Somebody needs to explain to me how we can fairly determine which teachers are deserving of merit pay across a vast system with wildly different schools.

You can't go by test scores uniformly as bad teachers at good schools will look better than good teachers at bad schools. You can't go by progress from the year before because every year you're dealing with a new group of students. You can't measure relative to your peers within the school because that would penalize a teacher surrounded by a great faculty and reward a teacher surrounded by a crap faculty.

I've never read a specific proposal fleshing this out. My best guess would be to classify individual schools based on their location and the population they're serving and then go from there using test scores?

Here's a decent example:
http://www.denverprocomp.org/generalinformation

Thanks Bill. I wonder what the distribution of teachers' salaries look like since institution of procomp and how they compare to Baltimore's teacher salaries.

Merit pay has always been a sticky subject because of the difficulty in quantifying the "merit" part of it. Corey notes some perfectly valid concerns; other schools will almost certainly experience problems related directly to the who's-friends-with-whom world of school politics which, as I see it, is the weakness in the Denver system. And if you think that sort of thing doesn't go on pretty much everywhere, you definitely have another think coming.

I don't think that there are any teachers who are opposed to No Child Left Behind in theory, but most of the ones I've spoken to about it think that it needs revamping. As written, it's a very punitive statute which does nothing to help the schools which are most in need.

(dripping with sarcasm BTW) Oddly enough, New York City has an interesting model that has some features that are actually worth looking at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/nyregion/17cnd-teachers.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

A few key features (I believe) include:
For a school to agree, a large majority of the staff has to sign on
The money doesn't go to an individual teacher, rather to the school and that gets split between all of the staff

I am actually in favor of merit pay but also see the issues that it creates. One thing to think about is the piss poor way that we evaluate (and by "we" I mean NCLB) schools. There are a number of other measures besides test scores such as attendance, attrition, mobility, parental involvement, teacher retention and so on. All of these might be worth looking at as we think about paying schools more for performance.

Not to mention encourages states to have easy tests so that more students pass, in addition to an over-concentration only on tested areas rather than the host of subjects not tested.

bmoreteach: Oh wait, that's already happened in Maryland.