A Cautionary Story About Merit Pay
Posted on | January 26, 2011 | Comments Off on A Cautionary Story About Merit Pay
In a just published piece on the PACE blog, I talk about the unintended consequences of paying teachers based on student results. In the long run, actually much more quickly than one might think, Talent will organize to insure its economic success. The blog piece retells the story of how baseball players became superstars with outsized paychecks. It’s a long way from teacherdom, and teacher salaries to major league baseball, but the principle holds: if you name something, and say that it is valued, it is likely to have economic consequences. I am not at all sure that pipers of economic competitiveness among teachers have figured out the cost of the tune they are playing. But some smart union organizer will. Read the whole piece here.
Tags: Malcolm Gladwell > Merit pay