Merit Pay Benefits

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When it comes to education everyone has their own opinion on every topic: Whether college should be free? Whether technology should be integrated into teaching? Whether schools should teacher common core? One of these many topics is merit pay. Merit pay is a system used to pay teachers based on performance. It can be provided in many ways including bonuses, raises, and sometimes promotions, according to whichever measurable criteria the school the teacher works for uses. However, merit pay for teachers is one of the most controversial topics in the education system right now. Most people are for the idea of merit pay because it gives teachers an incentive to be better educators and be more personally involved in their students education. Others …show more content…

Much of the people that are against it are the teachers themselves. This is due in part to the misconception that they will solely be evaluated by their students standardized test scores. Some teachers are also against it due to the amount of time that it takes for them to receive their bonuses for that year. For example, a teacher in Lamar County, Mississippi, had to wait 2 years to receive what was supposed to be an annual bonus in her paycheck. The teacher first received her first bonus check of $680 in December of 2014. She then had to wait two years for her second check, and is still waiting for her third check to arrive (Ciurczak). There was a study done that showed these delays in payment have actually decreased teacher morale and made the concept of incentive pay less attractive to teachers. In addition to this study, there have been many surveys done that showed that more time off, or more time for planning would be a better, more attractive reward than monetary bonuses (Ciurczak). Other than this aspect of delayed payments of these bonuses, there was a study done by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University, that showed that there was virtually no impact on student achievement due to bonus-pay systems across the country. Because of this many people are against giving money to programs that don't fulfill the purposes that they were created for

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