Merit Pay or Team Accountability?

By Kim Marshall

It’s time to admit that the idea of evaluating and paying individual teachers based on their students’ test scores is a loser. This logical-sounding strategy for improving teaching and learning sinks for multiple reasons: practical (standardized-test results arrive months after teachers are evaluated each spring); psychometric (these tests aren’t valid for one-shot assessments of individual teachers, and it takes at least three years of value-added data for reliable patterns to emerge); staff dynamics (when individuals are rewarded, collaboration suffers); curriculum quality (low-level test preparation festers in a high-stakes environment); moral (turning up the heat increases the amount of cheating); and simple fairness (how can schools divvy up credit among all the teachers who contribute to students’ success?).

So why are folks still talking about individual merit pay when it’s clear that it won’t work? Because the idea of holding teachers accountable for their students’ test scores sounds so obvious —and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a bunch of powerful politicians are enabling that gut feeling. States that didn’t include student achievement in end-of-year teacher evaluation and compensation worried that they stood very little chance of winning desperately needed Race to the Top funds.

Is there some way to make a silk purse from this sow’s ear? I believe there is. Let’s...