An Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, talked about how Amazon was able to survive a bad economy.  The idea was to do a good job in a cumulative basis.  Amazon is proud of its employees who had done exceptionally job in providing fast delivery service, low prices, and other Amazon’s services to the customers from the previous four to five years.  A teacher thinks this is a brilliant truth.  She goes on and explains that as a teacher, she feels like merit pay system that the educational reformers want may not work (i.e., superficial).  Teacher is there to teach, and each teacher is only a single piece of a puzzle that helps churn out good students over the course of several years.  If you don’t know what merit pay is, here is the link to explain what is merit pay.  In my opinion, merit pay is somewhat superficial, but it does have benefits.  It’s like an incentive for better teaching, and maybe merit pay is just one piece of a puzzle in making the whole educational system works better in the long run.