Why Merit Pay and Vouchers Have Never Worked — And Never Will

Here's why merit pay and vouchers have never worked and will never work.

These are both ideas that are being pushed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott right now, and they've been popular in some circles for decades.

And I've been following these two issues for decades.

I remember researching vouchers and merit pay in college when I was an undergraduate education major.

And since then, we've had plenty of opportunity now to figure out if these are ideas that really have any merit.

And it's clear that merit pay is not an idea that has any merit.

We have lots of evidence now that this is just not a viable idea.

And I wanted to talk a little bit about why that is.

Why does merit pay not work and why do vouchers not work?

They both come down to essentially the same issue.

which is random assignment.

In order to figure out if a teacher is truly better, they're truly outperforming expectations, outperforming their peers, you would have to do a good high quality scientific experiment involving random assignment.

You would have to randomly assign students to the teacher because otherwise any test score effects that you observe, any test score differences from teacher to teacher are almost certainly going to be differences in the students that are assigned to that teacher.

And we all have experienced this as educators.

No two classes get a truly random assortment of teachers, and we try to balance classes.

You know, there are lots of reasons that we don't truly randomly assign students to classes, because you get these very imbalanced classes, and there are always lots of local factors that cause us to not have truly random assignment.

So if you try to do merit pay without random assignment, what happens?

Well, people end up fighting for the easiest to teach students.

People advocate for themselves to get the easiest to teach students instead of saying, hey, we're all a team, we're all working together to teach all of our students.

you end up pitting educators against one another to teach the easiest to teach students.

And this is exactly the same reason why vouchers do not work.

You end up competing, schools end up competing for the easiest to teach students.

And all of the test score gains, there's been tons of research on this, all of the test score gains that supposedly some schools have achieved over other types of schools are due to different selection of students.

They're able to pick and choose which students they want to educate.

And they're able, most importantly, to pick and choose which students they don't have to educate.

And this idea of serving all students just goes out the window.

This idea of equity just goes out the window when we can pick and choose our students and when we're fighting to get the easiest to educate students.

Both of these ideas seem to never die.

They seem to be zombie ideas, both vouchers and merit pay.

And the reason they will never work is the same.

We've got to serve all students.

We have got to make sure that we are meeting the needs of all students.

And we don't want to be in a situation where we're pitting educators against one another to get the easiest to teach students who will make us look the best.

That is just a bad incentive to put in place.

It has never worked.

The incentives to game the system are too strong.

Let me know what you think.