate a merit pay
plan that is not vulnerable to union or teacher criticism.
At any rate, it is a fallacy to assume that the near
total absence of merit pay in public education is due
entirely to union intransigence on the issue. In many
districts, management could adopt merit pay over union
opposition; the NEA's policy recognizes this fact, even if
its critics do not. It is interesting to note the widespread
criticisms of teacher unions for their opposition to merit
pay, while school management opposition to it is completely
ignored.
It should also be noted that the attention paid to merit
pay plans in Denver and Cincinnati is unwarranted. The plans
are highly convoluted and unlikely to survive except for the
embarrassment associated with junking them. Actually, merit
pay has always been present in a few districts. The
avalanche of publicity about the merit pay plans in Denver
and Cincinnati merely illustrate media gullibility on these
issues.
Of course, teacher incentives are extremely important;
however, a major problem with merit pay in K-12 education is
that the amounts are too low in relation to all the costs of
implementing the plans. This is only one of the reasons why
merit pay in public education does not provide the strong
incentives required to improve performance. In competitive
industries, both employers and employees must take account
of the fact, or the possibility, that competing companies
will provide better products or services at a lower price.
This consideration generates incentives to improve that are
not present in public education. Furthermore, doctors,
lawyers, dentists, engineers, and many other employees would
face charges of incompetence or malpractice if they failed
to stay abreast of research in their field. In the absence
of competition, merit pay in public education does not and
cannot provide comparable incentives.
A competitive education industry would generate adequate
incentives, but it may or may not materialize in the near
future. In the meantime, educational reformers would be well
advised to focus on differentials by subjects and grade
levels. To be sure, the teacher unions will oppose proposals
to this effect, but the case for it, and the simplicity of
the solutions, render such differentials much easier to
adopt whether or not the teacher unions accept it. At the
present time, the unions cite the shortage of mathematics
and science teachers to demonstrate the need to raise all
teacher salaries; obviously, no university could operate
effectively, if at all, by insisting that professors of
medicine, dentistry, law, physics, and computer science be
paid the same as professors of English, history, and speech.
Nevertheless, virtually all public school districts have
adopted single salary schedules in which the absence of
differentials by subject is a much more serious problem than
the absence of merit pay. In order to raise the salaries of
mathematics and science teachers, school boards must raise
the salaries of all teachers. This outcome results in
overpaying some teachers and underpaying or going without
teachers in the fields of scarcity.
Controversies over merit pay also illustrate the
widespread failure to take account of the differences
between fee-taking employees and employees employed
collectively by a single employer. In the fee-taking
professions, pay for services is seldom negotiated. Your
doctor has a fee schedule. If you think it's too high, you
seek another doctor. Patients (that is, the employers)
generally are unable to evaluate medical proficiency, and
certainly not when they have been put to sleep for a medical
procedure.
To conclude, school administrators should be able to
award merit pay, but the effort to achieve this will almost
always fail in public education. When and where it does
"succeed," the outcome is a cosmetic plan that changes
nothing. What is needed is a system that generates
continuous incentives to improve. Paradoxically, this will
be easier to achieve than meaningful merit pay in a system
with disincentives to improvement.
|
Building a Competitive Education Industry
