The Argument for Merit Pay

I’m quite fond of the idea that Texas should use a merit pay system for teachers. For quite a while, I've wished that teachers would be hired due to how well they teach as opposed to just carrying a degree. Over the years, I've encountered several teachers that don't really like to teach or just don't know how to do so in an efficient manner.

With the sudden downturn in Texas' economy recently, the education department has been hurt quite a lot. At my former school, many great teachers had been fired because other teachers had seniority. If Texas focuses on seniority alone, some teachers may become lazy after several years and resort to teaching methods that may not be the most useful to students while it may be to them. Without calling names, I knew a teacher that would have important test grades on the syllabus but would sometimes put it off or not do the assignment at all if they didn’t feel like grading afterwards. This to me only reinforces to students that it’s okay to not to important things or to put them off for a long time. It doesn’t teach the future generations the importance of deadlines and how much it will affect them once they start to work in the real world.

If merit pay was implemented, teachers would focus on improving their teaching techniques and making sure that students fully understood the material they had to learn. This would also help school districts throughout Texas to keep the best teachers that know how to deliver the required information. If the best teachers were kept, then most students would know more about the courses they've taken from elementary all the way to high school and beyond. This would force teachers to actually pay attention to the students that don’t quite understand the material.

While this may create grade obsessed teachers, it will provide an incentive. Teachers should be paid accordingly to how well they know how to teach. Aside from having had a handful of not so great teachers in my life thus far, I do know several that deserved to get paid more than they currently were. Some teachers really care about the future of their students’ lives, and to me that creates a high level of respect towards the teacher. Teachers that actually care about making a difference in a young person’s life are the ones that matter the most and should be paid more and kept in the work force than the ones that don’t know how to make a difference.