Can we do merit pay right?

“By the way, we have merit pay now.”

Merit pay is a hugely contentious issue, dividing teachers, administrators, and policymakers. There is a body of evidence showing that merit pay will help improve student performance, especially when incentives are provided at the school, not individual level. Research from a 2012 paper by three economists, including Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) found that student achievement data in K-8 schools in Chicago increased a statistically significant amount under certain merit pay conditions. Notably, they found that when teachers were given the promise of money and stood to lose that money, their work actually produced the most gains.

Other merit pay concepts have less to do with year-to-year growth, instead focusing on attracting educators who are established as effective teachers to low-performing schools. One promising model was implementedin Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston. Researchers from Mathematica identified open positions in high-need schools and paid teachers with a track record of excellent scores $20,000 extra over two years to teach at these schools. Student achievement gains for those teachers’ classrooms was 4 to 10 percentile points higher than teachers in a control group -  a dramatic difference. What’s more, 60% of these teachers opted to stay in the high-need schools even after the merit pay experiment ended.

Assuming that performance on the assessments used is a good measure of student success, it’s hard to argue with the peer-reviewed studies.

In my home state of New Mexico, the NMPED recently rolled out a new merit pay pilot program, allowing certain districts around the state to design their own model for compensating teachers based on performance. My own school district has chosen to implement a cooperative merit structure, providing $2000 for each teacher in schools that improve their NCLB ‘school grade’ by one full letter (in our case that’s a ‘D’ to a ‘C’). It’s also a significant jump of about 15 points, which for our school would be last years total of 36 leveled-up to 51.

This is a very interesting program in our district, from a policy standpoint as well as a personal gain perspective. So how did my district and principal choose to roll out this fresh incentive program? To all staff at a meeting to get us onboard and invested in the program? To academic departments on the whole, to get us psyched to guide our students to greater-than-ever gains this year?

Nope, none of the above. Instead it was inserted as a footnote, more of a passing comment really. As my principal walked out of my classroom one day, he mentioned to me and another teacher, “Oh, by the way, we have merit pay now.” No more information, no indication of how this merit pay scheme might work…it was almost as if he were ashamed of it. It was also the middle of the school year.

When the research shows that merit pay can work when schools invest teachers in the program, and help them work collaboratively to achieve the goals set forth, policymakers and enactors have the responsibility to give it the best chance of success. Regardless of your predispositions on this issue, our school and district have received the grant, and the money is there if learning is improved.

So, New Mexico, let’s do it right and give merit pay every chance to succeed – it just might help our kids and our teachers in the end.