Merit Pay For Teachers Essay

Merit pay for teachers At any given institution, enhancing results is a critical goal. Maintaining a motivated labor force increases the likelihood that they will be more productive and regard institutional goals as their own personal goals. They will appreciate working more if they feel that they are more than adequately sharing in the benefits associated with the attainment of institutional goals. From an institutional perspective, the best of ensuring such an environment is to offer an attractive pay and a reward scheme that encourages the employees to improve their performance and hence optimize their output. Despite this knowledge, a merit pay system for teachers has not taken root in the United States (Meyers, 18). It is worth evaluating the arguments of both opponents and proponents of the pay for performance system to see where the strengths and weaknesses of each lie. Most American schools pay teachers based on time and school credit accumulated rather than paying them strictly for their performance, something which is viewed as ideal in other professions. The reasoning behind the different pay system for teachers is that it is difficult to evaluate individual performance, and there is reluctance by management to evaluate their employees

Better competition among teachers would raise the quality of education and this would translate into better educated students. However, there need to be sufficient incentives in place such that teachers are not turned away by an increasingly competitive environment. With the right incentives in place, a pay for performance system would motivate teachers and would help achieve the ultimate goal of such a reward system, which is to raise the quality of education. The biggest undoing of the system has previously been that the ways of measuring performance have been ambiguous (Zeller,