Reply #144: Merit pay and related concepts are generally bad for education!

[LeftishBrit]

Market-style competition in the public services, whether between individuals or between institutions (as in our 'league tables' of schools in the UK), may sound like a good idea, but tends to prove disastrous. Schools become factories, teachers become assembly line workers, and children become processed peas.

Merit pay and league tables in education are usually based on test scores, sometimes supplemented by school inspections. This encourages 'teaching to the test'; the neglect of subjects or parts of subjects that are not tested; undue pressure on children who are seen as close to a test grade boundary; neglect of children who aren't; and reluctance to teach children who have special needs or are for other reasons unlikely to perform well in tests. And while some school inspections are necessary, lengthy school inspections, on which a teacher's or a school's funding depends, are likely to distract from actual teaching and prove counter-productive. A study in the UK showed that children did worse *on the government-required standardized tests* during and just after OFSTED inspections than at other times.

If test scores are not to be the criteria, then what are? The only likely alternative is ratings by pupils, parents or superiors - any of which can be corrupted easily.

At the beginnings of state education in the UK in the 19th century, teachers in state schools were paid by 'results'. This almost strangled state education at its beginning.

Here are some fascinating excerpts from the 1867 'General Report' by Matthew Arnold, well-known English poet *and* school inspector, referring to the effects of this system, introduced in 1862. (Part of the report was reprinted in Stuart Maclure's "Educational Documents"; Chapman, 1986.)

'The mode of teaching in the primary schools has certainly fallen off in intelligence, spirit and inventiveness during the four or five years after my last report. It could not well be otherwise. In a country where everyone is prone to rely too much on mechanical processes and too little on intelligence, a change in the Education Department's regulations, which by making two thirds of the Government grant depend on a mechanical examination, inevitably gives a mecahnical turn to the school teaching, a mechanical turn to the inspection, and must be trying to the intellectual life of a school...

More free play for the inspector, and more free play, in consequence, for the teacher, is what is wanted.In the game of mechanical contrivances, the teacher will in the end beat us... by ingenious preparation (of children for tests).'


Some things never change!