Merit Pay System

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Recommended: Reflection on professional development as a teacher

It’s time to Get Rid of Merit Pay Teachers are a valuable asset to the educational system without them, how would the children of the future be able to go off to college with an open mind and ready to take on the world. The merit pay system kind of comes and goes. The problem is that they have a system set in place to encourage teachers to up their teaching abilities; meanwhile the merit pay system is struggling because there just is not enough money to keep up with how fast the teachers are reaching the set goals for the merit pay out. It’s a case of supply and demand or the lack of. When tight budget times came, such initiatives were often the first to go (Olson 2007). So how do they expect for the teachers to be all aboard on merit pay …show more content…

For instance, if one of the best teachers had over 50% of her class fails these bias standardized test she would not receive merit pay based off of the students’ failure on these tests. But inside the classroom this teacher makes sure that she is always available to help the students. The student’s grades in the class have an average of a low B but, yet it is based off of the test scores on these standardized tests. Both national teachers unions remain opposed to financial incentives tied solely to student test scores (Olson 2007). If we adopt the merit pay programs that Denver has set up for their teachers that they receive merit pay based on a student’s growth on the state test and on classroom concepts which gives all teachers a chance to obtain merit pay. It is not possible to accurately measure progress toward the merit pay goal (Lavy …show more content…

Teachers want to be able to obtain their goal of the students passing the test and not have to worry about if they may or may not receive the merit pay because they had challenging students that did not pay attention in class along with several other issues they may have. By having to get challenging students ready for these standardized tests it makes it frustrating for them. That being said the fewer loops the teachers have to jump through to get the students ready. They basically want high functioning students that they have a better change of receiving the merit pay for the student’s success on these tests. “Teaching these students was exhausting and demoralizing (Lavy 2007)”. The Political Economy has debated how the effects of teacher’s performance will go when more money is put in the situation such as the merit pay. Challenging student’s need more help than the others students and that is what the teachers are there to do is to help any and all students no matter what the issue is. They are being discriminative against the students that are challenging. It takes a great teacher to deal with a challenging student to give them the attention and time they need in order to do well on these standardized tests. No teacher should ever deny a student of having a fair chance at

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