One of the central focuses of this year’s Roosevelt Institute will be how local, state and national governments can construct policy in order to provide an optimal education for this country’s students, primarily at the high school level. One popular policy that has been considered by school boards across the country has been the idea of merit pay. Many believe that teachers whose students perform better on standardized testing, such as New York’s Regents tests or the SATs, should be rewarded with a higher salary bracket, which would provide an incentive for all teachers to do a better job in teaching their students. Since teachers’ unions have come out strongly against such policies, the divide has largely become partisan; merit pay policies have come to be considered part of a “conservative” agenda, representing a sort of survival-of-the-fittest approach to education, while equal pay and tenure policies are considered much more “liberal.”

Arguments for merit pay abound. The status quo offers few or no incentives for high school teachers to continue doing their best work after reaching tenure, which in many schools occurs after as few as three years on the job; most students going through the public school system in America know at least one teacher who has given up on tenure for lack of a reason not to. While the majority of U.S. unions have lost significant power in recent decades, teachers’ unions remain strong, which in many districts makes it nearly impossible for teachers to be substantially reprimanded in any way for poor performance. And it seems to be a system that meshes well with America’s capitalism, creating healthy competition between teachers and schools in order to maximize performance of everyone in the long run.

Of course, arguments against monetary rewards for high test scores are also easy to find. By pegging wages to standardized tests, the incentive would be towards teachers teaching only material that would directly affect student’s scores on those tests, removing the liberal arts aspect of education in that only the ends, the answers to questions, would matter, while the means, the actual thinking involved in solving a problem, would be severely discounted compared to the current system. If teachers were forced to compete with each other, then incentives would be against collaboration between teachers, both within and between departments, the result of which could only be a poorer and more fragmented knowledge base for students. Such competition would also add to the already-high stress levels of most high schools, which again would be to the detriment of the student body.

I recently interviewed Paula Massanari, the principal of a fairly high-performing high school in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Penn., asking her in general how she felt about incentivizing education. A former teacher herself, Massanari was strongly opposed to merit pay systems, and felt that since most teachers are in the profession because it is what they love to do, there is little need for incentivizing above the current level. But she did have a few interesting alternatives to merit pay that seemed to put the incentives in all the right places.

• In her high school, most teachers were assigned at least one additional job per day during their prep periods, monitoring lunches or the hallways, proctoring exams, et cetera. If she noticed certain teachers were receiving particularly positive feedback in the form of test results and from students, to whom she offered pizza on a weekly basis in return for their thoughts, then she was able to replace those teachers in their daily chores, allowing for more free time on their parts. Additionally, she was able to offer good teachers perks like funding for attendance at local or national conferences and talks directed at high school teachers.

• Whenever she or her administration team heard any good things about specific decisions made by teachers in her building, be it an effective project or an excited student, Massanari filled out a yellow “Positive Feedback” card to drop in that teacher’s mailbox, noting their actions and thanking them; she felt that it was extremely important to personally acknowledge any good decisions made by the faculty.

This is an excellent approach to what has turned into a very difficult question. As it is, until significant change is made to the No Child Left Behind policy being enforced by the federal government, it is unlikely that merit pay or any other more complicated system of incentives will be implemented on any greater scale than single districts; however, simple, almost policy-less decisions made by school administrations within the current framework to try to keep teachers on their toes can be highly effective while maintaining the safe and collaborative environment that makes up the status quo. For now, it is working within the system, not overhauling it, that will lead to the best education for America’s high school students.