On merit pay.

The problem with teacher merit pay is that it sounds like an excellent idea, but often functions poorly in the real world (like communism, some would say). I'm fairly certain that it would be supremely ineffective if it were implemented in this school, mostly because I have very little faith in the administration to make decent decisions about anything, much less as delicate a topic as this.

I really think something needs to be done about teachers' pay. There's so little money in teaching that it's become a last-resort job; "those who can't do, teach," as they say. So the people doing the educating are themselves not particularly well-educated, effective, or intelligent, many times. And even when there are effective teachers, they're hard to identify and therefore often not rewarded, and vapid, uncreative teachers who are only teaching because they have to are on a level playing field with smart, inventive teachers who teach because they love it. 

However, there are some major problems with merit pay. Most of the points made in the article are valid--favoritism and problem students would skew the results. And I disagree emphatically with the effectiveness of standardized testing, so I don't think basing it on numbers would be a positive thing at all. You could eliminate some problems by basing pay on student evaluations, but that would cause a whole other set of problems, because many students would give positive ratings to lenient teachers with easy classes, and a lot less learning would probably get done.

Merit pay is a solid idea to solve a serious problem, and there are some changes that could be made to improve it (base it on a combination of test scores, administrative evaluation, and student evaluation, for example), but ultimately I doubt that a practical application could ever work. There are just a few too many holes to fill, I think.

ETA: I'd love to do a blog post on copyright law on the internet, online piracy, and creative commons/transformative works.