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Why the government can't tell which teachers are good

Some lucid thoughts on merit pay from the Dallas Morning News:

The problem is that teacher quality gets evaluated on credentials, not quality. How many hours of math classes you took in college. Whether you’ve filled out the paperwork for a certain certificate. Whether you’ve gone back to get a master’s degree.

The federal "highly qualified" standard, for instance, is primarily about what hoops a teacher has jumped through, not how good of a teacher she is.

But there are awful certified teachers and terrific uncertified ones. There are amazing teachers with just a bachelor’s degree and terrible ones with a doctorate. Plenty of research has shown that quality doesn’t align neatly with credentials.

Differentiating good teachers from bad ones has always been a touchy subject. Take salary. Great running backs get paid more than benchwarmers. Great trial lawyers get paid more than mediocre ones. So shouldn’t the best teachers get paid more than the worst?

In Dallas ISD, an amazingly talented 15-year veteran teacher makes $46,176. And a thoroughly mediocre 15-year veteran teacher makes…$46,176.

(There are a few ways those figures can budge by a couple thousand bucks. But they’re tied to things like job titles and credentials – not individual performance.)

There have been a few stabs at "merit pay" proposals around the country, but most have flopped. Teachers, rightly, have complained that most such plans would reward teachers primarily on their students’ test scores. That’s not fair because teachers in Dallas get different kids to work with than teachers in Highland Park or Plano.

But why can’t a teacher’s quality be judged the way everyone else’s is? Not on some mechanized system tied to test scores, but by their bosses’ evaluation of their performance. 

Read the whole thing.  (Although if we were Jenny Katie Newmark, we would be leveling plagiarism charges right about now.)