More on merit

Judging from several of the comments on my last post, the ideas that undergird merit pay for teachers are not lost only on NPR reporters. Corey, for example, writes:

Does LeBron play better when he's paid $20 million than if he, and everybody else, were paid $1 million? That's a legitimate question. And different from asking if it's fair to pay LeBron the same as everybody else when he's clearly better.

It's also a different question than asking whether the players currently earning $1 million will work harder to try and earn as much as LeBron than they would if they had no potential for salary increases.

What is missing here is an understanding of, inter alia, the job market. Merit pay is engineered not only to develop better teachers by encouraging those already in the field to work harder, but it's also--and maybe more so--designed to attract talented people to classrooms and keep the best teachers from leaving and pursuing other careers. So, yes, it is incredibly foolish to ask, as Larry Abramson did, "Is performance pay working if it just rewards teachers who are already doing a good job?"