Professional Development

A recent article posted on StudentsFirst, the organization founded by former Chancellor of D.C. public schools and education guru Michelle Rhee, included a comment that caught my attention:

"Bonus pay by itself is not the answer, however. The reality is most teachers need additional training and support to increase student achievement. As such, we need to create a system that not only provides higher salaries for our top performers to incentivize improvement, but also offers high-quality professional development aligned to teachers' needs. New compensation systems will work only if they are coupled with meaningful feedback and support teachers need to grow professionally."

(The full article, written by Theodore Hershberg, professor of public policy at the University of Pensylvannia and Claire Robertson-Kraft, a PhD candidate at Penn's Graduate School of Education, can be found here).

This insight really speaks to the broader purpose of merit pay. While merit pay schemes are partially designed to reward good teachers and fire bad ones for the sake of government efficiency and fairness to tax payers, that is not their ultimate purpose. Their ultimate purpose is to ensure that all students receive a quality education. The article quoted above estimates that two-thirds of all teachers are effective. This means that one in every three children are an educational disadvantage.

One of the problems with this debate, however, is that we assume that there are immovable categories like "good" and "bad" when it comes to a highly complex profession like teaching, a profession whose success is greatly impacted by outside factors like a student's upbringing and a school's resources, just to name a few. Acknowledging these challenges is essential to creating a merit pay program that works for both teachers and students.

One way to acknowledge these challenges is to provide "high quality professional development" for public school teachers. It is important to treat teaching as a profession. Practicing a profession is a process of continuous learning and growing. Part of tying pay to performance means valuing performance. This involves allowing teachers to work within their professional community to help each other improve their methods and share ideas. Because ultimately, merit pay is just a way to hold teachers to a higher standard so that America's students are prepared for the future.