I am all for recognition of extra achievement by workers in any field.  I hold with those who require extra education for those in service – including schooling for doctors, lawyers, architects and other professionals. Those fields generally pay more to begin with and they are linked to the Capitalist mode of working for extra money rather than people just doing the job expected of them.

The only merit pay I received for over forty years of teaching was to be called a “crack” teacher by less than a model administrator showing off his wares in a Newark Junior High Ghetto school.  My ability to master teaching and non-teaching jobs involving dealing with children, changeling adolescents and young adults was recognized by my being given additional jobs.  I complained about my doing extra work for the same pay as other teachers who did less in their main job of teaching than I did.  My pay was the admonition that I could have job after job dumped on my shoulders for I would do them while the others barely did their jobs. 

Merit pay was something I never received.  I did receive “promotions” in the sense that my expertise in teaching landed me a job as an Assistant Professor (the lowest pay level as a beginning teacher and less than what a Public School teacher received) as a teacher of teachers in a Department of Education.  Earning my doctorate brought me a $1,000.00 a year raise with the title of Associate Professor.  Full Professorship only added the title. Being a better teacher or having produced something really unusual with groups of students (ideas which at least were not stifled) never brought me additional monies although much of what I achieved came out of my pocket for schools had no provisions for experimental exercises.

My first take on MERIT pay is that it is used to control and mould neophyte teachers into a standard product – something like the industrial model.  The second is that inevitable cronyism under the accurate nickname “brown nosing” is just another form of nepotism.  You form a family among your phalanx of fellow teachers and you take care of each other – all having nothing to do with teaching and learning. Learning is somehow discounted in the Merit Pay formulation.

The worst example of MERIT pay is that which is linked to performance of the classes of students for whom you are responsible.  Some do well and others “under”-perform.  What usually happens is that special payment is given for extra learning by students while extra pay is given to teachers linked to how many students pass standardized tests.  The old “everybody gets the same pay but go up a scale for years served” still works. Merit Pay starves innovation but rewards a singular brand of standardized achievement mentored by the compliant.