Education, part 2: Merit Pay.

I have no idea about the attitude of other daily newspapers, but the largest daily in New Jersey is The Newark Star-Ledger which is blatantly anti-teacher. Ever since Chris Christie became governor and started his anti-teacher campaign, the S-L has hardly missed a chance to excoriate teachers either for refusing to shoulder most of the burden for getting the state out of its fiscal crisis, or for daring to expect job security.

A recent editorial blazoned the headline New Deal for Teachers. Its subtitle was “Bipartisan Support for Merit Pay, Ending Tenure.” Non-educators in the state are fairly unanimous in believing that both issues are needed facets of much-needed educational reform, especially since the current governor has gone to great lengths to paint the majority of teachers in the state as incompetents who are overpaid and greedy. And my conversations with non-educators has pretty much verified that those people who did not believe that fact previously certainly do so now.

According to the editorial, “Christie wants to blow up the existing salary guides, those monuments to an antiquated system in which competence in the classroom means nothing. Instead of basing pay on seniority or accumulated degrees, Christie wants to focus on merit.”

Sounds good, huh? Except for one little question: who and what determines quality in teaching? I was fortunate in that until I retired last June I taught almost exclusively honors classes filled with immigrants and children of immigrants. Their parents were strong supporters of education, expecting their children to work hard and learn as much as possible, and supporting me no matter how hard I pushed their children. And push them I did! I was widely known as the most difficult teacher in the high school, and students crowded my math lab in the morning, during the day, and after school, working together or with me to master whatever difficult concepts I taught them. All this effort, bolstered by parental support, led to my students doing very well on standardized tests, including the advanced placement tests they all took at the end of junior and senior years.

Did that necessarily make me a better teacher than my peers? Other teachers as good as I was taught students who were not as motivated as the immigrants or children of immigrants were. Some of their families had similar attitudes to my students’ families, but many were stereotypical American family: materialistic, parents involved with their jobs 24/7, having little time to help their children, and little real interest in education. Few cared if their children learn much. They wanted them to get into decent colleges, but not at the cost of working hard or sacrificing any of their precious extracurricular sports time. Others had no interest in colleges at all, so what did education matter? Certainly not all, but many of those students hardly ever study, do not spend any extra time with their teachers out of class, and many are constant discipline problems, doing more to hinder the other students’ learning in the classroom than anything else. And do not expect administrators to remove those disruptive students from the classroom; they are more concerned with parents’ complaining about the school and teachers picking on their poor little darlings than they are about maintaining a learning attitude in the classroom.

And when the parents of those underachieving and disruptive students contact the teacher, it is often to complain that either the teacher is too difficult or they do not have the proper respect for the parent’s poor little darlings. Those students do not do well on standardized tests, and who would expect them to when they care a lot more for their cell phones and laptops than they ever care about schooling and their parents do nothing to change that attitude.

I have several theories about education and one is the following: education is only as good as the community which supports it. Based on my students, my personal community is one which considers education their children’s fulltime job which matters more than everything else in their lives. But the community most American teachers deal with does not support education or even consider it particularly important. Those teachers are like salmon swimming upstream; it is mostly a losing battle, and they can make some headway if they really work at it, but their chances of reaching the headwater is so much more difficult than my swim which is mostly an easy downstream float.

Ask any honors student in a public high school what is the attitude of most other students in the school, and they will likely shake their head in disgust. Ask most parents of secondary school students how much support they give their children in their education, and answers will run the gamut from little to none. And then they will either tell you that they are too busy to do so, or wonder why should they since that is the teacher’s job!

Merit pay sounds like a good idea in theory, but until all teachers have the same supportive community, it is like paying all baseball players based exclusively on how many games their team wins. The Kansas City Royals have one of the very best pitchers in baseball in Zach Grienke, but because he plays in a small-city market he has virtually no chance of his team winning as many games as the worst pitcher on the New York Yankees does. So is it fair to pay him based on his team’s success? Not at all, and the situation for teachers is similar. No math teacher in my high school had the opportunity for his or her students to achieve as well as my students did, because I taught the majority of truly motivated students with incredibly-supportive parents. The other teachers might have had a handful of equally-supportive parents, but the majority of their parents and students just do not consider education worth the effort.

In all the media and political complaints I have read about how teachers should be paid purely based on merit, not one has ever suggested that parental support is a factor in education, that perhaps we should try to change the environment in this country from anti-education to pro-education, from parents being primarily laissez-faire to being supportive. Let’s be honest: intellectuals in this country are distrusted and generally looked down-upon. A politician is far more likely to get elected if he or she is viewed as somebody you can sit down with in a bar and chat with rather than somebody who is likely to lecture you. Those were precisely the comments many voters made when they voted for George W. Bush (pretty much viewed as a non-intellectual) over Al Gore (the intellectual). And this attitude is not a recent one. In the 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower swamped Adlai Stevenson in two presidential elections, largely because Stevenson was an intellectual who few Americans trusted to run the country. Eisenhower, on the other hand, was a folksy good ol’ boy who was also a successful warrior. How much more a telling referendum on intellectual versus non-intellectual can there possibly be than that?

I fear that merit pay will become the legal basis for teachers’ salaries eventually without anybody ever considering equalizing the “communities” of each teacher. And that would be a vast injustice.