Anyway, merit pay for teachers is a bad idea for so many reasons; teacher evaluation and assessment come to mind. Ezra Klein has a post with this quote:
My point is this. It seems like reformers keep wanting to jump in and start doing things, because education is so stagnant. Which I understand. But the place to start isn't merit pay, it is finding methods of assessing teachers that aren't totally fucking useless and irrelevant. I think if we had such assessment, people would find teachers much more amenable to merit pay and a lack of tenure.Go check it out. The folks like Klein who think merit pay is a good idea get smacked pretty hard in the comments (yours truly could only cheer!).
Update: Here is the NYT article referenced in Klein's piece.