The Merits of Merit Pay (One Sixty-Two: Day 156)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Six: Bobby Jenks, Chicago White Sox & Scot Shields, Los Angeles Angels

One of the hottest issues in educational circles these days is that of merit pay. Legislators on both sides of the aisle, as well as many leaders in education, have supported the concept of paying teachers extra based on their performance in the classroom. Others in both government and education have stood in opposition to this concept, with their primary reason being this: How do you measure great teaching?

It’s a fair question. First of all, assuming you can identify clear student growth in a skill, who gets the credit? Is it the teacher who presented and assessed the work? Is it the parent who worked with the student at home? Is it the tutor whom the parent hired to work on skills with the student? Or is it the librarian, the administrator, the coach, the academic-lab teacher, or the countless other staff members who might have worked with that child during the year?

Taking another step back, there’s the issue of how you assess student growth to begin with. Can it all be measured via a standardized test? Or can student growth be seen in other ways, such as through work habits, class participation, and creative projects that allow for analysis outside the box? And, taking yet another step back, there’s the largest question of all: How do you measure the ways in which a teacher has helped a child to grow not just as a student, but as an individual as well? And if no one is even considering this growth when computing merit-pay formulas, what does that say about our values?

So yes, there’s a lot to work on when it comes to finding an equitable and workable system for merit pay. In baseball, players get incentive clauses in their contracts all the time – for awards won as well as statistics compiled. According to the blog Cot’s Baseball Contracts, Bobby Jenks of the White Sox and Scot Shields of the Angels both have clauses that pay them extra money if they win the Rolaids Relief Man Award. This award, given to the best closer in baseball each year, is determined via a statistical rubric that rewards relievers for wins and saves, but takes away points for losses and blown saves. It’s a rather straightforward formula that has been tinkered with over the years, and has been widely accepted in its 35 years of use.

Perhaps in another 35 years, educators will point to a system for merit pay that works as well as the Rolaids Relief Man system does. Or perhaps by that time we will have reached a consensus that good teaching can’t be computed. As a 12th-year teacher myself, I feel very good about the work I do in the classroom, and I’m very much in favor of seeing great teachers paid well. But can you set up a rubric to measure all the things I’m trying to do each day? I’ve yet to see one so far. But give someone a laptop, a pack of Rolaids and a wizard’s hat, and they might just find a way to get it done.