Teacher Bonuses
Are Incentives a Good Idea?
By Daniel Muniz

I was a bit surprised to discover that a tiny handful of public schools in my hometown of San Antonio Texas rejected the opportunity to hand out cash bonuses to their teachers. The money was authorized and made available from the Texas legislature so the schools that qualified for it could have taken advantage of this merit program. And the range of the dollar amount per bonus from these particular schools could have been anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000. That is not chump change for a teacher, especially in the upper limit.

Right now there about a dozen states currently participating in these incentive programs while other states are taking a wait and see approach to see how things turn out.

Incidentally, incentive programs have traditionally been opposed by unions and teacher unions are no exception.

However, state legislatures bypassed union opposition and implemented these merit programs anyway, oftentimes with quite a bit of public support. And for the most part, it makes political sense. A hardworking diligent teacher makes the same amount of money as his or her lethargic co-worker so why not reward the good educators with a cash bonus. After all, they should be recognized for their effort and rewarded in a tangible way. And cold hard cash is perhaps one of the best ways to encourage the better teachers to remain in their profession.
 

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The problem arises from who gets what as well as what the criteria should be for the incentive.

The largest urban school district in the country, Houston ISD, handed out its bonuses to teachers which created animosity from the faculty members who didn’t get anything. For some schools, the cash bonuses were divisive and created ill will amongst many fellow teachers.

And that is precisely the fear that many schools have.

Money does strange things to people and that is why a number of private sector employers have strict policies forbidding the discussion of salary and benefits amongst co-workers.

Of course there can be a backlash from faculty especially against the slackers who didn’t deserve a bonus but got one anyways. And worse, it disillusions the educators who did work hard but didn’t get anything in return because of political infighting and personal biases from their administrators.

For the school districts in the states that qualified for the incentives, they labored quite a while to create a fair merit program but it is difficult to employ the best methodology to determine who should be rewarded. In fact, the criterion is a minefield in itself because there are a number of variables involved.

On particular concern is that certain schools will use the pass/failure rate as their yardstick. There is a fatal flaw in basing incentives on student performance because there are too many factors that a teacher has absolutely no control over because they involve personal responsibility from a pupil.

Suppose an educator has a group of students who don’t want to study for tests or turn in homework and they constantly skip out of class. Those kids are not going to do well regardless of how gifted a teacher is. Personal decisions and behavior are the responsibility of the students, not the teacher.

However, it is temptingly easy to use student performance because it makes evaluations simple.

The dangerous outcome would be a perverse incentive in which an unscrupulous teacher would do just about anything in order to fraudulently win a bonus. For instance, if a principal wants to see high grades from a classroom, he or she may very well get that from grade inflation. Likewise, if a school wants to see to everyone pass a standardized test, then a teacher may only teach to the test and disregard everything else in the curriculum.

Unfortunately, that is already happening because many teachers want to avoid getting reprimanded from their principals for failing to meet their unrealistic expectations. As a result, some schools have greatly watered down the quality of their education with this perverse working environment.

And then wave a $10,000 bonus in front of someone’s face and that may very well tempt an educator to do something that causes more harm than good for a child’s education.

I strongly believe in merit programs in the private sector.

However, it is difficult for me to give any answer for our education system because many schools are already dysfunctional to start off with. Waving cold hard cash in some of these dysfunctional schools may create more of these perverse incentives instead of rewarding high achieving educators.

I do believe in the concept of merit programs for education and perhaps there is a way for a school district to establish a fair criterion that doesn’t dilute education or play fast and loose with the truth. Consequently, this experimentation that is already going on in several states needs to continue so that a practical solution can be found.

As a society, we do need to keep and reward good teachers. A cash bonus is a good idea when common sense is used to implement it. However, it can be a disaster if not enough forethought and planning goes into it.

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