The Covid-19 Pandemic engendered a multitude of problems in our world today and unemployment was and still is a severe problem in our society. Unemployment is when you are out of work and thus are not making money which is not only unfair but also out of the worker's control. Another issue in society that is similar is found in our schools which is both unfair and out of a teacher’s control; merit pay. Merit pay is a payment method that bases the amount of money for teachers on student test performances. Depending on how well the student does on the test means how much money the teachers get. Merit pay is unfair because teachers would have to have the exact situation. Therefore, teachers’ salaries and bonuses based on standardized test performances are unfair and could eventually lead to a procedure that focuses on the experience and assessment record of the teacher and not on the competence of the teacher.

To begin with, merit pay is unfair because merit pay based on teacher performance would have to have the exact situation for all teachers. The article, “Merit Pay Doesn’t Work for Teachers”, states “To be any way justifiable, teacher quality would have to be assessed using the same criteria under the same classroom conditions at the same time of the year and pretty much with the same classroom full of kids” (Johnson 2). Therefore, this is proving that for teachers to be paid fairly with merit pay, they have to have the exact situation for all teachers. They would need to have the same students, same classroom conditions, same time of year, and same school environment. Following this, the article also mentions “time bonuses, while diminishing permanent raises for teachers who had been with the district 14 years or more - a move that favoured newer teachers over more veteran ones” (Johnson 3). Hence, merit pay is also not fair because it would favor newer teachers over older ones. Why should teachers who have more experience be paid less than newer ones who have less experience? In addition, after an interview with a teacher, teachers think “Merit pay is unfair because no two students are the same, a lot of variables affect student performance” (Interview). To put in another way, no students are the same and a lot of variables like classroom environment or home issues can also affect how a student performs. To conclude, merit pay could not work because not every classroom, student, and teacher are the same.

In turn, merit pay is unfair because it would eventually lead to a procedure that focuses on experience and assessment records and not the competence of a teacher. The same article, “Merit Pay Doesn’t Work for Teachers'', affirms that “Even then, the degree of subjectivity that would enter into a decision as to whether to award a merit bonus or not would inevitably lead to a grievance procedure that focuses not on the competence of the teacher, but on the competence, experience and assessment record of the assessor” (Johnson 2). In other words, merit pay is unfair because if we kept doing it, it would lead to a procedure that picks teachers based on their experience and assessment records, making it not fair for newer teachers or teachers who have a class that does not have students who perform adequately. Equally important, another interview with a teacher acknowledges that “It's a wrong focus, the focus should be on learning and understanding and not test scores. For example progression of learning” (interview). Thus, this proves that if we continued with merit pay to the point where it leads to focusing on the experience and assessment record of the teacher, it would be a false focus. The focus should be on how well the student is learning and understanding the topic, including their learning progression. To exemplify, seeing the improvement of the student’s reading or writing skills or something simple like showing improvement instead of the score of a test is what the focus should be. To sum up, merit pay would lead to an unfair procedure that will have a focus point on the wrong teaching.

In conclusion, teachers’ salaries and bonuses should not be based on student test performance. Regardless of the people who are headstrong and who believe that merit pay is fair because it rewards the teachers who perform “better” than other teachers, it still would not be fair and ludicrous for all teachers. Thus, Merit pay is becoming prevalent across the country, and if we don’t stop it, it will lead to the horrible procedure of basing teachers’ pay on experience and assessment records instead of what really matters; the progression and ability of the student.