Merit Pay
Dear Mr. President,
I am currently a Senior Elementary Education major at Western Illinois University. I am enrolled in EIS 401 which is a class dealing with the laws surrounding education. We have discussed many things in my class including: religion in schools, teachers’ rights and responsibilities, teachers’ unions, charter schools, and merit pay. I am writing to you today to discuss with you my views of merit pay. I feel that merit pay is a bad idea. There are many things to consider before granting a thing like merit pay to the teachers of the United States. One of my main concerns is how it will affect relationships among the teachers. If one teacher is trying his/her hardest to teach their class and they do not succeed to the standards set and the teacher down the hall hardly does anything with his/her class except lecture to them and that class passes the standards set and that teacher gets merit pay what’s fair about that? This could start a lot of hostility among co-workers. Teaching is a job where everyone shares their ideas about things that do work and things that do not. If a teacher is getting merit pay for a job well done it will be less likely for them to share their ideas with other teachers. Merit pay also gives teachers more reason to “cheat” with their students. If a teacher knows what is going to be expected for their students on a test that teacher is going to teach to the test. They will only teach what needs to be learned for the test and nothing else. If a teacher does this things like science, art, and music go to the way side. Merit pay is also just another expense that the tax payers for this country will have to deal with. If we begin to pay teachers merit pay that will only make our taxes go up and do who knows what with the economy. With our economy the way it is now why would we want to add another bill to the already billion dollar deficit?
Thank you for your time,
Nikita Minder
This post was submitted by Nikita Minder.
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Dr. Mr. President,
I am currently a Senior Elementary Education major at my University, where I am enrolled in an Education Law and Policy class. We have been discussing many topics concerning education such as freedom of speech, religion, purposes of education, merit pay, along with the moral and ethical difference within the school. The one topic that sticks out to me to most is merit pay. With learning about the many pros and cons that come along with this quiet controversial topic, I would like to discuss with you my views on merit pay. As I weigh out the pros and cons, I see this to be more of a positive idea for present and future teachers like myself. To begin, I believe that enforcing merit pay would create teachers who work harder for the incentives given. While working harder for these incentives, teachers would be increasing their knowledge to become master teachers in order to receive more compensation. Since education is constantly changing, it is only for the benefit of the teachers and their students to stay current in the education field and get incentives while they’re at it. Merit pay will also help to increase the wages of teachers who are already in a low-paying job field. With merit pay, teachers would need to put more effort into their teaching to be rewarded for their efforts. Merit pay not only helps teachers increase their pay but it also helps the school reputation. The school will be known to have highly qualified teachers which in turn raises the bar of professionalism in teaching. Lastly, I see merit pay as being a great investment so that effective teachers can get compensated for doing a better job all together in the classroom, which is something that I look forward too as a future teacher.
Thank you for your time and consideration on the following topic.
Sincerely,
Jill Duesterhaus