Merit Pay and Award Criteria

Chris Cerf talks teacher recruitment and retention. By retention he means merit pay:

No, I do not believe our best teachers are holding back their efforts. And yes, I agree that most teachers enter the profession for reasons more noble than financial rewards. And I even agree that the mechanics of rewarding educators for performance are fraught with complex questions and even some dangers of abuse. (A good case can be made school-wide bonuses, for example.) But can anyone doubt that it is demoralizing and demotivating when radically different levels of performance are met with complete indifference? The litmus test, however, is this: If holding on to our most effective teachers is the most important consideration in moving our highest-need students towards a successful launch into adulthood, would performance pay at least contribute to that end? The answer to that question has to be a resounding "yes." Merit pay, in itself, won't solve our retention challenges. But it's a very good start.(emphasis in original)

Every time merit pay comes up, there is always the question of how will bonuses be awarded. As I mentioned here, bonuses have to be real and substantial to be of any incentive value. I also don't mind school wide bonuses, but they shouldn't be a substitute for individual bonuses. But at the same time Cerf says this:

As the Mayor observed, it is "ridiculous" to suspend our most basic assumptions about human motivation in this critical realm while accepting it as a matter of course in every other.

We accept bonuses in the private sector and to a certain extent in other public sector areas, often based on some subjective and objective criteria. Yet when teacher merit pay comes up, the first concern is about "objectivity" in assessment and awarding of bonuses. Why? While I admit that bonuses should not be awarded on one criteria alone, but a on a mixture of criteria, it stands to reason that some of those criteria will be objective (hard data on student achievement beyond simple test scores) and some will be subjective (principal and peer reviews). This same mix occurs in the private sector and no one complains about the system. It is time to get past the theory and start building a system.