School districts in at least eight different states are "experimenting with teacher-pay packages that front-load higher salaries and offer bonuses ... if student test scores improve or if teachers work in hard-to-staff schools," according to USA Today. This idea, while well intentioned, will only serve to further damage the educational system in the future as teachers, students and test scores become increasingly intertwined with one another. I, like many others, find it difficult to argue against increasing pay for teachers working in hard-to-staff schools, as I believe they genuinely earn such a pay increase for increased job stress, time commitment and a generally sub-standard work environment.

However, I could not disagree more with the decision to compensate teachers on the basis of their students' test scores. This pay-per-grade method of compensation will only lead to increased reliance on an already failing system founded on the cornerstone of standardized testing. This initiative will only lead to increasing instances of what has become known as "teaching to the test" which often forces both teachers and students to limit their intellectual interests and practices in order to better study or memorize test material. Paying teachers based on their students' performances on standardized tests will merely serve to further tie the educational system to the floundering No Child Left Behind act, making it, and more importantly its ideal of using standardized testing as the earmark of public education, seem viable, rather than ridiculous. The fact remains that while standardized testing is certainly necessary in order to provide a common method of academic measure, it does not (and was not intended to) allow for creativity and independent thought. Standardized tests do not, and cannot, measure the entire intellectual student; as evidenced by the fact that the majority of NCLB tests have no writing section and consist entirely of multiple-choice questions. Tests like the SAT and ACT were developed as a way to measure a student's mastery of a general body of knowledge, not as an end-all-be-all measuring stick, and they should have remained that way.

Moreover, ideas like this one and similar educational initiatives over the past few years have proven to be inadequately planned and haphazardly implemented. The problem, however, is larger than NCLB or even the ideas of better teacher compensation or school accountability. The reason why well-intentioned notions like this and NCLB fail is because they only address the symptoms, not the disease. Do schools need to be held accountable for their students' education? Does offering a higher pay-grade help to attract better-qualified teachers? Of course. Will paying teachers more and throwing more federal funding into testing systems save the education system? I highly doubt it. The problem of education is not one that can be solved by offering teacher bonuses, school funding or by threatening to close schools if students fail to fill in the right bubble on their Scantron. The problem is a social one, it extends well beyond the confines of classroom walls, beyond school districts and testing; it is interwoven into the very fabric of everyday societal living in households and apartment complexes nationwide. The failing American public education system is the severed Achilles tendon of the nation, and we are trying to cover it with a Band-Aid.

Carl Hoff is a graduate student in Peabody College. He can be reached at carl.j.hoff@vanderbilt.edu.