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Sam Dillon's piece in the New York Times seems to have reignited the merit pay debate.  At least for this week.  After watching the Twittersphere for the past few days, it remains clear that merit pay or pay for performance remains the most titillating of education "reform" discussions.

In a state struggling to get better at teaching all students, every reform has a glaring omission. Some reforms want to pay special teachers more. As if there are Blackwater mercenary teachers out there, ready to storm the castle and kick down the achievement gap.  They even tried this to the extreme in New York, luring in teachers with $100,000 salaries to get the cream of the crop. It didn't really work. A University of Vanderbilt study, the most extensive on performance pay, concluded there was no correlation between closing the gap and performance pay. They value purpose more than profit. Teachers do not sit around all day brooding upon what their colleagues may or may not make. They deserve professional pay, but teachers are neither mercenaries nor missionaries some folks want to reform how we pay teachers. They pay no attention to reforming how they teach.

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.

Taxpayer outrage arguments are in style these days (as if they ever really go out of style). Two particular taxpayer outrage arguments that have existed for some time seem to be making a bit of resurgence of late. Or, at least I think I've been seeing these arguments a bit more lately in the blogosphere and on twitter.  First, since now is the era of crapping on public school teachers and arguing for increased accountability specifically on teachers for improving student outcomes, there's the "I pay your salary so you should cower to my every demand" argument (I've heard only a few warped individuals take this argument this far, but sadly I have!).  Second, there's the persistent I pay for those schools and don't even use them argument, or the variant on that argument that I pay twice for schools because I send my kids to private schools.

There is a dearth of research that supports paying teachers beyond their base salaries to improve student achievement, but there is a broad body of research that indicates that pay for performance might actually do damage as teachers feel a threat to their livelihoods because of this narrow method of measuring their efficacy. Pay for performance has been documented as compromising the good will and cooperation among teachers since it creates competition for a small amount of money, which can result in an "I'm out for myself only" attitude. Such a tone can hurt the necessary collaboration and communication found to nurture student achievement and success.

In Wisconsin, there has been a bigger push to adopt merit pay ever since Scott Walker limited the collective bargaining rights for teacher unions.  Merit pay sounds like a good idea in concept, especially to those in the business world, but most teachers know that it is a crock.  In theory, merit pay, would work in a way that you determine the quality of the teacher and reward them based on that quality.  This brings about many problems.  The biggest of which is how do you determine the quality of teachers? This has been a widely debated topic in many of the recent educational reform debates.  Should we measure based solely on standardized tests? This would result in more teaching to the tests, a narrowing of curriculum, and most likely cheating to ensure the bonuses as we have seen in Atlanta and DC.

The term "merit pay" has gained a prominent place in the debate over education reform. First it was D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee trumpeting it as a key to fixing the D.C.'s ailing public schools. Then a handful of other cities gave it a go, including Denver, New York City, and Nashville. Merit pay is a big plank of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's reform platform. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has just launched his own version of merit pay that focuses incentives toward principals.

As policymakers across the country push headlong into education reforms, which in many cases include merit pay incentives, yet ANOTHER study was released this week (this time) from New York that found that teacher incentive pay (merit pay) did not lead to improved student performance.

Merit pay is the tool the corporate reformers are using to cut teacher pay. They are doing damage that will haunt us for years.

If your child's teacher seems a little bit on edge this year, it might not be your imagination. Education reforms now going into effect in Indiana, and similar ones sweeping the nation, are targeting something many Americans consider to be strictly off-limits: their paychecks. The laws passed in 2011 and being implemented over the next two or three years were partly based on the principle of merit pay. Under Indiana's new law, the state will ask that test performance of students be factored into pay raises for the first time. That is a major shift away from the rigid pay tables in most school districts that awarded raises primarily based on a teacher's years of experience and the academic degrees they earned.

"On Monday, the city's 4,700 union members are scheduled to vote on the contract. Both sides say they cannot predict the outcome, but either way, what happens here will echo among teachers' unions across the country. If the contract is approved, it could prompt other districts to push for pay-for-performance, by suggesting that merit pay is no longer so symbolic a fight among the rank and file. Newark's deal itself was prompted by recent changes to the state's tenure laws that were once considered unthinkable. And both sides insist that this deal could be a model for union-management collaboration, giving teachers a voice they have often felt was denied in reform. If it fails, beleaguered union leaders could take it as a new sign of strength in contract negotiations - similar, some teachers said, to the example of the Chicago teachers' strike last month."

One of the central policy ideas of market-based education reform is to increase both the risk and rewards of the teaching profession. The basic idea is to offer teachers additional compensation (increased rewards), but, in exchange, make employment and pay more contingent upon performance by implementing merit pay and weakening job protections such as tenure (increased risk). This trade-off, according to advocates, will not only force out low performers by paying them less and making them easier to fire, but it will also attract a "different type" of candidate to teaching - high-achievers who thrive in a high-stakes, high-reward system.

New York got the pineapple story because NY is paying Pearson only $32 million for five years of tests. Texas is paying Pearson $500 million for five years of tests. That means that Texas gets the shiny, new questions-the ones that make sense-and NY gets the recycled remainders, the ones that no one else wanted You get what you pay for.

Leaders of the Milwaukee teachers union are campaigning for members to sacrifice a week's worth of their pay to help reduce class sizes next year in Milwaukee Public Schools, if legislation allowing them a window of time to negotiate a salary reduction is signed by Gov. Scott Walker. The MPS Children's Week Campaign, which will be discussed with the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association membership beginning Saturday, is asking educators to give up 2.6% of their salary next year, or about five days of pay, to allow for class-size relief.

Anyone who knows the politics of public education in Florida would have seen it coming. We at The Post did. Now, though, we can confirm that another Great Tallahassee Schools Scam is heading our way. This one is about merit pay, the latest supposed miracle cure for education.

This report compares the pay, pension costs and retiree health benefits of teachers with those of similarly qualified private-sector workers. The study concludes that teachers receive total compensation 52% greater than fair market levels, which translates into a $120 billion annual "overcharge" to taxpayers. Built on a series of faulty analyses, this study misrepresents total teacher compensation in fundamental ways. First, teachers' 12% lower pay is dismissed as being appropriate for their lesser intelligence, although there is no foundation for such a claim. Total benefits are calculated as having a monetary value of 100.8% of pay, while the Department of Labor disagrees, giving a figure of 32.8%-a figure almost identical to that of people employed in the private sector. Pension costs are valued at 32%, but the real number is closer to 8.4%. The shorter work year is said to represent 28.8% additional compensation but the real work year is only 12% shorter. Teachers' job stability is said to be worth 8.6%, although the case for such a claim is not sustained. In sum, this report is based on an aggregation of such spurious claims. The actual salary and benefits for teachers show they are in fact undercompensated by 19%.

Teachers often say they don't do their jobs for the money, but surely financial incentives are a factor in just about any career decision. Would you work harder at your job if there was a cash bonus on the line? More importantly, would the extra money alone somehow make you a more effective employee? Under a new law being implemented over the next several years in Indiana, student test scores will now be used as a factor in whether a teacher receives a pay increase. The Indianapolis Star, in partnership with The Hechinger Report, is closely monitoring the state's reform measures aimed at boosting teacher effectiveness. The state's teachers are questioning whether the law can be fairly applied, and whether merit raises will ultimately result in students learning more, according to the recent entry in the newspaper's series. There are also fears among educators that the unpredictability of the pay scale will discourage people from considering teaching as a career.

Merit pay for teachers, an idea kicked around for decades, is suddenly gaining traction. Fervently promoted by Michelle A. Rhee when she was chancellor of the District's public schools, the concept is picking up steam from a growing cadre of politicians who think one way to improve the country's troubled schools is to give fat bonuses to good teachers.

In today's Washington Post is another story about "merit pay" for teachers. But this one, by national education correspondent Lyndsey Layton, spends some space on my own thoughts on the topic. For those new to the issue, or coming to the Pink Blog from Tweets about the article, let me summarize my views as succinctly as I can

So when St. Michele of Arc decided the kids of Washington D.C. weren't worth her time anymore, her wealthy patrons decided to split as well, leaving the district holding the bag. The IMPACT bonuses, by the way, never worked, despite Rhee's continuing insistence that they did; Matt DiCarlo takes her claims down quite nicely. So now the district is stuck picking up the costs for a merit pay system that never had research to back it up; simply because the Billionaire Boys Club - for which Rhee is the mascot - had a change of heart. What will happen, do you suppose, when they cool on charter schools?