Argumentative Essay: Indiana's Merit Pay System

I am in favor of a merit pay system in Indiana under the right circumstances. I think that teachers are underpaid for what we do. I also feel that there are strong economic arguments that support a merit based pay system for teachers. However, I feel that such a system is nearly if not totally impossible to implement. Indiana has suggested implementing a merit pay system based on test scores. Not only would teachers pay be based on these test scores, but so would retention. None of the states that implemented a successful merit pay system based teacher retention on test scores. Indiana wants to base whether I have a job on how well my students do on a standardized test. This is not only an illogical proposal it is insulting. As a teacher I do much more than prepare my students for …show more content…
If that was all I did my job would be so much easier. I spend hours and hours outside the normal work day developing lesson plans that teach more than simple test questions but I try to teach students how to think. I may have the summer off but I put in more hours during the school year that more than compensates for the time off. I kept track of the number of hours that worked the last month. It averaged to almost eleven hours a day. This equates to fifty hours a week which averages out to two thousand and thirteen hours in a school year. That is thirteen hours above a person that works 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. The time I have "off" in the summer is the same amount of time that a person is off that works forty hours a week with a two week vacation. The hours I counted did not include the hours spent working towards a graduate degree, volunteering in the community, (I am the cub master for pack 301 and help coach my children's baseball and tball teams), and being a father and husband. If all I had to do to be an effective teacher is to teach to a test, my life