Teacher pay Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Teacher pay - Essay Example The thesis statement of this essay is that teachers should be paid more in order to improve their teaching craft, methods and techniques, which translates to improved student performance. Discussion This essay explores the effect of an increase in incentive for teachers in relation to their performance in terms of teaching methods, differentiated and individual instruction, teaching morale etc. In addition to this, the essay focuses on the alternatives that are available to boost teachers’ performance standards, most notably merit pay and its effects on teaching efficiency. The essay also discusses the implications of merit pay, both ethically and professionally, citing different opinions of whether merit pay is professional or not. Different citations guide the thesis of this essay on finding the best solution to the problem statement of this essay, which is whether teachers should or should not have an increase in pay. In a Times Magazine article titled â€Å"How to Make Gr eat Teachers,† Claudia Wallis notes that, the most important aspect of boosting student performance is neither the amount of materials they are exposed to, nor the amount of money invested in classrooms and the students, but rather, the investment made to improve the welfare of the teachers. Claudia supposes that a merit pay system should be implemented in schools to motivate teachers. To most people, this is ethical and justifiable. It makes sense that people should be paid based on their performance and excellence. Other schools of thought have suggested that teachers should be paid based on the performance of the students. This example shows that Wallis’ believes that teachers should be paid more, and that this increase should be on the basis of efficiency and results. In another article, ‘How To Make Great Teachers’, David West, Caitlin Abruzzi and James Raynor, seem to disagree with Wallis; according to them, the idea of merit pay may seem justified an d a motivation to educators, but there exists the problem of whether the ethical way is the professional way. Teachers should not want to better their teaching methods, skills, efforts and craft because of the promise of an increased pay; they should do so because their work is to help students improve and better their knowledge. West, Abruzzi and Raynor seek to inform that although the merit pay might seem like a better move, the assessment rubric for assessing teachers would be biased. Victor Lavy opposes West, Abbruzi and Raynor, and supports Wallis’ idea of merit pay. According to Lavy’s â€Å"Paying for performance: the effect of teachers' financial incentives on students' scholastic outcomes†, Lavy states that the lack of performance based pay leads to mediocrity in many academic institutions. Lavy draws his argument from an incentive experiment performed to determine the effect of increased pay on teachers’ performance. In this program, Hebrew, Eng lish and Math teachers were awarded cash bonuses, on the basis of improved class performance in exams (Lavy 6). The study was based on comparison groups and it employed three strategies; a regression discontinuity method, a natural experiment whose concept derives from measurement of error in the assignment variable, and a propensity score matching. The results were consistent in all three methods, showing that paying incentives to teachers based on merit improved the students’