More on teacher salary . . .

Last week I posted on the Vanderbilt study suggesting that merit pay had no influence on student achievement.  To be fair, I need to share some of the voices on the other side that have found fault with the findings.  I found this link on Flypaper where the author questions the findings.

Stated another way: Designing effective incentives for teachers is a mighty complex task, full of many subtle decisions and much uncertainty.  This study, like the ones before it, and the ones that will surely follow it, is highly inconclusive.  It is merely one experiment out of an endless number of possible experiments that could have been conducted.

Later in the article he illustrates his point with a series of questions demonstrating the complexity of the issue and the difficulty in separating out the multitude of variables that can influence the outcome of any merit study.

In this Education Week article Rick Hess found reasons to find fault with the study before it was made public. 

The study will confuse the issue, obscure the actual question of interest, and (depending on the results) lend either simple-minded advocates or performance-pay skeptics a cudgel that they will henceforth freely misuse in the name of "evidence." Either proponents will start asserting that crude rat-teaches-harder-for-food-pellet pay systems are now "evidence-based," or skeptics will argue that we've seen proof that performance pay "doesn't work."

I do think he makes some good points about the need to consider attracting high quality new teacher candidates and then keeping them in the profession.  Common sense would suggest and the mental model about entering our profession would support that low beginning salary is a barrier to attracting people to the profession.  Though he also believes in paying "good" teachers more than "bad" teachers he does not believe that this difference can be measured by achievement on a single reading and math test.  It is hard to argue against this form of pay, the problem lies in how to identify where one is at on the good to bad continuum.  Or, perhaps the better question, why are students in classrooms every day with teachers measured as bad?

With the release of the Superman movie, we have not heard the last on this topic.  Oh, something else to consider, the Education Department has just awarded $442 million to school districts and nonprofits to implement teacher and principal merit pay models.  Do they know something we don't?