This letter by Diane Ravitch wants to say that merit pay is a failure, but it seems only to be a failure under the terms she’s hell-bent on clinging to. You can say that this chocolate cake sucks at washing your car, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad chocolate cake.

She says merit pay is to encourage teachers to teach harder. She says that underlying the concept of merit pay is that teachers are lazy. This sort of context, I think, totally misses the point. To prove her point, she cites a study that showed that in a merit pay situation, teachers didn’t perform any better than a control group in a non-merit pay situation.

Her conclusions are all spurious, point-missing, and surprisingly obtuse. Why would the promise of merit pay improve a teacher’s effectiveness? The only way, I suppose, is to assume that the teacher would try harder. That’s one conclusion, but it’s frankly a very passive aggressive, whiny way to look at it.

I think the idea of merit pay is to reward better teachers. The teachers will be as good as they are. Pay doesn’t influence experience or training—rather, it’s the other way around! The idea of merit pay is to better reward good teachers. How do people not get this? It’s not to punish bad teachers. It’s not punitive. It’s to reward good teachers and to try to encourage good teachers to start teaching. I suspect that the teachers who assume merit pay is to dissuade laziness are afraid of people messing with their paychecks, but it seems like the concept could be embraced as an opportunity to receive better renumeration.