Every business has the nerve to practice it every single day. The measurement of performance in business is customer satisfaction. If the customer isn’t happy, they don’t buy, they don’t come back etc. The business responds TO THE CUSTOMER by lowering the price, improving the product, improving customer service. If the business tried to respond with “you can’t measure us”, it wouldn’t survive.

Unfortunately, with public education, the system isn’t responsible to the individual parent or student. The students are not the customers, the parents are not the customers. I wonder who they are trying to please….oh yeah, the teacher’s unions, the administration etc. They don’t care what my child is learning as long as he’s there the required number of days to collect the money. Trust me, if I (the consumer of public education) am not happy with what is going on with my child’s education, I think I can find a better way. I may not be able to withhold my taxes, but I can deprive them of a body in which to collect money.

They made it simple.

And you made it simpler by not reading what was written.

Have you the nerve to practice what you preach in your business?

Pretty simple, unless you are in the hip pocket of the teachers union.

“if teachers do not respond positively to the prospect of higher monetary rewards, they are unlikely to respond negatively to the prospect of lower monetary rewards” assumes that negative and positive marginal returns are equal. Which they are usually not. Would you flip a coin for $100? For $10000? Only if the economic pain of losing the wagered amount is equal to the economic pleasure of gaining it. For people at marginal income levels, the pain of the loss is greater than the pleasure of the gain.

“In other words, the prospect of higher (merit) pay will not prompt teachers to perform better in the classroom.” There is more than simple salary-effort economics at work in merit pay for any profession where there are no clear and direct performance measures. Teachers have the same problem that government workers do with jobs evaluated by opinion: what matters most is the opinion of the boss. But bosses often don’t do it fairly, use inappropriate criteria, put their own slant on whatever measures are used, etc. Merit pay has serious structural problems by its nature as the federal government found out after the 1977 Merit Pay revolution.

What measure would you use for teacher merit? Smiling kids every afternoon, higher test scores than they would have got if they stayed at home, no discipline problems, etc? Are schools education assets or day-care centers? I would think that your true measure would be the marginal gain of the class over what it would have achieved with some other teacher(s)? What would you use as the starring condition against which the teacher is to be measured? Will you pre-test and post-test every child in the teachers class and use the marginal gain as your criteria?

And teaching is also a profession where economics is only part of the incentive. Many of them do it because they get great satisfaction from helping children.

I’ve seen a lot of theoretical palaver about merit pay with wheelbarrow loads of friendly assumptions to argue how clear and positive the results would be. Balderdash; it’s a lot more complex than that.