Professor Peterson identifies six primary objections to merit pay. Choose one: Devote the first half of your post to thoroughly fleshing out the details of this objection. Devote the second half of your post to refuting these objections as best you can. Finish your post by concluding whether or not this particular objection is a valid concern against merit pay programs.
Before going into Prof Peterson's objections, one thing that I wanted to note about the 'pros'. The video mentioned that merit pay would be an incentive to teachers to take their obligations seriously and to teach better. This assumes that teachers are motivated by money, and that they are able to change their teaching based on their motivations. While I certainly think that teachers can change their effectiveness with coaching and other instructional supports, I don't know if the assumption that teachers can magically choose to get better quickly because of a new motivation (money or otherwise) is a valid assumption. Children are not pieces in an assembly line where we can just motivate the line workers to build the finished product faster. Teaching is less of a technical skill that can be just be learned through more knowledge, and more of an adaptive skill that has to be learned through focused practice. It seems to me that any merit pay system that assumes that it will make current teachers better should also have a system in place to help the teachers improve their skills.
On to the objections...
Prof Peterson brings up the six objections of cheating, teaching to the test, being unable to test certain subjects/ages, having favoritism by principals (or parents, or students, or peers), not controlling for factors outsde of the teacher's control, and fostering competition rather than cooperation. On the whole, these seem to be less of 'cons' about merit pay as a theory, and more so 'cons' about particular implementatons of merit pay.
Let's look at the last objection - the idea that individual merit pay would foster competition between teachers rather than cooperation within schools. That certainly seems like it may be true, especially if the merit pay system is using rankings or other schemes where only a certain number of teachers can get the highest ratings, and thus the highest pay. If the teachers know that only some of them can get merit pay, then they may hoard resources - physical or intellectual - in order to gain the advantage, as opposed to sharing lesson plans and classroom ideas. Certainly we want the teachers to be trying to work together, to be sharing best practices, and to be helping the children succeed overall, not just in their individual classrooms.
Perhaps we can change the implementation of the merit pay system to address the issue of competition. If the system is set up such that any, or even all, teachers can get high ratings and higher pay, then they won't be fighting over limited resources. Similarly with students, most teachers don't grade on a curve anymore - each student is graded on their individual achievements, and any student who achieves all of the objectives will get an A, even if all of the other students also achieved the objectives and got A's. This is certainly how I like to run a classroom (with high expectations of course), and how I would think that effective administrators would want to run a school.
Another possible solution is to make all (or some) of the merit pay bonuses tied to the overall performance of the school, rather than each individual classroom. This would hopefully encourage teachers to collaborate and try to make the school better as a whole as well as their own classroom. Although as the reading about NYC experiment notes, there isn't yet a solid research backing to support this idea. The NYC experiment found little difference for the students, although there were confounding factors, and a system may take a while to actually show improvement (especially if, as I caveated at the beginning, teachers are not able to change their teaching on a dime). The study did seem to show some benefits for schools with fewer teachers - perhaps a reason to create smaller instructional teams or communities within larger schools?
In conclusion, the objection of competition versus cooperation is a valid objection about certain implementations of merit pay, but I certainly think that it is an objection that can be handled and even turned into a 'pro' with other implementations of merit pay. If all teachers can achieve at high levels (just as we'd hope that all students will achieve at high levels) and if some of the ranking is based on a small community (where there are supports and assistance in changing teaching practices), then merit pay may foster even more cooperation than no merit pay.
One last note not related to merit pay...
I disagree with Prof Peterson saying in the first video that the high school teachers need to know 'more' than elementary teachers. I would argue that they do need to know different things, but I don't know if 'more' is a fair thing to say. Elementary school teachers still need to know their content thoroughly as well as instructional strategies and developmental progressions. Just because we as adults think of addition and subtraction as 'easy' doesn't mean that it's easy to teach. Prof Peterson was talking about this in terms of high school teachers getting paid more. If we're going to do market pay, then yes perhaps high school teachers should be paid more because their skills & knowledge are more in demand in other professions, where as elementary school teachers' skills and knowledge are often only in demand in schools and other child-related careers. But to say that high school teachers should be paid more because they know more undermines the skills and knowledge that it takes to be an effective elementary school teacher. Not to mention, I would like to envision a teacher force where elementary teachers are just as accomplished as high school teachers in terms of college grades, how far they went in math classes, etc.
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