Merit pay, as it relates to education, is the practice of offering bonuses to reward teachers who do well. Over the past few years, many education reformers have advocated merit pay for the dual purpose of holding teachers accountable as well as rewarding them for good work. In the past few years, merit pay programs have been implemented all over the country at the state and district levels.
However, many people are very critical of the idea of merit pay in the education arena. Children’s test scores are generally used to determine success or ineffectiveness for teachers, and critics often argue that using student test scores is an inaccurate, or at least imperfect, way of determining teacher effectiveness. Furthermore, critics often argue that offering a bonus is an ineffective motivator for people with jobs that require creativity and complex problem-solving, and teaching certainly falls under that category.
Looking beyond the criticisms, there are many people who advocate for merit pay in education. Many advocates believe a cultural change and paradigm shift in the teaching profession are needed, and rewarding excellent teachers with merit pay is only a part their larger reform strategy, but still an important one. President Obama’s administration also supports merit pay, utilizing the $4 billion Race to the Top grant to encourage states to adopt merit pay policies. One of the states that has adopted such a strategy is Texas.
In 2009 Texas legislature launched the largest merit pay program in the country, called the District Awards for Teacher Excellence, or DATE. At its high point, DATE had nearly $392 million, which it distributed to teachers at participating schools based on TAKS scores and other factors. Nearly half of Texas teachers, about 180,000 of them, received bonuses for two years until the legislator slashed the funding for this program by a whopping 90% in 2011. After that, it was kept alive as a shell of its former self in the hopes that it would be revived when the state’s revenue condition recovered. But this year the legislature passed a measure that forced the remaining $24 million into a newly begun Educator Excellence Innovation Program. This is a grant program that will use the funds to pay for creative teaching and innovation in around twenty-five poor schools around the state.
But merit pay programs for teachers are not a thing of the past in Texas. School districts around the state have implemented their own merit pay programs. Houston independent school district began one, called Accelerating Student Progress Increasing Results and Expectations, or ASPIRE, back in 2006. ASPIRE combines its bonuses with teacher training and places an emphasis on individual student progress, instead of merely getting students to pass mandatory state exams like TAKS and now STAAR. HISD contends that is has seen improved academic success since the implementation of the bonus program in 2006. Furthermore, other school districts in Texas, for instance Dallas ISD, have either already implemented or plan to begin similar merit pay programs in their own districts.
The future of merit pay for teachers is still uncertain. Paying teachers based solely on test scores remains a contentious and uncertain issue, but states and school districts all over the country are implementing programs that utilize merit pay. Only time and more research will tell whether this is an effective means of improving our children’s education.