The Districts Created Merit Pay, and Lo, It Sucked

In the beginning, God created the students and the teachers. The minds of the students were formless and void, because the teachers were doing such a crappy job. The District glanced over the faces of the teachers and saw a bunch of unmotivated worms who did not really care about education.

And the District said, "Let there be merit pay"; and there was merit pay. And the bad teachers saw that merit pay was good, and the good teachers saw that merit pay was bad. And the District separated the pay scale. The District called the high end of the pay scale "Day Job" and the low end of the pay scale "You Need a Night Job." And there was the distribution of books and syllabi, one student day. And the District said, "Let there be higher pay when a teacher's students do well on standardized tests," and it was so. The bad teachers let their students cheat, and the good teachers did not teach to the test. And there was a food fight in the cafeteria and a fistfight in the halls, a second student day.

And the District said, "Let there be higher pay when students rate teachers highly," and it was so. The bad teachers threw parties in class, and the good teachers gave detention to little brats who used the f-word. And the students called the bad teachers "good" and the good teachers "bad", and each type of teacher yielded fruit according to its kind. And there was soccer practice and detention, a third student day. And the District said, "Let teachers rate one another as peers," and it was so. And the math teacher invited the gym teacher out for a few beers, and the beers multiplied and filled their bellies. And the gym teacher rated the math teacher "good," and the English teacher, who pissed off the gym teacher by correcting his grammar in an email, was rated "bad." And there were hangovers and fights in the faculty room, a fourth student day.

And the district said, "Let us waste the remaining days on more standardized testing and some useless teacher in-service." And there was testing and in-service, the rest of the student days.

Then the school year was finished, and the District rested from all the work that it had done. And the teachers who were good to begin with were disheartened, and the teachers who were bad to begin with earned an extra twenty dollars a week. And society looked over the fruit that merit pay yielded according to its nature, and lo, it sucked.

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