Comment & Debate
Steven Malanga. “Why Merit Pay Will Improve Teaching”. City Journal. Summer 2001: Predictably, when U.S. businesses first introduced these innovations, workers grumbled, especially in heavily unionized industries like auto manufacturing, where any change threatened cushy labor arrangements. “They said that you couldn’t measure some things, that the pay systems were too subjective, that supervisors were too subjective—in short, everything that teachers today are saying,” observes Alan Johnson, a New York-based compensation consultant. Many efforts stumbled at first, too, and companies had to discard or overhaul them. Creating effective programs, it became clear, would not be an overnight fix. “Even today, with all we know, it takes three years to start up an effective incentive-pay program,” cautions Martha Glantz, a compensation expert with Buck Consultants in Manhattan. “You can spend the first year just deciding what the company’s goals and missions are, and collecting the data.”
But American firms, needing to change or perish, forged ahead, winning over employees who liked the challenge of incentive pay and, through trial and error, developing pay plans that worked. By the mid-1990s, half of all major American corporations used such incentives. “It’s no longer credible to say you can’t measure something or that the only thing you can measure is a simple output,” says Johnson. Merit pay played a crucial role, most observers believe, in generating the zooming productivity gains and superior product quality that American firms began recording in the late 1980s and that have been central to the nation’s economic prosperity ever since.
The public education monopoly has long resisted merit pay with the same ferocity with which private-sector workers at first greeted it. Opponents have constantly invoked previous attempts that failed—though their only examples have been two experiments that are over 100 years old, and another from the 1960s, before modern notions of performance pay emerged. The conventional wisdom among educators had long been that any attempt to pin down exactly what makes for good teaching, let alone measure and reward it fairly, was doomed to fail. “There was a general feeling that you were either gifted as a teacher or you weren’t, and that good teaching wasn’t something you could define,” says Charlotte Danielson, an expert on teaching at the Educational Testing Service in New Jersey. As a last-ditch defense, some educators even argued that factors outside school, especially a student’s socioeconomic and family situation, had a much greater impact on student performance than teachers did, so that using merit pay based on student performance to promote good teaching, even if it could be defined, wasn’t fair. The unasked question was why teachers should ever receive salary hikes if what they do doesn’t matter.
Over the last decade, these views have utterly collapsed, undermining the intellectual case—weak as it was—against merit pay. A key figure has been University of Tennessee statistician William Sanders, who discovered how to measure a teacher’s effect on student performance. Rather than try to filter out the myriad sociological influences on pupils, a nearly impossible task, Sanders used complex statistical methods to chart the progress of students against themselves over the course of a school year and measure how much “value” different teachers added. Now called the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, Sanders’s approach proved what every parent already knew: not only did teachers matter, but some were lots better than others. Other education experts, including Danielson, author of several popular books on pedagogy, developed widely accepted criteria to judge good teaching, which put paid to the absurd notion that it was too elusive to define.