Merit based pay for the Education System

You're claims: 1. it is both impractical and unconstitutional at the federal level. 2. Certainly states could be convinced of the benefit of a universal grading system. Even if they could not, would it not be simple enough to devise a conversion system between the two (or more)? More importantly, it is to a particular state and/or region that each teacher must answer. 3. private schools already measure teacher performance in a number of ways 4. The same method that suggests the U.S. is beginning to lag behind other nations would be the same method to 'prove' student improvement. 5. however there are other was to measure a teacher's performance, as mentioned above. 6. Almost every other profession has a merit based pay. For the sake of this debate. I'll pass on claims 1 and 5 as agreed and focus on the other four. Rebuttal: 2. I don't think that it would be very easy to devise a conversion system. You would have to account for testing method, testing material, cultural context, etc. I disagree that it makes it an unimportant issue, but rather even more important. You wouldn't create a testing method w/o having some way to see if you "stack up" against the neighboring school districts. In addition, the government could easily use the new tests to grade the schools. Then once grading is entered into the mix, schools won't care as much about the students in fear that they will lose the funding that every school desperately needs. 3. Private schools are a whole other matter. First they are privately funded. The teachers' salaries are based on the parents' feedback, not the government. The number one thing to a parent is obviously going to be their child. Because they are private and have a lot more resources (and much less regulations) to work with, they have a lot more room to decide how things are taught. They also attract "better" teachers because they are able to offer higher starting salaries. I'll address this more later. 4. This testing method has a serious flaw. They are taking a sample of students to grade the nation as a whole. If you used this method to grade individual teachers, things get complicated. In order to get accurate results, you would need to test the entire class. Because most schools have different teachers for different subjects (starting around 5th or 6th grade), you would have to test in multiple areas every year. This again as I stated above, would cause teachers to teach the test instead of teaching the material. Not only is a raise on the line, but a job and possibly the school's funding. 6. I disagree that almost every other profession has a merit based pay. Before, I go on, I think it's save to assume that teachers and every other job has some merit base to it. Do a job or get fired. Most jobs stop there and I will be referring to "merit" as what goes beyond that basic idea. They don't require that you do it well or that you even do it completely. Want proof? A lot of gov't funded jobs, road construction, office work (not gov't), and many others. You can see that the jobs aren't always done as well as they could have, or even as well as the person was able, but they still get raises, and many don't deserve them. No it's not a bad thing for a teacher to care about a raise. It's what this nation was founded on. Capitalism and competition. It's bad when it pulls all of the "good" teachers out of the poor schools because their improvement can't be equally funded. Or when teachers start to flock to the schools that have the trend of improving leaving the unimproving schools with the second rate teachers and perpetuating the cycle. I don't think that creating a merit based education system will help anything. Additional claims: 1. College is a great point in providing that more money doesn't necessarily make a better teacher. They are in every school from Harvard to Community Colleges. Resolution negated: 1. The rewards will not be even across districts and will further perpetuate the cycle with bigger gaps between districts. Resolution negated: 2. The rewards will not create a higher quality educator, it will merely show which teachers are better at preparing for another standardized test. Resolution: Focus more on how the teachers are teaching the material and help the teachers understand how to reach the students on a more in depth level and less on the pay they receive.