Teachers are in most cases public employees. So the public at large, in theory, gets to decide how they are paid. The commission model variants of which have been proposed for some time, would involve compensating teachers for the value they provide to their school's operation, that is, the degree to which they educate their students. Unfortunately, the amount of education a student receives in a given year is much harder to quantify than the total sales recorded by a clerk in a store. Measuring student growth has been made somewhat easier by recent advances in the tracking of student performance on standardized tests over time. But the notion of paying teachers on the basis of their ability to improve test scores, often termed "merit pay," while discussed among education policy researchers, is strongly opposed by teachers unions and is a political nonstarter in many parts of the country. Lost in the debate over merit pay are significant facts about the way compensation is currently distributed to teachers. Most districts reward teachers for their years of experience, advanced degrees, and in some cases special credentials such as a certificate from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). If every year of experience and every credential were strongly associated with a teacher's ability to educate students, people could feel assured that the system rewarded the ability to educate. Available evidence, however, suggests that the connection between credentials and teaching effectiveness is weak at best, and the connection between additional years of experience and teaching effectiveness, while substantial in the first few years in the classroom, attenuates over time. Exact results vary from one study to the next, but trend towards demonstrating that beyond the first years, credentials and additional years of experience matter less to teacher effectiveness than they do to teacher compensation as currently designed. This article examines a teacher salary schedule and proposes that more pay be given for new teachers and less for older ones. (Contains 3 figures.