Performance Pay Argumentative Essay

There is no more critical role in our current society than that of a teacher. Teachers help shape the minds of the future. Tomorrow's engineers, scientists, politicians, and educators are all greatly influenced by today's instructors. Without teachers society would not be anywhere near where it is now and only a select few would have access to learning. Sadly, however important teachers are in civilization, they are still drastically underappreciated, underrecognized and underpaid. Although some people may argue that performance pay is helpful, performance or merit pay is actually detrimental to schools and students for several reasons: 1) teachers would spend less time personalising the curriculum and use that time teaching only what lessons they need to teach according to standardization 2) teachers may not want to teach struggling students 3) teachers would have a harder time helping more advanced students learn at school 4) students’ scores and performance may not accurately represent how well a teacher teaches 5) teachers may compete with each other if performance pay is implemented. One of the major drawbacks of performance pay is that teachers would have less time to personalize the curriculum, focusing instead on keeping student test scores up so they will be paid more …show more content…
They think it will motivate teachers to work harder, solve the problem of teachers being underpaid, reward the best teachers, and make more people want to be teachers. These claims, however optimistic, are not realistic because most teachers do not become teachers for the money. Even with the additional pay raises, they would still not be paid as much as they deserve to be paid and it would only affect the top few teachers. Further, there is no definition of a good teacher and it would still not be an adequate paying job for the amount of education, training, and work required to become a teacher