With the nomination of Arne Duncan as potential Secretary of Education, the idea of “merit pay” has come to the forefront of most discussions. As someone who has been teaching since 1990, I want to point out that any argument in favor of merit pay for teachers is based on several faulty premises. First and foremost is the assumption behind all merit pay arguments—that teachers make minimal effort to help students learn, so some kind of extra financial incentive is necessary to get them to do their job. For the thousands of teachers who regularly put in 60–80 hours a week—despite being paid 15% less than comparable professionals, according to the Economic Policy Institute—this assumption is not only incorrect, it’s insulting.

The other fallacy at the root of the merit pay argument is that the educational profession is fundamentally the same as a business. This could not be further from the truth. An employee in the for-profit industry will service a handful of clients at a time, and it is a given that those clients want the product being offered. A teacher, on the other hand, must service 20–40 “clients” each hour, and may have more than 100 clients in a day. If the teacher is lucky, a majority of those clients actually wants the product enough to cooperate with the teacher.

Unfortunately, there will always be people who don’t want the product. In the business world, an employee and a disinterested party would have no further contact, but in education, unwilling clients will continue to sit in on every presentation. These clients may simply ignore the teacher, but sometime they will work to sabotage the presentation, preventing other clients from receiving service. The teacher can remove the saboteurs temporarily, but they will be back for future presentations. Not only must a teacher constantly work with the saboteurs, but he or she is also considered responsible for the education of the interested clients, the apathetic clients, and the saboteurs equally.

An even more basic difference between business and teaching involves the philosophy underlying each enterprise. The for-profit industry follows the "Me Paradigm." A business is structured hierarchically: Employees of any company are on a ladder, and the goal of each employee is to move himself closer to the top of that ladder. Fellow employees may be friends, but they are also competitors for that next rung. Ultimately, each employee looks out for himself first.

Unlike the business model, the teaching profession is based on the "We Paradigm." A school is structured communally: Teachers share the common goal of helping all students achieve their greatest potential. Unlike a business, it is not a Darwinian competition in which only the strong survive; it is a familial system in which meager resources are shared so that all may move forward, however slowly. It is not profit that motivates educators; it’s altruism.

Perhaps this altruism is what makes teaching so difficult for people living in a materialistic society like America to understand. Forcing the teaching profession into a business model will never be successful, because the foundations of the two enterprises are not just different, they are diametrically opposed. A model created for an organization whose primary focus is material gain—in the form of profit or power—will never fit an organization dedicated to helping fellow human beings.

The for-profit world needs to understand that money is not everyone’s motivation. Teachers aren’t in it for the paycheck (although it certainly comes in handy when paying the bills). We teach because we care. We love knowledge. We love learning. We love our students. No amount of flinging cash at random teachers based on arbitrary test scores is going to change that.

And does America really want teachers who are motivated by money? The recent economic debacle, brought about by money-motivated individuals, is proof positive that the Me Paradigm isn’t in our country’s best interests. Why would we want to force it on our children?