merit pay ain’t the way

There is no question that Barack Obama will be a better president for the state of education in this country than George “is our children learning” Bush could ever hope to be, and almost anything would be better than Bush’s odious, expensive, top-heavy and radically stupid No Child Left Behind.

That being said, merit pay is just another Republican red herring and should be round-filed along with all of their other “ideas” about “improving” the critical services government provides.

While many of their uninformed followers may think that merit pay and charter schools are true to GOP principles of market efficiency and meritocracy, movement conservatives could care less about the policy implications of these public education “improvements.” Rush, Newt et al don’t want the majority of kids to be well-educated, because an educated electorate would threaten the status quo (and might even put upward pressure on wages).

No, Republicans back merit pay and charter schools for the same reason they shriek about “tort reform” and use the argument of the “secret ballot” to try and kill the Employee Free Choice Act: they want to shrink the pool of resources available to back Democrats in congressional and presidential elections.

Just as “tort reform” would cut pay to the trial lawyers who support Democrats, and defeating the Employee Free Choice Act would limit union membership (and thus union political action and organizing), Republicans want charter schools to limit membership in (and thus the political resources of) the National Education Association, and they want merit pay to pit teachers against one another so that organizing and fundraising among teachers will become more difficult.

The only thing the Republicans are interested in improving is their own electoral prospects. And if, at the same time, they can kill public education, strangle the middle class, further enrich the top 2% and “prove” that government can’t get the job done, so much the better.

There is no way of measuring teacher performance for merit pay that can adequately take into account the dozens of variables that can impact a single child’s ability to learn and improve his/her academic, social and life skills; and conversely, there is no way to judge whether and how merit pay will improve teacher performance.

It is simply impossible to measure one teacher against another – or even to measure one teacher’s performance over multiple years – because the raw material s/he has to work with in any given year (and even on any given day) will simply be incomparable. Children are not widgets to be tightened down or honed, and the circumstances of life for each child are so different from one to another, and can be so different for any one child from one year to the next, that even if the same teacher had the same children to teach two years in a row it would still be difficult to accurately measure that teacher’s relative performance in each of those years.

The Republicans’ failure to support proven techniques to improve teacher and student performance confirms their dishonesty on this issue. Everyone knows that smaller class sizes, longer school days, extended academic years, modern facilities and equipment, and student opportunities for enrichment through sports and the arts all improve academic (and life) outcomes; but these would require significant investment in public schools, which Republicans hate on principle. Such investment would also lighten the burden on individual teachers, giving them more time to collaborate and organize: horrors!

Republicans also refuse to recognize their own arguments in favor of stratospheric corporate executive compensation when the same arguments are made on behalf of educators. Remember when, just last month, the GOP went ballistic over Obama’s demand that executives of banks getting bailout funds have a pay ceiling of $500k? “Bbbbutt the banks will lose all of their talented managers if we limit their pay! No one will want to work for a piddly half million a year!”

For some reason, though, teachers should top out at a salary that falls far below the entry-level pay for a trader just out of business school.

Do you need any other proof of where their priorities (and loyalties) lie?

In Finland, they approach teacher pay as Hank Paulson and his Goldman Sachs buddies view executive compensation: the higher the salary, the more competitive the candidates for the position. The Finns pay their teachers salaries comparable to doctors and lawyers, making for stiff competition among prospective teachers to get into the best university education programs, and for the best grades while in those programs. In this country, we have to depend on a teacher’s “calling” so that s/he will endure the long hours and low pay.

For Republicans to demand shitty salaries and resources for teachers and then to complain that the teachers aren’t good enough – particularly when so many educators could be working in law or medicine or business but choose teaching because they truly believe in its importance and in the value of their students’ lives – is the ugliest kind of slander.

Republicans cannot legitimately defend their refusal to invest the kind of money in teachers and in public schools that all of our children deserve, and so their only recourse is to lie and say that bad teachers and bad administrators are the problem.

And unfortunately Obama’s speech yesterday, with its nod to merit pay and charter schools, fed right into this movement conservative fallacy. We’ve tried it their way: No Child Left Behind was merit pay writ large, and it has been a dismal failure.

If you want teachers who only teach to the test, and whose every action is calculated to meet a merit rubric rather than to educate our kids, then our education system will continue to fail, and movement conservatives will then get what they’ve really wanted all along: a de-funding of public education.

But if you want our kids to get the best teachers and the best education, follow Finland. Pay teachers well, and give them class sizes that allow every student to get the attention and instruction that s/he needs. Then we will have the brightest kids in this country fighting over slots in education programs at our best colleges and universities, and our children will have quality schools befitting the richest nation on earth.