This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 21st, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Giving good teachers a financial boost should be a no-brainer. The devil is in the details. What is merit?

And why should principals give merit pay to good teachers instead of to their cronies?

The experience in Denver long held as a model of merit pay for teachers may be instructive.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, comments.

Here are some of the criterion for earning merit pay in Denver right now. $3,200 for earning a graduate degree.

A thousand dollars for a satisfactory evaluation.

Working in a tough school, $1,000, taking a hard to staff job $1,000, raised student test scores,

$1,000, working on professional skills, $700, a school with strong academic growth, $700, and met two student growth goals, $350. It seems to be a highly regimented system of doling out pay for something that is a pretty

nebulous term, which is merit.

Well, unfortunately, this is the sort of system you get when you have a bureaucratic organization

like a school district having negotiate with a big block, a special interest block that has great political power.

You're not going to get any sort of even close to meaningful merit pay where a principal

who has an autonomous school is able to reward teachers in any way they want for doing the job

or getting the skills that that principal thinks is most necessary to educate kids and to get

kids to want to come to the school and make the school successful.

Instead you get something like this where notably the by far biggest bonus is for getting

more education, which is already part of almost every salary ladder in the country.

Your biggest bonus comes from, you go and you get a master's degree or you get 15 credits, which

might mean nothing in terms of whether or not you're able to teach. get

15 set bonuses for well, did your school do better,

and did you teach somewhere hard? And none of that really makes teachers professionals.

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