Daily Kos has some interesting information on merit pay and the failure of charter schools:
...Besides the stick of firing teachers who perform poorly, education "reformers" have put great hopes in merit pay, both as a means of recruiting superior teachers into the profession or enticing superior performing from existing teachers. New York City, under Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, put $75 million into a system of merit pay bonuses, only to find that thescheme showed negligible impact on any indicator; similar results were found in a Nashville experiment.
The problem here is that education "reformers" are working from a narrow neoclassical conception of human motivations - pay people more and they work harder, because human beings are rational, self-interested hedonists in Econ 101. In reality, things are more complex. As the Federal Reserve found out when they studied the empirical results of merit-based pay systems, this kind of incentive only works with simple tasks and in cognitive tasks, has a negative impact on performance.....
....Stanford University's 2009 study of charter schools found that "17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference." In other words, all other things being equal, if we were to replace every public school with a charter school, academic gains would decline by as much as 20%.....
Of course, the Kasich administration won't admit to any of this because, as Kasich said during the campaign, he wants to "break the back of teachers unions."
***** Plunderbund has a great column called, "Republican teachers are now extinct."