Resolution is to long and will be posted in first Argument: Regarding Merit Pay.

====== The Intro ====== My opponent: 1) Concedes that it is an unwarranted generalization 2) Drops the issue of it dismissing teachers who use blackboards (like my science teacher) as antiquated and archaic. ======== Contention 1 ======== The evidence provided only gave info as to which colleges teachers came from. It gave nothing related to merit based pay. Now my opponent links me to a source. I don't have time to read through that whole source in a 15 minute debate and still have time for an adequate rebuttal. Further, he didn't post it in his original round. He hasn't even posted the specific parts I'm supposed to attack, or the ones that he says are directly related, in this round either, so it stands that he has no reliable evidence for "Hoxby's suggestion." Simply saying "He has merit pay and his plan is effective" is far from enough evidence to draw a conclusion. There can easily be confounding variables, it could simply be correlation, not causation, etc. etc. etc. Further, there is still no source for this 72k survey he claims. ======== Contention 2 ======== My opponent has misunderstood my argument. He posted a source saying America supports merit pay IN GENERAL. The problem is that he is defending a specific type of merit pay (student achievement-based.) Many American's, like me for example, recognize the problems with student based merit pay, but don't reject merit pay as a general concept (I, in fact, advocate it) which means him posting evidence of merit pay in general does not allow him to draw conclusions of America's opinions of his specific form of merit pay. ======== Contention 3 ======== The resolution is "Merit pay BASED ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT should be a significant component of K-12 teacher compensation in United States public schools." I advocate multiple forms of merit pay (such as the 2 PRO listed in his original contention 2, teacher degree based and administration evaluation based.) That does not mean that I in any way support merit pay mased on student achievement, which is what Pro defends. In fact, I would say that it leads us to quite the contrary conclusion, that we should reject student based merit pay, because we have alternatives that solve the problem (teacher motivation, etc.) without the harms student based pay brings (teaching to the test, grade boosting, etc.) ======= Conclusion ======= My opponent confuses his burden. He is not advocating merit pay in general; he is advocating student achievement based pay in specific. He has listed other, better, types of merit based pay that will equally well (if not better) solve the problems of which he complains, not be affected by the problems he argues about in C3 (because they aren't salary based), and avoid the problems his system has, namely, teaching to the test, which I see almost on a daily basis. We thus reach the conclusion that instead of merit pay based on student achievement, we should instead endorse merit pay based on teachers' college degrees and administrator evaluations, thus we negate the resolution and vote CON. Good luck again to PRO in the final round, and be careful with that timer. That last round was posted with 2 seconds left and if you aren't careful, the lag time can get you.