Merit pay: A case study in a California school district

This paper is a report on a study which examined the possibility of instituting a merit pay plan in a small school district in California. The paper is a preliminary investigation aimed at focusing attention on the substantive issues of merit pay and their effect on instructional performance. The first part of this paper summarizes merit pay in business and industry, merit pay in education, merit pay plans in California schools, and characteristics of the district under study. In the second part, practical difficulties in the district under study are described and analyzed. The third part constitutes the enumeration and examination of conditions which are required for the development and implementation of a merit pay plan in the district. Due to the difficulties in accumulating raw data, decisions on methodologies were made during the process of data collection. These methodologies are described throughout the paper.