Merit pay for teachers is an appealing idea that could wind up costing billions of dollars for little or no result. Its proponents – such as the Liberal leadership candidate Kevin Falcon in British Columbia, who promises to push for it if he becomes premier – need to explain, at least in broad outline, what the costs would be, and how the many practical barriers to its success would be overcome.
The idea has a superficial appeal because teaching quality is a key to student achievement. And money is a strong motivator. Also, the unions make it very difficult to fire a bad teacher; at least, merit pay could give good teachers an advantage. Perhaps it could even be a trade-off for relinquishing tenure – more money, no job security.
But how much more money? Employees account for 75 to 80 per cent of education costs. How much, over time, would costs rise to give teachers a greater incentive to do better? If the raises or bonuses are minimal, there's not much incentive. Some United States jurisdictions are proposing salaries as high as $147,000 a year in return for an end to job security.
And how would teacher quality be assessed? If it is on overall performance, the measures are subjective to the point of arbitrariness. If it is on test scores, many more problems arise. Would all students need to be tested annually? What of all the factors that can confound comparisons, such as poverty, disability, mother tongue, mid-term family moves and the quality of teaching each student received the year before? And how to measure the human element in teaching?
Teachers do not teach in a vacuum. They need constant training in how to achieve better results. Teachers who don't succeed “probably don't know how to do any better than they're doing,” according to Susan Moore Johnson, a Harvard University professor of education who studies merit pay.
A well-designed program of merit pay for teachers may yet be found to have some, uh, merit. But Canada, which achieves enviable international results on math and literacy tests, should satisfy itself first that it is giving teachers the much-lower cost tools they need (such as training, team approaches to literacy and other innovations) before making an expensive change whose usefulness remains to be shown.
