Merit Pay

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"Legal Challenges to Merit Pay Programs" discusses several different court cases from several different states in order to help illustrate how merit pay schemes have been dealt with in the court systems of the United States. Wood and Baldwin come to the conclusion that how the courts dealt with the issue of merit pay depended on which state was being looked at but also that "...the issues of merit pay plans lead to many unanswered questions yet to be addressed by the courts." (Wood, 1988) which means that there are still issues with teacher merit pay to be dealt with by the courts. The authors use several decisions from actual court cases which illustrates their point that different states view merit pay depending on which state is dealt …show more content…
This article also mentioned the findings of several previous surveys taken, though not at any length. The SASS included several questions about the background of each participant, which made breaking the results down into smaller areas for study available. Ballou and Podgursky looked at several different factors when considering the results including if the respondent was male or female, from a rural or urban area, a rich or poor area or even just if they were from a public or private school. They came to the conclusion that: "The conventional wisdom is that teachers oppose such plans [meaning merit pay schemes] because they believe performance evaluation will not be fair...Opposition is said to be especially keen wherever student achievement is thwarted by problems beyond the teachers' control....teachers of disadvantaged and low-achieving students are, if anything, more supportive of merit pay than the average teacher...we note that a slim majority (55%) of the teachers in the SASS survey favor merit pay." (Ballou,

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