Week 8 Persuasive Essay: Can Merit Pay Accelerate School Improvement?

MERIT PAY AND SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT
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Week 8: Will Merit Pay Accelerate School Improvement?
Assignment: Identifying Fallacious Arguments and Rhetorical Ploys.
Educational Expert Position
Yes: Steven Malanga.
No: Stuart Buck and Jay P. Green
Summary of the Author’s Position:
Steven Malanga draws on examples from corporate world and public schools in Cincinnati, Iowa and Denver to make and support his argument for performance-based merit pay for teachers (Malanga, 2001). From the corporate world, he noted that serious retailers hired ‘mystery’ shoppers to hastily investigate how his employees treated the customers and based their payments on the results.
From the analysis of public schools in Cincinnati, Malanga noticed that principals and peer evaluators devoted 20 to 30 hours to assess every teacher in the ten chosen schools. In the Iowa schools, John Forsyth stated that they know good teachers make a difference in the school system and they are going to pay those teachers who make a difference.
Lastly, in Denver, Malanga found out that at the beginning of the academic year, principals and teachers sit and discuss on the kind of results they want at the end of the year and the improvement they ought to achieve (Malanga, 2001). When the year ends, they will carry out an evaluation on the achievement of the same then award the specific teachers who contributed, on a big part, to the attainment.
Rhetorical Fallacies and Ploys Used by the Author:
Quotations and Rhetorical Ploys
Part 1: Quotations
1 “One major benefit of merit systems is that they allow schools to pay teachers- especially younger and ambitious teachers- fatter salaries”.
2 “Though Cincinnati and Iowa have skirted the controversy of using student test scores, Denver is confronting it head on. T...