MNEA Rejects Merit Pay Plan

The president of Nashville’s teachers’ union says she’s surprised by a vote to reject a pilot program for merit-based bonuses.

The Metro Nashville Education Association had a hand in creating the plan to reward the faculty and staff of the city’s two lowest-performing elementary schools, Alex Green and Inglewood.

MNEA President Jayme Merritt says the union’s leadership supported the program as the best available compromise between the union, the school board, and the private donors who wanted to fund it. But when the plan was put to a vote of MNEA members across the district, just over 51-percent voted against it.

Merritt says teachers were concerned about the size of the bonuses, which would have ranged from 2-thousand dollars for a 5 percent gain on test scores to 6-thousand for a 20-percent gain. And she says many are hesitant to link pay to results on standardized tests.

“Teachers are skeptical of judging a student on a single test score, which makes them skeptical of teachers being paid based on the test scores.”

If approved, the program would have been funded by the Nashville Alliance for Public Education. Director Kay Simmons says the point of the plan was simply to reward teachers who are already working very hard.

“Incentives seem to work in every single other organization. I don’t know if it works in teaching or not, but this is a way to see if it did work.”

Both Simmons and Merrit say the issue of incentive pay in Metro schools will not go away. The district, the alliance and Vanderbilt’s Peabody School are currently in the planning stage of a 10-million dollar research study that would offer bonuses of up to 15-thousand dollars to middle school math teachers.