Instead of providing rigid mandates on how State and local educational agencies increase the number of high-quality teachers, this program will provide funding for the above broad purposes and will then hold those agencies accountable for achieving results. Teacher development programs will have to be shown to increase teacher knowledge, to increase student achievement, and to be directly related to the curriculum and subject areas in which the teachers provide instruction. There are several problems with such systems. First, they pit teacher against teacher. Teaching should be a collaborative process, but if teachers realize that the principal is watching them to determine who is better they quickly begin to compete.
Teachers quit helping each other, and the overall quality of instruction declines.
Another problem is that it results in teachers emphasizing those parts of teaching on which they know they will be rated. A related problem is that teachers end up trying to make rapid advancements with those students who are easiest to teach in order to raise the overall test scores as rapidly as possible. A fourth problem is that teachers will not spend as much time on developing students' abilities in areas that are not measured by merit-pay tests, such as the ability to cooperate with each other. In contrast to the failure of merit-based pay systems for teachers, merit systems for entire schools have worked well. When teachers know that if they raise the academic achievement of the entire student body they will get a pay raise, they work togther as a team and succeed.