Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, and Value Added Measures

This is well done and is a voice that belongs at the table. I am also happy to see that you do not dismiss merit pay out of hand. Consider 2 teachers in my school. Each has taught 18 years. Each has spent >7 yrs in their current position. 1 of them works, longer, harder, is better organized, does more pd and even mentors rookies like me. Her scores are always near the top of the dist. Yet, cause our contract maxes @ 15 yrs so their $ is =. Is that fair? No. We need to reward superior teachers.

Super job!

Terrific job on the video -- the best articulation yet of the arguments against merit pay. I don't find them persuasive, but I admire your effort.

The first point -- missing data and fairness -- can be addressed through the increasing availability of extremely granular data, data that follows a student from one school to the next anywhere within a state.
Second -- merit pay works in every other profession. Teaching is not that different. It can be structured fairly.

I'm not necessarily against merit pay. I'm against using a measure that will not work the way people think it will.

AWESOME! I teach kids with severe and profound disabilities, which means that I will always be excluded from any sort of merit-based system. It often takes YEARS for some of my kids to make a month's worth of developmental progress. My kids don't take such tests and they floor through most standardized measures.

Find a system that reaches my kids and I, and you have a winner.

Why not base merit pay on an average of 5 years of performance? Wouldn't this mitigate the fairness issue?

I think it would mitigate the reliability issue--taking more data points almost always gives you a more reliable estimate. But it wouldn't address the other points, which are problems of *systematic* bias in scores, not randomness.

awesome.