I thought that this response from Don Boudreaux over at cafehayek.com to the local teacher's union insistence that merit pay for teachers won't work because teachers aren't motivated by money was awesome. His point was that if teacher's aren't motivated by money, wouldn't it be good public policy to lower teacher salaries?

So if teachers do not respond positively to the prospect of higher monetary rewards, they are unlikely to respond negatively to the prospect of lower monetary rewards. Alternatively, if the problem with merit pay is that measuring teacher performance is simply too difficult, then we can conclude that Fairfax teachers now are as likely to be doing a truly lousy job at educating children as they are to be doing an excellent job at this task. (Indeed, if performance can’t be monitored, then chances are the teachers are doing a lousy job. After all, why put forth effort if worthwhile results of your effort – or lack thereof – are undetectable?)

Either way, cutting teachers’ pay is unlikely to reduce the quality of education supplied in the County schools. If teachers aren’t motivated by money, then they’ll work just as diligently at lower pay as they will at higher pay; if cutting pay will, in fact, cause some teachers to quit, their replacements are likely to perform no worse than them.

I'm don't buy the argument that teacher's aren't motivated by money. They're human beings. Sure, teachers have a certain amount of desire to improve their world or they'd have become a doctor or a lawyer rather than a teacher, but that doesn't mean they're completely devoid of a desire for greater compensation.

Schools frequently offer rewards, some of which are financial, to students for attendance, test scores or other desirable behavior. Why shouldn't we be able to reward effective teachers?