Collaboration and Pay

An on-going conversation that recently gathered steam is the issue of how best to compensate teachers.  The current method used by KPBSD (and most school districts) considers years of teaching experience and level of education as the determinant for how much a teacher is paid.  There is however,  a growing sentiment that this method is flawed since the annual raise may or may not be in response to an  increase in performance.  There are some who propose that a fairer way to calculate teacher pay is to base it on merit.   That is, the more deserving you are, the more you get paid. 

The premise of merit pay is that if there is more money to be had, teachers will work harder and get better results.  Unfortunately, there is a growing body of research that disputes this when the gain is limited to individual performance.  The findings of this reserarch show that a group working together will be more easily motivated to improve than will an individual.  So, the idea of offering more to a teacher if her fourth graders pass the SBAs is, according to this group, not a guarantee that this will happen.   A more effective way to motivate teachers to improve is to have a team or the whole school work together to achieve a goal- people that are a part of a team generally are more likely to try harder than when working alone.   My take is that trying to incentivise teachers with individual merit pay will probably not work, and more importantly will lead to a fractured staff .

Collaboration when done well is a difficult endeavor.  It is however, well worth the effort when it causes an increase in student learning .   Conversations on merit pay should avoid the reward of the individual and instead focus on the whole staff.