A/T Merit pay systems are arbitrary…

Merit pay systems create gateways for litigation in courts, which means only affirming
can allow us to reform the education system for good.
Paul O’Neill, a scholar at Columbia University elucidates in a November 2003 article:
[education] issues are all likely targets for litigation. Such suits have most often
These

been grounded on the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses of the
Fourteenth Amendement. Suits involving special education issues have also relied on Section 504 and IDEA. What follows is an account of
significant case law drawing on each of these areas, which should provide precedent for and insight into the ways that courts will approach such claims in the future.

A. Due Process Claims

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment makes it unconstitutional

for a state to “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of
law.” In determining what process is due, courts look to the nature of the interest at stake to assess whether the interest is protected and whether the government abused its
power in acting to restrict it. In making this determination, courts consider the interests and the value of the procedures available. The Due Process Clause offers procedural
safeguards to protected interests and provides protection for substantive aspects of liberty against impermissible governmental restrictions.

Procedural due process guarantees that a state proceeding that results in the
deprivation of property or liberty must be fair, while substantive due process
insures that such state action is not arbitrary and capricious. Each of these aspects of
due process will be dealt with, in turn, below.
While they represent separate analyses, these aspects tend to blend in application.

Courts have often been reluctant to second guess the discretion of public school
officials with regard to evaluation of the academic performance of their students,
“but judicial intervention in school affairs regularly occurs when a governmental
education institution acts to deprive an individual of a significant interest in either
liberty or property.”
Indeed, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld the rights of students in the face of improper actions by schools, holding that young people “do not shed their constitutional
rights at the schoolhouse door.”

Note without merit pay, parents wouldn’t be motivated or angered by teachers getting
undeserved merit pay, and without merit pay systems creating standardized tests to
measure performance, there would be no precedent for a court to question the evaluation
of students, since grades cannot be statistically proven to be arbitrary as can be with hard
data that comes with standardized tests.