Merit Pay Benefits

1659 Words4 Pages

The Imperfections of Merit Pay in Schools
Would you want to put your child into a school where they will be more likely to get bad grades, lose interest, or fall behind? Merit pay or teacher pay for performance is linking how well the students do on standardized tests with the pay of their teachers. If a student does exceptionally well on a standardized test then the teacher would be rewarded with money. On the other side of it, if a student does poorly on a standardized test, then the teacher will not receive as much money. Teachers pay should not reflect how well their students do on standardized tests. Because merit pay will cause teachers to be more dishonest, and it will drive teachers out of the industry. Other reasons why student performance …show more content…

Teachers will give more of an effort. They will become more organized and make sure that they do not get off track. They will not give busy work or get off task because they want to see their students test scores improve so they can get more money. This would make teachers try harder because they want more money and they would have to work hard for it. These are just some of the methods that they could use to get high test scores on standardized tests. Ultimately, teachers will assign more homework and assignments to see if the kids are understanding the units. This would help the students test scores improve because if the teacher notices that the student is not understanding the unit, then they would help the student to understand it. The other thing is most educators do not go into their profession for the money. “Teachers enter in the industry to become to become the difference in the students lives.”(Princeton, University). These teachers just want to see their students succeed. They will not do whatever they can just to get the extra money. Even though some teachers just do it for their students and not for the money some teachers do. Which means the students with those teachers are more likely to fail. There also might is a chance that some students grades would go up but, the majority of the grades would decrease because of lack of understanding the material. The students would not understand because the teachers would be so focused on trying to get the extra money that they will either confuse the student or be to busy trying to help the higher risk students. The other thing is most educators do not go into their profession for the money. “Teachers enter in the industry to become to become the difference in the students lives.”(Princeton,

Open Document