There is no more critical role in our society today than that of a teacher. Teachers help shape the minds of tomorrow. Tomorrow's engineers, scientists, politicians, and teachers are all greatly influenced by today's instructors. Without teachers, society would be far from what it is today, and only a privileged few would have access to learning. Unfortunately, as important as teachers are to human civilization, they remain significantly undervalued, unrecognized, and underpaid. Although some people may argue that performance pay is a good thing, performance/merit pay is bad because it will cause teachers to personalize the curriculum much less and spend that time only doing what needs to be taught in order to to maintain their students' learning. in turn, students will have a harder time learning, because instead of teachers teaching what students need to learn, they will spend more time teaching what people who don't know what students think think that students students should learn. For example, if a student already knows how to write a story but the standardized curriculum requires them to teach how to write a story, it would be a big waste of time to have to expand on it if the students had already learned it . . If these people had not intervened, the teacher could have acted more quickly and taught the students something they actually needed to learn, like how to write an argumentative essay (Paying Teachers for Student Test Scores harms schools and undermines learning) (Does Merit Pay for Teachers Have Merit? Pros and Cons of New Teacher Pay Models). During the 2011-2012 school year (the year they tried to implement merit/performance pay in Idaho and many other states), sat scores actually declined very slightly, or didn't change at all - the score didn't increase like it was supposed to (Idaho ED