But aren't all jobs essentially "merit" based? If you are a bad factory worker, you get fired. If you suck at flipping burgers at Burger King, you get fired. The idea that you can't fire a teacher because her students aren't learning is absurd.
The problem is that there is no objective way of measuring a teacher's ability, whereas it's very easy to tell if someone "sucks at flipping burgers".
Exactamundo, Franzl.
A personal anecdote, FWIW: My mother was a suburban school teacher for close to 30 years, and a registered Republican for as long (though admittedly she voted for Obama and Dukakis). Her take on merit pay is that it was doled out primarily to those who were the principal's or superintendent's drinking buddies more than on "merit".
Sadly, that's how pay tends to work in private business too. The person who works the hardest tends to end up working even harder while the person who sucks up to the boss tends to get ahead.
Not all businesses are like this, but plenty are.
Teachers are not like supreme court justices, or even college professors. Termination requires proper cause, but it is far from impossible. Heck, anyone who has worked for a large company knows that even the department boss doesn't usually have carte blanche without at least showing a proper paper trail and following it up with their supervisor.
The biggest problem with supposed merit is that it brings pressure to seek short term results over long term objectives. "Teaching to the test" ignores any sort of real learning in favor of rote and recitation. An analysis of something - say understanding the various forces that which led to WWII gets reduced to a list of bullet points to be memorized for a multiple guess test. Mathematics becomes blindly following a set of instructions for solving equations, rather than understanding how and why they work. It provides higher short to medium term test scores, but cripples a students understanding of the world as well as their long term progress in learning.
Sadly, some teachers do succumb to these shortcuts - which are easier and lazier to teach, but they are also the sort of thing which give the illusion of progress and help in sucking up to the boss. So in at least some cases, 'merit' pay is likely to promote the worst (and bring out the worst in) teachers, and alienate those who actually want their students to learn, rather than just regurgitate.
Consider the case of
Jamie Ecalante . He didn't start with nothing and bring kids to brilliance in a single year (as it might seem from Hollywood magic), he put together a program going back into the middle schools helping students set the groundwork for higher mathematics. Education is a process that takes several years, not a one shot deal. If someone cuts corners and starts with a shaky foundation in order to bring things in faster and cheaper, it's going to be felt down the pipeline repeatedly for years to come as better teachers try and fill in the gaps.
There may be some bad teachers who do game the system, but I suspect that connects more to good old fashioned cronyism (just as bad managers stay on the job because they golf with their boss), rather than deficits in the system. And although I have seen my share of awful teachers, I don't think they are quite as common at the propaganda would claim.
