Teacher Merit Pay

Teacher merit pay, also known as performance-based compensation for teachers is becoming a widely examined phenomenon in not only the United States but around the world. Merit pay is a system of offering bonuses to workers who perform their jobs at a very efficient level. The history of teacher merit pay has been improving very gradually in the United States. Since the 1800s, there have only been three major changes in teacher merit pay. The first was paying for teachers’ room and board followed by a grade-based salary schedule, where male teachers were rewarded at a higher level than female teachers. Lastly, we arrive at today’s single-salary schedule. A single-salary schedule is one where teachers are awarded bonuses based on years of experience

These exams are administered both nationally and at the school level and have two separate graders to avoid score manipulation. Students receive credits based on their scores on these exams. For example, each student must earn twenty credits to matriculate to university. In 1999 and 2000, less than half of all Israeli students earned enough credits to apply for university. In Lavy’s paper, Performance Pay and Teachers’ Effort, Productivity and Grading Level, it is hypothesized that offering incentives to Israeli teachers will increase student achievement. Student achievement will grow by increasing the test taking rate, the conditional pass rate and test scores on math and English

After the study, Lavy surveyed the teachers that participated and discovered that offering them performance-based incentives increased the amount of effort they put towards teaching their students by a large amount. 60% of teachers that participated in the study thought they would have a better outcome than anyone else. Lavy concluded that teachers who were involved offered more extra help after school hours to their students than those who were not. English teachers also realized the benefits of small, concentrated group work to increase student ability. It was found that both English and math teachers from the experiment focused on improving the lower-performing students test scores more than the higher-performing students, which could be because the lower-performing students benefitted from a more individualized type of learning. Lavy’s experiment was successful overall. However, one problem he ran into was the concern that Israeli teachers were now “teaching to the test”. Yet this problem exists in the United States as well with standardized testing and is a way for schools and teachers to widen the core curriculum, rather than having one teacher who assigns a semester-long project instead of teaching many subjects. A second limitation Lavy encountered was time. His experiment was only one year long and thus did not show the long-term effects this study had on