Merit Pay for Teachers

Before I begin, I'd like to start off with a quote from the great Eli Broad: "Public education is the key civil rights issue of the 21st century. Our nation's knowledge-based economy demands that we provide young people from all backgrounds and circumstances with the education and skills necessary to become knowledge workers. If we don't, we run the risk of creating an even larger gap between the middle class and the poor. This gap threatens our democracy, our society and the economic future of America." I'd also like to quote Cody-Franklin when he once said the following in one of my dreams "Sometimes, the truth isn't good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded. Although it's true that the world isn't fair, it's no reason for us not to strive to be. Let us surpass the world itself." Because I believe in the words of Mr Broad and Mr. Franklin, I strongly negate the resolution which states: Resolved: That merit pay based on student achievement should be a significant component of K-12 teacher compensation in United Sates public schools. As insisted, rebuttals to the instigator's contentions shall be made in round two. To start, I shall provide two contentions of my own: CONTENTION 1: Endorsing merit pay for teachers stimulates a conflict of interest between students and teachers A) During the year 2001, our former president George W. Bush initiated the infamous "No Child Left Behind" program. Like the system the opposition is upholding, it too revolved around funding on the basis of performance. A consequence of this policy was that teachers in many schools WILLINGLY ended up lowering their standards so that they would receive better funding [1]. Ladies and gentleman, the moral of the story is that performance based pay can and will drive people far enough to work in a manner even as depraved as depriving students of a decent education. Especially when taking into account the fact that our economy is not doing so well, teachers are all the more likely to behave no differently than teachers were behaving when it was. B) I would also like to add that even for the teachers that are less likely to just flat out manipulate the curriculum in order to insure that it is easy, that merit based pay suffers from another problem that NCLB did and that is that it encourages teachers to focus on teaching students the skills needed to excel ("narrow subset of skills") in standardized testing rather than a broad range of skills which we are to expect from those attempting to receive a proper education.[2] Given the massive amount of evidence in favor of this assertion, it's rather clear merit pay based on student achievement will easily further the United States' dismal education record in comparison to the rest of the world. CONTENTION 2: Adhering to the Merit pay system is unfair amongst teachers as there is no way to fairly give out payment based on performance. We must keep in mind many factors when taking this subject int consideration. Lo and behold, I offer the video on the right as my source for the claims I'm making below. A) Some score gains might not be equivalent amongst teachers. For instance, lets say at the end of a year, certain students in a certain teachers class manage to go from the 75th percentile to the 80th percentile. Let us also say certain students in a rival teachers class manage to go from the 90th to the 95th percentile. Naturally, such teachers would receive equal increases in pay for improving such students up 5 percentiles. However the fact remains that more educated children might be easier to teach and that it may very well prove easier to move students from the 70th percentile to the 75th percentile than it would to move them from the 85th to the 90th. The only way to go against equal pay for equal increases would be to flat out reward the teachers who have the best performance with their students more moolah! Yet this still is quite problematic as we are still faced with the fact that student background can easily be a vast influence on their success. In other words, "smart kids" can do well without the teacher's influence. B) Other people can quite easily effect what teachers do. There are some schools who have rather supportive and helpful principle willing to work alongside teachers and insure that their efforts to teach go smoothly whereas there are other schools were principles are completely apathetic. In other words, teachers who have a helping hand are likely to do perform better (hence receive better pay) whereas teachers who have to put up with incorrigible jerky administration have a lower salary. This also applies to the very students themselves. I'm sure most of us here have been or are around peers who are quite often "out of control" as well as peers who are reserved and polite during our days in grade school. The fact of the matter is that it can be difficult to put up with the former group of students and that it can be breeze to put up with the latter. Teaching one or other alone can determine one's salary. There were additional points made in the aforementioned video and I invite others to watch it. That said, I feel the two points I've presented here to be the most important as they demonstrate just how totally unfair merit pay is when attempting to run it. I assert that there is no way to run the system while adhering to fairness and await my opponent's attempts to insist otherwise. With that said, I now await the affirmative side's first rebuttal. SOURCES: 1: http://www.factcheck.org... 2: http://www.reading.org... http://www.youtube.com...