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A teacher's pay should be merit-based.

I'll begin with my arguments, and then address each piece of my opponent's advocacy. 1. As my opponent acknowledges in his case, nations need more educated children. In order to meet this goal, most nations, and all first world nations, have responded by creating universal assessment tools to gauge student achievement in its public schools. The result has been standardized tests, generally built by states/localities and given to students each year. The federal government then examines the scores of these tests. Per almost all current educational research, these tests are statistically and empirically non-indicative of student achievement, progress, or even potential, which many in the educational field argue cannot be tested or measured.(1) Therefore, there is no way to accurately measure student achievement in a way that is politically viable and accurate, as the political climate of today demands hard numbers, which are impossible to deliver. 2. Grades and corresponding GPAs are equally unreliable for a number of reasons. Teachers, like police officers, directly control all evidence of their merit. Without severe and monumentally expensive supervision, teachers will always be able to corrupt assessment results, even on statewide exams, to increase their pay. There are countless cases of teachers who have manipulated grade systems or test systems for their own benefit. Even state governments have been accused of and confessed to "dumbing down" assessment tools in order to secure monetary benefits or administrative stability. When was it that the number of teachers and governments attempting to cheat assessment tools began to exponentially rise? 2000, when the Bush administration fielded and implemented the No Child Left Behind Act, which directly tied these assessment tools to merit-based benefits for schools.(2) 3. If being judged by a state or nationwide standard, historically and empirically low-performing schools are distinguished by socioeconomics, geographical location, and ethnic background. Urban schools and rural schools routinely get the short end of the educational stick. Those schools are underfunded due to high levels of poverty, they are unable to pay teachers as much so they get poorer quality of teachers, less resources, and less face time with students. Naturally, they will consistently underachieve with standards that cannot physically be met in these schools. Educational research confirms that this is so. Teachers know this, too. This is why the federal government has had to begin offering numerous incentives for highly qualified teachers to take jobs at rural and urban schools, include college loan forbearance, loan forgiveness, and tax incentives. All of this work to get good teachers into the areas where they are needed most, to catch up decades of consistently mediocre education, will be reversed by the merit pay system, since the students in these disadvantaged areas will never perform as highly in quantifiable assessments as advantaged students. 4. The impacts of merit pay are clear. Highly qualified teachers will take positions in schools where they can achieve. Mediocre teachers (the ones left) will take positions in the schools that need highly qualified teachers instead. This will lead to the above-mentioned corruption within the education system in order to gain merit pay, even as high as the state level. This will affect student achievement in myriad, terrible ways. (1): http://www.fairtest.org... (2): http://www.susanohanian.org... Note: these are what I have on hand. I have many more extensive, specific studies if you like :) And my opponent's case: Quick note on outside-of-US anecdotal evidence: as long as the example could reasonably be applied to the US, my opponent can introduce any evidence he likes. "I point out that I believe in western society today, our teachers are under-valued, under-appreciated and under-paid. I certainly do not propose reduction in any teacher's salary but instead, I would like to see those who perform best rewarded even more." 1. Very true. However, the affirmation's plan will only entrench this mistreatment, as it will clearly discriminate against certain teachers based solely on the area in which they choose to teach. "Student achievement. I think it is important to recognise that this should apply not merely to getting the highest marks or the most number of A-grades in a class but should rather be a measurement of the 'distance-travelled' by pupils." 2. This is, indeed, a valid part of student achievement. Unfortunately, there is no way to measure this, along with all of the other facets of academic achievement, in a universal way, which is what merit-based pay would entail for the purposes of accountability. "Performance related pay is a powerful tool in Employment. While it is suitable for many jobs it is not suitable for all." 3. Teaching is inherently different than sales, and this is important to note in reference to merit pay. Sales commissions are based on a quantifiable standard: did the person make the sale? Yes: that representative will get a percentage of the commission. No: no commission. First of all, educational achievement and potential cannot be quantified in nearly the same way. The only way to universally quantify it is to use standardized testing, which fails miserably to prove any sort of academic achievement. "An example of a less appropriate field would be police-work. Rewarding an officer on their number of arrests or conviction rates does not seem a good idea to me as this would encourage them to be over-zealous and perhaps even tempt them into corruption and tampering with evidence as well as criminalizing more of the general population." 4. In a similar vein, teachers and states alike have freely admitted to corrupting test results or corrupting the test itself. Several states have been found to manipulate test difficulty, format, and content in order to ensure more passing students. This only happened when the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted under the most recent Bush administration, in which funding and school functionality became tied in the same merit-based way to academic success based on universal, quantifiable academic assessment tools that are in and of themselves deeply flawed. "I think teaching is an appropriate profession to apply performance related pay to as the benefits would clearly outweigh any negative impact. I would like my opponent to explain why it is not and what negative effects she believes that it would have." 5. The negative impacts are outlined in my case, and affect both students and teachers. Teachers will be paid less for working in certain socioeconomic, geographic, and ethnic locations. Therefore, teachers will leave the schools which need their expertise the most in order to seek pay increases. The US government is already having to lure highly qualified teachers to these areas in order to keep them there. These underprivileged schools cannot stand this strain. This is where the students suffer, as mediocre teachers will be able to find jobs more easily in already struggling schools, which will simply lower the quality of education in urban and rural areas, resulting in an even greater educational gap in the nation. Hence, not only will merit pay for teachers not improve the world, but it will devastate any attempts the government is currently making to level the educational playing field. In essence, using assessment in relationship to teacher pay is a recipe for disaster. While assessments are valid and necessary, tying them to teacher pay is a drastic mistake on the part of any nation, especially if those assessments are universalized, even by state governments. I look forward to my opponent's response!