MEA Votes

Some ideas in education just keep getting recycled. Merit pay is one and the Mackinac Center’s recent forum to generate enthusiasm for public-private partnerships for merit pay didn’t really offer up anything new.

The Livonia gathering and the Center’s corresponding publication, “A Merit Pay Pilot Program for Michigan Public Schools,” covered some old ground – merit pay will improve teaching; better student results would be the outcome of public monies spent this way; if the incentives are there, merit pay won’t create unwelcome competition.

If the incentives are there. Now there’s the key. Merit pay programs minus the pay have fallen by the wayside in many a setting. I remember the career ladder program in Texas many years ago being heralded as the shot in the arm education needed to produce better student results and to reward “good” teachers. Teachers would get extra pay for jumping through academic and performance hoops. But there was one catch: the Legislature didn’t set aside enough money for everyone who qualified after maneuvering through the hoops. And it never did. The result? Collegiality and cooperation, two hallmarks of teaching, frayed. Disillusionment about pay advancement caused some to just leave it behind for better paying lines of work. Finally, the program quietly died after about 10 years of ill-fated attempts to make it work. But the root cause of the failure was lack of funding.

In this financial climate, it would be foolhardy for public – or private – entities to jump at the chance to tackle this old idea once again. Let’s just leave it on the shelf and worry about funding some of the basic programs. Yeah, back to basics. There’s another old idea that could be recycled into something useful – like funding basic programs.