Dick Murnane and Barbara Phillips, I think, had a paper about why merit pay plans persist. One finding that stuck with me: plans that stand the test of time are low key in their implementation. People don't feel they are being singled out. So much for research.

When you get right down to it, it's the students who are the variables. A great teacher can get a low group one year while a mediocre teacher can get a high group. I say pay the test takers not the teachers. Today's kids seem to be harder to motivate than ever before.

To whom it may concern: Merit pay is wrong when our school children are envolved. Hard working teachers are now rewarded in other stright forward ways. Non-unionist are trying to break the teachers union and have no regard for stability in the profession and the children who deserve unpolitical environment.

No education reform program will ever work as long as it is based solely on "single-shot" test scores (e.g. NCLB). Until other variables such as performance based assessments, portfolios, long term projects, etc. are considered, we may as well hang it up. The current system is like determining a pro baseball player's lifetime batting average on his performance in a single game. It's just bad science.

What really hurts me about the performance is the sense of total non worth I have had since the district has no way of measuring my student's progress. Last year, as a technology teacher, I taught my non or low English speaking students how to help themselves learn by using bablefish to translate. They showed great progress in learning to read and write in English. All my students also had to learn standard writing as well as correct writing and formatting for Power Point Presentations. They had to learn how to translate what they read into their own words and not just copy other people's ideas. We learned the proper way to write newspaper articles while learning to use Word. When we used Excel, we did a lot of work with graphing and interpreting graphs.

But this was considered worthless by the administration and I could not even compete for the individual teacher pay.

Well, congratulations to teachers considered "noteworthy". There are so many teachers who are not "teachers of record", who teach in areas such as art, music, special ed, technology, ESL, "shop",and others.
How about teachers who take additional training to reach kids who perhaps do not test well, communicate in a language other than English, or have their giftings in non-academic areas? Does "merit" pay extend only to teachers whose students succeed academically? This idea has too many questions to be the "answer" to anything positive and lasting.

The only way to judge a teacher's "merit" is through student's response in the classroom everyday, and that is not measurable by one test, or any test scores. This "merit pay" does not take into consideration "at risk" students who manage to barely or almost pass. Sometimes getting close or passing the second time is an exceptional achievement for my some of my students. This neglect of non-core teachers also increases the hostility that can occur between the core and non-core teachers. The more often they are treated differently with the addition of extra duties or separate rewards, the harder it becomes for them to view each other as memebers of the same team working towards the same goals.