Without Merit.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Merit pay will not lead to reform

Why merit pay won't reform public education.

Forget about what students did on their summer vacations. Their teachers were up to something far more interesting, and something that signals as surely as the final class bell of the day the inevitable end of the public school monopoly.

At its annual convention in July, the National Education Association--the country's largest teachers union, with about 2.5 million members--flirted promiscuously with the idea of endorsing "merit pay," the whacked-out notion that wages should be in any way linked to job performance (an idea which, for reasons the union has yet to grasp fully, is the rule in every profession except for teaching). Over the past few years merit pay has emerged as one of the leading proposals to reform public schools.

The NEA, famous for refusing even to consider what it routinely disparages as "arbitrary, top-down merit pay systems," actually passed a resolution that the national organization will give "technical assistance" to the growing number of local chapters that have such inhumane systems foisted on them by school boards or state legislatures. Additionally, the union was open-minded enough to include this comment on its Web page devoted to the "Best New Idea Heard" at the convention. "Pay for performance," wrote one attendee, lamenting, "I guess we're just not ready for it yet."

In a similar vein, Sandra Feldman, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second-largest teachers union, has granted that "great teaching" should be "rewarded financially" and that such rewards can in fact "be handed out in a fair and rational way."

To be sure, such crumbs don't make for much of a mid-morning snack for kindergartners, much less a hot lunch for high schoolers. And it's true that the NEA rank-and-file roundly voted to condemn what union head Bob Chase castigated as "merit pay based upon subjective criteria," a term the NEA defines expansively enough to include both evaluations by school administrators and student performance on standardized tests. But the simple fact that teachers unions are even opening the topic to discussion underscores that the education establishment is being destabilized. The only reason they are taking up the issue is because they're trying to preserve whatever credibility they have left with taxpayers.

In most contexts, of course, minor concessions to common sense are hardly noteworthy. When it comes to education, such...